The Thompson Gunner

by Nick Earls

  Felicity starts to move after it, and I stop her and say, ‘You’re already my hero. I don’t need the card.’

  She sticks with me all the way to the check-in counter at the airport. I ask her if she thinks I can’t handle it myself, and she says she’s sure my chances would be at least fifty–fifty.

  I want to say something meaningful, but every thought I have sounds clumsy and better off not turned into words.

  ‘Call me,’ is the best I can manage, ‘if you’re ever in Brisbane. We could go out for a drink. I could stop lurching from crisis to crisis, you could stop saving me . . .’

  We spent half the past week together, and I don’t remember asking her anything about her life or what she’s hoping for.

  ‘Call you?’ she says. ‘Sure. I will. That’d be good.’

  ‘Or email me at least, in the meantime. Who knows when we’ll be in the same place, or where it might be? I really owe you, you know, for the past few days.’

  ‘Don’t hurt yourself on the plane,’ she says, and smiles. ‘It’s a long trip.’ She hugs me. ‘If you cry I’ll cry, so don’t.’

  As my carry-on bag passes through the scanner and I’m emptying my pockets, I look around and see her going through the doors and towards the cab rank. I would have cried if I’d said any more. She was right about that, judging that it could happen all too easily.

  In the Qantas Club I realise how little food I ate at the dinner, and I get myself a bowl of pumpkin soup and a glass of mineral water. I sit in front of a TV that’s set to Fox Sports, and I watch two clay-courters slugging it out in a tennis tournament somewhere in Europe.

  I’ve never pulled out of an event before. Never.

  I find Claire’s number and I call her and thank her again for seeing me through my craziest day. For giving me ice-cream, letting me cook, hearing me out, as far out as I wanted to go.

  ‘Yes, well, I did rather make it up as I went along,’ she says. ‘How are you going now? Are you okay?’

  They’re calling the flight. I tell her I’m fine.

  On the plane, the flight attendant takes my bag and says she’ll put it in the overhead locker for me. She asks if my hand injury is from the canoe race, and says they played the paddle-dropping bit on the news several times in slow-motion. I don’t tell her about the glass.

  I’ve been true to my word, my word that I gave when I was eight and everything in the world seemed to be riding on it. How could I tell Murray now, or my parents, about the glass in my hand, how I feel when I see things lying in the road? Where would I begin? It should be over. It should have been over long ago. No more glass, or dreams, or ideas that don’t apply. New memories have come along and been cast on top, and they work like a whole story most of the time, but not all of it.

  My doll’s house came out here to Brisbane, then I got the Partridge Family bus for my ninth or tenth birthday. I passed it on to Elli, and to her it was just a bus and there I was, with a five-year-old, doing my damnedest to explain the Partridge Family.

  ‘Maybe when she’s a bit older,’ Murray said. ‘Contemporary five-year-olds aren’t always great at grasping the cultural significance of the seventies.’

  And when he said that, I thought about being young and how I had gone about grasping the significance of things, and I remembered old houses, tall clocks, display cabinets of knick-knacks – though I had been more like seven then, and the knick-knacks were from the thirties or earlier. But there was a sense in those places that if something was behind glass it was significant, and that’s where your grasp of significance starts – with other people’s meanings and how they get them across.

  Murray has a cricket bat of his grandfather’s that’s too heavy to use, as well as his two World War One service medals. He has a book of poetry that his father studied at school, mainly by memorising. He has three mismatched horseshoes from the property his other grandparents lived on until the sixties. He has a Bible someone gave him on a forgotten occasion, and which he kept because it was the only book he ever had that zipped up, and it had gold along the edges of the pages. Murray has a picture of the cart he built at the age of nine, taken earlier on the very afternoon that he stacked it and broke the front axle and took the skin from his forearms on the bitumen road.

  In the photo, the mood is clear. There’s pride in the construction and excitement about the ride to come, no hint, of course, that the afternoon would end the way it did.

  ‘But you’ve got to be a kid,’ he said, when we’d known each other a while and he showed me the photo. ‘You’ve got to feel invincible and sometimes come a cropper.’

  And he showed me scars on his arms, which were next to invisible, and the blueish hints of pigment below the skin where flecks of bitumen had gone, and stayed.

  But I told him nothing, showed him nothing. There’s a past I started keeping from him that very day, him and his cart story, and once you start keeping it, your choice is made.

  ‘You’re getting my full story,’ he said in one clear moment of anger, or at least anguish, ‘and I’m not getting that from you, I don’t think.’

  And he looked at the floor, and Janis the counsellor looked at me, and I said, ‘I don’t know what you want. I’m not going to make up stories because you haven’t heard enough. People are different. That’s what this is.’

  It was meant as observation, not as a catalyst We could observe difference, and accommodate it. That’s how I meant it. But it was a big one for Murray – Murray whose self-disclosure was absolute and who, if pushed, would say that he found any other way dishonest. So I’d set us on the track to a conclusion, just by rounding off my response.

  It’s well into night now, and this is the notorious red-eye flight – out of Perth late, into Melbourne a few hours afterwards, at dawn. I chose, two months ago, to take it just this once, since it was the very soonest I could be home. My life was only weeks away from changing then, and I can’t believe I didn’t know.

  I should sleep, but I don’t want to sleep.

  Ballystewart — 1972

  I CAN’T PLACE it in time, that trip to Belfast. Not on a calendar, since that’s not how life worked for me then. There were school times, and school holidays. Short days, and long days. Time for planting, time when things grew, harvest. There was a time when the people who fell from boats at sea would not last long at all, and that was winter. I read that in the bank, next to the lifeboat.

  But it was probably spring when we went into Belfast that day, and I know it was June when we left, and not much happened in between.

  Books arrived and told me about Australia and how different it was, and I had to adjust to the idea of leaving everything I knew behind. ‘It’s very sunny in Australia,’ my father said one drizzly Sunday, while we waited for the weather to clear for our walk in the woods. ‘Sometimes people don’t even wear shoes.’ I didn’t know how those two things were related, or why the second was good, but he seemed very positive about the prospect.

  Perhaps it was a matter of a few weeks between the bomb in Belfast and us leaving. I think I can remember a ninth birthday party with a magician when my hand was still bandaged. It was inside at someone’s house on another cloudy afternoon. And there was also a day when the sun shone and we did walk in the woods and I collected flowers for keeping in a flower press, so that I’d have something to take with me from the only place I knew. No one explained quarantine laws to me, and the flower press made it through customs unnoticed. I still have it, with its layers of spring flowers and leaves, brown and flat. I can still remember putting some of them in there when they had some bulk, then refitting the top and tightening the wing nuts at the corners.

  There was another roadblock too, the same people standing there with a few rifles and a handgun, waving the traffic to a stop, making a show of looking in the boots of people’s cars.

  And a trip to Belfast, another trip to Belfast in the van. This time, at night. My mother did my hair in Heidi plaits before I left for the Maclei
shes’. It was a style that she quite liked, though my thick unruly hair didn’t make it easy. I was sleeping over, which was something we did quite often at each other’s houses. But this time, in the middle of the night, I remember someone waking me and soon we were in the van and on our way to Belfast. Paul was driving, and his friend Danny was in the front with him, talking tough, which is what he did. The rest of us were in the back, with the bags.

  But that was before the other trip in the van to Belfast, not after. It was before.

  Brisbane — Monday

  IT WAS BEFORE, that’s the thing. It was a time when there seemed to be people killed every few days in shootings and bombings, and a lot of it was put down to retribution for previous attacks. Tit-for-tat killings, they were called. They were always on the news, and one would lead to more and they didn’t stop. And the night trip to Belfast was somewhere in the middle of that, and before the trip with the bomb and the Thompson gunner.

  The sky is clear as we come over the fields and into Melbourne. I’m not awake and not asleep either. In the Qantas Club I make coffee, I press the wrong button and get a long black, I eat a plate of fruit. I sit with my back to the wall and people come and go, most of them travelling with work. I listen to them talk, lining up their days, making calls. There are newspapers, but I can’t read them.

  I can remember the smell of the van, farm smells, and the way everything jolted and clattered around when we hit a bump in the road, and how there was nothing to hold onto in the back.

  It’s almost as if the smell is in the plane on the way to Brisbane, it’s so real to me. They serve us breakfast, but I’ve had my fruit. They show us the early news, housing approvals for the last quarter, Tiger Woods putting to win a golf tournament.

  I have a window seat, which leaves me feeling stuck, but I can look out at the world down below, at the mountains and the brown, drought-stricken fields.

  We lived in a peaceful farming area. My parents always said that, and it was true. Much of the province was relatively unaffected by conflict, or seemed like it, and life went on in a lot of respects as it had before. There were real seasons, and they had a bearing on our lives. I have sycamore seeds in my flower press, collected before that final spring, I think. They were too fat for the flower press really, the seed parts of them anyway, but they had the most interesting shape so I had to have them.

  I call Janis’s rooms as soon as I’m off the plane. My plan is to say that something’s come up, but I can feel my voice going, or my breath going wrong, as if I’ve breathed in too much before calling. My lungs feel stuck full with air and I can’t move it in or out.

  ‘Do you want to come in today?’ a voice says, when I’m stranded with my request half-made. ‘Do you want to make an appointment? We have a cancellation mid-morning, if you’d like that. If you can get in here in about forty minutes.’

  I go into the toilets and I sit in a cubicle until I can fix my breathing. I read every word of the tampon ad on the back of the door. I count, and breathe slowly in and out, and I remember Elli reading the condom ad in a cubicle at this same airport.

  There’s still a crowd around the baggage carousel when I get there, and my suitcase is out and doing laps.

  Outside the terminal, the air is warm and thick and humid, carrying the usual smell of spent fuel and the nearby wetlands. I queue for a cab and give the cabbie Janis’s Wickham Terrace address as we pull away from the kerb. He’s not a talker, and I’m grateful. We glide down the airport road, swinging in and out of the curves on the lazy suspension. There has been rain while I’ve been gone. The grass is now lush by the roadside and it was brown when I left. The early summer storms have come.

  A plane takes off beside us, the road curves and then curves again, the cabbie fiddles with a knob, trying to tune in properly to the radio station that’s crackling away playing Steely Dan.

  ‘Bloody thing,’ he says. ‘It’s not my car.’

  We loop past industrial buildings and the wharves to Kingsford-Smith Drive and the Inner City Bypass. There is hardly a cloud above the city today, and little traffic now that peak hour has passed. I’m home, but it’s not enough like home. I know it all well – the steel and glass of the city centre, the timber and tin of the old houses, the tall trees in Newstead Park – but the light is harsh today and nothing looks entirely like itself, and I feel sad.

  Janis is still with her previous client when I arrive.

  ‘You’ve hurt your hand,’ the receptionist says, and I tell her that’s what celebrity canoeing does to you, if you’re partnered with some dweebie guy who’s known for the best mosaics on TV, and some idiot goes and puts a paddle in his hand.

  I wish I could remember her name, but I can’t. She’s not always here, but I know we’ve met before. I push my suitcase into the corner and she gets me a glass of water and says I should sit. I tell her that I’ve been sitting on planes, sitting for hours, and I’d rather stand, if that’s okay. She nods and gets me more water. There’s a plant in the corner and I ask her what it is and she says she doesn’t know. I tell her I like the look of it and she says it’s probably artificial. She doesn’t know for sure, but she never goes near it so she hopes they’re not expecting her to water it. She laughs.

  I’m feeling slimy and unclean and tired from the flight and I realise I must look far from my best, so I explain that I’ve just flown overnight from Perth via Melbourne and that it feels wrong and unfair to have jet lag without having left your own country.

  And she says ‘Oh, jet lag’ as though it might account for a lot at times like these.

  I ask if there’s a bathroom, and I go and wash my face. I take my time, and Janis is waiting when I get back.

  ‘Hi,’ she says with a smile. ‘Come on in.’

  And I say Hi to her and ask her how she’s been, and it’s not so bad. It’s familiar. I walk into her room and she shuts the door behind us.

  There’s a picture of a boat on the opposite wall and all of a sudden it seems to shudder and she says, ‘Take a seat, take a seat.’ She gives me the calm smile therapists give you before you tip your life all over them, and she says, ‘So, how have things been for you? You’ve been away for a few weeks, haven’t you? There have probably been a few times during that that haven’t been easy.’

  And I say ‘Yeah’ and I start to tell her my tooth story, and I’m racing through it but she’s onto me, giving a polite half-laugh and saying that as long as I found a good dentist the worst of that episode is hopefully behind me.

  So I tell her, ‘I met this guy in Canada, and it’s so complicated, but he has a wife and three kids in Thunder Bay, Ontario, so not that complicated in the end. And of course, I wasn’t looking for anything like that, not that it amounted to much, but Murray and I had reached our conclusion by then.’ She’s nodding, nodding and waiting for this to go somewhere. I’m talking too fast, and the timing of my breathing is all confused. ‘It was just an incident, hardly life-changing. Anyway, anyway, okay, there’s one or two other things, I have to admit that. I hit a guy in the face with a paintball gun and it was deliberate.’

  ‘Could I just stop you for a second,’ she says in a voice that sounds half-speed, so slow it’s hard for me to stick with it. ‘Could I ask what happened to the wrist that you’ve got the bandage on?’

  ‘Well, sure, that’s part of it. Not part of it directly, but it got hit by a canoe paddle, and I’m getting there. I’m getting to that bit.’ I have things I want to say and she shouldn’t interrupt me. It’s hard to get them right. ‘Remember those times, remember those times when Murray told us that stupid story about the cart and the bent axle? Did he tell us that one in here? Do you remember it? And how I didn’t tell the same sort of thing, the same sort of story? And that was a difference. Which was the bit I said, just that it was a difference . . .’

  And she says, ‘Slower. You’re losing me. Just take your time and tell me what you need to tell me.’

  ‘Yes, it’s from a long time
ago. And it’s a secret, a sworn secret, you have to understand that. Lives depended on it once. Or there was a chance they might have. I don’t know.’

  She has a jug on the desk, and she refills my water glass, which I’m still holding tightly in both hands. She pushes the box of tissues over. She nods, but doesn’t speak.

  ‘All right. It’s a complicated story. There was glass in this hand, there still might be more, but I don’t think so . . .’

  And I’m afraid telling her, afraid telling her one word of these things that I’d promised I’d keep to myself. Everything would be okay if I kept the secrets, that’s what I knew. And it was okay, or next to okay, ever since. Though it was a terrible effort sometimes, and very tiring. Dreams came along and got mixed in, and things can lose their certainty, but stay just as vivid when they come back at you. And you call it a dream, a bad dream, a recurring nightmare, but you can hear it, smell it, taste it because you did it. Because you were there. And it never figures in other people’s stories of that time – your parents’ stories, told with authority – because they weren’t there, not that day, not that night.

  And you never tell them because you said you never would, and because you flew away with them to start a new life, without them knowing what you’d done. Time passes, and why would you change that? Why would you bring anguish upon them, and guilt they don’t need to feel? They can’t be faulted, and you can’t let them down.

  My mother said it was bad dreams, then and later, when I’d wake up shouting in the middle of the night. And it was bad dreams, but here’s where they came from.

  I tell her. I tell Janis about the Macleishes and the arsenal under their barn. I tell her how it felt the first time I fired the Webley at targets in the field. I tell her I’d got the story wrong in parts, remembered the wrong worst bit. The wrong trip to Belfast.

  Belfast — 1972

  WE’RE IN THE VAN and it’s dark and bumpy, but I’ve got a torch in my pocket – just a little one my mother gave me for any bathroom visits in the middle of the night. Not that it’s a room that’s hard to find at the Macleishes’ house. It’s two doors down on the right from the one I get to sleep in.