Where the Line Breaks

by Michael Burrows

  ‘One of ours?’ says one of the post-Gallipoli recruits.

  ‘Must be. We control the sky.’ He spurs Kelly forward, but slower, as they approach the Turkish lines.

  The sparse plain and the thick brush remind him of home, the arid fields where the spinifex grows, where the bleached bones of dead cattle are picked clean by the weather. Home. And Rose. Sending him tedious letters. Patiently waiting for his return. Each letter professing her love, renewed. He’s not sure he believes in love anymore.

  Love is being unable to tell someone you no longer love them.

  Love is hating yourself for falling for someone new.

  Love is hating someone for loving you.

  He writes to her like he would write to the family of a dead trooper. Opens each new letter with disdain, numb boredom and the bitter taste of self-loathing on his tongue. But still he doesn’t say anything, can’t bring himself to write the truth.

  One of the recruits whistles, and he glances up. Off to his right, a small plume of smoke outlined against the smudge of morning sky. He would have missed it, deep in thoughts of the past. He’s still asleep. Wake up, Al, get a grip.

  They dismount, leave the horses with a volunteer behind the crest of a hill, and scramble closer for a better look. There’s not a lot of cover. He drops to the ground and pushes forward on his hands and knees among the scrub. The rest of the men do the same.

  Turkish scouts, cooking breakfast over a small fire. They should know better, but it’s bitterly cold. He doesn’t blame them.

  One of the Turks drifts away from the camp, close to their hiding spot, and lowers his pants, crouching in the brush. Alan motions for two of the men to bring him in. Silence, but for the grunting of the Turk. From their camp, the stagnant air carries the oblivious chatter of the Turkish scouts. The grunting stops.

  The two troopers drag him over with his pants around his ankles, bayonet held against his throat, brown smears down his skinny legs. Alan tells him to pull up his pants. There’s a whispered interrogation, nervous looks toward the Turkish lines, cold seeping into their kit from the earth. In a few hours, the earth will be baked and dry. For now, they freeze.

  When they’re done, they face a dilemma. They can’t take the Turk back with them, and they can’t set him free without alerting the scouts to their presence. They must destroy the evidence. Grim job, but orders are orders.

  ‘Go get the horses ready,’ Alan says, pulling out his knife. The Turk’s eyes widen. They’ve stuffed part of a shirt into his mouth, but he can whimper, can still squirm. Alan holds his knife against the bare skin of his throat, and the noise stops. ‘Sorry, mate.’

  Always the same dream. The morning of The Nek. The same stretch of trench. The same gnarled pine tree on the horizon. The same blurred faces of the men around him, the men he signed up alongside. Men he knows from home, their faces like old shoes, comfortable and worn. The pocket watch at the end of his right arm. The whistle between his lips. The pistol in his left hand. The sun, imminent.

  Some nights, he dreams he is back on Lemnos – sun in his eyes and the cool touch of seawater drawing him down into the dark, pulling him, down, further down, until he can’t breathe. Suffocating, his eyes bulging in his head. The crush of bodies on his chest, drowning in blood.

  On the good nights, he won’t remember his dreams, will wake to the bugle call refreshed. He can’t remember the last good night.

  The troopers are waiting to ride as he scrambles back to the horses. He nods to them, job done, and throws himself onto Kelly’s back. They race back the way they’ve come, putting distance between themselves and the Jacko camp. Then they can slow down, and reassess. Already, the sky is lighter, the day warming up. The Turk told them what he knew – it’s been a successful morning.

  The cool air disperses as the temperature rises, and the heat settles back on them like an old coat. It weighs on his shoulders, saps the strength from his arms. Kelly shakes her head as the flies find her wet muzzle and turns to eye him up. She sticks her long tongue out the side of her mouth like Dad’s kelpies panting.

  ‘Alright, girl.’

  He leans forward and runs his hand through her mane. Turning to the men, he orders them back to camp.

  The campsite is a roar of activity as they ride back in – the smell of the billy on the fire, shorts hung on makeshift lines, the other horses already fed and watered. He pops a feedbag over Kelly’s head and asks the trooper on detail to give her some extra care. He pats her rump as he leaves, but she ignores him, engrossed in the feedbag, tail swishing to keep away the flies.

  After debriefing with the Major, he heads back to his tent, passing groups of laughing, jockeying troopers lying shirtless in the morning sun, mixing burnt offerings in their mess tins. He passes a group of men walking back the way he came, off to swim in the cold waters of the nearby creek. No-one salutes, but some of the older boys, his original Mena crew, give him a quick nod. All of them wear khaki shirts and slouch hats as per orders, but are naked from the waist down, thick dark hairs on their upper legs and groins. They laugh among themselves as they disappear behind him. Once he might have found comfort in the sound.

  Back at their tent, Nugget sits by a stuttering fire, a mess tin perched over the coals. The men from the surrounding tents lounge around listening as he rabbits on. Alan catches his eye before popping into the tent to take off his spurs and change shirts. When he re-emerges there’s a tin plate of hot food and a mug of tea waiting for him, the flies already congregating on the surface. He grunts a quick thank you and tucks in. He hadn’t realised he was hungry.

  ‘Anything to report, Lewis?’ One of the new officers asks, white foam on his cheeks and a razor in his hand. Alan catches his eye in the reflection of the pocket mirror he’s hung from the front of his tent. He hasn’t shaved for weeks, thick tufts of hair on his cheeks. He can’t remember when he stopped caring.

  He chews a chunk of gristle and mutters between mouthfuls.

  ‘Not much doing. Interrogated an Abdul scout – we’re about three clicks south of their main force. A biplane, but I think it was one of ours.’

  ‘Clear skies. Perfect weather for a recce.’

  One of the other fresh recruits screws up his face in protest. His hair is orange and the skin on his nose is peeling. ‘It’s bloody freezing – there was frost on my bedroll this morning.’

  ‘Mate. You don’t know what freezing is. Back on Anzac,’ Nugget pours the last dregs of tea onto the hot ashes and the coals spit and crackle by his boots, ‘back on Anzac, it freezed so hard you couldn’t blow a candle out. You had to knock the flame off with a stick.’

  The ginger kid tilts his head, squints his eyes.

  ‘Ain’t that the truth, Al?’ Nugget peers up at him.

  Alan laughs. ‘You ever get to uni, might be worth starting with some basic science.’

  His stomach rumbles uncomfortably, growling in pain. He drops his plate and mutters a quick apology, running half-stooped to the wooden shack housing the latrines. He can smell them half a field away. As he clatters open the wooden door a cloud of flies rises from the dark holes in the bench. When his eyes adjust, he can make out three other men hunched forward, drained of colour, the whites of their eyes obscured by the swarms of flies. The flies land on his lips, tickle his ears, crawl close to the wet corners of his eyes.

  He barely has his shorts around his ankles before he relieves himself, his skin clammy and wet. His stomach settles and he relaxes, until he realises he’s forgotten bog paper. He risks a sideways glance at the men next to him, but the looks on their faces tell him they won’t be sharing.

  There are two letters in his shirt pocket.

  Rose’s latest. The one she wrote because his mother didn’t have the strength. Tom has fallen at Passchendaele. I’m so sorry, Al, she says. She writes on thin cream paper, smelling faintly of banksia and the smoke from the hearth, her writing looped and floral. He holds the pages up to his nose, breathes her in, forgets the
flies and the stench and the humid heat.

  The other is from Nancy, who has started to write more often now, hoping to build a relationship after her year of silence. It’s about the baby, cute descriptions of the way she toddles around like a tiny drunk. When it’s all over, she says near the end, we will find a place in the country and make this work. I want to make this work, she writes on hard white paper, unscented. What she means is she wants his money.

  The white paper is rough as guts, and the sand that has found its way between his cheeks tears his arse. It leaves his skin pink and raw, but it does the job. His stomach gurgles once more as he knocks his way back out into the light and breathes in the sweet smell of a thousand men living together, the fresh air of a thousand Walers and all their farm smells. Slowly, wincing with each step, he winds his way back to his tent.

  Always the same dream. The last minutes of night. The pine tree. Standing on the firing step, at the lip of the trench, peering down at the watch in his hand. Playing at being an officer. One moment the watch hands are spinning wildly, back and forth, close to his eyes so his breath fogs up the glass, and next his arms are longer than they’ve ever been before; so he can’t make out the minutes, his breath catching in his chest. All he’ll hear is the tickatick of the hands, the spinning cogs whirring and each second passing with a click that shakes the trench walls. Then it’s time, and the whistle in his hand won’t reach his mouth, can’t make the journey from his side in time. He blows a dead, silent blast, cold metal scratching on his teeth. The eyes of the men around him are hardening. Peering. Thinking, who is this boy, leading me to my death?

  Mate,

  Nugget’s getting on my nerves, bless him. Truth be told, it’s all getting on my nerves. Bloody sand and the same old routine every day. None of it is the same without you.

  The girls in Cairo miss you. If that fuckin’ shell hadn’t had your number, I wouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t shacked up with one or more of them by now. For some reason I can picture you with a harem.

  You wouldn’t put up with any lip from the new boys. You always knew what to say, what to make light of, when to put the foot down. Don’t get a big head up you when I say I looked to you for some of that stuff. Lord knows you were no good when the bill came.

  I wish I was brave enough to send this.

  The tent is quiet for a half hour, and he finds himself writing yet another letter he doesn’t have the guts to send. His notebook is full of them. Half written. Scratched out. Dead before their time.

  He re-reads the first letter from Nancy, for the thousandth time.

  I was angry at you. I didn’t want you to know. You have an obligation, now. You have a reason to survive. Her name is Harriet. She has your curls. She is your daughter.

  He tries to feel something for the baby, some form of ownership of the letters on the page and the person they embody. The words are thin and distant. He writes because he is expected to, because he misses Nancy’s curves, her schoolmarm mouth.

  Nugget’s voice arrives a full half-minute before his body, announcing his approach and giving Alan time to fold the paper in half and stuff it in his pack. He looks up as the wiry Irishman enters the tent and skips his way over to his bedroll. No sooner has his backside hit the material, then he’s back up like a jack rabbit, making his way over to the makeshift desk.

  ‘Bit of a sauna in here, Lewey. Mind if I crack open the French doors?’

  Without waiting for a reply Nugget crosses to the entrance and pulls back the material, twirling the long drapes around the side posts. Alan squints; the whiteness of the sand sears into his brain and everything is a bright haze.

  But it’s not worth fighting Nugget on this. He grunts. A throwaway sort of back-of-the-throat noise. Half-hearted. Nugget looks at him. Can read his silences like he reads the odds on the horses in the regimental races.

  ‘What’s up with you then?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It’s always nothing.’

  ‘Well, this time it really is.’ He smiles, and the rough skin on his lip breaks. How long has it been?

  Nugget inclines his head like he’s accepting this as a reasonable response, then asks again.

  ‘Missing your woman?’

  ‘Women. Plural. Bars. The beaches back home. Grass.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth.’

  They sit in the sticky air for a while, not talking. Then Nugget pipes back up, as he always does. ‘You know, there’s a pretty young bint in the local town …’

  ‘Get out of it, Nug.’

  ‘I’m just saying, you’re only human.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Rose wouldn’t need to know. No-one would need to know.’

  ‘Shut up, Nug. Listen.’

  He holds his breath. Nugget does the same. For a moment, there’s nothing but the sound of horses whinnying at the other end of the camp, and then, faint at first, the mosquito buzz. They stare at each other like dumbstruck mullets, gasping for air. He watches as Nugget’s pupils widen, staring back at him, watches the words being formed by his mouth, but all he can hear is the mechanical roar of the engine, all he can hear is the tinny rattle of his own voice, lost somewhere on the journey between his chest and his mouth, the whispering cry.

  ‘The horses.’

  Nugget sprints out into the light with his shirt unbuttoned, running down the row of tents, screaming to the men. When Alan closes his eyes all he can see is the bright haze on his eyelids.

  The machine gun begins firing as he exits the tent, and finishes by the time he’s at the end of the row, turning the corner, racing across the camp alongside the other men who have cottoned on. Then come the screams. Up ahead he sees Nugget fall to his knees in the sand by the dark form of a dropped horse. A few of the men have their rifles out, taking pot shots at the plane as it finishes its dive and climbs, machine guns steaming. Already it is tiny in the vast space of the sky, a dot receding into the distance, back the way it came.

  The screams are human. Like children. The mother on Cottesloe Beach who’d lost her son in the wash of waves when he was little more than a child himself. The screams like The Nek. Like Lemnos – the sound of the surgeons on the hospital ships taking off limbs. The animal noise of frightened creatures. Mouths filled with blood. Gurgles.

  He looks down the line at the horses, the blood-drenched sand, the reins torn off in terror, the few who missed the rain of bullets standing tall over the twitching bodies of those on the ground alongside. His feet move of their own accord. The trooper on steward duty managed to let twenty or thirty horses loose; they fan out across the plain, knowing the danger, running for their lives. Two injured Walers, exit wounds like huge craters in their thighs, have jerked loose and are stumbling toward the tents. A trooper grabs the reins, soothes the startled creatures and lowers them to the ground. Alan hears the soft murmur of whispered comforts.

  Kelly sits on the ground like a giant puppy. She swings her head around at his approach, her eyes huge and terrified. Purple veins swim in her milky whites. All around her, the ground is shot up, sharp pebbles in her mane and a thin sheen of white sand on her flank that clouds off when he rubs his hand along her side. She’s breathing rapidly, rabidly, spit dripping from her lower lip, teeth exposed. He moves alongside and quietens her, breathes in time with her. Running his hand down her mane, his fingers knot in the thick hair.

  ‘Easy, girl.’

  The bullet has entered at the base of her neck, in the thick muscle of her shoulders, and crossed her body diagonally, down through her chest and exiting through her stomach on the opposite side. She tries to raise herself, back onto her feet, but he wraps his arms around her muscled neck, pulls her close and whispers soothing words in her ears. He takes a quick look at the wound, and gags. The immensity of her ribs, each bone thick like a table leg. The writhing red snakes of her insides, the drip of thick dark blood. He sits down next to her back legs, the puddle growing by his thigh, bits of pebble floating in th
e stagnant dark pool.

  His hands shake with the uncontrollable tic of adrenalin, and he struggles to get into his own pocket: the tiny corner of a cube of sugar, the letter from Rose he couldn’t bring himself to destroy. He holds the cube under Kelly’s mouth, and a long glob of spit drips into his palm, dissolving the sugar, but she slips a leathery tongue onto his skin. The edges of her tongue are white, and blood mixes with her spit. Pink drops patter, raining the dirt below while her teeth grind the cube. He unfolds the letter, thick scarlet smudges on the ink. Tom is dead, and he couldn’t find the courage needed to kill a lone Turk. Kelly coughs like the smokers in the morning.

  A gunshot from somewhere close by, and he swings his head. Nugget walks down the picket line, silencing those horses too injured to survive. ‘Brave unto the last’, like he writes home in the letters to the families. He raises himself off the ground, sand sticking to his red palm, and tries to wipe the muddy sludge off on his shorts. He leaves a long red streak down Kelly’s back as he strokes her, the blood fading into her coat.

  Nugget reaches the end of the line and stares at him across Kelly’s bulk. He shakes his head. Nugget turns the pistol in his hand, offers it to him across the night sky of her back, handle first. He nods, and Nugget leaves him to it. No need for words.