Amongst the Dead

by Robert Gott

  ‘Well, it’s the nature of the exercise,’ Luther said. ‘I take it you haven’t been briefed at all about this?’

  We shook our heads in unison, like fairground clowns waiting for someone to push ping-pong balls down our throats.

  ‘It’s straightforward, really. We just want you to pop across for a few hours to a place called Channel Island. It’s close by, out in the harbour a bit. A quick boat trip. The people there have had a rough trot and could do with a bit of light entertainment.’

  ‘I suppose they were badly hit by the bombings,’ I said, now knowing how much havoc had been wrought in the harbour.

  ‘No,’ Luther said, ‘they weren’t hit at all. It’s like the Japs deliberately avoided hitting Channel Island.’

  Brian drew his eyebrows together, a facial expression he’d used since childhood to signal dubiousness about what he was hearing.

  ‘What,’ he asked, ‘is the missing piece of information here?’

  Luther coughed.

  ‘Channel Island is a leprosarium.’

  He looked at each of us in turn.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘My ears are still ringing from the bombs, but just for a moment I thought you said “leprosarium”.’

  ‘You’ll be relieved to know that there’s nothing wrong with your hearing. Channel Island is indeed a leprosarium.’

  ‘What,’ asked Glen, ‘is a leprothingo?’

  In the calm voice of a patient teacher explaining something to a dull child, Brian said, ‘A leprosarium, Glen, is a place where lepers are sent for treatment.’

  ‘Lepers? You want us to entertain lepers?’ Glen asked, and the disgust in his voice was unmistakeable.

  I said nothing for a moment, and was busy taking internal umbrage at the thought that someone, somewhere, had assessed my talents as being suited to a leper colony.

  ‘There are seventy of the poor bastards out there on Channel Island. Men, women, and children.’

  ‘No way am I going to catch leprosy,’ Glen said. ‘Khaki dermatitis was bad enough. I’m a magician. I need all my fingers for my work.’

  ‘You can’t catch leprosy from a single visit,’ Luther said. ‘You have to be exposed to it for a very long time, and even then you have to be unlucky. Besides, you’re being asked to sing and dance for them, not sing and dance with them.’

  ‘It’s all very Father Damian of Molokai,’ I said. ‘Do we have a choice?’

  ‘Of course, but I didn’t think …’

  ‘Good,’ Glen said. ‘I’m not going. I don’t mind being shot at, but this is germ warfare, and that’s against the Geneva Convention.’

  There was something so fierce and ugly in Glen’s tone that I felt a compulsion to distance myself from him.

  ‘These people aren’t our enemies, Glen.’

  ‘You don’t even know who they are, you stupid bastard, and I don’t care who they are. They’re lepers, and I’m sticking with tradition and having nothing to do with them.’

  ‘All right,’ Brian said. ‘Will and I will go.’

  If he was expecting Glen to change his mind, he was disappointed. He stuck to his guns with a sullen stubbornness that made me see in him the revolting child he must have been.

  After little more than two hours’ sleep we woke to a slate-grey morning. The colour of such a morning in Melbourne would suggest a chilly day ahead. Here in Darwin the air didn’t seem to need the sun to heat it. The sky was crowded with dense and ominous clouds, and by the time we walked out of Larrakeyah Barracks, with Luther as our guide, and without Glen, I was sweating profusely. Brian and I were both wearing shorts, our pale legs betraying us as new arrivals. We were to catch a small boat and make the short crossing to Channel Island; but first, Luther wanted to give us a brief tour of Darwin’s shattered streets.

  It wasn’t a long walk from the barracks to what had once been the commercial centre of town. Houses along the way stood or had fallen according to a random pattern of destruction. Here, a lush and flowering garden sat unscathed, its house empty but intact; there, a garden had great gaps blown in it, the yard pocked by bomb craters, and its house a tangle of blasted, scorched timbers. At the gate of one property, Luther drew our attention to a now-faded notice dated April 1942 and bearing the mayor’s signature, exhorting troops to forego looting abandoned properties and reminding them, as if they needed it, that the abandonment had not been voluntary but the result of enemy action.

  It was difficult to determine what the streets might have looked like, so extensive was the damage. The Bank of New South Wales, which must have been a rather grand building, was now a crumbling shell, and its neighbours sat roofless, or boarded up, or with great, jagged holes in their walls. There were plenty of men about clearing the roads of rubble, or doing the best they could to repair what was repairable, or tear down and make safe what wasn’t. Almost to a man they were dressed only in shorts, and most of them were hatless.

  ‘A lot of these blokes are Civil Construction Corps volunteers,’ Luther said. ‘Not army. Without them, practically nothing in this place would work.’

  ‘Where are they from?’

  ‘All over. Some of them have been directed into the corps by Manpower. How’d you be? One day you’re in Melbourne doing some job Manpower thinks is useless, and the next you’re on your way here. You’d be pissed off.’

  I couldn’t disagree with him and, after looking around, refrained from suggesting that perhaps the nation hadn’t lost too many significant buildings. By this stage we were approaching the enclave at the end of what had been Cavenagh Street. This, Luther said, was where the notorious, open-sewered Chinatown had been. It had been looted bare, and more or less dismantled.

  ‘No great loss,’ he said. ‘It was a squalid and immoral place, apparently.’

  The way he said this reinforced for me the suspicion I’d been harbouring that Luther Martin’s attitude was rooted in a thoughtless Christian revulsion for anything that might offend his God. I immediately distrusted him, and told him that Brian and I needed some time before catching the boat to work out what we were going to do to entertain the lepers.

  Luther left us at the harbour, where the skeletons of many ships protruded from the water, and where men were busy repairing the wharf. We had half an hour to sort out what we’d do. We’d already decided the night before, after finding a recording of a Glenn Miller swing tune in the Mess (and having been assured that there was a gramophone on Channel Island), that we’d attempt a demonstration of the jitterbug. We agreed that it would be pointless of Brian to slip into his Jean Harlow sheath.

  ‘We need to run through this dance,’ I said.

  ‘What, here?’

  ‘We rehearse where we can, Brian. Our stage is wherever we happen to be.’

  Where we happened to be was on the partly repaired timbers of the long wharf, surrounded by Civil Construction Corps workmen and others, all hammering and carrying and swearing. I have no doubt that, for those who looked up from their work and saw us, the sight of two men moving woodenly through the steps of the jitterbug was very strange. Woodenly at first, that is. Having established the general shape of the dance, and who was to do what, I counted us in and began to hum ‘In the Mood’. Brian is an excellent dancer, and he moved easily and fluidly to the syncopation he was hearing in his head. We began apart, both gyrating independently, and then came together in a graceful and energetic rendition of the dance. I threw Brian over my hip and between my legs, and we span and twirled and stomped — and didn’t believe Fred and Ginger could have done better under the circumstances. When we’d finished we were suddenly aware that work on the wharf had stopped, and men were staring at us, some with hammers poised in mid-air. If this had been a movie they would have applauded; we were rewarded instead with a few disbelieving sniggers, and the workers returned to their labours.<
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  We were both breathing heavily; I, for one, had underestimated how much energy the jitterbug required.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘That’s good, but it’s only a few minutes. I’m sure they’re expecting a bit more.’

  ‘Maybe we could teach them a few of the steps.’

  ‘They’ve got leprosy, Brian. If they start throwing each other around, bits will fall off.’

  The teacher in Brian, always lurking just beneath the surface, couldn’t resist correcting my apparently poor understanding of the condition.

  ‘All right. All right. I was only joking, Brian. For heaven’s sake.’

  ‘I’m glad you can see the funny side of leprosy, Will, because frankly it doesn’t strike me as one of nature’s wittiest diseases.’

  ‘Well, I guess we all have our favourites. Now if I could just drag you down from your pulpit for a moment, do you have any ideas of a non-earnest variety for our programme?’

  Brian sighed with familiar, exaggerated resignation and said, ‘I thought I might recite “The Geebung Polo Club” — I know it off by heart — and maybe “Bellbirds”, and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.’

  I wasn’t sure how the lepers would react to Brian’s English curriculum, but I had to acknowledge that recitation was the go. My only difficulty was in deciding which speeches from which plays would be best calculated to make a leper forget his hideous condition for a few, precious minutes. Something from Cymbeline perhaps, and definitely a piece from Titus Andronicus, my performance of which had been thwarted a few months earlier by events beyond my control. In one of those flashes of inspiration that come whenever my attention is focussed on Shakespeare, I decided that I would sing a couple of the songs from Twelfth Night. I’d have to forgo the lute, of course, and do it unaccompanied, but I thought that the ostentatious plucking of a stringed instrument with healthy fingers might anyway be seen as rubbing their noses in it rather.

  The boat, which was little more than a canoe, arrived, and in a few minutes we stepped ashore on Channel Island. It was a desolate place — almost without trees of any kind, as if the landscape itself had contracted leprosy. We were met by a nurse in a uniform that had once been white, but which had been poorly dyed a khaki colour. (She told us later that the white uniforms stood out dangerously in the shadows of slit trenches.) There were people moving about near a group of buildings which I supposed constituted the lazaret.

  Sister Lucille greeted us effusively, and led us to a small, barren courtyard where the beginnings of an audience had started to assemble. They chatted amongst themselves, and the evidence of the awful infection that afflicted them was immediately apparent in the faces of only one or two of them. There were Europeans, Malays, Chinese, and Aboriginal people amongst the small crowd, and they sat together in the democratic intimacy of the ostracised and the diseased.

  Sister Lucille found a gramophone and set it up in the dirt at our feet. Thus far, neither Brian nor I had said a word to any member of the audience, despite their sitting or standing in close proximity to us, and I assiduously avoided catching anyone’s eye. A dark-haired, fair-skinned man in his early fifties, supported by crutches, broke from the group and swung towards us.

  ‘Welcome,’ was all he said before retreating. I don’t know whether it was our sensibilities or his that he was protecting, but he proffered no hand for us to shake.

  ‘Thank you,’ Brian said, and then, addressing the audience, he repeated loudly, ‘Thank you.’

  I moved the gramophone a safe distance from us and wound its handle. I suddenly felt sick with nerves, and wished Glen was with us to dazzle these people with the impossibility of his magic. I placed the record on the turntable and lowered the needle to its spinning surface. The opening bars of ‘In the Mood’ crackled forth, and Brian and I assumed our positions. It wasn’t a perfectly executed jitterbug, but it was all right. The dust rose around us, and the sweat poured off us, and our audience called out for more; so we rewound the gramophone and did it again.This time we improvised new steps, and I tossed Brian over my hip as if he weighed nothing. We stood panting, vaguely astonished that two men doing a competent demonstration of an American dance could provoke such applause and laughter. Brian raised his hands, and they fell silent. He walked around the edge of the half-circle they’d formed, catching people’s eyes, drawing their attention to him, and creating the impression that something significant was about to happen. At the far corner of the arc he began to speak the opening lines of ‘The Geebung Polo Club.’

  ‘It was somewhere up the country in a land of rock and scrub,’ he said, and he looked about him as if this were the very land in question. He gestured to great effect, and spoke the verse with startling and hilarious clarity, assuming the poshest of voices to describe the Cuff and Collar polo team, and reverting to an exaggerated drawl to bring the Geebung Polo Club to life. Until I heard Brian perform it, I wouldn’t have picked Paterson’s poem as anything more than faintly amusing doggerel. But, whether they understood it or not, his listeners laughed themselves silly.

  Brian bowed and handed over to me. I decided to change the pace, and sang for them, in my light tenor, one of Feste’s songs from Twelfth Night. I think perhaps I ought to have sung, ‘What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter.’ It was only after I’d launched into, ‘Come away, come away, death, and in sad cypress let me be laid,’ that I thought it wasn’t absolutely on the money. I noticed conversations breaking out before I’d quite finished. The applause was merely polite, which I resented. It’s never pleasant to be patronised, but to be patronised by lepers is really beyond the pale.

  ‘I think we’ve lost them,’ I said.

  ‘We?’

  ‘They’ve been sitting in the sun for a long time.’

  We were rescued from the need for further discussion by a part-Aboriginal girl who approached us, one arm held from sight behind her back, and said, ‘Show us. Show us that one. That dance.’

  ‘All right,’ Brian said before I could stop him, and he began organising the audience into laughing pairs. Over the next two hours, we painfully taught those who were willing the rudiments of the jitterbug, and both Brian and I became so engrossed in the task that all squeamishness fell away, and I forgot myself to such an extent that I placed my hand in the leprous hand of an elderly Malay woman, and danced closely with a European woman whose face bore no resemblance to what it once must have been. She didn’t speak, and I had to overcome her reticence by almost forcing my attentions upon her. It must have been a long time since anyone had touched her, and I don’t know whether her streaming eyes were a symptom of her condition or a response to physical contact.

  At the end of the lesson, in the heat of the courtyard, in the mean shadow of the lazaret, we all lined up, and Sister Lucille wound the gramophone. As the music began, our large group began to move, not quite as one, and although we couldn’t boast the precision of Busby Berkeley, when the needle slid off the record we were all aware that something remarkable had happened. I stood, grinning helplessly, absurdly prouder than if I’d delivered a perfect soliloquy from the London stage.

  A man standing beside me passed me his water bottle, and I automatically and gratefully took a full swig. I passed it back to him and he took it in a hand that was misshapen, scaly, and missing two fingers. All my joy vanished in a rush of bile and panic as I realised that, for all intents and purposes, I’d swallowed leprosy. My horrified reaction wasn’t something I could disguise, but if I hurt the man’s feelings I was suddenly past caring.

  I said nothing to Brian, believing childishly that silence might somehow quarantine me against the pestilence I’d imbibed. He was beaming, although his face soured when he saw mine.

  ‘Jesus, Will,’ he said. ‘You’re a mean bastard. We just did something good. Nothing’s good enough for you, though, is it?’

  I wanted to explain when I saw how badly h
e’d misread my response, but I was so stricken that I could do nothing more than stare at him, thereby confirming his ugly, misguided beliefs about my flawed character. He shook his head in disgust and accepted the congratulations offered by Sister Lucille.

  We returned to Darwin in the same small boat that had taken us to Channel Island, and Sister Lucille returned with us. She never stayed on the island overnight. There was a nun who lived with the lepers, but she was away and not expected back for several more weeks.

  ‘Does she have leprosy?’ I asked, and marvelled at the awful sound of the question. Sister Lucille knitted her brows as if she disapproved of the inquiry.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘I was just wondering. I don’t know very much about it, that’s all.’

  Brian chimed in with, ‘Will probably thinks he’s caught it.’

  ‘If it’s any consolation, Will, even if you have caught it, it can incubate for thirty years before it appears, but you won’t have caught it. It’s not like you had any contact with body fluids.’ There was a steely little quality in her voice that came, no doubt, from countless ignorant inquiries and assumptions about the people she nursed.

  ‘I shared a water bottle!’ I blurted.

  Sister Lucille and Brian exchanged a glance, the meaning of which I couldn’t read, but I had the impression that Brian’s face arranged itself into a smirk before he turned it towards the approaching wharf.

  ‘I’ve caught it then, haven’t I?’ There was an involuntary catch in my voice.

  Sister Lucille reached behind her and produced a water bottle.

  ‘Is this the one?’

  ‘It looks like it.’

  ‘This was provided for your use and for Brian’s. It might have been passed to you by a patient, but he wouldn’t have drunk out of it.’

  My relief was so overwhelming that I felt my eyes water, and I looked down to disguise the fact.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘he might have taken a swig. We’ll know in thirty years' time. Did you drink from it, Brian?’