Our Shadows

by Gail Jones

  Jake looked alarmed.

  ‘Please don’t fuss,’ she said, turning away. ‘Just a small memory.’ As if it barely counted. As if Will had fully gone. She saw that her narrow white hands were shaking.

  Jake sensibly left. He turned on his heel and retreated behind the flagrant, death-driven Midori. It was a courtesy, of a kind. Frances fled to the toilets and saw there her disappointing face, mottled red, and puffy, and emptied of all appeal. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and applied a smear of pink lipstick. There. Better. The public face.

  Behind her the roar of the electric hand-dryer made her think of a plane taking off.

  She’d met Will in a bar, not long after she arrived in Sydney. He sat beside her and struck up a conversation. She thought him cocky and funny and was on her guard. But late in the evening, when the cocky tone had fallen away, when he’d become easier to be with and tending even to silence, he mentioned in passing that his father had been a miner in Western Australia.

  Frances struggled to retain her composure. ‘Gold?’ she asked.

  She wondered if she sounded inebriated or daft. She was relieved to have found a connection beyond the messy business of sexual appeal, something truer, something that linked them in time. She knew then how dedicated she was to her own past, how a small statement might strike and alert her.

  ‘Asbestos, in Wittenoom.’

  It was a ghost town now, he said, closed by the government because of the mesothelioma and asbestosis. Some diehards remained there, but only a handful, with no electricity and no amenities and death floating in the air. Dust, poison dust, and tailings drifting into everyone’s lungs.

  She saw him hesitate: his father had died of it, he said shyly. It was a terrible death. No compensation for his mum, still no full admission of liability.

  She’d heard of this town and the scandals of company cover-ups and denials. She’d seen miners on television, blue-faced with paper skin, skeletal and transparent, sucking oxygen through stiff tubes and croaking out their stories. Vaguely, it occurred to her that she may have seen Will’s father on the television, if he’d been one of the activists, one of the publicly dying, one of those offering up his spectacular suffering for the larger cause. Frances thought of Fred, towards the end, how he would clutch at his chest. His private small death, his leave-taking.

  Mining. All those generations of men diseased and coughing. All those hours in darkness, labouring in filth and dust. Frances was struck by the unlikelihood of their connection: how many men in Sydney, nowadays, were the sons of underground miners? She wanted to touch Will’s hand in the generous shadows of the bar, but for a while they remained cautiously apart, and silent. Both had unlocked an earlier time and were caught in their own remembering. At some stage she told him about Fred, and the gold-mining, and their house near the Super Pit. She exaggerated the shaking house and their fear of subsidence. It was an unusual flirtation. Lines of shining glasses hung upside down above the bar; the handsome bartender, about thirty, gave Frances a little wink. He had been witness to their connection, and was now offering ironical encouragement. A modern cupid, Frances thought, plonking cocktails for office girls in spaghetti-strap dresses, and watching everyone like a spy.

  Later, Will described how something almost visible spread through his father, the eating away of his flesh, and his big miner’s body, broad-shouldered, all muscle, whittled down from the inside until it was a bony shape, almost clacking as his thin limbs shifted.

  That night he came back to her flat, drank tea, and fell asleep on the couch. In the morning he was embarrassed to have spoken of the death of his father. He apologised and for a while he wouldn’t make eye contact. This, and his manner of shuffling around the room, lifting objects, then putting them down again, starting to say something, then offering a retraction; all this allowed their hearts to open, right from the start. He had seen some quality in her, and she in him. He was standing at the window with his hands thrust into his pockets, holding himself against her rejection. She couldn’t help brushing his arm with her fingers, leaning towards him, sending a message.

  At their wedding—with a bottle-blonde celebrant who had lipstick on her teeth—Will’s older brother Mark gave a clumsy speech to the small group assembled. As was customary, he praised the bride and mocked the groom. But he said too that he wished their dad had been here; the old codger had loved a good party, and a good drink, and the knees-up fun of any old wedding. Their dad, he repeated, pulling a ghost to the party. Mark was suddenly choking and bleary and side-tracked into brotherly tales. What wild kids they were. Always up to mischief. He told a story of pushing his brother in a wheelbarrow, how they careened around the tailings dumps, he said, with him always the driver and Will always the passenger, the slacker, grabbing at the sides of the barrow, whooping, shouting, holding on for dear life. He half-raised his glass. To Will the slacker and his pretty new bride.

  ‘Once,’ he started again. But some instinct or realisation stopped him mid-story. He seemed to know in a flash what he’d dropped into the cheer of the wedding, the bombshell of fate and disease and their awful waiting.

  36

  A few days later, Frances rang Nell and said, ‘I’ve thought about it, and yes.’

  ‘Yes, what?’

  ‘Yes, we should do something. We should try to find our father.’

  There was silence at the other end; Frances knew then that this had been a mere provocation, that Nell had no intention of seeking their father, but had wanted to bait and annoy her. To assert her control.

  Nell said softly, ‘Are you sure?’

  What should she say? No, she was not sure. She was sure of nothing any more. The world of surety had died, like God and the dinosaurs.

  ‘Yes,’ she lied.

  It was like peering into the future by starlight. There was a hint of shapes and surfaces she might want to discover and touch.

  ‘No,’ said Nell. ‘No, I’m not ready.’ She sounded detached.

  Frances might have remonstrated, or complained, or interrogated her sister, but instead she said, ‘Okay,’ and dropped the subject. She resented Nell’s manipulations and her ability to discompose. But she knew too of Nell’s ‘episodes’ and periods of bad health; she knew that timing was important.

  ‘I liked our walk.’ Nell was trying to propitiate. ‘Perhaps we can do it again. Or how about a swim?’

  And Frances was left where she always was, being the one who organised, and fixed the times, and followed up suggestions. From her window she saw Mrs Davoren’s front light on, broken behind a messy hibiscus which jiggled in the wind. The rectangle of light was incomplete and appeared to have a life of its own.

  She must make a time to ask Mrs Davoren about the Hippodrome and Else; she must follow up and knit together all that was fraying around her.

  Nell was trying harder, no doubt on the advice of Dr Wright. ‘Sorry, Frances,’ she added, with possible sincerity.

  In the past, Nell had rarely apologised. She was reforming; she was becoming more accessible to others. She was beginning to talk of their childhood and her feelings, and this seemed a kind of recovery. So despite her frustration, Frances was overcome by sisterly tenderness. ‘No problem,’ she said. ‘No problem, sweetheart.’

  Frances pressed off her phone. She closed the blinds of her window.

  Turning away, and for no reason, she recalled ‘voids officer’. What was a voids officer? It had been the job of their next-door neighbour, Mr Covich, who worked at the Super Pit. A quiet man, who looked up to Fred and explained to Frances that one of the dangers of the Super Pit was the existence of voids. Tunnels and chambers and shafts that had to be located before any blasting event.

  Voids officer. The one whose job it was to notice the voids.

  37

  Fred told Else almost nothing about his war.

  What could he say? More than the mines, it was a secret. It was between the men who returned and those who were lost. You couldn’t te
ll the missus.

  He couldn’t even tell himself. He spent his energy after the war blocking all that returned in bad dreams and moments when the past cut through him like a bayonet. To say any of it would have made it more real and more present. And you couldn’t. There were no words.

  He was gone for three years. Three phantom years. He would have liked to placate them with something grand, like it was the thought of Else that had kept him going, that kept him sane; but in truth there were many times he didn’t want to keep going, and couldn’t imagine a return to a bed, and a wife, let alone a future with daughters and granddaughters in it. So he said nothing, and eventually Else stopped asking. He returned to the underground he knew, and then there was a war pension, and the labour of perpetual forgetting.

  There was nothing heroic to report, at least not in Fred’s judgement. He spent nineteen months as a POW surviving the Burma railway, before being shipped to the coalmines in Fukuoka in June 1944. This was harder, somehow. When they arrived, the locals of Omuta stoned them but the guards were just as cruel, the conditions and punishments just as harsh, but with the added torment, later on, of the winter cold. It was a large camp, of 1700 prisoners, Dutch, British, Americans, Australians, others like him, from Burma, and some from the Philippines and Singapore. It was strange to have survived the Burma camp only to find himself sent to a mine in Japan. But it was all strange, in those days. The illogic of wartime was the hardest thing to endure. Men went off their heads with it, with the randomness, and the hurt of discontinuity.

  Marty Friedlander was there. Marty, of all people, whom he loved, and who loved him, and who was his own continuity. They’d been through thick and thin together and kept each other alive. That simple. This much he told Else, that Marty Friedlander was there, that Marty had helped him. He didn’t tell her how Marty died, just weeks before the bomb. He didn’t give any details.

  They were down in the mines twelve hours a day, 1800 metres beneath Nagasaki Bay. Their daily ration was a bowl of rice and one of radish soup; and as one of the miners he was given three buns, every second day, to take underground for lunch. It was a slow starvation, but the men above ground had less. And cigarettes: each man was given five cigarettes a day, and so Fred was a smoker when he returned from the war. It helped, to suck in smoke, to feel the burn at the back of his throat and a sting and a light-headedness that wasn’t just the malaria. Marty never succumbed and traded his ciggies with one of the miners for a bun or two, which they shared. Fred was humiliated because he could not do the same—once he started, he couldn’t give up his five ciggies a day—but he was also appalled at the trade in which men, so addicted, exchanged food for smoke. And there was the shame too at the shared obsession with rations, how much time they spent calculating, and waiting, and saving bits and pieces, and chewing slowly, and then scoffing and then calculating again. Every grain of rice was a glittering hope. They pressed their fingers into the tin bowl to pick every last one, stringent, careful, not even thinking of their degradation. They were all sacrilegious. Once in a while there was Red Cross aid, medicines and some food, and they worshipped a can of salmon as if it were the body of Christ himself.

  They were ill all the time. Benjo Boogie and Hirohito’s Curse were two of the worst, because men couldn’t handle shitting themselves in the mines, or in front of their mates, but there was beri-beri too, and pneumonia, and Fukuoka Fever, and much more besides. In the delirium of fever, all men were animal, and lost. All the skelly-men, they called themselves. All the skelly-men. Fred would stare at other soldiers and see a khaki mass, with only a dim sense of purpose and with no volition. Slave workers, nonentities, lean and trembly in loose trousers.

  No one, any more, dreamed of freedom. But they all wanted a meal of steak and mashed potatoes. And socks. All of them wanted new socks. The simplicity of their homesick dreams was a misery and a comfort.

  Fred knew enough about mine safety to know how bad things were, and spent time instructing poor buggers who’d never been down a mine, who didn’t know their arseholes from their elbows. He taught how to use drills, how to avoid the rockfalls, how to look out for each other. He became a kind of leader, and an anguished supervisor. When someone was crushed, he felt the same pang. When there was a choking from the fumes, or a hand caught in a machine, it might have been one of his team from home. Mining was dangerous everywhere. The same sense of responsibility and the weight of awful fate, the same haywire of things going wrong when the grip of control slipped and someone fell, or was fallen on.

  In the last months Fred believed that he would not survive. The spirit inside him failed. His ulcers were bad, and he feared the onset of gangrene. His feet were swollen with beri-beri and their deformity disgusted him. He’d seen so many deaths, but in his dark night developed a conviction that Marty would live, that Marty would return to the goldfields, and greet Else with a sweeping bow, and present her with some acceptably bland account of the prison camp and his passing. Fred agreed to do the same for Marty’s mother, Violet, should he be the one to return; but knew in his heart that it would be Marty who lived. He’d seen Marty joke, and even dance—a scandalous sight in the barracks—him whistling a tune softly and turning as if in a ballroom, his scrawny frame sticklike, his ragged shirt loose and swaying, his feet crossing each other with dainty, even finicky, precision. There was something in this man that endured as a gift for others; yet it almost embarrassed them to see him move in this way, to see his frame and his flesh telling them of another kind of life. That they could stick it out. That bodies might still have a rapture inside. No one mocked or gave cheek. Marty would be a memory to them, or a solace, as they sank filthy and hurting into their own danceless deaths.

  In the Burma camp Marty had picked up a little Japanese and at Camp 17 in Fukuoka he seemed to form a link with one of the guards. Fred had heard them exchange words and correct each other’s pronunciation. It was terrifying to think they might be discovered, but over six months these careful men, Hideo and Marty, kept alive a dream of speaking, a dream of speaking together, as men, each sharing their own inner and outer worlds. It was delighting and alarming to hear their whispered conversation, words shifting tongue to tongue, English and Japanese, and their hidden meanings transferring, and their covert solidarity. Fred warned Marty, but Marty wouldn’t hear of it. The war can’t go on forever, Marty used to say, and afterwards we will need to speak to each other.

  ‘There is a future we must hope for. A future of languages, but no nations.’

  In this place where men’s words to each other also had a quality of scarcity, Marty’s lofty pronouncements signified a hope that no one believed in.

  They were discovered when Hideo brought a pen and paper and wrote down some Japanese words. Fred did not learn exactly what happened, but heard from others that they were found, their heads close together, their shoulders bunched, concentrating like spies over something furtive. When each straightened, there it was, a page of Japanese script for a gaijin and a page of English for the Jap.

  Hideo disappeared; no one knew his punishment.

  Marty was tied to a pole and used in bayonet drill. When he was cut down the camp doctor, keeping records, counted seventy-five wounds.

  38

  Somehow, they knew that the war was coming to an end, and the camp rules slackened that final week.

  One morning in August, Fred was still above ground when he heard the air-raid siren judder and scream out its warning. Across the bay: a bright flash, and the slow rise of a tremendous cloud. Like the others, he was emaciated and almost too weak to stand, but he knew this was a bomb, and in Japan, and he felt a vicious euphoria. Perhaps too it was the end of all their lives. They might all die and be relieved at last of the strain and duty of survival. Done for, he told himself. Prisoners and guards alike watched the cloud and waited dumbly for what might come. There was suspension, even community, as all looked into the cumulus mass. They were woozy with the scope of it. The scale was insane. It ke
pt expanding and expanding, it kept increasing its form.

  Fred felt abruptly ill; he vomited over his feet. He was reminded of the newsreel, long ago, in the Palace Cinema. He was reminded of his response to the explosion of the Hindenburg zeppelin. Here he was chucking grey slime, recoiling from his own body and its horrid prisoner’s stench.

  He may have been hoping for his own immolation. Could that be it?

  This portent cloud reassured him that it was nearly over, this life. He waited for the fireball. He willed his extinction. He felt at once curiously still, and finally ready.

  Early September the POWs were shipped out through Nagasaki. Fred Kelly saw close-up what an A-bomb might do. He saw blasted spaces in which wind was the only animation. He saw wilderness and loss and ash drifting in the air. No sound but of machines: motorbikes, army jeeps, growling tractors pushing mountains of ruin and rubble. No trees. No birds. No colour in the world. And not in cowardice but in shock, he averted his gaze from any sight that might have been human. He looked down at his own hands, seeing how distinct they now appeared, the lines explicit with grime, the outlines clear, showing he was still here, and definitively alive.

  An Australian voice behind him said, ‘Now we can all bugger off!’

  Did he rub his hands together? Did he shake, or wave? Did he perform, from habit alone, the sign of the cross? He could not remember. There was no meaning to his hands now. He felt he was nothing.

  Fred took orders and lined up with the other prisoners for his freedom. He was given new clothes. He was given new socks. A nurse scrubbed at his hands. He was fed and treated in the ship’s hospital for his various diseases and derelictions. Fred Kelly, 8th Division, AIF, submitted in patient silence, acknowledging in a vague way this was the beginning of repair, but otherwise removed from his own alive body.