The Cloud Forest

by JH Fletcher

  Colin tightened his grip convulsively on his rifle, using contact with the cold metal to remind him of reality. Reality was not the images of the past — fern and forest, cloud or even Sanette herself — but steel and war and death. Reality was horror and damnation, a world in which every man, himself included, was conditioned to feel nothing but rage and hatred and lust for the receiving, and giving, of death. Passion and, most of all love, the tranquil beauties of the Cloud Forest, had no place in a world dominated by the earthquake annihilation of trench mortars, the crash of English eighteen-pounders and French seventy-fives.

  Yet, he told himself, that other reality existed, too. He groped for feelings he sensed but could not express, even in his thoughts. Without the awareness and constant celebration of life’s potential for wholeness, there was no point in remaining alive. This was the basis both for hope and the death of hope. He must not permit that truth to escape him, even for a moment. Once that happened, evil would have won. In the core of his being, Colin believed that it was only his memories — the green holiness of forest and crystal streams, the grave silence of leaves, the liquid eyes of animals — that protected him from the steel malevolence of the guns. They were what kept him alive, the means whereby he would come finally to celebrate the life that would surely be restored after the nightmare of the war was over.

  Life …

  ‘Let’s get this lot over first,’ he told Wally. ‘Then we’ll talk about it.’

  The bells of the forested streams rang within his head.

  5

  The child was born, and safe. A boy. Sanette, too, was safe.

  Colin had managed to grab a day’s leave. Not easy, but the sergeant had made an exception in the circumstances.

  ‘Most blokes I know would’ve run a mile …’

  Not Colin.

  He looked down at them: his woman, his child. His heartbeat deafened him.

  ‘I have called him Charles,’ Sanette said.

  She pronounced it Charl, in the French manner.

  ‘Charlie,’ he said, pleased. He stretched out an exploratory finger but did not dare touch the tiny head with its down-like hair.

  ‘You can touch him if you like,’ she told him. ‘You can hold him.’

  Wonderment, and life.

  6

  April 1918. There came a day, and a night, when the shutters of hell swung open again, when the German bombardment shattered trenches and men, and the whole of life was pulverised, drowned in thunderous destruction. After the guns came the snarling teeth and drawn-back lips of men fighting, gouging, maiming in hand-to-hand combat. Then happened what he had told himself must not: horror became pleasure, the only purpose of being. To kill, and only to kill, was to live. Anything else … Unimaginable.

  Normally, after such a frenzy of battle, no memory remained. Not this time. After it was over, when he had established that he was alive after all, Colin remembered exactly how he had felt; how, during the frenzied hours, the angel of death whom he had rejected so often had finally become his friend.

  The protecting walls were breached. Damnation had triumphed, after all. It had even conquered death.

  7

  The bombardment caught them in the open, amid the wreckage of what had once been a grove of trees. The word was that this place had been a pleasant meadow once. Lieutenant Parsons had been killed long ago, as had his two successors. Now they had a new officer, a young bloke called Gage. They all felt sorry for him. Barely out of nappies, he wouldn’t survive long: junior officers never did. In the meantime, though, he had told them how he’d been chatting to a French officer who had said he’d often come here with his family in the days before the war. Hard to believe; no one would call it a pleasant place now.

  Colin and Wally and a couple of other blokes lay out, more or less in the open, while the darkness heaved about them, vomiting black columns of soil beneath the impact of the high explosive shells. They’d been patching up a stretch of wire that had been wrecked in an earlier bombardment, had been on their way back when this new lot had started. Not a healthy place to be, but at least there were always shell holes to hide in. After a week of spring sunshine, the water level was down. In daylight, protected from the worst of the shrapnel, it would have been almost pleasant. As it was, it was terrible, but there was no help for it. They would have to stay put until the bombardment was over and hope no shell fell on them in the meantime. If one did … At least they wouldn’t have to worry about growing old.

  For what seemed hours they cowered while Colin remembered, only too clearly, how the angel of death had befriended him a few days before. Now it was someone else’s turn.

  He felt something thud into the canvas pack that contained his gas mask. He looked down and saw that a spent piece of shrapnel had clipped him. It had been going too slowly to penetrate far; he hadn’t even been scratched. Lucky, once more.

  Of course, luck could change. Amid the reverberant crashes of the high explosive, there came a succession of dull thuds, followed by the frenzied clatter of rattles from the line of trenches, so near and so inaccessible.

  The four men stared at each other.

  Gas.

  ‘Quick!’

  Trembling fingers snatched at their masks. They whipped off their helmets — how naked they felt without them! — and pulled the masks over their heads. As soon as they were in place they stuck their helmets back on. They waited, nervously, watching the clouds of gas billowing sluggishly in the wind-free night. Now was the testing time, when they would discover whether the face pieces of their masks were airproof or not. Cautiously Colin breathed in, as shallowly as possible. And frowned, feeling cold fingers of panic clutch his stomach. Always, in the past, there had been a tension that had made breathing difficult but had demonstrated the effectiveness of the air seal of the mask.

  Nothing like that now.

  On the edge of terror, he stared through the eyepieces at Wally, who frowned back and pointed with an emphatic finger at Colin’s mask. Colin fumbled, horror and disbelief swarming, and discovered a puncture, no doubt where the spent shrapnel had struck only a few minutes before. It was a tiny hole, no more than that, but enough to be the death of him.

  And he had told himself how lucky he had been.

  He knew he had to get away at once, to escape from the enveloping cloud of gas that was almost upon them. He watched in terrified disbelief as it crept silently, obscenely, over the ground towards them. Heavier than air, it lolled first into one hole, then the next. In minutes, less, it would be here. His only hope was to leap out of the crater that sheltered them and run …

  It was impossible. The air overhead was scythed continuously with flying steel fragments; to go out would be death.

  To stay would be death.

  He thought if he could somehow use his fingers to plug the hole … At once he did so, and found — at least for the moment — that it worked, the air pressure inside the mask increasing at once. If only he could keep his fingertip over the rent … It was a big ask, but at least a possibility. To run, to have any hope at all of surviving in the open, was out of the question. He could do nothing but wait.

  The gas seeped and flowed. Colin breathed so lightly that he was barely breathing at all. Yet lungs demanded oxygen, and air, however minuscule the quantity, still had to reach them. And did so. So far, only air.

  The gas licked the rim of the crater in which they lay before sidling over the brim and downwards to form a lethal pool upon the surface of the water at the bottom of the hole.

  Terror made Colin’s chest heave.

  He had a woman waiting, a son who was now over a year old. He had missed his first birthday, missed almost all there was of him. The first year: obliterated. He had promised himself the future would be better.

  His lungs demanded more air. The gas cloud rose billowing about them. Each breath became a nightmare of apprehension, never knowing if now, or now …

  He remembered the gas victims in the base hospita
l, drowning in slow and ceaseless torment, coughing up their lungs in bloody clots.

  No, pray God, no …

  His fingertip pressed ever more firmly upon the hole in his mask. Not too firmly. Make the hole any bigger, he would truly be done for.

  Wally sensed his anguish. He reached out a hand and rested it on his arm.

  Hold on. Don’t panic. Hold on.

  There was nothing else Wally could do, but to have him there, to feel the pressure of his hand, was in itself a blessing. Not to be alone …

  Slowly, the gas flowed upwards towards their faces. Outside the mask, death. Inside, lack of oxygen made his temples pulse, his eyes ache. If only he could relax, hold his breath, be still, be anywhere.

  He made a conscious effort to revisit the Cloud Forest. He took Charlie with him. Together they tasted the mountain air, watched the water cascading past lichen-coated rocks as old as time. They climbed the final steep slope together. It was shrouded in mist, in clean cold mist. Through rents in the curtain, he saw distant glimpses of the sea, shining silver in the sunlight. The clean wind closed the cloud rent, brought the vapour swirling in soft, moist eddies about his head. The cold air caught his throat. He coughed.

  He coughed. Again terror shook him.

  God, no!

  A paroxysm of coughing, racking him helplessly. A violent burning in his eyes. He was choking, fire reaching into his lungs. He thrust his finger deeper, harder, seeking frantically to plug the hole. Failing. Flame blazed within his chest, a taste foul, insidious, indescribable. Within the pain, he felt the blood vessels rupture.

  The gas filled his mask, his throat, his lungs.

  CHARLIE

  Tu proverai si come sa di sale lo pane altrui.

  You will find out how salt is the taste of

  another’s bread.

  Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

  JUDY SPEAKING …

  Colin Mandale died under the gas in 1918.

  He left behind him a woman whom by all accounts he had loved and who loved him, a son of thirteen months and a mate, their close and enduring friendship forged in the trenches, who more than anyone else was instrumental in Charlie coming to Australia shortly before his eighteenth birthday.

  As for Sanette and Charlie …

  Heroes in a brave new world: Digger or Poilu or Tommy, that was what the polies called them, when they were looking for votes, but it was a different story after the guns stopped. Try asking the kids of any of those blokes who sweated their guts out, trying to make a living off the land allocated to them after they got back from Flanders. Tried and failed, most of them, because that land was so bad that never in a thousand years would it have grown any crop but heartbreak. There was plenty of that. Broken hearts and broken men and broken families and broken lives, that’s what so many of the Diggers got for their suffering, an enduring blot on this nation’s pride.

  I feel so strongly about it because my own family was in that situation. I’m not old enough to have first-hand memories of those days but I’ve heard stories and know that suicide is not just a word you hear on the evening news. Maybe I’ll tell you a bit about it later on.

  It wasn’t just the Diggers who were badly served; as far as I can make out, it was no better overseas. And you must remember that Sanette, with Colin’s child barely walking, had never been married to him. No way could she expect help from the French authorities. Far from it; no doubt there were some who, if they’d known of her situation, would have paraded her down the street, a placard around her neck, flame-coloured letters screaming WHORE.

  It never came to that; there were other ways. Sometimes retribution, if that’s the word for it, can take years to catch up, and it doesn’t seem to matter how respectable you’ve been in the meantime or whether you’re a culprit or an innocent victim of circumstance.

  NINE

  1

  The children dived again and again through the cloud-high breakers, the dolphin spouts of foam. The star bursts of water exploded over them before the three boys scrambled out and ran in the cold, starched wind, chasing each other shivering along the steeply shelving beach, the tan sand explored by tongues of foam.

  Then back into the water once more. There were deep holes in the seabed along this part of the coast. Always they tried to reach the bottom of these holes but Charlie was the only one who could do it.

  Again and again they did it until, tiring of the sea at last, they scrabbled in the wet sand, building monuments and boy-high parapets from which they flung defiance at each other and seaweed in shiny, slimy strands. Eventually, after the bloodthirsty battles, the bright explosions of water, the curving brackets of seaweed marking the limits of the charging sea, after the gulls in noisy clouds, the pink, pink of oystercatchers flapping their black wings over the breakers, the boys ran home — Emil and Jean to their parents’ shack built of timber and tar paper, black as a ship’s hold and redolent of fish and coarse tobacco; Charles to his thin and frowning mother in her thin and frowning house, where the salty air stood dank and still and voices tiptoed around the furniture.

  On the wall of the parlour was a picture in an oval frame. It was the portrait of a man, dark-faced and serious, wearing army uniform and a hat with the brim turned up on one side. Charles did not know him, knew only that the stranger was his father who had died in the war and who, his mother said, watched out for them both from his place in heaven.

  It was a house stiff with reverence and whispers, with legends and dreams. Legends of the hero who had died; dreams of the mighty deeds Charles would carry out in his name in a grey world in which his mother was one of many dark-clad widows who drifted like ghosts through the town.

  As far as war dead were concerned, the town with its stone-girt harbour on the edge of the sea was luckier than most. Fishermen had been in a reserved occupation and few had gone to the trenches, but those whom the shells had spared remained vulnerable to the sea. Each year, along this coast of storms, boats put out under the pull of their bright sails never to come back, so Sanette was not alone in her widowhood. Yet somehow the way of a man’s dying seemed to change his status and the status of those left behind. To Sanette, death by drowning was different altogether from death in the trenches: a routine hazard for those who challenged the sea every day of their lives. Death was death, but she could not help feeling that her grief was more deserving than those whose sons and husbands had hazarded their lives against the waves and lost. There were no heroics in drowning, whereas her man, her Colin, her increasingly mythical hero, had died in defence of France.

  She wanted her son to feel the same. She was apart from the town because of the nature of her bereavement and because she had not been born there. Her cousin had first given her a home and then, dying conveniently of influenza immediately after the war, the house itself. For the sake of the dead woman, the town was prepared to tolerate the cousin who claimed to be a widow but who in truth — rumour slicing, razor-sharp — had been no better than a two-franc whore who had been left up the spout by a foreign soldier who had been blown to bits or bayoneted or gassed in the closing stages of the war.

  Not that it mattered how he’d died.

  ‘We are respectable folk in this town,’ said the town’s black-gowned harridans, dripping their venom. ‘She needn’t think she can get away with that sort of behaviour here.’ Although their avid eyes hoped she might try.

  They were doomed to disappointment. Whatever the truth of the strange woman’s gaudy past, there was no sign of it now. A patch of darkness, she drifted through the salt-bright air of the little town, speaking when spoken to but making no friends among the locals, walled up in her rituals of grief in the house that she might occupy but that would never, in the eyes of the town, be hers.

  She wanted to be apart, that much was plain, and the town was happy to oblige her.

  ‘Needn’t think she’s going to impress anyone here with her fancy big-town ways …’

  Every night, lying in the bed in
the sea-sounding bedroom, waiting to be stolen by sleep, she held out her pearl-white arms to draw Colin close. His heat warmed her loins and her heart. She slid into sleep amid flickering laughter, rampaging steps clattering up the cobbled street from the bar’s wine-scented cellar, figures that plunged, still laughing, into the bed and each other, living in a blaze of joy the life that, like Colin’s, had ended so soon afterwards under the gas.

  Beneath her grey exterior, Sanette would not admit that anything had ended at all. The nightly visitations that moistened her, the man’s heat, above all the son whom he had left as fulfilment and reincarnation of himself, enfolded her with a recurrent joy.

  ‘I need no one else,’ she told herself, and believed it. ‘There is Colin, still. And Charles. And myself. We three, forever.’

  It was obvious to her that the child, whose name she had chosen to accommodate both his French and Australian heritage, would grow up to share her devotion to the past, to the father who had died. She told him stories of heroes, and the war; she tried to explain to him about sacrifice and glory; she took him each year to a vast meadow set about by laurels and sown with the teeth of graves, to stand in silence before the one that, she said, contained the man whose photograph, slant-hatted, hung on the parlour wall. She took it for granted that the past was as alive to Charles as it was to her.

  In the way of things, that was impossible. The sea drew him. Whenever he could escape, it was to the sea that he went. He met other urchins on the tide flats. They rounded big eyes at each other, fought and yelled and chased and tumbled. They caught crabs and slink-shaped shrimps that darted backwards in a burst of sand but that, with stealth and patience and a glass jar armed with whelk meat, could be tempted to their deaths. After the small butchery of the beach, Charles returned in triumph, bearing the trophies that Sanette boiled for him upon the wood-burning stove in the galley kitchen where the blue coffee pot held pride of place. Until, one day, exuberant Charles carelessly sent it flying and earned himself a belt around the ear while he stared at the tears, unexpected, traumatic and inexplicable, which streamed down his mother’s face and affected him far more than the blow itself.