Amongst the Dead

by Robert Gott

  ‘You and Ngulmiri don’t talk. Different language?’

  Isaiah shot a quick glance in Ngulmiri’s direction.

  ‘Taboo, boss. He married wrong way. Very bad.’

  I thought of telling him that Brian had, in my opinion, married ‘wrong way’ too, but that I still spoke to him. When I looked from Isaiah to Ngulmiri I felt there was more there than I was capable of grasping, so I held my tongue. Whoever Ngulmiri had married, the problem went deeper than choosing a dull, vapid, vulgarian, as Brian had done.

  ‘Fires now, boss.’

  I walked back with him into camp and he began to set half-a-dozen fires in a circle around a central fire. The fires weren’t for cooking — Rufus was busy concocting some sort of fried-rice affair over a primus stove — so I surmised that they were to provide smoke to keep mosquitoes and sandflies at bay, at least temporarily. Beside each fire he laid a bundle of damp branches. All day I’d been swatting flies, sandflies and mozzies, the last two in annoying but not overwhelming numbers. I knew this would change at dusk, and dusk was fast approaching.

  ‘Put your pants on, boss. Shirt, too.’

  I took his advice, went to my kit, and got dressed. Rufus called out that I should put on two shirts and two pairs of pants.

  ‘Are you serious?’ I asked.

  He shrugged.

  ‘These fuckers can skewer you through thick cotton, mate.’

  There was a scurry in the camp as everyone hurried to cover every bit of his skin. We all donned mosquito gloves and our netted hats, and pulled thick socks over the cuffs of our trousers. I felt suffocated by my own clothes, but when the insects arrived I saw that there was no alternative if one was to remain sane. The fires were lit and a pall of smoke raised. We ate our meal inside the circle, although Isaiah and Ngulmiri took their food to their grass shelters and ate it there. The food was palatable, and Rufus’s bread was excellent. It was closely examined and given the thumbs up.

  ‘You’re a bloody good cook,’ Fulton said, and indeed Rufus had managed to coax flavour out of his mixture of rice, bully beef, dried vegetables, and herbs. I realised that the ‘Herbs For Victory’ campaign actually meant something. For each mouthful I lifted the netting that covered my face and, despite the smoke, which greatly reduced but didn’t entirely eliminate the mosquitoes, one or two of the creatures would zip in and find my cheek or neck. I wondered if Isaiah and Ngulmiri fared any better in their shelters.

  ‘Why don’t Isaiah and Ngulmiri stay and eat with us?’ I asked.

  ‘’Cause they’re fuckin’ niggers, mate,’ Nicholas Ashe said. ‘They shouldn’t even be eating our rations, I reckon. They should find their own fuckin’ nigger food.’

  ‘We’d be rooted without them,’ Rufus said.

  ‘We’d be rooted without the horses, too,’ Ashe said, ‘and I don’t want to eat with them, either.’

  ‘Surely they’re entitled to rations,’ Brian said. ‘And pay.’

  ‘They get paid,’ Ashe said sourly. ‘Five bob a week and nigger twist.’

  ‘So they get paid in a week what we get paid in a day. That doesn’t seem fair to me,’ I said.

  Ashe made a farting noise with his lips. ‘Fair? You know what’s not fair, mate? The left-hand side of a black gin’s bum. That’s what.’

  ‘What’s “nigger twist”?’ Brian asked.

  ‘Tobacco,’ Rufus said. ‘It’s rolled up like a stick of liquorice.’

  It was a strange sensation talking to figures whose faces weren’t visible and whose individuality was obliterated by their head-to-foot coverings. Nothing, however, could obscure the vitriol that seeped from Nicholas Ashe whenever he referred to the ‘niggers’. It became clear in the course of the conversation that he held in his dark heart a particular detestation for white men who married Aboriginal women. ‘Combos’ he called them. He’d only heard rumours that there were white women who’d taken up with Aboriginal men, but this seemed so outrageous a proposition that he’d assigned it to the status of myth.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I asked at a break in a diatribe about some bloke he’d met who’d turned out to be a half-caste, and nobody knew, and he’d actually bought the bastard a beer.

  ‘Brissy,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t wait to get out of there.’

  Ashe’s attitudes didn’t seem to bother anyone else, and the only conclusion I could draw from this was that Ashe’s feelings were accepted as reasonable, or not so unreasonable as to be worthy of comment or dispute.

  Andrew Battell took to his bed as soon as he’d eaten the few mouthfuls he could manage. The shivers had passed and been replaced by sweats, so his clothes must have been torture.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Fulton said. ‘He doesn’t want to be evacuated. We just have to wait for it to pass. We’ve all had a dose.’

  There was a great deal of praise for Brian’s and Glen’s little magic act, and it was agreed that Brian made a satisfactory woman. No mention was made of my contribution. It had been cut short by the rain, so any legitimate judgement was impossible anyway. There was talk, too, of how close the Japanese were, and there was no doubt at all expressed about their intentions. Invasion wasn’t a matter of ‘if,’ but ‘when’. This certainty wasn’t good for the nerves.

  ‘I wouldn’t trust the niggers up here as far as I could throw them,’ Ashe said. ‘They’ve had contact with the bloody Japs for years.’

  ‘But why would the Aborigines want to be invaded by the Japs?’ I asked.

  ‘Dunno. Maybe they think the Japs will give them better tobacco. Who knows what they think, or even if they think.’

  The fact that both Isaiah and Ngulmiri were within earshot was of no importance to Ashe. He didn’t credit them with feelings worthy of even the most grudging respect. He was of the view that, ‘You wouldn’t watch what you said in front of a dog, so why should you worry about the blacks?’

  ‘It’s a clear night,’ Fulton said. ‘We might be able to pick up Tokyo Rose.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear that shit,’ Ashe said.

  ‘So go to bed,’ Fulton said, and for the first time I heard in his voice a note that suggested the camaraderie between them might be fragile. I was anxious to talk with him about the three deaths that had so alarmed Army Intelligence in Melbourne. I’d have to do this discreetly because it was important that Fulton not know that the real purpose of this visit was to unmask a murderer, not raise their morale with vaudeville. Until I had a clear idea about what was going on up here, I didn’t want to expose Fulton to any unnecessary danger.

  Glen, Brian, Rufus, and I brought smoking branches under the tarpaulin while Fulton fired up the battery-charger and settled himself in front of the radio. It would be a long night of transmitting and receiving for him unless the skies remained clear and free from electrical storms. The FS6 was capable of voice transmission over relatively short distances, but this was only used in emergencies, the outgoing signals being too easy to intercept and track. All other transmissions were done in ciphered Morse, which demanded great accuracy. Enciphering and deciphering were skills I couldn’t master. Fulton, however, was obviously at home with the FS6. He tinkered and fiddled until a woman’s voice broke out of the static.

  ‘Tokyo Rose,’ he said. ‘It’s not always the same person.’

  I was expecting a sultry, come-hither voice designed to lure men to their deaths. Instead, a rather flat, almost officious, voice with an American accent told us, as if it were a news broadcast of an irrefutable truth, that the Empire of Japan considered the troops in northern Australia to be prisoners of the Japanese already.

  ‘We guard you with our bombers,’ she said matter-of-factly, ‘and General Tojo sends his regards and gratitude to the Australian government, which feeds you until our soldiers arrive.’

  There was a moment of static, and Glen laugh
ed — no one else did — and then she was back.

  ‘Australian soldiers, you are lonely where you are. Your girlfriends are not so lonely. Nice American soldiers look after her. Maybe they’ll marry soon. Boys in Darwin, ask the American soldier if he knows your girlfriend. Ask him how she is going. He knows.’

  The transmission was lost.

  ‘Cunt,’ Rufus said.

  ‘Surely no one’s going to fall for that,’ Glen said.

  ‘If you’re tired, shit-scared, and miserable,’ said Fulton, ‘and you hear it often enough, you start to think about it.’

  Certainly, Tokyo Rose had done something to the mood of the evening, and we left Fulton to his transmissions and his smoke-screen, and decided it was time to turn in.

  ‘Check your bedrolls,’ Rufus said. ‘Just in case. Snakes and scorpions. And when you hear Ngulmiri call out, don’t panic. He’s just letting any blackfellas who might come by know who he is and what his country is. It’s an etiquette thing, and stops any trouble.’

  As I walked in my heavy clothes towards my date with scorpions, I realised that my dream of lush, benign rainforest was now comprehensively deceased. I carried a smoking branch with me, and when I reached the coffin of cheesecloth that Brian had erected for me, I gingerly lifted its edge and shone my torch through a cloud of mosquitoes to check if anything serpentine had crawled in. There was nothing there, so I waved the branch about to drive out any insects that had rushed into the space, and quickly stretched out on the bedroll, the branch still in my hand. The cheesecloth was thick — so thick that it wasn’t transparent — and smoke soon filled the small void. At least it had the desired effect of clearing out the mosquitoes, and I was able to release some of it when I tossed the branch away.

  I waited for a minute, and, when I was sure I was alone, took off the cumbersome hat with its netting, and the gloves. I’d been strongly advised, however, to keep all my clothes on, however stifling it became; given that the cheesecloth excluded even vigorous breezes, I thought I might die of heat exhaustion or smoke inhalation.

  When my head touched the bedroll it became apparent that it was wet. The cheesecloth wasn’t waterproof. My clothes were wet, too, as they soaked up the bed’s moisture. I was suddenly so tired that I didn’t care. I couldn’t, however, ignore the insistent whining that began close to my ear. By now the smoke had seeped out from a tiny breach in my defences, and at least one mosquito had found the hole and gained entry. And then another; and another. I slapped at them, put my hat and gloves back on, and wondered why I’d ever thought this operation was a good idea. Ngulmiri, who was on horse-tailing duty, began calling out his name and some other words in his language. He did this several times. I was glad we’d been warned about it because I found it alarming and spooky. I fell asleep thinking that a few short weeks before I’d been luxuriating in an unpatriotically deep, hot bath. Still, I thought ruefully, that had turned out rather badly. Perhaps, starting from such a low base, this experience might improve, rather than decline. As if.

  It rained heavily during the night, so heavily that water and mud flowed freely under and around my bed. I awoke so thoroughly saturated in rain and sweat that it was as if I’d spent the night submerged in a pond. It was just daylight, and when I raised the corner of the cheesecloth I saw that no one else was yet stirring. Through the filmy gauze of the hat netting I noticed the cheesecloth around Andrew Battell’s bed bulge as a body pressed up against it. He must be getting up, I thought. A figure, dressed as I still was, and unrecognisable, emerged and stood up. His hands were briefly exposed and, as he looked down at the low, elongated tent-like covering, he slowly put his gloves on. To my astonishment, he then lifted the edge of his netting veil and spat. Why would Andrew Battell spit on his own bed? He was feverish, it was true, and the cloth’s inability to secure a decent night’s sleep might well provoke an irrational attack against it.

  I lay back down, put my hands behind my head, and waited until the Nackeroos decided the time was right to get up. Having accepted that there was nothing I could do about the water, I even managed to doze, and it was a deep, reviving doze, which I was shaken out of by Brian.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ he said.

  There was bustle in the camp. Rufus was busy preparing ersatz scrambled eggs, using powders of various kinds, and Isaiah and Fulton were loading the FS6 onto horses — it took four horses to accommodate its bits and pieces and, from the strain apparent on Fulton’s face as the accumulators were loaded, it was clear that they were very, very heavy. The horses couldn’t possibly be expected to carry these for more than a couple of hours without relief. This explained, I suppose, the extraordinary number of remounts required to service only four Nackeroos. The tarpaulin had been taken down, and crates and boxes gathered into the centre of the camp, prior to loading or discarding.

  I packed up my things quickly and, following the lead of the Nackeroos, I wore long sleeves and trousers. This wasn’t going to be a day for wandering about naked in Eden.

  At some point it was noticed that Andrew Battell’s little tent hadn’t been packed away.

  ‘Get up, you lazy bastard,’ Nicholas Ashe called, but without rancour. Battell’s dengue fever gave him some leeway, temporarily, in the pulling of his weight. All the others had either been in his position already or knew that they would inevitably be so at some stage. There was no reply from Battell’s tent.

  ‘Maybe he’s off having a shit,’ Rufus said.

  We ate, and final preparations for departure were made.

  ‘Why are we leaving?’ I asked Fulton as I forced the barely edible egg-matter down.

  ‘Last night, Platoon HQ recalled us. Fair enough, too. We’ve been on patrol for weeks now. It’s going to take us a couple of weeks, maybe, to get back to Flick’s Waterhole.’

  He pulled out a Fighter Guide map, with hand-drawn additions, and showed me what lay ahead. It was a maze of water courses and swamp.

  ‘It doesn’t seem logical to me,’ I said. ‘Flick’s Waterhole is south of Company HQ. Why don’t we go straight there, to Roper Bar?’

  ‘We’re not just going home, Will. We’re mapping all the way. We mapped a route on the way up here, so we know where there’s grass and water for the horses, and where the going is impossible. With the Wet settling in now, things will have changed, so we’ll go back pretty much the same way and see what’s what. It’s going to be bloody hard work, and without the blackfellas we couldn’t do it.’

  ‘Maybe Nicholas Ashe needs to appreciate that a bit more.’

  ‘Nick’s all right, Will.’

  He said this in a way that precluded further discussion, so I let it go, supposing that camaraderie forged in difficult conditions had dulled my brother’s decency. Brian’s words about our having separate fathers echoed suddenly in my mind, and I looked at Fulton’s profile with some concentration. Family resemblance isn’t a reliable marker of paternity or maternity; but, even so, I thought I detected, in the general shape of his head and in the way he held it, a decided difference from either Brian or me — and it wasn’t just that he was younger. He wouldn’t grow to look like us. No. He’d grow to look like someone else entirely.

  Nicholas Ashe appeared and declared that, as we were ready to leave, it might be a good idea for someone to wake Andrew Battell. This time he sounded irritated, as if he’d been prepared to make allowances up to a point, but that point had now been reached and passed.

  ‘All right,’ Fulton said, ‘I’ll wake him and help him with his kit.’

  He began by standing outside Battell’s cheesecloth tent and calling his name. There was no reply, so he pulled the material back to reveal Battell apparently asleep, although not wearing his mosquito hat. Fulton was about to shake him when he drew back and said, ‘He’s dead.’

  We hurried over and stared down at Battell’s face. His eyes were open and lifeless b
ut, appallingly, maggots had already been deposited in their corners and in his mouth, and they crawled and wriggled as they sought purchase to feed.

  ‘How did the flies get in?’ Brian asked, and at that moment it seemed like a more important question than how Battell had died.

  ‘Maybe he went to the dunny and left a gap,’ Glen said.

  ‘Yes, he did,’ I said. ‘Just after dawn. I saw him leave his tent.’

  As soon as I’d said it, I realised I’d made a terrible mistake because, as if to prove my skills as a detective hadn’t deserted me, I was struck at that moment by the knowledge that the person leaving Battell’s tent at dawn wouldn’t have been Battell, but his killer. I’d just alerted this man to the fact that he’d been seen, and this put my life at considerable risk, especially in a landscape where there were a million ways to die — and all of them could look like an accident.

  ‘What do we do?’ Rufus asked reasonably.

  ‘The first thing to do is to radio someone and tell them,’ I said, ‘and then we should try to figure out how he died.’

  ‘We know how he died,’ Fulton said sharply. ‘Dengue. And I know it sounds hard, but we’re not unloading and reloading the radio. We can do that tonight. It’s not going to make any difference.’

  ‘Well, I think we should check to see if there might be any other cause of death,’ I said quietly, but firmly. Brian caught the determination in my voice, and realised that I might have reason to believe that Battell’s death was suspicious.

  ‘We have to do that,’ he said. ‘For the family.’

  ‘You’re going to do an autopsy here, are you?’ The small, unexpected sneer in Fulton’s voice was unfamiliar, in the true sense of that word.

  ‘No,’ Brian said calmly, ‘but we can check for things like snakebite.’

  ‘Or stab wounds,’ I said sharply, unable to resist the small shock such frankness might provoke in the murderer, and signalling at the same time that he needn’t think I was going to be as easy to dispose of as the feverish Andrew Battell.