AWOL

by Jennifer Barclay

  On the job, their blank and professional faces were as hard to read as those of the survivors, who met my gaze steadily, calmly. “What do they feel,” I thought, “the journalists and the survivors? What do they think of me?” I wanted them not to hate me, but it was so hard to tell.

  I spent my days loitering on the fringes of misery, scuttling from rubble heap to field hospital and back. Finally, I got lucky. I stopped to talk to some British rescue workers sunning themselves on a patch of grass between shifts. They were exhausted but elated; they’d pulled someone out alive. An American.

  At least he sounded American. A young lad, about twenty, in remarkably good shape for someone who’d been buried alive for two days. Bit of a miracle, really. It had been a high-rise building by this town’s standards: eight storeys. The top five were more or less intact, but they’d collapsed onto the bottom three, just pancaked them. The Turkish rescuers had swept the building with dogs a couple of days before but had found no signs of life. Then yesterday, a neighbour had come to the Brits’ camp and said he’d heard someone calling. They’d been skeptical but went along, banging on the rubble and calling out; to their surprise, a weak voice had responded.

  It had taken them two hours to reach him, shifting rubble and inserting props and inching their way forward. They pulled him out and put him in an ambulance. The boy said he’d been in bed asleep when the early-morning earthquake struck. There was shaking and a huge noise, and he’d woken up with the ceiling six inches from his face.

  He’d sat in the ambulance and drank some water, and they tried to take him to hospital but he refused. His family was still inside: his mother and brother and an uncle and aunt and a cousin. When he’d called out after the earthquake, a female voice had responded from nearby; but after a while it had stopped. He even drew them a plan of the house.

  They told him he needed to see a doctor, but he wouldn’t listen. And in truth, there wasn’t a scratch on him. Some of his other relatives had arrived, and they took him aside and huddled with him near the building, and there the rescuers had left him.

  A miracle survivor. I knew what I had to do. The high-rise building stood on its own on the edge of town, set back from the road; a tall, middle-class oasis, pale pink and white. The central elevator shaft had split away from the building and leaned toward the ground. The residential wings on either side also leaned outward, surrounded by three-storey skirts of rubble. It looked like a tree split down the middle by lightning.

  Since the rescuers had left the site—one miracle deemed all the tower would yield; lightning unlikely to strike the same place twice—an earthmover had arrived to begin clearing the debris. A large crowd watched with silent, sombre faces.

  I edged into the crowd, making tentative—and, I hoped, tactful—inquiries. “The young man who was rescued yesterday,” I began. “Do you know him?” The bystanders either did not understand or had no answer, and they turned their backs.

  I retreated in defeat to the margins. A jolly television reporter hailed me. “Looking for the guy they rescued? He’s standing over there.” And he pointed to a lithe young man in brown trousers and a short-sleeved shirt. “He’s been here ever since they pulled him out. He hopes they’ll find his family. But you’ll never get near him. His relatives are keeping everyone away.”

  I looked at the youth, who appeared clean and dapper. He stood looking toward the building, one hand holding a paper mask to his face, the other on his head: a posture of frozen surprise. I couldn’t see his eyes.

  I knew I had no choice. I began walking toward the youth, in what I hoped was an open and friendly manner. Before I’d gotten very far, several of his relatives broke off from the crowd and advanced upon me, shaking their heads and waving their arms.

  “Told you,” said the television reporter. “It’s a bugger.”

  I left the compound and walked around the perimeter fence, until I was opposite the young man, separated by chain-link but only twenty yards away.

  “Hey—excuse me,” I called out. “Where are you from?”

  The youth turned and looked. He had deep black eyes.

  “Is there a message I can give to anyone?”

  The relatives were shaking their heads, and the young man seemed to register my notebook and pen. “Go away,” he said, turning back to face the tower.

  “No, look,” I said, desperate now. “I want to help. I can take a message, tell people you’re all right. Your friends or your fam—”

  “My family!” The young man spun around, strode forward and shook the chain-link fence with both hands. “My family is here! We were all visiting my aunt and uncle: my mother, my father, my brother and me. It was the Christmas holiday. We were almost ready to leave. Now I am here and they … they are in there.

  “I must stay here and find my family. If you want to help, get digging. Otherwise, you are just a vulture and you can fuck right off.”

  He turned away again, and the relatives rushed the fence. I leapt back and scurried off.

  “Any luck?” asked the television reporter.

  I considered. “I can get a story out of it,” I said.

  The next day I returned with the Englishman to the ruined old city. We clambered across the new alpine landscape to a hill where a knot of young men stood watching. Two middle-aged men, one large and bald, the other compact with a mop of black hair and a moustache, were tunnelling by hand into the debris.

  “That is their mother’s house,” a young man whispered to us. “They have been digging for three days.”

  But the men had stopped digging. They nodded to one another, reached in and pulled in unison, gently. They eased a woman’s body from the hole like a cork from a bottle. She was about sixty, stout and grey-haired. Her skin was grey and deathly, but her dirt-encrusted sari was as neatly wrapped as when she had put it on, on the last morning of her life.

  Her two sons stood and wiped their foreheads with the back of their forearms. They wrapped their mother’s body in a blanket, then stood beside it, looking down, their hands clasped in front of them.

  The Englishman nudged me, and we edged our way down the slope. We shook the hand of one man, then of the other. “I’m very sorry,” I said. The bald brother looked up. “Thank you,” he said. His dusty hand gripped my sweaty one.

  We returned to the car and sat in silence. At last I spoke.

  “Do you think I can catch something from shaking hands with those guys?”

  “I was just wondering that myself,” the Englishman said. Then he leaned over the front seat. “Come on, driver! I’ve got a story to file.”

  A former Toronto theatre critic and editor of Mongolia’s first independent English-language newspaper, Jill Lawless is the author of Wild East: Travels in the New Mongolia. She is a journalist based in London.

  028Destination: Canada

  TWO DRAWINGS

  Michael Winter

  Abandoned

  La Manche, July 20

  I was swimming here with a woman who’d come to live in Newfoundland for the summer. I was going on day trips in my car. This one’s about forty minutes south of St. John’s. We packed a suitcase full of picnic things, English plates and Duralex water glasses. We swam naked in the water, which is backed with a cold waterfall. We ducked under the falls. There is a trail with a walkway over the water, and you can hike between communities. This one is abandoned. A puffin dove. A few humpbacks out by the point. The woman sang a Gillian Welch song on her guitar. I wondered if I could fall for her and then I realized I was wondering. She said, “I could bring you joy.”

  Indiscriminate

  Terra Nova, September 20

  I was caribou hunting the morning after a tropical storm smacked into Newfoundland. The water rose two feet, washing away my campfire. My tent is in the woods to the right. I decided to camp across the river from a family of beavers. As I drew this, a caribou appeared by the big rock, downwind. He did a move I associate with wild horses: he swivelled the weight in his
chest, which caused his front legs to twist and turn in the water. At night the beavers paddled across the river, climbed the bank and gnawed on the birch around my tent. Their work was tremendous and indiscriminate. The expression is not as efficient as a beaver. I worried for my forehead. The tent just big enough to house me. How good is a beaver’s eyesight if he waddles past and considers my head?

  Michael Winter wrote a book called This All Happened. A lot of people think it’s autobiographical, and he’s glad he convinced them of this. He lives in St. John’s and Toronto.

  The raw atmosphere for imaginings.

  029Destination: Australia

  HEADLANDS

  Jonathan Bennett

  For James

  It’s still early and the morning sky is empty, neither black nor blue. A small mob of grey kangaroos has come down off the headland. They graze in the light scrub, moving only a hop or two at a time. In this scrappy light, they are easily mistaken for rocks or stumps or shadows. My mug of tea rests on my leg, the concentrated warmth of it calling attention to the outside chill. My bare legs, hanging off the front verandah, move a little involuntarily, twitching to keep warm.

  In the garage I turn the key in the old, orange Land Rover. My brother instructed me to douse the engine in WD-40. “Be nice to her,” he joked, “and she’ll start.”

  Thankfully the old girl does turn over, the clutch having given about half a metre before jamming against the metal floor. As I grope to fulfill the demands and desires of a 1967 British gearbox, I can almost feel my father sitting beside me, tossing in words of encouragement. The engine roars and the kangaroos bound into the reaches and folds of the headland.

  I stop at the wharf beside the tea-coloured river and pick out two very large, discarded fish heads from the fishermen’s bins. In the half-light of this still morning, I thread a piece of rope through their mouths, aghast, and tie them to the bull bar on the front of the Land Rover. You need these fish heads to stink in order to catch bloodworms, an unsurpassed fish bait. In a few days’ time, after having hung in the scorching Australian sun, they will be perfect. It’s a simple cycle: rotting fish to catch worms, worms to catch fresh fish. Today, however, the heads are new. Still, I will try.

  You can imagine Hat Head just from its name. It’s a long day’s drive north of Sydney, up the murderous Pacific Highway. Drive through Taree, Forster and Tuncurry, Port Macquarie and, at Kempsey, you make a right turn and head back for the sea to find the windswept headland, upon which a large hill shaped like a hat—a misshapen fedora, a punched-out Stetson—juts into the Pacific Ocean. A few hundred people live here year-round, the population swelling in the summer with holidaymakers and surfers, fishermen and bush walkers.

  I drive fast but stay close to the shore where the sand is firm. In all the times I’ve returned home to Australia, revisiting this stretch of coastline, I’ve never travelled the beach from end to end. No matter how far I go, the beach just seems to continue, to disappear into the haze and wind ahead. Should the orange Land Rover break down or the tide turn and come in high and sooner than expected, I am a stranded Crusoe, four-wheel drive or not.

  The sky is lightening now, and a few solitary fishermen cast their lines into the surf, reeling in the first dart fish and whiting of the dawn. Seagulls hover out beyond the breakers, concentrating on schools of fish that rise and fall in swarm-like formations from the bottom of the ocean as they are chased by larger fish. To my left, sand dunes veined with thin runners of grass and the odd burnt stump of a tree go on forever, disappearing into oblivion, into the haze of scant light and sea spray ahead of me. With my bare feet on the hot metal pedals, I push the Land Rover to go faster. Behind me, my tire tracks recede only to be erased by waves sliding up the beach.

  The tide is low and I scan the sea, the breakers. I find a deep gully of water between two shallow sand flats where the fish feed. Reversing the Land Rover up the beach into the soft sand, I point its nose down at the sea. If it will not start later, at least I’ll have a modest hill to try to jump-start her. I learned these secrets as a boy, by watching my father and my uncle John. I saw first-hand what happened to ignorant tourists in lightweight jeeps bogged in fine white sand. We’d have to stop and help dig them out, or winch them free in the worst cases.

  My fish heads are too new. Standing in the surf up to my knees, I wait as each new wave washes in: when it pauses, caught between advance and retreat, I drag the fish heads across the sand. I watch for the tiniest indications of bloodworms poking their heads up through the sand, smelling what they think is a meal. I swivel my hips, digging down into the sand, hoping to feel small, hard shapes on the heels and balls of my feet. Pipies are clam-like bivalves, and I bend to collect them one by one, putting them in a bucket tied to my waist.

  I smash two pipies together and their shells burst open, exposing blond flesh and opaque tentacles. The insides of their shells are smooth and opalescent in the new morning light. I drag the fish heads across the sand once more as a wave goes out, and as it does, I see a small break in the diminishing water’s film, something interrupting its evenness, like an arrowhead pointing at me. Kneeling beside it, I wait for another wave to come in, which washes against me hard, soaking my shorts and most of my T-shirt. The water is cold. I want this bloodworm now.

  The wave withdraws and I wag the pipi over the area where the bloodworm’s head split the rushing water only moments ago. The head emerges again; this time I am close to it and I tempt it with the pipi’s flesh. I manoeuvre my fingers in behind its head, ready to pinch and pull in one swift motion. But I must not rush.

  Be nice to her and she’ll start.

  As children of eight or ten, we would try to catch bloodworms. My uncle John would offer outrageous sums of money—sometimes even five dollars—if we could pull one worm up whole. The chance at these winnings was enough incentive to keep us occupied for hours while he and the other adults fished and wormed. His money could not have been safer.

  Bloodworms live in the sand and sea and are as thick as a ten-year-old’s baby finger. They can be just as long as a boy is tall, a sort of seafaring millipede, and are difficult to catch because of the innumerable tiny legs that run down either side of their bodies. If all the legs are not going in the same direction, then the head will simply rip off. To make matters worse, bloodworms are extremely fast in retreat. Twice I wait for it to come to the surface, nibble and recoil, my thumb and forefinger lingering gently around the neck, before I strike.

  I get the worm first try. I feel it arching, its momentum heading upward, and I pull it from beneath the sand with all the precision of a surgeon in mid-suture. I fish with it as bait for about an hour, using segments of it at a time. I catch two bream and put them in a bucket of sea water where they swim in circles. Not big fish, but with the sand under my feet, the salt in the air, and the horizon before me, I feel elemental. This is why I have travelled up here. Lolling about in the last licks of wave are my two fish heads, bound, dead. After a time, I decide to drive farther up the beach, but before I do, I upend the bucket in knee-high surf, both fish swimming free.

  Driving again, I am looking for signs of a sudden tidal shift. Yesterday’s paper said it wouldn’t happen until late this afternoon, but I drive distracted nonetheless. The beach continues to unfurl ahead of me in slight variations of dune, scrub and surf. A piece of driftwood. A washed-up plastic bag half-filled with sand catches the wind. This is how I remember the drive from my childhood, but now the possibility and concern of being trapped by the tide is no longer my father’s or uncle’s worry. I drive on.

  In the distance a sharp wall of dark rock breaks the horizon as if thrown down by a spiteful God. It punctuates the beach, a piece of geographical exclamation, halting my progress northward, ripping me clear of my thoughts. A sign announces South West Rocks and a turnoff to Trial Bay Gaol.

  The gaol, constructed of locally quarried pink and grey granite, closed for good in 1903 but was briefly reopened in 1915 to hold
First World War internees from Germany. They were allowed out onto the beach during the day, so the story goes, but were locked up at night. I climb up on one of the low walls. Looking out to sea, I can’t help but scour the distance for a glimpse of Hat Head. All I see is beach and haze.

  In the lee of the cliffs, I sit on the sand where the internees must have spent their days. I imagine two lovers, freed from nightly lock-up, finding each other in broad daylight, their white bodies wading at the shore. In real life, he has made promises to another woman, but shut away up here, he finds himself drawn to this new woman, the curve of her mouth in the morning, the way her hair falls in the bright light.

  She is younger than he is, I think. She makes her choice and they swim, touching only below the water, swimming deeper into the ocean until neither can stand. Their love is made suspended amongst porpoises, concealed from the island gaolers patrolling the beach.

  They must have feared the future. Would they know freedom again and, if so, would it kill their love? The sun rises wholly, and I am miles from Hat Head. I have travelled to the end of a beach that I had always imagined to be unrelenting.

  The next few mornings the kangaroos return and I watch them until the light firms and they melt into the landscape of the head. They dissolve one by one, between mouthfuls of tea, as I look down at a bull ant that is getting too close to my bare leg, or crane my neck to catch a glimpse of a pelican employing an updraft. I fish each dawn, first repeating my worm hunt, then throwing back the catch. I get more adept with each day. The fish heads decompose and ripen, until maggots writhe in their eye sockets. Fish eating worms, worms eating fish. Daily too, I press ahead to Trial Bay Gaol. The beach no longer a fearful passage limited by memory but the raw atmosphere for my imaginings, the source and cause of those stories still yet to come.