by Ray Clift
Later that night Martin was still in bewilderment about the high-tech machine with its computer which tells the driver when to sow, the expected profit, which ground has more moisture and so on. I went to sleep while he was telling me the whole story. But I was very happy we had come to the farm of my childhood.
Jane and my nephew Michael visited each day because they were not far away. There were a lot of family matters to catch up with. Shane is in the Army Reserve and is a military police officer. He told us that he was soon to go on a six-month tour of duty to East Timor. It was a training assist role and the money was very good, enough to pay off the mortgage. Dad cornered him later outside. I suspect he was telling him about some of the dangers in the developing country. I never had any bad vibes about his tour and guessed he would come through OK. Martin said nothing about East Timor but I think he knew more than he was letting on.
I sat on my old bed in the house a few days before we left to visit Rosemary, our cousin in Canberra. Martin dearly wanted to see the War Memorial.
The room was deadly quiet. It was a breezy day and the windows were shut. I was thinking about Mum and how she used to read stories to me. I looked under the bed and there was the old suitcase of my school days. I opened the case and found my Beatrix Potter books. My hand brushed the cover of my favourite. I opened the book and sniffed. A familiar aroma of lavender and rose scent came into my senses. They were Joan’s favourite and I clearly recall how she brushed the underside of her left wrist with the perfume throughout the day. I looked at my feet and saw my shiny black school shoes. My feet were crossed. I looked down and saw at my feet my old school lunch box and I opened it. There was an alfoil-wrapped sandwich with tuna, lettuce and an apple in the box as crisp as the day when I sat there. The alfoil was flat without any creases. Mum used to say, ‘Smooth as a baby’s bum.’ That’s what she was like. Who would take the trouble nowadays to run an iron over a piece of alfoil?
Wind came from nowhere, blowing the mobiles still fixed to the ceiling. I looked into the bedside dresser and froze at the sight: she was sitting alongside of me, misty, but it was her all right. I felt no freezing cold (which is supposed to be the announcement of spirits about). She was knitting and occasionally looking up. I dared not turn around lest she fade.
I picked up the Beatrix Potter book, still open at the first page, and placed it on my right side, where she sat. I whispered, ‘Read me a story, Mum, please, please,’ as if I had reverted to a six-year-old child.
I heard the pages being flicked over.
Then her voice, a bit quieter than I remembered, not like her great belly-rocking laugh: ‘This is a good one, dear.’
I sat stunned while she read the three pages. I could not resist it. I turned my head very slowly and then she misted away to wherever spirits go when they’re tired. I looked back in the mirror. She had definitely gone. I cried and cried yet felt a strong hand on my shoulder and saw her wedding ring still in place.
‘Don’t worry, dear. It’s all in God’s hands.’ It was a raspy whisper.
I stood and heard a fading belly laugh which stopped near a door which I had closed but was now wide open. The wind gusted in and blew away my mum, back into the other world.
In spite of what Martin said, I hadn’t gone to sleep. ‘It wasn’t a dream, mate.’
He knew not to meddle with my psychic senses.
I told Dad later.
‘She comes to me a lot, Suzie.’
He held my hand very firmly the next day on the drive to the airport. I was in my trackies, wearing my Pumas as well.
There was a waiting time and I visited the toilet, which isn’t a place one would expect to find spirits. The door was closed. I reached over for the toilet paper and was amazed when it floated in the air and then I heard her laugh, ‘I’m so proud of you, love. So proud.’
I stood and flushed the loo, put the roll back on the hook and walked up to see Martin and Dad. How did I explain this one to them? I felt the flushed energy all over my face. I paused, waiting for their attention.
‘Listen, both of you. She was there in the toilet. She touched me. I know it.’
Dad spoke first. ‘Well, why not? Humans spend a lot of time in dunnies, you know.’
Martin giggled but stopped when Dad went on, ‘Shit, she’s just laughed in my left ear. It’s her. I know that laugh real well.’
I hugged Dad and walked to the plane. When I looked back to wave, he was standing there having a bellowing laugh along with Mum, I opined, on his own. I guess people walking past him would cast furtive glances and rush away from the mental man talking and laughing to himself. However, I know and he knows and maybe Martin does as well, Dad was not alone, in spite of a crowded airport with strangers flashing past intent on their own journey and not noticing the man talking to a loved one in another world.
10
Suzie
Canberra
Martin handed me the typed transcript of his father’s tape. Close to the end of his life, he recorded those last evocative moments alone in the cave, stuck fast after the fall of a huge boulder. It interested me more than New Idea with missing pages or an old National Geographic. I realised how eloquent his father was within a few sentences, his desperation splashed across the words.
The stars were twinkling on the night I left Bea and my two kids. I waited like a snake on a rock for the moment when the contract of marriage, in my mind, was overdue for breaking. I am aware of what folk would say about my abandonment. Shock and unfounded assumptions. Yet I never took a glance back, which was caused by my selfish form of justification, which had been tied up in some dark cave within my shadow. The boredom of it all drove me. It was uppermost and finally arose like Neptune, with my steps hurrying away for ever. I made my gallop then just like a hyena, skulking away, tail down and fleet of foot. Here I am now, watching the glittering stars and gazing at the huge boulder perched high above and waiting, slowly inching forward to its release and another home at the foot of the cave, with a silly human squashed under it. I wish that boulder could talk. What ageless stories it’s seen, mine being one of them soon.
It’s the third night since my sure foot gave out, and the pain comes in waves with a blue black cloud enveloping me. Maybe that’s the colour of my skin which I see. My time is near and the jig is up. The easy escapes I employed for years have run out of petrol. I’m twixt and between whether I ought to end my life now. Maybe the many spider bites will have mercy on me. Maybe I’ll have a stroke and then a coma. I feel God near me, I think.
I made life happen rather than let it happen and that’s the rub. I used a fashion in life to dart between major and minor events, never hoping for a slack time in between. The slack times were my desert and I saw those times as rubbish accumulating, waiting for an empty status. Maybe my life was built with flaws like a house badly built with bits and pieces stuck together uncoordinated on improper foundations. Like Joseph’s coat without a lining.
Marriage and kids came quickly after my discharge and a good job was there waiting. So what was wrong? Nothing. My great meals were always on time. My clothes were immaculate and then we would cuddle up after, like two spoons nestled in a cutlery drawer. Good music reigned in the house and we had top kids, who were a pride. Kids to die for.
The bridges were burnt. Maybe I thought I wasn’t good enough to deserve such contentment. Perhaps I’m just an impersonator who like an actor delivers lines yet has no emotion afterwards.
What I ought to have done was constantly decipher bad messages coming in and each day make a prayer to God of gratitude. But I chose unguarded information to wreck my life and yours, dear Bea. And Jane and Martin, I was never a ladies’ man and quick lust was not on the horizon, so there was no other third person in my life. I think I chose the certainty of misery rather than the uncertainty of life. The tape is running down now. Forgive me, my dears. I always loved you. I hear the boulder dislodging and I’m chucking the tape aside lest it gets squashed.
I was moved by his similes and his confessions. ‘How sad, how sad,’ I said. ‘But Bea endured and you must be happy about the closure.’
‘We are, love. It lifted her spirits from that day on. And I was at last able to get rid of the burden of not forgiving. I forgave him.’
The plane circled around Canberra and I spoke a few words to Martin after he had just woken up from a doze. ‘Rosemary’s part Aboriginal. Her mother Lill was the first woman of her race to make it into the Queensland police. She was married to Dennis, a detective there who investigated when Lill was raped by a sailor on leave. She refused to have an abortion and raised Rosemary on her own until Dennis, Dad’s second cousin, and Lill were married. Lill was killed by a drunken driver when she was walking across the road. Rosemary’s IQ was so high she was accepted for a science scholarship but as soon as she could she joined the Australian Federal Police. She served in a lot of spots until Afghanistan. I’ll let her tell you her story, the bones of which you already know.’
Martin put both hands behind his head and drawled, ‘Hell, what a drama. But our family are survivors as well as yours.’
We walked from the tarmac chatting all the way in to the terminal. I pointed to Rosemary in the distance. There she was with her walking stick yet still bright-eyed.
Her husband was on a job, she said when she greeted us. She had seen a photo of Martin and remarked, ‘Not unlike Smithy in a way, Suzie. Maybe a bit heavier.’
She drove the short distance to her house near Lake George, the mystical disappearing lake which, I read in a glossy brochure, Aboriginals think is taboo. I was curious if that was true.
‘Doesn’t worry us,’ she said. ‘Besides, we’re from another tribe.’
‘What tribe?’ I enquired. I ought to have remembered her humour.
‘White tribe, mate.’
Martin burst out laughing but I was embarrassed.
She dug me in the ribs and said, ‘Hey, I’m not going to eat you but some of my tribe did, I think, many moons ago, Lone Ranger.’ Then she added, to keep the joke going, ‘Hey, do you like koala on a barbecue?’
I wasn’t going to answer for fear of another line but Martin did.
‘What’s it like?’
I waited apprehensively for her to answer.
‘A bit like platypus actually.’
And then we all laughed so much that the car swerved. I was unsure if Martin knew what a platypus was but I didn’t ask.
Westie came home armed with bottles of wine. He was a happy guy and warmed any room he walked into, as I soon found out. There was a lot of laughter at the barbecue, but no koalas. There was a lot of booze and we fell into bed in a drunken stupor, waking up with sore heads.
We hired a car for the day trips we’d planned and took Rosemary with us. She showed us all the sights except the War Memorial, which was earmarked for Martin the next day. I’d seen it many times.
‘How did it go, Martin?’
‘Great, Suzie. I saw all I wanted to see. It’s really amazing. I bumped into some American tourists wearing Vietnam baseball hats and chewed the fat with them. They were armoured corps people in there in 1971. I met a military cop who was there right up till the time the NVA broke through. He was suffering really bad about the Vietnamese families and soldiers who were left behind to face the music. I wasn’t aware but up to 300,000 of the South sympathisers were murdered after the hostilities ceased.’
I didn’t interject while he was on a roll.
‘A bloody tragedy, really. The war ended in disgrace.’
It was the only time I ever heard Martin speak out openly about the war and its consequences. He was lost a bit for a few days until we cheered him up with a visit to a military club. He played his harmonica, which revived his spirits, and no mention was made of who I was, for which I was grateful.
The rest of the time was just a quiet interlude with the reading of many emails and great booze consumed to bursting stomachs and lots of belches. Oh, and squeaky silent farts.
Rosemary was urged by Martin to tell her story and the dramas which followed. She looked at Westie, who was very lively and in an inquisitive mood and sucked the best out of Martin and me from his 1968 year in Da Nang and the Silver Star which came after, like a cart catching up to a horse.
‘OK, Martin, but I’m interested in what your injury was.’
Martin looked at me. I nodded.
‘Got my balls blown off, or rather 1.5 of them to be exact.’
I could see Westie cross his legs and squirm, the natural reaction from a male.
Rosemary chipped in with a cliché. ‘Any change of voice?’
Martin was in on the old joke about squeaky voices and lowered his voice. ‘No, ma’am, but the Bee Gees once asked me to join the band.’
Rosemary kept it going. ‘I can’t hear you, Lone Ranger.’ And she went on, ‘Any other problems, sergeant major?’
Martin replied as I knew he would, ‘Not really. One consolation is I can cross my legs without an accident,’ which brought the topic to a close. ‘So what about you, Rosemary?’ Martin leaned towards her.
It was her turn to talk about war wounds. ‘OK, Martin. Let me shuffle through some papers first. Settle down and pour us all some drinks. Glasses are up there.’ She pointed to the cabinet and the medal for valour was uncovered, having been gathering dust behind the glasses.
Martin picked it up. ‘This is great, Rosemary. You should both be proud.’
‘I suppose so. Don’t want to sound ungracious. There was a big parade. I was in a wheelchair. I was thinking that my big chance to have a child was gone when my reverie was interrupted as they called my name. I felt like my hero Cathy Freeman when she once said in her great ocker voice, “I don’t want a medal. I want a baby.” I walked out into a life of art, like basket weaving for a while, splashing paint about and sculpture, which is my great love now. I settled into a life of invalid pensioner till something else happened.’ She paused.
‘What was it?’ enquired my southern boy.
‘I was at home here when I saw Westie hovering outside my front window. He was with me when we found the baby. He bloody near bowled me over with what he said.’
She went on after swallowing a great glass of white wine and smacking her lips. ‘“Rosie,” he said, “I want to ghost write your story. I’ll make you famous.” I shook my head but he still prattled on like a woodpecker. “Imagine your story, Rosemary. What a lift to your race.” He then spins it out with me being a credit to Oz. Then he blurts it out: “I love you. Will you marry me?” “What the fuck for?” I say. He’s stuck for words but I take it up anyway. “So do you want to be with a celebrity and a black one at that?” “Stuff your colour,” he said. “In fact, I’m darker than you once I’ve been out in the sun.” I laugh at that and tell him to call back in a week. He does and I walk to the door naked, hoping it’s him. He gulps and I watch his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. I grab him by the arm and haul him in and I says, “Slip into something more comfortable and afterwards I’ll give you my answer.” There he is lying on the bed in the longest pair of undies I have ever seen. They were like my grandmother’s bloomers. I yank ‘em off and jump on top of him.’
‘What happened then?’ said Martin, who was nearly crying with laughter.
‘I married the little prick.’
They were holding hands at that point. Then she found the papers and the newspaper articles. We watched as she shuffled through the medical reports and the sad news that her child-rearing days were over, until she found the statement she had made at the time to the team of investigators.
‘I’m sick of the sound of my voice. Have a read of this. It is of course in the first person as you’d expect.’ She plonked the affidavit in front of us.
Statement of Rosemary Pearce, 25 years, AFP officer stationed at forward base Kabul, Afghanistan, obtained by Detective Senior Constable Ronald James AFP
I was on duty outside of Kabul in June 2006 in a co
nvoy of military vehicles and in company with Shane Wallace, also a member of the AFP. I yelled out to the driver, ‘Stop, stop.’ I saw a small baby on the road. I jumped out to pick him up and saw something metallic inside his nappy. It was an M26 hand grenade with the pin just tied with fine cotton. I called out after I held the grenade and Shane took the baby. The pin lever was held down tightly with my right hand but I had no idea if precious seconds had been used up on the fuse. I called for all of the vehicles to form a semicircle and asked people to stay a good distance away. They obeyed and I walked slowly to the high point of the circle and hurled the grenade over the vehicles and ducked down. A huge bang was heard as the bomb exploded in mid-air. The shock wave threw me to the ground. I was in blackness. I floated out of that, I know. Yet I felt no pain and looked down. I saw I was on my back on the road and bleeding. I saw pins of light.
I woke up in hospital with machines attached and the doctor told me my shoulder and leg injuries were bad.
(Signed) R. Pearce.
‘What did they say about the out-of-body episode?’ Martin enquired.
‘They tried to delete it but it’s what I saw. They tried again and I told them to fuck off. Which they did.’
Our time had come to fly back to Western Australia and make some final farewells. We waved goodbye to Rosemary and Westie and watched as they stood in the rain on a cold frosty morning in Canberra. We’ll sure miss her.
11
Suzie
Perth
Just before the plane landed, I asked Martin if he was sick of meeting relatives because there were many lined up to see both of us. For some it was a quick hello and goodbye but I had my mum’s side of the family to consider, if only for a brief stop.
‘You ought to know me by now, love. I am family. You’ve met lots of my family on our brief tours down south but they’re now fans and appreciate the gifts which we’ve sent to the numerous children. Can’t meet them all. Not possible, love. But sure, let’s meet as many as we can on this last leg of the journey.’