by Tom Keneally
‘Stop dreaming,’ yelled the officer and shook his head, as if he were not a boy, nor claimed by boyish fantasies himself. And then a succession of profound thumps from further upharbour—one, two, three, four, five! Each release of explosives echoed brutally in Darragh’s spinal cord. He thought, ‘Oh, God, the power …’ At once, there was a frantic conversation about these noises among the members of the gun crew, and the young officer took the sights as the gun swivelled towards Rushcutters Bay. ‘Fire!’ he screamed, and the gun pumped out a thunderous rack of anti-aircraft shells into the water.
In hollow stillness afterwards, while Trumble’s eyes darted around the clouds, Darragh heard a roar across the water. ‘For Christ’s sake, you Yanks. This is the cutter from HMAS Geelong.’ The gunners looked at each other in amazement. Had they failed twice—in firing upon a friend, as well as in sinking nothing? ‘You nearly sunk us, you stupid pricks!’ roared the voice. Fratelli began laughing, and went so far as to dig Darragh in the ribs.
‘Give us a fucking go!’ cried a second voice from the Australian cutter.
‘Godspeed,’ called the lieutenant.
‘Go to buggery!’ called a sailor aboard the cutter as it increased speed to leave the bay.
This absurdity, doubt, horror were all overlaid in the air. ‘There aren’t any bloody paratroopers,’ Trumble announced beside Darragh. He still loyally held Darragh’s grip with his black overcoat in it.
‘Neither there are,’ said Fratelli with satisfaction.
‘We should go,’ Darragh told him, trying to find his eye in the dimness. But would he be obeyed in this darkness in which Fratelli reigned with such composure? Fratelli thought, and pulled a half-bottle of scotch from his suit pocket. Clearly he had bought it while making his phone call. He offered it to Darragh.
‘No,’ said Darragh. Now to Trumble, who was both willing to drink and could hardly be told not to—that the flask came from a murderous hand. This was a sort of triumph for Fratelli, who took the small bottle back and looked at Darragh by the remaining light shed by hooded lamps still undoused beneath the eaves of workshops and barracks and messes in the dockyard area.
‘Father Darragh,’ he said, in a voice so even Trumble could not have detected slyness in it, ‘your friend drank. But you treat me as if you know something about me that keeps you from sharing a crock with me. Do you?’ Darragh would not answer that serpentine question. ‘Do you, Father?’ Fratelli insisted.
‘No,’ said Darragh. He took the flask, and began to sip. Then he found that he drank hungrily, in the conventional desire of drinkers that the heat of the liquor would fuse a night in which there were too many elements to one reality. The mouthful tasted anciently familiar as if Darragh had been drinking it from childhood. To drink it standing in the dark was appealing, even in the dominant presence of Fratelli. What would Kate think of this men’s ritual? But you are not forgotten, he promised. Not by a long way. Yet this is how it happens, thought Darragh, habituation to evil. Dangerous men do not wear horns. They carry a kindly whisky flask in their pocket. A shipyard siren wailed for no particular reason, and Fratelli accepted the whisky back from Darragh.
Did time still exist down here on the water? He had no certainty that it hadn’t been blown out of the harbour by detonations. Ten past eleven. Searchlights sprang up from warships beyond the huge black bulk of the Chicago. They danced towards Bradleys Head and swept back again towards the Sydney foreshore, illuminating islands in midstream. Guns of ships at Garden Island began to fire into the mouth of Elizabeth Bay, and Darragh could feel rather than see the gravity of the displaced water, and a presence out there. There was energetic turning of wheels and grinding of ratchets on the gun to which Fratelli, Darragh and Trumble were loosely attached. ‘Hold fire,’ said the lieutenant, at the sights himself. ‘No, I see it!’ cried the soldier in the little metal seat who had charge of training the gun, and—after a few orders from the officer—the gun, calibrated more in hope than certainty, howled and thumped again, and recoiled on its tyres, firing directly north. Three deafening racks of shells were shot off before there was silence.
Would my father, in his boyhood, have suffered this day after day, months at a time, in France? Darragh, dealing with the echo-speckled quietness after cannon, asked himself. Did I respect him sufficiently for it? But of course, no son did. The stories as related were hollow. The intimate shock even of one gun could not be rendered in words.
Into the pool of light thrown by warships moved a substantial silhouette. One of the gunners cried, ‘That’s Perkins putting to sea.’ Across the molten light the ship edged, disappearing only by inches at a time into the darkness and shifting lights. For some reason, seeing the ship depart the scene of peril, Darragh began to breathe again and noticed the gun crew did too. ‘One away,’ said the lieutenant exultantly. In the past seconds, Darragh had all but forgotten Fratelli. He looked around, adverting to his presence, to Trumble’s. The two men stood together, equally serious witnesses in the dark.
‘I was sure that big bugger was going to blow up,’ Trumble told him reverently.
The lieutenant and one of his men were peering across the water through binoculars, while a searchlight came from the great battleship, Chicago, and gun crews aboard it began firing across the harbour with scarlet tracer bullets. Thus a spine of periscope beyond Garden Island became clear to Darragh’s vision and to others, for Trumble yelled in Darragh’s ear, ‘They’re all round it.’ He sounded an enthusiastic participant in the battle. ‘All round it, but not on it!’ The peculiarities of light and tracer and shadow which had enabled them all to see the tip of the submarine had passed and been replaced by raw, unregulated sound. So simultaneously did machine-gun fire and rifle shots and shells and depth-charge explosions occur, including here, with the gun crew and the men with the automatic rifle at the end of the ferry jetty all adding their foreground quotient to the body of sound, there was not room for a breath. Darragh was reminded of his loud day in Lidcombe with Gervaise, and found it hard amid the chaos to hold for much time at all to the bruised image of Kate Heggarty, still dear to him as the chief victim of this war and all its noise and lunacy.
He had just retrieved Kate’s memory from the wreckage of noise when a new, dominant explosion occupied all his senses, searing his eyes, tearing at his eardrums, taking air from his mouth, bouncing his lungs off their accustomed walls and threatening their collapse. It lasted and lasted, and he had no rationality left as it passed—indeed, even as he knew it had ceased, it still ran crazily round the pan of his brain.
Darragh found himself senselessly running away from Trumble and Fratelli towards this recent explosion-in-chief. The earth took the vibrations from beyond the seawall, so that he ran like a peasant running in an earthquake, yet heading perversely towards the source, the volcano, the central unrest of the earth. There was a gate with an Australian sailor on it. He tried to block Darragh. But Fratelli was running too, to keep up with Darragh, and called, ‘He’s a priest, he’s a priest,’ and the sailor stepped back.
Darragh ran on at his frantic young man’s pace through the darting searchlights of the high, moored Chicago, its sounds of bells and commands and its individual voices of bewilderment audible across the water. He saw a crowd of Australian sailors gathered, formlessly and without power, by a seawall. No, not utterly without power—some were leaning through a hole in the seawall and lifting drenched, bloodied men out of water which was nearly solid with the rack and ruin of something not yet defined. A submarine with the name K9 on its conning tower stood offshore a little, but between it and the seawall lay, smashed and sunken, a bow of wood and a crowded wreckage of fragmented steel and timber. A black disembodied funnel emerged from the water and gave a dominant clue to what all this meant. A drenched sailor with a cut cheek and blood at his waist grasped Darragh.
‘There were dozens on it,’ he said, and Darragh knew he would tell anyone he met, all night, until he was taken away and his wounds dressed. �
��They’re down there!’
Whatever this ship had been, its ruin was final. Trumble was beside him, gasping and staring at the melee of wood and steel guy-rope. ‘Jesus,’ he said. Weeping, Darragh raised his hand over those who must still be drowning in this ruin.
‘Ego te absolvo,’ he intoned, more by instinct than by coolly arrived at intention. And as he did, he felt Fratelli’s arm confidingly embracing him in brotherly shock for the unseen men seeking the mothering air in wreckage below them. Two further gashed sailors, rescuers or survivors, were hauled onto the seawall, retching and bleeding at the feet of other ratings and officers.
‘Jesus,’ said Trumble, ‘poor buggers!’ Naval police began walking along the edge of the seawall, ordering men back, warning of further undersea explosions. Precisely because Fratelli, Trumble and Darragh were dressed as civilians, and might have authority of the kind to which Fratelli made such easy pretence, a naval policeman explained, ‘The Japs were after the Chicago. They got this depot ship. Dozens of blokes. Dozens.’
Darragh wondered how the night could be expected to accommodate the scale of this, of the horror of those men whose lungs had flooded in the dark, bloody anchorage, as he and Fratelli stood there ineffectual by the cluttered surface water. More and more Australian sailors wearing the armbands which declared them to be police now proliferated, and Darragh found that even he and his companions were forced back from the calamity. Their right to be in the graving dock by the seawall was never challenged, but they found themselves further and further from it, walking backwards among sheds and barracks, but always pausing to look and exclaim. Fratelli handed around the remnants of the bottle, a badly needed mouthful each. Fratelli’s arm played around Darragh’s shoulder.
‘This is the night, Frank,’ he said. ‘Even I know God is abroad.’ He earnestly kissed Darragh’s cheek, and Darragh did not recoil as much as he might have expected to. ‘For Christ’s sake, Father, you can’t really expect me to do anything with the big guy here. Get rid of him, and you can take me to my medicine.’ Under pressure of death barely achieved yet by the seawall, this seemed a peculiarly reasonable idea. It was, as Fratelli had said, a night when the relentlessness of destiny, the unarguable nature of punishment, seemed written on the air. ‘Just get rid of the big guy,’ Fratelli pleaded, throwing the empty whisky bottle on the pavement, indifferent to whether it shattered or not. ‘He’s not part of anything.’ The anti-aircraft and other guns were firing again all round the harbour. There were the sea-bed sounds of depth charges. Darragh’s brain jolted with fright for the Japanese submariners. What must it be like to be encased in the silt, in the Christ-less dark of Sydney’s profound moorage? What faith could soothe that bitter, thunderous dark?
Darragh turned to Trumble. ‘Ross,’ he said, ‘I could be here till morning. I have to thank you, but everything’s settled now and you ought to go. It’s a long way to Homebush. Bert might need you.’
‘I thought we were going back together?’ said Trumble, his solemn eyes reminding Darragh of the possible dangers of Fratelli, which were greater than Trumble could know. Was Darragh sure? Darragh said that yes, everything was settled. He could see that Trumble, after all the liquor and row, was trying to remember how to make his way back to the world of taxis and electric trains.
‘If that’s the way you feel,’ said Trumble, a little offended to be dismissed.
‘Thank you,’ said Darragh.
Trumble was all at once gone. Fratelli said, as thumps and thuds receded, ‘I’d bet the sons of bitches in the subs are dead. And look.’ He drew his hand up towards the overcast. ‘No paratroopers.’
There was piping aboard the great battleship Chicago as it slipped its moorings and was all at once veering seaward, edging out towards the vast safety beyond the Sydney Heads. Darragh watched it, since its scale demanded watching, for an indefinite time.
‘Bless ’em all,’ said Fratelli in a dream. ‘Let’s go, Frank.’
He had talked like this to Kate Heggarty, with hypnotic authority, while she stayed stunned and fixed in place by her husband’s capture. Darragh could well understand how she could have savoured his kindness, the powers of persuasion, the glittering eyes that transcended the dull charities of the St Vincent de Paul Society.
Darragh and Fratelli fell into step, moving as one being.
‘Where are we going?’ Darragh nonetheless asked.
‘Up the steps again … A station at the corner of Darlinghurst Road. I ought to know. MPs and Aussie cops.’ They passed through a gate guarded by two Australian sailors, who wanted to hear anything Darragh and Fratelli could tell them. Fratelli did the duty. A ship was sunk. The rumour was there were dozens on it. A torpedo had missed Chicago, come right under the Dutch submarine, exploded under the seawall, and reduced the depot ship to splinters. ‘Christ,’ said one of the young men. ‘That must be Kattabul. I know a bloke on that!’
‘Yeah,’ said Fratelli, moving on with Darragh. ‘That’s the war.’
They mounted the stone steps back to the world they had left a few hours and some eras ago. Darragh hoped to retrieve the known world at the head of the stairs, and Fratelli seemed lighthearted, about to be rescued by grace at the plain desk of a police station. He stopped, however, on one of the stone landings, by a cement balustrade.
‘Do you think you’ll ever see the nigger, that Gervaise, again?’
‘I hope so,’ Frank confessed. ‘He deserves to live and to go home too, in the end.’
‘Do you think he’ll go home? Not if my kindred souls in the corps have their way. Penal battalions of black men! Don’t kid yourself, Frank. You won’t be seeing that boy again. Not ole Gervaise! How sad! A big guy like that stepping into some minefield in New Guinea. Yeah. How sad!’
‘Then we don’t deserve to win,’ said Darragh.
Fratelli waved that concept aside. ‘Frank, you’ve ruined everything for me, you know,’ he reproved Darragh. ‘Frank.’ He wrapped his arms around Darragh with a ferocity Darragh could not have expected. ‘You took her fucking soul, Frank.’
In that ferocious embrace, Darragh could barely move—he writhed but Fratelli had, as Inspector Kearney had warned, abnormal power. ‘I’d led her to where we went, but you had her soul, Frank, fuck you!’
Fratelli’s power seemed languid, but it put Darragh on his back, against harsh stone, or cement and gravel, nothing as erosive as Sydney’s kindly sandstone, and Fratelli descended on him like a felled tree. Darragh was pinioned. I thought I was strong, Darragh told himself. But this was strength. Fratelli’s massive hands were on his windpipe, and around the span of the throat. As in Kate Heggarty’s case, there was knowledge and power here to crush the breath and interrupt the blood. If he, the Ordained of the Lord, a priest forever, could find himself in this choking situation, with the thunder of his blood detonating in the sky, providing the phantom paratroopers whose existence Fratelli had denied, how much more forgivable had this been in Kate Heggarty? Anyone could come to this end with such a powerful fellow! Darragh wanted only to tell the world that he had been validated in the sermon he had given that distant morning, twelve hours ago. The words of the Mass worked like solid lumps through his chest, up the column of his throat, taking on neon proportions in his brain. Wrestling with the power of this dark angel, he spread his hands, thumbs tucked in behind the two forefingers. For some reason, he thought liturgical correctness was required. ‘Dignum et justum est. Vere dignum et justus est, aequum et salutare, nos tibi semper, et ubique gratias agere. It is worthy and just. Truly worthy and just it is, truly proper and salutary, for us always and everywhere to give thee thanks … Sanguis Domini Nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam aeternam … The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, in His throat through which He deigned to share with us the prosaic air, guard my soul into eternal life.’ Darragh struggled under the prodigious flashes of light he saw beyond the slope of Fratelli’s omnipotent shoulder. When will the peace set in, he wanted to know, beneath Fratelli�
��s crushing hands?
The jagged litanies continued to run out of him into a breathless sky, Jesus my Lord and my God, why has thou abandoned me? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, look down on thy servant in mercy. Sweet heart of Jesus … Tower of ivory … Morning star … Source of our joy, oh our joy. A dreadful thing to die with submariners, in the blossoming dark, with the merciless paratroopers descending and descending.
Now he could feel, even as his brain threatened to leave him, the hard bones of Fratelli’s pelvis and the specific penis battering at his right thigh. He gagged for mercy but could feel his own penis engorged in a kind of vicious cooperation with Fratelli, who owned the night and all its mayhem, and had the power to evoke all squalor.
Among the multiplying parachutes of his last breath, a parachutist or minister of mercy appeared at Fratelli’s shoulder. He wrestled without much effect at first, dragging at the shoulders of the succubus. Then, as the searchlights of vessels lit up the harbour again, Darragh saw Trumble the merciful creature lift a huge square of sandstone and drop it on Fratelli’s head. Fratelli slid away, and Darragh was abandoned to a sudden ache for air. Trumble had lifted the successful lump of stone again and was about to let it fall from chest height on Sergeant Fratelli. Kearney preposterously arrived and prevented him. Kearney cried, ‘Come on, come on, boys. Enough fun. Jesus, Trumble, let it go!’ Two men in suits were lifting Darragh upright, and he saw before him Kearney, framed by the lit harbour and honoured by a new set of deepwater explosions. Kearney reached out and shook his hand. ‘What are you up to, Frank?’ he asked. ‘You’ll never be a fucking bishop now, you know.’
DARRAGH SPENT A drugged Monday in St Vincent’s Hospital, attended by whispering nuns who had much to celebrate in God’s benevolence. The Chicago had not been sunk, the young priest had been rescued, the killer detained! Though there were rumours that the mother submarines from which the swarm of midget subs had been released had shelled the innocent streets of Bondi or Bronte, the bodies of the Japanese submariners lay as deeply dead as that of Kate Heggarty, and the nameless citizens of the city walked abroad with tales to tell of the night of their survival.