But these well-wishers thought of the physical as well as the spiritual man. There was also in each parcel a tin of very sticky lollies, a handkerchief, a pair of socks, a tube of toothpaste which was admirable for cleaning rifle barrels and polishing metal souvenirs, and, of course, a cake of soap.
A grateful country looks after its men when they are going into battle. ‘Nothing,’ as Dick the Barber remarked sourly when we opened the parcels, ‘is too good for the Australian soldier.’
Pez made his way down the alleys between the bunks.
There was Regan lying on his bunk—the top one of the tier, with the luxury of direct lighting and an overhead air vent that roared gently in amplification of the sound that you heard when you were a kid and pressed a shell against your ear to hear the roar of the sea.
Regan lay in his bunk in fractional comfort, his body sticky and sweating and his face and throat bathed in the thick, cool jet of air. He was a thin lad in his twenties with a ragged thatch of black hair, a thin, swarthy, Irish face and close-set blue eyes.
He was holding a paper-backed novel, but he wasn’t reading. He was lying there, staring at the blurred page and feeling fear in his heart. It had always been the same for him—this fear of being hurt and the greater fear of people knowing that he was afraid.
Pez passed on and paused to watch the poker game for a moment. He saw Cairo Fleming grin and bluff his last pound on a pair of deuces. And when old Whispering John called him on an ace-high blue, he laughed. He got up from the table broke, and he grinned: ‘Hell, Mrs Kelly wouldn’t let her little boy Ned play with you blokes.’
You can tell a lot from the way a man plays poker—especially the way he loses.
Old Whispering John always played his cards with elaborate cunning, close to the vest. Next hand he was first to bet.
‘I’ll make it a modest sixteen shillings,’ he whispered.
Brogan’s hand went into the pack and young Griffo made it twenty-four. Sunny and Ocker both threw in and it was up to John again.
‘You can’t make it twenty-four,’ said Whispering John querulously. ‘It was only a four-bob game.’
‘I made it eight for cards,’ said Griffo. ‘You made it sixteen yourself, first bet.’
Whispering John looked hard at young Griffo and felt hatred for this youth who sat looking at him with elaborate unconcern and a womanish mouth.
‘I wish to Christ I knew what you had in your hand,’ John whined.
‘There’s one sure way to find out,’ said Sunny.
‘All right, all right!’ snapped Whispering John. Anyone’d think I didn’t have the guts to look.’ He held his cards up between a bony thumb and forefinger. He was breathing unevenly.
Young Griffo laid down three queens.
‘Six tits,’ he said.
Whispering John slammed his cards down with petty viciousness on the table: ‘I had three tens,’ he complained. ‘I get three tens and he has three queens. He’s been got at, the bastard. He’s been touched. Christ, I never seen such paper as I’m getting tonight.’ He pushed the stool back and stood up, ‘That finishes me—when your luck runs that way it’s time to get out.’
Pez threaded his way back into the alleys between the bunks.
There was a group around the Laird, who swung gently in the hammock he had scrounged from the crew’s quarters and slung between two iron stanchions so that it was in the cool spot right under the big ventilator shaft.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ boomed the Laird, ‘but I’ll make a bet that fifty per cent of these skulls we’ve got get themselves killed or go troppo within a week.’ He snarled with fine scorn: ‘Duntroon boys! My God, what hoons! What drongos! After seeing their form it’s my considered opinion that they couldn’t lead their old grandmothers to the company latrine.
‘You know that little bloke?’ he said. ‘You know, that smooth-faced snotty little bloke with the curly hair—what do they call him?—Billy the Kid, that’s right…’ His voice dropped to a horrified rumble: ‘Do you know what he tried to make me do at Redlynch, just before we got on the boat? He tried to make me do rifle exercises by numbers! I’ve been in the army four years and that hairy-arsed schoolboy comes along and wants me to do rifle exercises by numbers. I told him what he could do with the rifle—by number, too, and bayonet end first.’
Said Dick the Barber: ‘Well, I don’t know, you can’t always tell by the way a bloke looks—remember Bosker?’
‘Who’s he?’ asked Bishie. ‘Not that big major up at Brigade?’
‘No,’ said Dick the Barber. ‘He was a lairy little bloke, Bosker, with a kind of Haw Haw voice and an absolute nut about having your buttons done up. He got killed at Sanananda—but he did a bloody good job.’
‘Yeah,’ said the Laird. ‘He should have got a VC for that job—he earned it.’
Pez remembered that day. Three times Bosker had gone through that desolate waste of swamp and palms, where the shells were falling, to carry orders to ‘A’ Company, pinned down on the flank. The fourth time he died in the swamp.
‘But I wouldn’t worry too much about these apes of officers we’ve got,’ Dick the Barber was saying. ‘When you get down to it, who does the work? The poor old drack private and the corporal. The corporal—he’s the leader—he’s the one that actually takes the men in and does the job after all the brass hats have finished deciding what the job is. And we’ve got better corporals than any other army in the world.’
Said Bishie: ‘If it comes to that, we can always shoot the skulls first and carry on from there.’
But Dick the Barber was talking: ‘And you know there’s men on this boat that aren’t even getting their efficiency pay. Brass hats—brass bastards! They’re going to send those men in and ask them to go forward scout and they won’t even give them efficiency pay.
‘Christ, it’s an insult! They say to a man: “Now, if you’re a good boy for six months, and you don’t go ack-willie, and you know how to fire a Bren gun, and you can do your bloody gas drill that you’ll never bloody need—then we’ll open our great big brass hearts and give you an extra zac a day.”
‘Sixpence a day! A lousy zac! Christ, you’d think they were giving you gilt-edged security for life! Some of these blokes over-stayed their leave a couple of days—or else they shot into town and got drunk—so they took the lousy zac a day off them.’
His voice jumbled with bitterness and anger: ‘So they reckon they’re not efficient soldiers, but they’re still going to send them into action. They ought to be cut up and their swags burnt!’
‘Now, now, Dick,’ grinned Bishie, ‘don’t get yourself excited.’
‘Why the hell shouldn’t I get excited?’ snapped Dick the Barber. ‘That’s the trouble with the world—people don’t get excited about these things.’
‘Sure,’ cut in Harry Drew quietly. ‘But it’s a waste of time and energy, getting excited and not doing anything. We’ll fix a deputation to Slapsy Paint tomorrow and see if we can get anything done about it.’
The Laird heaved his bulk up in the hammock and leaned on one elbow as he chuckled reminiscently: ‘You know, I had a mate once like that. If anything went wrong he’d scream and tear his hair and stamp around cursing and swearing better than any bullocky.
‘He was with me when I was up the scrub—a little bloke, sandy hair, name of Samuels—and a bloody good mate, too. You might know his brother, Dick—he had a brother, Alec, I think his name was. He was a dentist down the ’Gong.’
Dick the Barber reflected. ‘A thin dark-haired bloke with a bit of a twisty eye?’
‘No,’ said the Laird, ‘he was a big fair-haired snodger—hell of a nice bloke but always getting into strife with married women.’
‘I can’t place him,’ said Dick the Barber ruminatingly. ‘Can’t place him anywhere round the ’Gong.’
‘Oh, well,’ admitted the Laird, ‘I wouldn’t be certain it was down the south coast—might have been out Wagga way he lived.’
&nb
sp; ‘Think I’ll hit the cot,’ said Harry Drew, rising and stretching. ‘We’ll be in tomorrow, I guess.’
‘Yeah, we’ll see her tomorrow.’
Bishie stared sombrely ahead. He was new to this mob, he’d come out of the militia. He was remembering the last time—a different time to the one they knew and he could not really share it with them.
He remembered the smell of smoke and blood. Behind them Rabaul was burning and they fled through the jungle and the swamp with the dry mouths of fear.
This time they wouldn’t have to run.
Cairo Fleming stood hunched over the rail in the deeper shadow of a lifeboat and stared down at the boiling blue sparks of phosphorescence in the white foam furrowed from the ship’s bow. He knew the feel of the sea—the wild, swift bucking of a small and slippery deck and the sting of the combed salt spray as the fishing smack butted jauntily into the long, grey rollers of the South Pacific. Toes, naked, gripping the smooth surging deck…The small comforting smell of oil and engines in the gulf of wind and sea…The nets running out, dropping out behind in the grey water…The squirming, heavy weight of them when they were hauled in and the slower, heavy bite of the boat in the running seas to home…
Cairo stared at the blue and boiling sparks and felt the surge of the deck as a memory. Inside the heavy army boots, his lean toes instinctively crooked and clung, as though his trousers were again rolled to his knees and his feet planted, balanced apart, gripping the small deck. And in the foam and the darkness of the sea and the hurricane-grey sky and the timeless surge, he felt his loneliness—that loneliness and nostalgic discontent he knew all his life.
He knew what they used to say: ‘Cairo’s always happy,’ they used to say. ‘You never see Cairo without a grin on his face.’
The Laird used to tell about him and Cairo in the Owen Stanley show: coming up the track from Popandetta, the Nips opened up with a mountain gun. Cairo dives for a hole and then props when he sees a considerably dead Nip sitting up in her. Then one lands a bit close and the shrap whistles through the trees. Cairo says to the dead Nip: ‘Brother, I need that hole more than you,’ and he leans down, grabs him by the collar, hauls most of him out and dives in just as another one bursts about five yards away.
No one ever knew whether Cairo was blown or jumped into that hole—Cairo himself thinks he maybe got some assistance.
And again at Sanananda, the Laird would tell: We were cut off for a bit and things looked sticky. Cairo says nothing to us, but goes quietly to Coulter—Captain Coulter, his third pip came through not long before and he had charge of the Company then—he got killed a couple of days later, remember—Cairo says to Coulter: ‘Look, I don’t mind seeing if I can get back to the battalion—we might get some help.’
And Coulter turned on him: ‘Get back to your bloody section, Fleming,’ he said. ‘You’re too good a bloody soldier to lose trying this VC stuff.’
Cairo shrugs, and says OK, and starts back. But he’d only gone a few steps when Coulter calls him: ‘Thanks mate,’ he says.
Poor old Coulter copped it two days later—shrapnel in the guts. He was a good man. He died hard.
Sure, he always had a grin, had Cairo. He was always happy—though sometimes when he grinned he wasn’t happy.
It’s bad, the loneliness of being apart from humanity when you want desperately to be part. It keeps you awake like a hunger in the night. And even when people do accept you, there is always that doubt, that fear in the mind that they may be doing it consciously out of pity, or condescendingly to flatter their own egos. It is a burning thing, that fear—it scorches the clean flesh of your pride.
‘Hell,’ thought Cairo. ‘I’m being sorry for myself.’
He grinned wryly in the darkness and the twisting of his broad mouth showed strong white teeth. It was a strong face—a round, heavy jaw and broad mouth and nostrils, deep brow, soft brown eyes and crinkly black hair. His body was lean and hard and his hands slender, the fingers thin and strong.
‘Hell,’ he thought. ‘What does it matter? Tomorrow we land and after that…’
A vague figure blundered a little, missing the roll of the boat, collided with the frame of a lifeboat derrick and cursed casually.
‘That you, Log?’ said Cairo.
‘Yeah,’ said the Log. ‘Where are you?’
‘Over here near the rail—watch the rope.’
Log groped his way to the rail, rested his elbows on it and hunched down beside Cairo.
‘What are you doing, mate?’ he asked.
‘Just thinking,’ said Cairo.
‘Problems?’
‘No—just thinking.’
They slouched there watching a drunken star that staggered on the northern horizon. They were comfortably silent for a long time. Cairo felt a strange contentment in the surging of the ship…
Deacon had been lying on his bunk, his eyes closed, the sticky trickle of sweat on his body, trying to sleep.
But instead of sleep he drifted back always into the dream—until in the end he was forcing himself to stay in the half-darkness of the mind and striving to re-create the look of her and the sound of her voice and the scenes they had moved through together.
The heat and stench and sweat of the hold, the throbbing of the ship and babble of voices from the Laird and Bishie and Dick the Barber talking down the alley, he forced away until they were resting thinly on the skin of his brain and he was burrowed deep into the warm darkness of his memory.
He felt a faint, pleasant stirring of the bowels as he conjured. They were lying in the long, sun-warm grass on the banks of the river. The wattles grew low over them and made a cool, thin cavern of shade. The golden pollen drifted down as a small breeze rustled the branches. Some of it had powdered the deep auburn of her hair and he noticed it as she turned to him.
Her cropped auburn hair, with the small curls clinging round her head like that sculpture of the Greek boy in the museum. Her eyes shining, her tip-tilted nose powdered with freckles and her rich mouth slightly open and wry with desire.
His arm was around her shoulders and she turned her soft, firm young body urgently to his. The feeling of the sun warming and the earth and green things growing and the sap singing…
His mind hinged on this sequence and he couldn’t force the imagery on past that point. The memory of her turning to him blurred into the sun and the earth and the trees.
Three times he forced the image up and each time it blurred. With a small curse of frustration, he sat up suddenly. He reached under the pack and the illegal lifebelt which made up his pillow, and took out a leather wallet. He opened it and drew a folded letter from among the small pack of photographs in the celluloid-covered compartment. The letter was grimy on the edges from handling. Deacon leaned on one elbow, part way out of his bunk to catch the light, and read it again.
That young, flourishing, artificial script…
Oh My Darling,
I cried all night after you had gone and next morning the girls at the office were very sticky about why my eyes were so red. But I wouldn’t tell them. I couldn’t tell anyone about us and how I feel for you.
Everything has been black and miserable since you left me and the only thing that lets me go on living (the only thing that makes me want to go on living) is the thought that this time will be the last time that you will be away.
I am jealous of all the other times you went away and it was not me that felt sick in the heart when you were gone. (Do you really think I am jealous of you, darling? I am! I’m terribly jealous! Do you think that is a bad thing?) I hate all those other women you have known. You are the first man I have ever truly loved and I wish I could be the first one for you, like you are for me.
I know you will laugh at me, but perhaps men never feel the same way about these things as a woman. And I am a woman now, my darling—you made me that, even if you haven’t made me an honest one yet. But you will, won’t you? You do want to marry me, don’t you?
It�
�s different for a man, I know, but sometimes I get terrible black depressions and I am sure that you never truly loved me and I am so desolate and miserable and I could kill myself. Other times I just wake up in the morning and I am sure, for no good reason, that you do love me and you will come back.
Oh, I’m a shameless woman, I know I am, my darling. I gave you my body and I suppose I really am a very immoral person and I ought to feel ashamed when I sit opposite Mummy at breakfast.
But I don’t, my darling, I don’t! I feel very proud and very happy—that is, when I’m not feeling very small and very miserable and certain that you don’t love me.
Oh, come home soon, darling. Look after yourself and come home soon so that I can be an abandoned woman and be yours again.
Goodbye for a while, a little while, my darling.
Margaret
Deacon finished reading, but stayed, leaning on one elbow, staring at, but not seeing, the written page. He could feel a pride of conquest and an egotistical glow at the extravagance of her abandonment. She was so young and theatrical, with such a young passion for being in love with love.
You told lies to a woman and tried to weave those lies into a pattern to make the whole affair a golden tapestry, a piece of artistry, a highly skilled game. You never found in your beloved Margaret that depth and sincerity of emotion you thought to find in love when you were young.
When you were young, Deacon! The romantic bitterness and weight of twenty-two years made you mourn for the time ‘when you were young’.
This beloved Margaret had touched but never torn your heart. Everything you did or said had a cold shadow of calculation in it. ‘It’s got to stop,’ Deacon thought. The labour of weaving patterns in words and keeping up the pretence was too great, the game was palling. But there must be some way to let her down easy—to break it up but leave her with the shine in her eyes and the warm, eager parting of her lips.
Oh, when we are arrogant enough to believe that we have created love in a woman, Deacon, we must condescend to handle her very gently. Even when we break her heart we must make sure that we find some pattern that relieves us of the burden, but provides that she still must love us. ‘There must be some way that wouldn’t hurt her,’ was the way Deacon thought of it.
The Long Green Shore Page 2