by JH Fletcher
4
Despite his experiences on the mountain, for years nothing in Colin’s life changed at all. The circus followed its path, meandering yet purposeful, through Australia’s outback. They stopped for a night here, two nights there, travelling round and round like a mule with bound eyes driving a whim. During the winter lay-ups, Colin went with the other kids to whatever school was handy; education was never destined to be a big deal in his life, but at least he learnt to read and write, even if he seldom did either.
One event might have made a difference. Bruce had the fall that had always haunted his nightmares, plunging from the trapeze bar one spring night into the front rows of the spectators to lie sprawled and broken across the benches from which a fat farmer and his family had miraculously extricated themselves just in time.
He was not dead, would have been a lot less trouble to the world if he had been. Day and night he lay on his back in the wagon, in the cot that had now become his, with his eyes fixed on nothing and his voice reduced to a series of harsh caws, like one of the flock of crows that followed the circus on its journeying. Marge cared for him, sat with him and cleaned him, but no one knew if he was aware of it, or of her.
She was careful of him, always, but angry, too, because what had happened she believed he had brought upon himself. And on her; in futile outrage she repeated, again and again, how Bruce’s punishment, which he so richly deserved, in practice lay far more heavily on her. She knew only too well the prison to which his endless boozing had brought them, whereas it seemed unlikely that he did.
Yet the accident and its aftermath, which might have been expected to have had a huge impact on Colin’s life, in truth made little difference to him at all. Only time, inevitably, brought change. He grew too big to be a topmarker so took Bruce’s place in the act, which kept Gus Evans happy, and they found another boy, Jinks Callaghan, to do the aerial somersaults the audiences loved so much.
Colin was twelve, fifteen, twenty. Now he, too, was one of those who slipped his hand into the blouses of the local girls when he had the chance. Once or twice did more than that, fortunately without consequences, or none that he knew of. Marge must have guessed what he was up to, but for once in her life kept her mouth shut. Since Bruce’s accident she had wailed less, perhaps because she had more to wail about. In particular, she no longer tried to shame Colin into loving her, with the result that it became easier for him to do so. Time had its impact on Marge, too. She was still able to carry her role in the act, but they both knew the day was coming when it would no longer be possible. Where did old circus performers go? She was frightened she was going to find out, although Colin had told her time and again that she wasn’t to worry, that he would take care of her.
‘And when you get married?’
He laughed. ‘Fat chance.’
Though that, too, seemed to come to even the gayest of bachelors in time. Jinks Callaghan grew up in his turn and was replaced as topmarker by Flora Evans, one of Gus’s granddaughters. She was a pretty little thing; if she hadn’t been related to the old man, Colin would have tried putting an arm on her long before he did. All the same, he’d have had to be barmy not to see the advantages of tying the knot with a member of the family that owned the circus, and he was taking the first cautious steps in that direction when three things happened, one after the other, to shatter the fabric of Colin’s life.
One morning they woke to find Bruce dead. Sometime between light and light he had stopped breathing, without either Marge or Colin being aware of it. It seemed wrong that there should be so little ceremony in the second most important step a man could take, yet that was the way of it.
They were working Willapan, a small town a hundred miles south-west of Brisbane — never again had they travelled north to Goorapilly, Gus decreeing the bridle tracks too poor, the audiences not big enough to warrant the journey — and there was a church and a priest. To whom Colin went, with Gus, and arranged the funeral that had to be carried out that day, because in the morning they would be on the road again, heading for the next place in their endless schedule.
Charley Jakes, the carpenter, made a coffin out of a few planks. Considering he was burying someone he had never laid eyes on, the priest did a good job. He visited Marge in the wagon that was now hers; he talked to her quietly; afterwards she said he had comforted her.
He would have talked to Colin, too, had he wished or even if he hadn’t, but Colin, in his own way, was finding it hard to come to terms with what had happened and gave him a wide berth.
From the first his relationship with Bruce Mandale had been a rough one, with a lot more kicks than ha’pence. Even after the accident Bruce had been a trial, less man than cabbage. They’d grown used to it, like you could get used to a bellyache, in time, but the priest had been right: his death had been a merciful release, and not only for Bruce.
Colin had thought he couldn’t wait to see him six feet under, be free of him at last. Yet he soon discovered that burying the man and being free of him were two different things. Indeed, Bruce dead seemed more alive than he’d been for years because Marge, rid of him at last, started to gab on and on, endlessly, about a Bruce Mandale whom Colin had never known: how caring he’d been, how gentle and loving and kind and strong and brave and …
Nothing he could identify with, there.
Bruce had already been two people: the drunken bully, the helpless cripple. Now a third man joined them: Bruce the hero, existing only in Marge’s imagination, who came to occupy so much space that Colin felt he could not breathe for the air stolen by this unlikely ghost that had taken over their lives.
Perhaps Marge felt it, too, or perhaps, despite her endless eulogy of praise for the man who had never existed outside her imagination, she was after all eager to seize the freedom that had been so long denied her. Within three months of Bruce’s death Marge, still praising her dead husband to the skies, was wooed and won by the owner of a vaudeville act that crossed their path during a week-long stopover in St George, halfway between hell and nowhere at all.
Dalby Keith must have been the fastest worker on record, Colin thought. With bemused eyes he watched as, within the space of one week, his foster mother was approached, wooed and bedded while Colin himself was banished to the backblocks. Marge, with a smile starting at her lips and ending God knew where, announced to him that she was leaving the circus to go with this new love of her life. In the old days she had pestered Colin to say that he loved her; now it was as though he had ceased to exist altogether. She chucked him the wagon and what it contained, carelessly, but only because she had no more use for it. She was spaced out, quivering when Dalby so much as looked at her; it made Colin nervous, as though love or at least infatuation were some kind of sickness that might infect him, too; but Marge, it was clear, had always needed to be someone’s slave.
So that was the second thing. And then, finally, came the third and final event. It had nothing to do with the circus or anyone in it but in its impact was immeasurably greater, on Colin and the world, than Bruce’s death or Marge’s elopement. On the other side of the world, in the European summer of 1914, a terrorist blew an Austro-Hungarian archduke into eternity and the world descended into the maelstrom of war.
FIVE
1
Matt said, ‘Reckon you’re round the twist, mate.’
Colin was half inclined to agree with him. To volunteer to fight in a war on the other side of the world, for a country he knew next to nothing about, for reasons he knew nothing about at all, seemed crazy, indeed.
‘Barmy as a bandicoot,’ he agreed.
Yet he knew he was going to do it. The circus was the only life he’d had in all his twenty-four years. His foray into the North Queensland Cloud Forest apart, he’d spent barely a day away from the circus in his life. The nature of the job had meant that he’d been cut off from all the things that other people knew and did, journeying endlessly, getting nowhere, stopping in a multiplicity of towns so much alike that
it was no more possible to tell them apart than the grains of dust that lay everywhere, that stained the air he breathed, that must have permeated his lungs and flesh and mind from the beginning of his life and would, unless he did something to prevent it, go on doing so until he died.
Dust to dust, he thought. That’d be right.
It didn’t seem much, as an epitaph to a bloke’s entire existence.
‘I dunno nuthin.’ He tried to spell out his feelings to Matt, but explanations weren’t much in his line and he could see he wasn’t getting anywhere.
‘What’s to know?’
‘Gotta be more than this.’
Matt frowned, looking about him with eyes the colour of sand and seeing the flat plains of the outback, the horses that were his life, the existence he had never questioned amid another world, alien and phantasmagorial, which he found hard to believe existed at all.
‘You reckon?’
‘Gotta be.’
Matt shook his head, dismissive of the demands of that wider world in which, in his heart, he did not believe. As a child, even more now that he was an adult, he would never have gone with Colin into the Cloud Forest; he had stared with an outraged astonishment when Colin had attempted to tell him about it and the feelings it had awoken in him; astonished, not so much by what Colin was telling him about the magic and mystery of the mist-girt mountain, but that anyone should have bothered to spend two days clambering about on what, when you came down to it, was no more than a hill at the back of a tin-pot little town.
Matt was the child who had driven both Benjy and Colin into that hare-brained excursion on boards down the river and over the waterfall, yet nowadays all the adventure he wanted was confined to the circus ring and the horses that over the years had become an extension of himself.
‘You shove off, then, you feel like that about it. When you get sick of killin’ Jerries, you kin always come back.’
At least Colin knew better than that. Blokes were signing on for the duration, which meant killing enough Jerries to end the war. Get sick of it in the meantime, that would be just too bad. It was a thought that gave him a few moments’ uneasiness, but not enough to change his mind. He wasn’t bothered about all that duty and loin-girding crap the Prime Minister was on about — there was a bloke who didn’t look like he was rushing off to fight, for one — but because it represented a door opening in a life that only now he realised he had been afraid would confine him forever.
‘I wanna check out what’s goin’ on out there,’ he said.
‘Good on yer, mate.’ But Matt turned away, the gesture as much as his tone revealing his true feelings.
Old Gus, when Colin told him his plans, had much the same views. ‘You’re a brick short of a load, you ask me.’ Unlike Matt, he was snakey about it; he was a man used to getting his own way and he had plans which Colin, it seemed, was intent on wrecking. ‘What about Flora?’
Who had asked much the same thing, when Colin had talked to her the previous evening.
Well, what about her?
She was cute: that was a fact. And willing: that, too. He’d come close to slipping it to her more than once, sensed that he would have had to push aside no more than a few verbal protests, thin as paper, to do so. Yet he hadn’t done it. The gate had been wide open yet he’d stayed out of the paddock. Even at the time he’d wondered why. Flora was willing, she was available, she was Gus Evans’s only grandchild. The bloke who grabbed Flora Evans would be in the quid seats. He had set things up, quite deliberately, his eye on the main chance, and now he was turning his back on it. It made no sense at all.
Her very compliance put him off. It made him feel he was being suckered into something he didn’t want. Flora’s blouse was nicely packed, as he had reason to know. He was the last man on earth to complain about that, but it reminded him how he felt about his existence in general: surely there should be more to life than a pair of breasts?
Flora had even tried that trick of shaming him. ‘I let you make free of me, then first chance you get, you’re off. I should have listened to my mother. She warned me about blokes like you. Men!’
Colin felt like telling her there was a lot more he might’ve done, that it had not been her but only his own caution that had stopped him. Decided he’d better keep his mouth shut.
‘Reckon I wanner see a bit of the world,’ he told Gus.
The old man was as mad as a cut snake. ‘You piss off now, you needn’t think there’ll be a job waitin’ when you come back. If you come back.’
To which there was only one possible answer. ‘Suit yourself.’
The next town, he turned himself in to the recruiting office to get his chest measured.
2
Colin discovered that the army was just like everything else: you took the first step, then the system took over. It shoved you around like you were Blind Freddy. Basically, you were helpless. You never knew where you were going, or what was happening. The system didn’t encourage questions. As to doubts … Way too late for that.
With a whole heap of other volunteers, he entrained south to a place in Victoria called Broadmeadows. Colin couldn’t remember being in the State before in his life. After Queensland he was afraid he’d freeze to death; now he found, to his surprise, that the weather, at least during the weeks he spent in training, was as hot as fire.
He quickly found he was capable of doing a lot more than the others, most of whom couldn’t have stood on their hands to save their lives. The training blokes loved him, although some of the others weren’t so keen. One of the corporals, Corporal Rabbit, watched their eyes as he told them his name, daring them to make something of it. He looked Colin up and down, like he was a pile of shit in a hayloft.
‘In the circus, you said?’
‘Right, Corporal.’
‘Circus is bloody right, by the look of you.’
Too late Colin discovered that a peaceful life in the army depended on one principle: no one must know who you were. Too late to do anything about it in Broadmeadows, where he had become a marked man from the first, but he was determined he wouldn’t make the same mistake when they went on to the next place. Calls for blokes to carry the grand piano would get no snappy answers out of him.
Corporal Rabbit, who had problems coming he knew nothing about, held out his hands to show the troop what he was holding.
‘What’s this?’ he asked them.
‘A rifle, Corporal.’ Some clown. Colin kept quiet.
The corporal pounced, like a fox after his namesake. ‘Not a rifle. This ’ere’s a Short Magazine Lee Enfield, Number I, Mark III. Got it?’
‘Yes, Corporal.’
‘Say it, then.’
‘Short Magazine Lee Enfield.’ Fumbling with the unfamiliar names.
‘Number I, Mark III!’ Rabbit, screaming up his tonsils.
Empires had been lost for less.
‘Number I, Mark III.’
The army found Colin was a good shot, which didn’t surprise him. Most of the country boys were the same: they’d had plenty of practice over the years, potting rabbits for dinner.
That part of it was all right, but the marching up and down was a pain in the arse.
‘Lep ri’, lep ri’, ’bout turn!’
They gave them phrase books in French.
‘Looka this!’
I want to go to Berlin.
Yeah, right.
‘Does it tell you what to say when you want a …?’
No such luck.
Training finished. The last night, a gang of them waylaid Corporal Rabbit coming back from the pub. One sat on his head while the rest tanned his arse for him, pinched his strides, took off before he could see who they were.
The next day, equipped with rifles — Short Magazine Lee Enfield Number I Mark III — a book of handy French phrases tucked away somewhere in the bottom of each man’s kitbag, they headed west. On 1 November, in a fleet of transports that seemed to cover the ocean, two or three cruisers in atte
ndance, the convoy steamed out of King George Sound and headed for Europe.
‘Je veux — how the hell do you pronounce that, for God’s sake? — je veux aller a Berlin …’
Instead they went to Egypt.
3
Flies, sand and the pox.
‘Jest like bloody home!’
The place was full of gyppos, and pyramids. Seen one of either, you’d seen the lot.
‘Makes Oz look real good …’
Meanwhile blokes were dying in France.
‘What we doin’ here?’
‘This rate, we’ll miss all the fun.’
They needn’t have worried. After more training, on 24 April 1915 they embarked again. Under cover of darkness, the ships headed north. First light on 26 April found them hove to in front of a narrow beach, backed by a line of massive cliffs. Still no Germans anyone could see.
‘Where are we?’
‘Search me.’
One bloke, better informed than the rest, had an answer, of sorts. ‘Somen to do with horses …’
‘Horses?’
‘I reckon. Gallop somen.’
Gallipoli.
4
Getting ashore was a problem, staying alive once you got there a bigger one. The beach was a killing ground; the cliffs, guarded by Turkish machine guns, impregnable.
The word was that the general had asked permission to pull out of what everyone knew was an impossible situation; the commander-in-chief had told him to dig in.
Dig for Diggers, in fact. All right for him.
They were told they’d have to fight their way to the top.
‘Don’ be barmy!’
The cliffs were nearly vertical. Apart from the occasional rocky outcrop, a bush here and there, grass in wiry tufts, there was no cover at all. Like potting rabbits, for Johnny Turk.
‘No way we’re ever getting up there!’
‘Do the best you can, lads.’
No one could believe the bastards meant it.