Love in the Years of Lunacy

by Mandy Sayer

  ‘Girl, I’m trying to teach you how to solo.’

  ‘If you think I’m so boring . . .’

  ‘I don’t think you’re boring,’ he said. ‘Your playing is.’

  It was as if he’d speared her with a fire poker. She gripped the neck of the saxophone, wanting to throw it down on floor and flee.

  ‘What’s all this about, anyway?’ he said angrily. ‘You wanna parade me in front of your parents? Is that what it is? So they can be all horrified and spit in my face?’

  ‘I want to know where—’ She paused, to search for the right words. ‘I want to know what this all . . . I mean, do you think you and I, after the war . . .’ She swallowed, not knowing how to complete the sentence.

  He sighed, and turned his face to her. ‘Honey, in America, what you and me are doing is illegal in thirty-three states.’

  ‘But what if we got married?’

  ‘Girl, ain’t you been listening to anything I been telling you? We’d be thrown in jail before we even got out of the church. Uncle Sam’s happy to fight fascism—long as it’s the German kind.’

  ‘But we’re in Australia.’

  ‘I’ll end up like one of them niggers your mama talked about. Caught in bed with a white girl, out on the next boat.’

  As the significance of what he was saying dawned upon her, something broke inside her. She bolted from the room and ran.

  At home, Pearl went straight to her room and locked the door. She lay on her stomach and bawled into her pillow, choking on her own snot and hyperventilating. Was James trying to break up with her for good, or was he merely trying to slow things down a little, to reduce the tempo at which their relationship was now playing? Everything seemed hopeless and beyond repair: her future with James, her saxophone playing, the seemingly endless bloody war.

  Suddenly, she heard the sound of smashing glass. She got up and hurried downstairs just as Clara came stomping up from the basement and Aubrey shot through the back door, covered in sawdust. In the parlour, the three of them discovered broken glass scattered across the floorboards and a strong smell of whisky. Lulu sat in her chair, gazing at the mess as if it were a thing to be admired. And there was Martin, his face ruddy, holding onto the back of a chair and swaying. In his free hand he held a second bottle that looked as if it hadn’t been opened. He bowed, stumbled and then lurched backwards. But the biggest surprise of all was his hair: he was now sporting a severe crew cut. He looked like a convict, Pearl thought, or an inmate from an asylum.

  He was lurching towards Clara when the other bottle slipped out of his hand and smashed at his feet.

  Pearl stared at her brother. When she’d seen him early that morning, he’d seemed quite normal, dressed in his blue overalls and a worn tweed cap as he headed off to the factory. Now it was four o’clock in the afternoon and he was roaring drunk.

  Martin looked surprised that the second bottle was no longer in his hand, as if it had somehow smashed itself.

  ‘Guess what?’ he announced, grinning.

  No one dared say anything.

  ‘Next week I’ll be gone!’ Martin saluted his family and began marching around the room, a big childish grin on his face. ‘I’ve joined up.’

  At first, as she watched him stumble in circles, Pearl didn’t believe him. Martin abhorred the idea of war, of any kind of combat. Maybe it was just the booze talking, or an unfunny practical joke.

  But as Clara went to make some tea for her son, she said to Pearl that it wouldn’t surprise her if he had, indeed, signed up for duty. ‘Lately he’s been edgier than a butcher’s knife.’

  Pearl had been so preoccupied with James and her saxophone that she’d paid scant attention to what Clara dubbed ‘Martin’s monster moods’. According to the twins’ mother, he’d been irritable, not eating, suffering from insomnia. And as Pearl watched him staggering about the parlour, she realised just how much weight he had lost.

  She sat on the arm of the couch and studied his uneven crew cut. Was he still upset about Roma? she wondered. Had he loved her that much—as much as she loved James? She felt a pang of guilt for not having noticed how much her brother was suffering, followed swiftly by a stab of trepidation as she remembered what James had tried to tell her: that he couldn’t see a future for the two of them.

  The next day, as they quietly sipped beers in Martin’s bedroom, he explained everything. He was nursing a hangover, but was still excited by the fact that he’d volunteered for service.

  His misery had begun when he’d received the papers instructing him to register for a Manpower job in a Redfern factory which manufactured and canned bully beef for the US and Australian armies. The huge iron shed in which he worked always stank of stale blood and intestines, a smell that came to represent the aroma of desperation and despair. Like most musicians at the Trocadero who had been conscripted into Manpower, he was supposed to leave the ballroom as soon as his last set was finished, while the girls’ band was still playing, and go straight home to grab five hours’ sleep before rising at dawn to go to the factory. No sleeping in, no more jam sessions at the Booker T. Washington Club, just vats of meat, endless queues of cans and the rattle of machines. Most mornings he found himself half hoping for a Japanese invasion: anything would be better than this awful purgatory.

  Pearl cocked her head. ‘So this sudden decision to join up hasn’t got anything to do with Roma, then?’

  Martin bristled. ‘It’s got to do with Merv Sent, dingbat!’

  It was Merv from the Booker T. Club who finally came up with a way to avoid being conscripted into combat while still getting out of working at the factory. On 10 August, Martin would join Merv Sent’s 41st Division Entertainment Unit and embark on a national tour of Australian army camps. He’d already passed his medical exam and now had to go through six weeks of basic training at a Victorian base before he could join the concert party.

  According to Martin, it wouldn’t be all that different from the usual touring circuit that most musicians travelled. ‘The only difference,’ he boasted, ‘is that the food’s all free and I get paid every fortnight on the dot. No wrangling with nightclub managers.’ He sounded almost happy, Pearl thought. But Pearl wasn’t happy at all. She and her brother had been inseparable throughout their childhoods—together they had wagged school, contracted illnesses, formed bands. They’d shared beds, clothes, shoes, instruments and even, as kids, swapped identities for an entire day. It was as if Martin was part of her and she of him.

  As Pearl gazed at his shorn head she was keenly aware of how much she would miss him. Indeed, she sensed that he was already gone, travelling along bush roads, over distant bridges, vanishing into valleys, away from punch clocks, the factory and the draft—disappearing in a cloud of dust down a highway, away from her.

  7

  The morning that Martin was due to leave, Pearl woke before dawn, feeling nauseous. When the time came, she hugged him goodbye so tightly she could feel his ribcage through his jacket. This would be only the second time they’d been separated in their lives, the first being when Pearl and Clara had toured Ceylon years earlier.

  Before he walked down the front steps she gave him one of the superior saxophone reeds James had given her.

  ‘Thanks, Burly,’ he said, bowing and kissing her on the hand. ‘Every time I play it, I’ll think of you.’

  She tried to think of some witty comeback, but she was too upset, and instead watched in silence as he shouldered his backpack, stopped at the gate to salute his family, and marched up the street as if he were already a soldier.

  Later, still wearing her pyjamas, she retired to the basement with her saxophone to practise. She was already missing Martin. Nora was gone. And so that morning she was experiencing a double dose of loss and she dealt with it the only way she knew how: by blowing it all into her horn.

  She hadn’t heard from James since their argument at the Con, but their regular weekly lesson in the rose garden was due to take place at ten o’clock that mornin
g. She assumed he would turn up as usual. She felt foolish now for running off the way she had. She just hoped he’d understood.

  After forty-five minutes or so of practising scales she began the second exercise in the sequence James had suggested. She would play ‘Cherokee’ in every key signature—all twelve of them—and in the coming weeks and months she was supposed to rehearse every song she knew in this way, until her body was so intimate with each nuance of any piece of music that her embouchure and fingers, ears and lungs could interpret it effortlessly.

  She heard the doorbell ring but didn’t stop playing. Moments later, Aub came clumping down the stairs with a telegram. She ripped it open and read it with a sinking heart. no lesson today. no pass. james.

  ‘Bad news?’ asked Aub.

  ‘No,’ she said, trying to hide her disappointment, wondering with a feeling of dread if James was giving her the brush-off. She needed to see him—that day. To wait another week would be agony.

  An hour later she was boarding a train at Central station, carrying her saxophone case. She’d heard of the camp where he was stationed, about fifteen miles out of the city centre in Granville. She knew it was a reckless thing to do—to just turn up at the camp like a lovesick girl—but the missed saxophone lesson gave her an excuse. Hadn’t he himself done crazy, wonderful things for the sake of his music? Coffee and Benzedrine for months on end. Hitchhiking to Kansas City and then on to New York. Working as a dishwasher at the Savoy Ballroom for a year just so he could hear Art Tatum play the piano every night.

  At Granville station, she asked directions from the ticket collector who pointed down a road towards a cluster of huts that stood in perfect rows, behind which were a baseball pitch and a swimming hole. The passages between the huts were lined with ferns and daisies. A unit of American GIs, shouldering rifles, was being marched around the outskirts of the camp, under the command of a drill sergeant who was shouting orders. She suddenly felt ridiculous, peering through the fence at an army office, wearing her primrose-print dress, holding her saxophone case, planning to invent a flagrant lie just so she could have a brief glimpse of her lover.

  A uniformed man popped his head around the doorjamb. ‘You lookin’ for someone, lady?’ He was wearing spectacles and chewing gum.

  She told him she was looking for Private James Washington.

  The soldier thought for a moment. ‘You mean Ernest.’

  Pearl put down her case. ‘No. James. James Washington.’

  The man chomped on his gum. ‘I’m the company clerk, lady. Type up the rosters every week. Ain’t got no James Washington on my books.’

  She squinted against the morning light, watching the unit marching back towards the camp, and could see them all clearly now, their faces covered in sweat.

  She told him that her Washington was in the Quartermaster Corps.

  The man looked her up and down. ‘What’s a nice dame like you want with a coloured boy?’

  She picked up her case. ‘Do you know where I can find him?’

  The clerk shrugged and shook his head. ‘We keep ’em over there.’ He nodded across the dirt road at a group of tents huddled against a scrubby rise. ‘We call that there the zoo.’ She began backing away.

  ‘Hey,’ he called after her. ‘You a charity moll?’

  Pearl kicked a stone towards him. He ducked out of the way and it skittered off into a flowerbed. ‘I’m a musician,’ she replied testily.

  She walked down a path towards the tents. Now that she was so close, she felt anxious and unsure. What if James didn’t want to see her? The stubby grass died away and she found herself slogging through a bog of mud indented with thick tyre marks and boot prints. The stench of raw sewage blowing on the westerly wind made her breakfast flip in her stomach. She could see now that the camp was enclosed by a chainlink fence crowned with razor wire, and the sight of it almost defeated her: not only would he be unable to get out; there was no way she’d be able to slip in undetected.

  The fence, however, was ringed by bush and, as she circled the settlement she was camouflaged by trees and scrub. Unlike the camp across the road, with its straight avenues of wooden huts roofed with corrugated iron, its rows of daisies, its swimming hole and baseball pitch, its air of middle-class military civility, this camp looked like a shantytown. The company seemed to be housed in a series of large, sagging tents, and when she glanced through the open flap of one she could see there were no cots inside, and no flooring, just rows of bedrolls lying on the ground. And the mess was right out in the open, beneath a canopy of canvas stretched between four gum trees. Two black men were cooking something in a huge steel drum over an open fire. In the distance, on the other side of the camp, she noticed a group of tiny figures bobbing against the ground, performing push-ups. Behind them was what looked like a huge warehouse rising out of a cluster of ironbarks. Leaves and twigs whipped her face as she traced the length of the fence. She saw many black soldiers as she passed—fixing trucks, washing jeeps, cutting trees—but not one of them was James. When the fence veered off at a ninety-degree angle, she continued to follow it.

  After about five minutes, she saw the head of a man level with the ground, as if he were buried alive from the neck down, but as she got closer she realised he was standing in a ditch, shovelling dirt, and that there was a second man in the trench with him, also digging. When she was upon them, she hid behind the trunk of an ash gum and, after peering at the two bobbing heads for a few moments, she finally recognised the second man and had to stop herself from throwing down her saxophone case and scaling the fence.

  She hadn’t planned what she would do in the event that she actually found him, and for a while she just stood there, heart pounding, wondering if she should retrace her steps before he realised she was there. She found it hard to reconcile her proud, dignified James with this man standing in a ditch, sweating profusely and shovelling dirt. It was like seeing a sultan scrubbing a floor, or a prince cleaning a toilet. She couldn’t believe the man who’d played with Count Basie and Benny Goodman had been reduced to digging trenches.

  He was only about ten yards away from her. She tried to draw his attention by hissing, but he just went on with his work, oblivious. It wasn’t until he and his mate took a break for a cigarette that she mustered the courage to whistle the melody of ‘Cherokee’. His head jerked around, trying to find the source. She emerged from behind the tree and pressed herself against the fence, and with a grin he jumped up to join her. His friend, Tyrone, kept watch for the sergeant, while James kissed her through a gap in the wire. ‘Oh, baby,’ he murmured. ‘I’m sorry.’ And between kisses she stammered her apologies, too, until he hushed her by kissing her deeply again.

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ he whispered, glancing over his shoulder. ‘I been thinking about what we talked about last week.’ He gripped the fence with his fingers. ‘Yesterday, I put in for a request.’

  ‘A request—what?’ She swallowed hard. ‘For a transfer?’

  He shook his head. ‘For permission—’ he glanced over his shoulder again ‘—for permission to marry.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who?’ he asked. ‘Who do you think? My buddy Tyrone?’

  Her pulse was racing as she asked, ‘Are you proposing to me?’

  ‘We’ll have to get my CO’s permission first. And wait two months from the day the request was lodged, but . . .’ He looked at the ground, suddenly shy. ‘’Course we’ll have to deal with your parents. But Tyrone here, he found out there ain’t no law in Australia stopping you and me being together. And I got to thinkin’, well, maybe this country ain’t so bad.’

  So many words winged through her mind but she was too overwhelmed to utter a sound. She laced her fingers through his. Their lips found each other and they kissed again through the wire and the taste of him made her feel as if she were levitating and falling at the same time.

  When they finally pulled away from one another, he smiled and licked his lips. ‘Your em
bouchure’s improved,’ he said, grinning.

  Tyrone suddenly called that the sergeant was coming. Pearl pulled away from the fence and fled back into the bushes.

  The next week passed in a fast, delirious rapture. She floated through rehearsals, the sets at the Trocadero, her household chores and her daily four-hour music practice. She was dying to tell someone about the proposal, especially Martin, but he was on the road now, heading west across the country.

  When Nora Barnes telephoned Pearl at the Trocadero and told her that she was now engaged to Pookie, who was converting his property into a peacock farm, Pearl could no longer contain herself. In a rush she told Nora about her own impending marriage. Nora, far from being shocked that Pearl was to marry a black man, was so happy for them both that she insisted they come up and visit. The four of them could go bushwalking together, and at night they could dine at the Carrington Hotel. Nora would be Pearl’s bridesmaid and Pearl would be Nora’s. Perhaps they could even have a double wedding, suggested Nora. ‘A double white wedding—with one black groom!’ The two of them laughed until the line went dead.

  Pearl could hardly wait for her weekly meeting in the rose garden with James, but on the Thursday morning another telegram arrived with exactly the same message as the week before: no lesson today. no pass. james.

  ‘Looks like your teacher’s been misbehaving,’ said Aub, glancing over Pearl’s shoulder at the message.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Denied passes two weeks in a row. Must’ve done something really bad.’

  Her hand began to tremble as she pocketed the telegram. She knew her father was only teasing but it worried her nonetheless. She hated being denied James, so suddenly, without warning, and wondered whether the same wording in the telegram was a covert invitation for her to seek him out at the camp once more.