He misses home. His proper home, the one he pretends he has forgotten. He misses the smell of gumtrees and the cackle of kookaburras in the dawn light.
There are two bullets in the chamber.
He weighs the pistol in his hand. This war is not for him. It would be quick, cold metal on his temple, and the simple click of the trigger. Or on the roof of his mouth, like that English officer on Gallipoli, blowing out the back of his head in a pink cloud. A quick release. Falling on his sword like the Greek heroes he once idolised. He could find his way back home, safer then, as a memory.
Kelly’s wild eye follows him, the flicker of a wink, then it rolls back until all he can see is whites, her tongue lolling from her mouth. A baby’s whimper. The white strip across her eyes is brown with blood and sweat and dust. A thick gobbet of pink snot stalactites from the darkness of her muzzle. She’s gone feral, a wild brumby galloping alone across the Kosciusko plains she can’t even remember anymore. Time to take her home.
‘I’m sorry.’
His hand moves in slow motion, through the water at Cottesloe, remembering, and strokes the side of her face, while he practises, placing the barrel against her forehead. He mimes pulling the trigger, and lets the gun fall. He let the Turkish scout scramble free, unable to plunge the knife into the soft skin of his neck. Unable to do what was necessary. Their scouting party had probably followed them back to camp, unobserved, and sent the plane. He leans forward and places his forehead against hers, like the Maori boys taught them, and pulls back. She looks him in the eye, saying, do it, you coward. Be brave for once. Please.
‘Thank you.’
He pulls the trigger.
The noise is enormous, filling his ears, ringing through his teeth, kicking his brain about in his head. He closes his eyes and waits for the spasms to subside.
Kelly screams; the end screams, wandering lost in a field of agony. Her head thrashes in his arms ragdoll loose. She throws her neck back, trying to pull her body up but lacking the strength. Her back legs kick out, throwing sand and showering them with powdery dust.
All he’s succeeded in doing is blowing her left eye and ear off. Thick stringy links of pink sinew and skin hang down the side of her head. Dots of blood splay out across the black canvas of her back. She falls onto her left-hand side, hiding the cavity of her eye socket in the dirt. He can’t bring himself to look down at the creature twisting by his feet. The wild beast, the fallen soldier.
The sky is perfect clear above them, blue like children draw the sky, and clean. Kelly’s right eye peers up and through him.
He places a sandy boot on her muzzle to keep her from moving, and fires the second bullet through her brain.
109 See Susan Freedland, Max Whitlock, Howard Greene, et al. All are worth considering, though there is still no general consensus. Em’s off to Paris tomorrow, catching the Eurostar early in the morning, so I went round to hers tonight to say bye. I’m not allowed pets in my apartment, so Artie is staying with Em’s friend Sam. For the first time since we bought him we had the place to ourselves. Em made dinner (roast chicken, asparagus and lemon, side salad) and we finished a bottle of wine.
Want me to stay? I said, when the credits on the terrible Johnny Depp film rolled. I’ve got a tute tomorrow, but my boss is away. I did an over-thetop wink and smiled, but Em missed it.
Nah, you should go.
Ouch.
She gave me a plastic bag of leftovers, and ushered me to the door. I felt like a sheep in a sheepdog trial.
110 For far-fetched, see Whitlock or Goodberry, or me, hoping to stay the night. Hey, I said as I was leaving, it’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.
I know.
If you feel uncomfortable, say something.
I will.
And call me if anything happens. She rolled her eyes at me. Anything, ok? I pulled her into a bear hug. If I can get to Sloane Square at four in the morning, I can get to Paris.
Why do you have to do that? Her voice was all scratchy as she pulled away.
Do what?
I told you to drop it.
111 She gave me a quick peck on the cheek and said she’d try and message if she could, and then started to shut the door on me. Hey, I said, I love you.
I know, she said, as she closed the door. And then, I love you, too.
112 Freedland, The Mystery of the Unknown Digger. An invaluable aid to my own research, if only to prove that the established theories are easily debunked. Had an interesting email from Jennifer Hayden recently, while I’m on the subject: Hey Matt, it’s nothing personal. Keep doing good work, and I’m sure you’ll do great things in the future. J. Not entirely sure what that means. Em hasn’t called or messaged yet, but I assume they got into the hotel ok – they’ve got adjoining rooms, so I told Em to make sure the door between them is kept locked at all times. It’s not that I’m worried about her, Em knows how to handle herself, it’s more that I don’t know what I can do to help from over here. I feel completely neutered.
113 Freedland, The Mystery of the Unknown Digger, p. 204. Had an email from Max Whitlock, of all people, that simply read: Now you know how I feel. Sucks, doesn’t it? Poor guy seems to have completely lost it. No idea what he’s on about, but then I never really understood his argument anyway. Still not convinced he knows what emails are.
114 Cooked myself steak and oven chips – still no word from Em, but I knew she’d be super busy minding the Prof. I’m not worried. Figured I’d get some more work done, so went online to read the latest issue of Australian Literary Journal, and nearly threw up my dinner. Jennifer Hayden has stitched me up, royally.
115 ‘Those Who Would Be King: The Next Steps in Identifying the Unknown Digger’, by Jennifer Hayden in the most recent issue of Australian Literary Journal (Issue 6, Volume 70, April 2019), is a 60-page condemnation of everything I am currently killing myself to achieve. Outright attacks against my working thesis, mentions of me and Alan Lewis, by name, along with repudiations of my last article, my current work and future job prospects, and even my honours thesis back in Perth. Complete radio silence from Paris.
116 Fuuuucccccckkkkkk.
117 I’ve called Em sixteen times, left ten voicemails, and sent about thirty messages. She’s still not answering. I don’t know what to do. Do I email Jennifer and ask her to retract her comments? Do I need to respond somehow, with my own article? I keep hearing her question over and over in my head: ‘The very idea of Alan Lewis as the Unknown Digger is laughable – who should we nominate next, Ned Kelly? Or Skippy?’ (p. 33) Where the fuck is Em?
118 Message from Em, finally: Sorry, Matt – big day & bigger night. Don’t take JH personally. You rock. Speak 2moro? Xxx And then one of those smiley faces with the heart eyes emojis, which we all know doesn’t mean anything concrete. Don’t take it personally, when my last ten years work is being eviscerated on an international scene? Em’s message came in at about 3am, so I woke up to it, but she hasn’t replied to my new messages. I couldn’t eat anything this morning – the very thought of vegemite on toast made me feel sick. Em’s probably eating Parisian croissants and European delicacies with her big sunglasses on, sipping espresso.
119 ‘Alan Lewis was a remarkable soldier, and certainly a brave man, but nothing in his military record or civilian life points towards a career in the literary arts: unfinished degrees, unremarkable letters home, and a penchant for volunteering himself and his men for extra duties do not equate to literary heroism’ and ‘the Victoria Cross is not the same thing as the Nobel Prize in Literature’ and ‘poetry can come from unexpected quarters, and appear in the most undistinguished of forms, but unfortunately for Matthew Denton, the idea of Alan Lewis writing the poems I discovered in 1995 is absurd’ and ‘I’d be amused by Denton’s claim if I wasn’t so saddened by the fact that he seems genuinely convinced by his inaccuracies’: Jennifer Hayden and the remains of my academic career, ladies and gentlemen (pp. 1, 2, 4–60, etc.).
120 Greene, Six Essays on the Australian Spirit, p. 21
3. Em called and helped me get some perspective.
Don’t listen to it, she said. Don’t read it, don’t respond to it, don’t worry about it.
I feel sick, I said.
I didn’t tell her about the half a bottle of cheap red wine I’d bought from the offie and started drinking at ten o’clock. Or the three packets of Polish pretzels.
Ali says it’ll all blow over and once you publish and prove her wrong, she’ll be biting her tongue.
How’s Paris? I rolled over on my bed. I miss you, you know.
I have to go, Matt. I could hear someone laughing in the background. She hung up.
121 Greene, Six Essays on the Australian Spirit, p. 215. I emailed Jennifer Hayden: What the Ken Oath, Jennifer? You couldn’t have told me you disagreed with my findings after one of the 52 separate emails I sent you for corrections and advice? What’s with the personal attacks? I can’t believe I thought we were friends! What made you such a turn-dog? Get regimentally reduced.
Probably a mistake to send it from my uni account but I made sure I didn’t swear, so it wouldn’t get flagged up by the filters.
122 Taking Greene’s findings into account, ‘Percute Velociter’ becomes a socio-political statement on the foolishness of war and the absurdity of ‘The Long Ride’ through the Sinai toward Jerusalem. Definitely a mistake to send it from my uni account. I’ve been locked out of my emails, and told to schedule a ‘Progression Evaluation’ with my consulting supervisor. That’s the Prof, when he gets back from Paris. Fucking perfect.
And the offie has sold out of the cheap wine. And the Polish pretzels. And ice-cream.
123 Haven’t spoken to Em again since this morning, but I have heard back from the Prof, so how does that work? They get back late tomorrow night, and my ‘Progression Evaluation’ is scheduled for Friday afternoon. How many messages is too many messages to send to one phone? I must have sent about fifty to Em in the space of twelve hours. I’m trying to hold back on sending any more – don’t want to freak her out. I miss Artie. I’m convinced something happened. She’s never this quiet. I badly need a hug. I might stop writing for a little while – the thought of Alan in the desert, the smell of dead horses, the sand getting in everywhere, the dark shadowy huts and the spark of a match … Everything about this thesis is making me feel sick.
124 Death, or, I don’t know – a war, maybe? Riding nonstop across the desert for three years, fighting an invisible enemy, missing the love of your life, maybe? Being told your thesis, the thing you’ve been working on for the past ten years or more of your life, is ‘laughable’, maybe? Sitting at your desk late at night, waiting and waiting for your phone to light up with the comforting purr of a message, as it gets later and later, your head drooping onto your chest, your thoughts running ragged, the darkness taking over. Blood. Anger. Betrayal. Love.
Maybe?
125 Greene, Six Essays on the Australian Spirit, p. 77. Em didn’t want me to meet them at the station, so I waited until she was home, and then headed around to surprise her with a box of chocolates and some flowers. She opened the door in her bathrobe, tiredness in dark rings under her eyes, her bags thrown in a heap by the window.
Matt, she said, I’m tired. Can I see you tomorrow?
I’ve got my meeting with the Prof, tomorrow, and I’m scared. I need you.
You’ll be fine. Ali said they might need to give you a slap on the wrist, but nothing will come of it.
Immediately the tension in my shoulders relaxed and I smiled. I overthink everything.
Well, celebrate with me?
I have to sleep, Matt.
Of course. Everything is fine, she’s just sleepy. I let her sleep.
126 Arrived at the Prof’s office early to see Em for a few minutes, but she wasn’t at her desk. Come on in, Matt, the Prof called out, and I could tell something was wrong. First up, he was wearing black socks and a proper tie, unlike his normal pink shirt and messy hair combination. Second, he had a printout of my email to Jennifer Hayden on his desk. And he wasn’t smiling. He sat me down on the squeaky chair Em says they use to torture undergrads – every time you so much as shift your weight, it lets out a long whiny squeak.
Look, Matt. As your friend, I have to be straight with you.
I fumbled awkwardly in my seat, and the chair squeaked. As my friend? Something had happened with him and Em. I knew it. He was unable to control himself, and Em paid the price, and now I’d have to kill him. Well, shit.
It’s not good. He sighed a long, fatherly sigh. We have to let you go.
I didn’t breathe. Didn’t nod. Didn’t move an inch. The chair creaked. Let me go?
Obviously this isn’t coming from me. I fought hard for you, but the higher-ups have made their decision, and there’s nothing I can do. You can finish up your tutes next week, and then we have to part ways.
I mumbled something pathetic, like, But my book?
Finish it, Matt. Prove them wrong.
I can’t … I ran out of words. He didn’t mention Em.
I believe in you. He shook his head and wouldn’t meet my eyes. But you’ve dug your own grave, I don’t know what got into you.
127 I’m sorry, Matt, the Prof said, in his pathetic, Colin Firth–miserableness.
128 Two forty-five on a Friday afternoon. Boom. It all came sliding down, like the first strip of wallpaper we put up however many months ago. Not enough glue. We slapped it up on the wall and stood back to watch, and the tessellating triangles all smooshed together and widened out as the whole sheet slid down, rolls of paper piling up on top of each other until it grew too heavy and fell and spattered the carpet with wallpaper-glue constellations. The sky out the Prof’s window was that particular London afternoon smudge of orange, where the sun is lowering itself behind the smog and the clouds are backlit, and there are chubby birds flitting above and hopping back and forth on the windowsill, but they’re not like the birds in Australia, these fat London pigeons – they’re not sun-kissed and windswept like the seagulls back home, these gluttonous London filth-bags – and as the smear of sky collapses the birds stop chattering and slide from the air, and dissolve into the grey concrete wall, and your tongue turns to liquid in your mouth, your thesis slipping away into dark oblivion, and all the background noise of the university, the students thundering through the corridors behind you, the hum of computers, the papers on the desk, turn black and white and then the black seeps away until there is only white oblivion in your periphery. You sit there, wings broken, wondering how you ever had the confidence to jump off the ground and into the sky.
The Prof is shaking his head, but you swear there is a smile in his eyes.
129 The Prof walked me out of his office and told me to take the rest of the day off, said he’d take my afternoon tutorial. Em still wasn’t at her desk. My bag, I said, and ran back to the office to pick it up. My eyes fell on the email printouts on the Prof’s desk, and without overthinking it, I picked them up and stuffed them into my satchel. Grabbed the pile of torn papers from his bin as well, because the top one was an email from Em, signed off with three kisses. xxx
130 I’ve been looking for the wrong proof.
CHAPTER 6: Conclusive evidence of a physical relationship between my girlfriend and her boss, who also happens to be my boss: Analysis of the primary sources, secondary confirmation and just how fucked are we?
It has taken me a few days to get my head around it; the idea that Em might not have been 100% truthful with me during our relationship – accepting the realisation that I might be wrong about certain fundamental aspects of my life, understanding that various basic tenets of my London existence would very likely have to change – but the evidence speaks for itself. And, as in all things, I have reviewed the evidence and come to a balanced and impartial conclusion.
Basically, I’m fucked.131
My initial evidence was purely circumstantial: I walked out of the Prof’s office after they fired me, and Em still wasn’t at her desk. I stumbled acros
s the litter-strewn square out the front of the English and Social Sciences Building, in a daze, and happened to pull out my phone. Em had sent me a message: ‘I’ve had to run across to the Admin Centre, but let me know how it goes! xx’, which I must have received sitting in the Prof’s office while he mumbled his platitudes and pretended to care. And yet, I know full well from multiple personal experiences, and as evidenced in this thesis, that ‘there’s no reception in [Em and the Prof’s] office’.132 Maybe it was a lucky quirk of fate, maybe the message came through before I arrived at the office, and I hadn’t seen it before I went in. But then I looked at the time stamp, which said it had been sent at 14:42, right as the Prof was explaining how hard he had fought for me to stay. Random happenstance, or first microscopic crack? Let us examine the further evidence.
There is a large amount of anecdotal evidence for a possible relationship between my girlfriend and my disgustingly British supervising mentor: the countless nights spent working late on what exactly – teaching rotas, introductions to books, university courses? No-one else that I know works until eight or nine o’clock each night.133 No-one else messages at five or six o’clock, the official time that they are contractually paid until, when they should be packing up their desk and heading home, just as I’m getting the pasta on or the chicken marinated for what would be a perfectly timed dinner, and says ‘Sorry, Matt, [something] has come up, it’s going to be another late one. I’ll be home as soon as I can. xxx’ And sure, the somethings that came up with regularly scheduled timing might all have been actual, provable somethingses (Deputy Head of Linguistics calling in sick a day before the exam period / booked guest dropping out of appearance on late-night live TV show and a certain supervising professor being asked to cover / that one time when the photocopier wouldn’t stop beeping, etc.) but that doesn’t get anyone off the hook – I’m calling bullshit on the whole thing.
The emails I swiped from the Prof’s desk were unhelpful in my search for evidence:
A printout of my late-night ramble at and toward Jennifer Hayden.
Where the Line Breaks Page 20