Amongst the Dead

by Robert Gott

  ‘No, no, I didn’t. So, if it wasn’t full …’

  ‘You’ll be disappointed to hear that it was full,’ I said, but I couldn’t remember whether it was or wasn’t, and I was aware that my voice expressed this slight doubt. Brian reached out and took the water bottle from Sister Lucille. I thought he was going to take a swig, which would have been a reassuring gesture, but instead he removed the top and emptied its contents over the side.

  ‘Just to be sure,’ he said.

  This was a small, unnecessary cruelty whose roots must have lain coiled somewhere in childhood. He watched me as the water trickled out, and he must have been satisfied with the effect because, as he replaced the cap, he smiled at me in a way that suggested the evening of some score. In Brian’s head there was a tally board, and only he was privy to where each of us stood on it. I decided then that, at some point, I would demand to know.

  When we disembarked at the wharf it was late in the afternoon, and we were surprised to find Corporal Glen Pyers waiting for us. We were even more surprised to discover that he was surrounded by our kit.

  ‘Will’s got leprosy,’ Brian said, ‘so resist the urge to kiss him.’

  ‘We have to hurry,’ Glen said. ‘The boat has to leave now.’ He indicated a ketch that hadn’t been at the wharf in the morning. It had seen better days. It had a single mast at the bow end, and railings that were bent out of shape and which came no higher than the thigh — clearly not a safety feature, unless the boat’s owner was a dwarf. There was something approximating a cabin, and in front of it I could see the bent back of a man arranging something in the hold. There were many boxes and drums on the deck, and when he straightened to pull one towards him, he saw Glen and called out to him.

  ‘Righto! Let’s go.’

  I’d been looking forward to going to the pictures that night. There was a movie house in Nightcliff that hadn’t been bombed, and it was showing A Yank in the RAF — an appalling bit of rubbish, no doubt, but starring Tyrone Power, an actor I was always interested to see. Glen bustled us onto the boat, which smelled unpleasantly of fish and rot, and our feet had barely touched its deck when its ancient motor turned over and caught with an unhealthy splutter. The master of this tub was busy behind its wheel, so introductions were delayed until we were out of the harbour and chugging across Port Darwin towards Larrakeyah Barracks. We rounded Emery Point, headed up Fannie Bay, passed East Point, and sailed out into the Timor Sea. With the boat set on a secure course, our captain called to Glen and told him we’d be there by morning.

  ‘And where,’ I asked patiently, ‘is there?’

  ‘While you two were healing the sick,’ Glen said, ‘I was helping load this thing with supplies.’

  We were sitting on the deck near what in a grander boat might have been called its prow. Glen indicated the fellow behind the wheel at the stern.

  ‘That’s Charlie Humphries. He’s a Nackeroo who sails this thing around the coast, as far as the Roper River.’

  We waved to Charlie Humphries, who touched his hat in reply.

  ‘So we’re on our way then,’ said Brian, ‘to where Fulton is.’

  Glen nodded.

  ‘They’ve set up camp somewhere near the mouth of the West Alligator River. There are half-a-dozen blokes there, and when they’re not scared shitless about the Japs, they’re bored shitless waiting for them. We’re going to cheer them up.’ He paused and looked directly at me. ‘Apparently.’

  I didn’t bite, and in fact bestowed a smile upon him before standing up and making my way perilously to Charlie Humphries, from whom I hoped to gain some useful information about what lay ahead.

  I introduced myself and he pushed his hat back on his head, nodded, and said, ‘You fellas are actors, is that right?’

  I was immediately defensive and said, rather more snappishly than I’d intended, that we all fought our own war in the best way we knew how. He suggested that I might like to keep my hair on, and that he hadn’t used the word ‘actor’ in any pejorative way. I was so startled to hear the word ‘pejorative’ in the middle of the Timor Sea that I immediately apologised for my tone. I’m always taken aback when people around me express a familiarity with their mother tongue that goes beyond a vocabulary sufficient to secure them a feed or a fuck.

  I looked more closely at Charlie Humphries. I think he was well short of thirty, although the creases around his eyes were deep. His colouring, fair and more suited to the limpid light of Ireland, had become adjusted to the fierce tropical sun, not by freckling or tanning, but by roasting to a sort of permanent sunburn. His reddish, blond hair grew high on his forehead, and was dark with sweat where it emerged from the band of his hat.

  ‘So where are we headed?’

  ‘West Alligator, mate.’

  ‘Sounds rather confronting.’

  ‘They’re not after tourists, mate. The only things that live there are mosquitoes, sandflies, crocodiles, and Nackeroos. I’m happy to drop these supplies off, and I’m even happier to get out of there.’

  He paused.

  ‘So you see, I have a high level of job satisfaction.’

  ‘And you do this on your own?’

  ‘Not usually. I’ve got a blackfella who helps out, but he’s off doing some ceremony business, as he calls it. Someone died, I think.’

  To my ear, Charlie Humphries' speech sounded as if he’d made a conscious effort to rough up properly acquired vowels. I suspected Jesuits in his background.

  ‘Why did we have to leave so urgently?’

  ‘It’s a tidal river, mate. To get up it far enough, you have to catch the floodtide. You ever seen any of those tides, mate?’

  I indicated that I hadn’t.

  ‘They can be bloody scary things. I’m hoping this one doesn’t knock us around too much.’

  He squinted at me.

  ‘Whatever you do, mate, don’t fall overboard. If the water doesn’t kill you there are plenty of things in it that will.’

  ‘Thank you, Charlie. My immediate plan is to hold on tight.’

  Over the next two hours, until the light faded, I talked amiably with Charlie Humphries while Glen and Brian reposed at the opposite end of the ketch. He wasn’t dismissive of acting as a profession; quite the contrary. He was interested, and volunteered that the priests who’d taught him in Perth — I’d been right about that — had attempted to direct his expressed desire to perform into a vocation. Not the priesthood, or the Jesuit priesthood at any rate. They told him frankly that he wasn’t quite bright enough to wrestle with Thomas Aquinas, but that perhaps he was more suited to the Christian Brothers — an order where, apparently, high intelligence was a disadvantage. Charlie’s parents were enthusiastic; an enthusiasm fuelled by the financial relief promised by the seminary’s obligation to feed and clothe its novices. Charlie was less enthusiastic and, as pressure mounted for him to discover that he’d been called by God, he took off. He was sixteen, and he’d spent the next six years, until the war began, ‘knocking around’ Western Australia, mostly in the north around Broome.

  ‘Have you lost contact with your family?’

  ‘The people up here are mostly splinters,’ he said, and didn’t elaborate. I nodded as if I knew exactly what he meant.

  The sea was mercifully smooth, and I was able to eat and keep down a can of bully beef, followed by the ubiquitous tin of peaches. The storm and the savage seas that Charlie had warned might spring up failed to eventuate, and he woke us at dawn — the piccaninny daylight — to announce that we were about to turn into the West Alligator River.

  My eyes were unused to scanning coastlines from the deck of a boat, and the mangroves seemed to me to form an unbroken line. Before I was really aware of it, however, we’d left open water and had entered the wide, brown mouth of the West Alligator River. Charlie assured us that its sluggis
hness was entirely illusory; and I could see, at its edge, that it was moving with considerable speed.

  ‘Are we expected?’ Brian asked.

  ‘Yup, but I’ll fly the flag just in case. I don’t want some jumpy bastard shooting at us.’

  He unfurled what looked like a hand-stitched, home-made square of cloth with the colours of the patch that had been assigned to the NAOU — a double diamond, yellow on one side, green on the other.

  We travelled upriver a good distance — too far, I believed, for Fulton’s unit to be doing any useful coast watching.

  ‘They watch the river,’ Charlie said. ‘The Japs’ll have to come up it to land. It’s unlikely they’d choose to do that here; but you never know, they might send out a reccy party.’

  ‘To be met with a hail of bullets from half-a-dozen men?’ I said.

  ‘No, mate. The NAOU is not supposed to engage with the enemy. They observe, follow, and report. Ideally, the Japs should never see them.’

  The river began to narrow and split into a confusion of channels until it became impossible for me to discern which was the river and which was a flooded tributary. Mangroves grew so thickly that if there was any scrub or dry land beyond them, I for one couldn’t see it. Egrets and pied herons rose as we passed, and the air smelled strongly of salt and mud.

  Charlie cut the engine, and the ketch drifted forcefully towards a wall of dense, green vegetation. He swung the wheel, and we were suddenly in what looked like a small, scooped-out cove, a half-circle of mangroves with a thinned-out area at the top of the arc. There, standing knee-deep in mud, and waving his arms above his head, was a man whose only clothing was a hat.

  ‘That,’ said Charlie, ‘looks like Rufus Farrell.’

  ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘is he naked?’

  ‘The only blokes who wear anything up here during the day are the blackfellas. Big skin shame. Aren’t missionaries marvellous?’

  As if on cue, an Aboriginal man appeared behind Rufus Farrell. He was wearing trousers but no shirt, and his chest was rippled with thick cicatrices. The boat came to rest and both men clambered aboard. Rufus Farrell wore a thin beard and, incongruously, a pair of boots, and was probably little older than nineteen. His companion, who was introduced as Isaiah, was, I estimated, in his thirties, although he might have been younger.

  ‘We’re glad to see you blokes,’ Rufus said. ‘We’re sick of the sight of each other.’

  He waved his hand over the boxes on the deck.

  ‘What have you got for us?’

  ‘No beer.’ Charlie withdrew a list from his pocket.

  ‘Oats, bran, tinned milk, lime juice, salt, flour, yeast, egg powder, baking powder, bully beef, onions, tinned cabbage, peaches, petrol, oil, peas, battery charger, medicines, comforts, three actors.’

  ‘Let’s get it unloaded,’ Rufus said, and so began two of the most exhausting and uncomfortable hours of my life. The heat, which I hadn’t really noticed until the boat stopped, was killing, and the boxes of supplies were awkward and heavy and, worse, they had to be carried first through water and then through sucking, malodorous mud — a substance I’d soon learn to despise. We were advised to keep our boots on to avoid the soles of our feet being cut to ribbons by sharp shells imbedded in the mud.

  We unloaded the boxes and drums a few yards from where the mud became sand and then hardened into earth. The mangroves gave way here to ti-tree, pandanus, and thin, scraggly eucalypts. There was no deep shade.

  ‘We’ll get the other blokes to help us cart most of this lot to camp when they come in this arvo. Give us a hand with the charger, though.’

  I made the mistake of volunteering to do this. The others picked up a ration box each. The battery charger was for the FS6 transceiver, and it was more than cumbersome; it was vicious, weighing more than ninety pounds. The transceivers were, though, the single most important piece of NAOU equipment. They were all that stood between these men and isolation so complete that they might as well have been camped on the surface of Mars. They also helped create an illusion, directed at the Japanese now massing on Timor, that Australia’s northern coast was alive with defence forces babbling constantly on their radios. If only they knew that the West Alligator River was currently protected by a naked man, an Aborigine, three entertainers, and a chap running away from the Jesuits.

  Chapter Five

  fulton

  THE LANDSCAPE WE TRAVERSED bore not the slightest resemblance to the lush tropics of my imagination. There was no great canopy of towering trees, or coils of vines, or rich, outrageous flowers. Here the sun fell with almost unimpeded brutality through a sparsely spaced forest of tough, wiry stringybarks onto yellow-green tussocks, bare earth, and sharp-leafed little shrubs. I slaked my thirst from my neck bottle several times over the short distance from the boat to the camp; my body seemed intent on surrendering its moisture to the sun with an abandon that I’d never before experienced. Rufus said that they weren’t short of fresh water, that there was a creek not far away that didn’t suffer the brackish influx of the West Alligator’s tides, and that anyway it now rained almost every day, and they were in the habit of collecting rainwater in drums.

  I thought it would be unlikely that Japanese aircraft flying over this camp would identify it as such. It consisted solely of a piece of ragged tarpaulin tied to four trees, a few ammunition crates, some drums, and two peculiar mounds of what looked like dried grass but which were, in fact, the makeshift sleeping arrangements of the two Aboriginal men who’d been assigned to this outpost.

  The radio sat in the shade under the tarpaulin. Having helped Rufus carry the charger to it, I sat exhausted on an ammunition box, suddenly feeling dizzy.

  ‘You all right?’ Rufus asked.

  ‘I feel quite ill, actually.’

  ‘It takes a while to get used to this heat. You’re probably just dehydrated. That happens.’

  He took my neck bag and filled it from a drum, and I drank deeply. Perhaps it was just dehydration, but the lingering possibility of leprosy wasn’t far from my mind. I think both Glen and Brian were almost as distressed as I was by the exertion of carrying some of the rations, but they were determined not to show it — not just to avoid looking weak in front of Rufus, Charlie, and Isaiah, but to make me look bad. I only thought this afterwards; at the time, my mind was so disoriented that for a brief period I was incapable of independent thought or action. I may, in fact, have fallen asleep sitting up, insensible to the flies and to my surroundings. I couldn’t have lost consciousness for more than a few minutes, but when I opened my eyes the only person in the camp was Rufus, and he was bent over a camp oven, manoeuvring it in the coals of a fire. I stood up groggily, and was relieved to discover that I felt better.

  ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘Gone to get some more of the rations. There are comfort packages in one of the boxes.’

  ‘Should I go back and help?’

  Rufus laughed, and scratched his balls.

  ‘You’d get lost, mate.’ He told me, generously, that I shouldn’t feel bad about feeling ill. ‘Those other blokes’ll cop a dose, don’t worry.’

  I noticed that Rufus’s body was a mess of bites and scratches in varying stages of suppuration. He saw that I’d noted this, and shrugged.

  ‘The Japs will shoot you. The mozzies and flies will eat you alive. Sometimes I’d like to get the jump on them all and blow my own brains out.’

  He turned back to the camp oven and lifted the lid with a stick. The smell of bread reached my nostrils, and the activity of the flies intensified around my face as if the repellent creatures could feed on the odour alone, being unable to settle closer to the fire.

  ‘Could you see if there’s any jam in those boxes?’

  I found a tin of jam, and Rufus’s face lit up.

  ‘There are cans of butter, too,�
�� I said.

  ‘It’s shit. Rancid fat. This is good damper, worthy of jam. The boys are gunna love it.’

  ‘Where are the boys?’

  ‘They’ve been out for a couple of days now. Reccy.’

  ‘And you and Isaiah are left here on your own?’

  ‘Someone’s gotta do the radio. It was my turn to stay behind. Not that I mind. Fulton’s the best at it. He can do it in the pitch-dark in a howling gale.’

  ‘Fulton’s my brother.’

  ‘Is he? Jeez, I’d never have picked it. We were told that two of his brothers were coming. Brian’s the other one, is he? He looks a bit like you.’

  A sudden clamping in my guts made further small talk out of the question.

  ‘Where do I go to the dunny?’ I asked.

  ‘Just off in the bush. We haven’t bothered with a trench or anything. The flies’ll crawl up your arse. And watch out for snakes. The browns around here work for the Japs.’

  I walked some distance away from the camp, lowered my shorts, and crouched over a scrape I’d made. For a moment, for just a moment, I could see how strangely beautiful this landscape was. The initial sense of its monotony gave way to the realisation that the scraggly eucalypts had trunks of brilliant white, and around me there were subtle varieties of green, tinged in the turpentine bushes with gentle purple. In the distance, through the trees, tall grass moved in response to the wind. My reverie ended with the extrusion of the first stool. Flies — huge, thunderous blowflies — appeared in a swarm, and my disgust was so intense that I didn’t linger a moment longer than was necessary. So greedy were these monsters for my waste that when I pushed dirt over the mess, many of them chose burial rather than flight.

  I had a small moment of panic when the walk back to the camp began to seem longer than the walk away from it had been. My sense of direction is not the most finely honed of my skills, and I’ve never had to utilise it for much more than knowing the difference between stage left and stage right. Here, north, south, east, and west looked the same to me. I stopped and listened, and caught the faint sound of conversation. I’d been going in the right direction after all, and when I came into the clearing, Brian, Glen, and Charlie were setting up their beds, pegging the cheesecloth anti-mosquito coverings to convenient saplings or to sticks driven into the ground. Isaiah was nowhere to be seen, and Rufus was examining the contents of several newly arrived boxes.