There was one morning when I couldn’t get him out of bed no matter what I did. So I left him there and went off job hunting on my own. As usual I didn’t find anything, but I was gone all day. When I came back home to No Worries in the evening, Marty had gone. I thought he’d gone out drinking, that he’d be back later. Even when a couple of policemen came the next morning, early, and woke me up, I wasn’t that worried. I just thought he’d picked another fight and ended up in a police station for the night. I recognised one of the policemen – he’d interviewed me on the night of the fire.
I was half-asleep when they told me, so I didn’t really understand, not at first. It was about Marty, they told me, and I had to come with them. I still couldn’t understand. “We’ve got a witness who saw it happen,” said the policeman I had met before, “someone who knew him. But all the same, we need you to come and take a look.”
Then they told it to me straight. Marty had been drunk. He’d been doing the dinghy dance, leaping from boat to boat in the harbour, messing around. He’d fallen in, and just never came up again. They’d tried to find him, but it was dark. Then this morning a body had been found. I’m still trying to believe it happened. Even now, all these years later, the shock of it and the pain of it goes through me every time I think of it.
They took me to see him in the hospital. It wasn’t Marty. It was just his body. I felt nothing then. I tried to feel something; I stayed there with him for hours. But you can’t feel emptiness. They brought me back to No Worries, and I found Aunty Megs sitting on her suitcase waiting for me. It was the strangest thing. She’d woken up a couple of nights before and had known at once that we needed her. When I told her, all she said was, “I’m too late then.”
There were just the two of us there for Marty’s funeral. We buried his ashes up on the hill where the bushmen had left us that day, where Aunty Megs had first found us. I recited a few verses from The Ancient Mariner, ending with the line I knew he loved most of all: “Alone on a wide, wide sea”. I’m glad I did that, because that poem is not just about a sea voyage, it’s about the journey through life, and about the loneliness of that journey. It was the right thing to read.
Aunty Megs took me in again. She took care of me all she could. But now there were two spirits in that house with us, Mick and Marty. She had photos of them on the mantelpiece, side by side. But they were omnipresent, particularly, I remember, when we were sitting in silence together as we often did of an evening.
So much was the same. But so much wasn’t. Henry’s hole was still there under the verandah steps, still full of his beloved hats. Barnaby wandered the paddock shadowing Big Black Jack. The two had clearly become quite inseparable. But Aunty Megs’ old horse had gone.
Aunty Megs and I still did everything the three of us had always done together. She didn’t have the cows any more, just one nanny goat for her milk. But we still went up to the main road to rescue the orphan marsupials, her little fellows. We still kept them in the compound, and from time to time we’d make the long journey up to Marty’s hill, as we called it now, to see if one or two of them would go back to the wild.
I had never been quite sure of Aunty Megs’ age, but she must have been about seventy-five or eighty by now, and I’d have been in my late twenties. As the years passed she stayed just as active in her mind, just as spirited. But as she said, her “poor old body doesn’t work like it should”. She didn’t go out walking much these days. Her legs pained her. She never said anything much about it, but I could see it. She moved more slowly, more stiffly.
But she could ride all day though, and it wouldn’t bother her a bit. On the contrary, she was happier up on a horse than anywhere else. She told me once that God had given her four legs to gallop with and a tail to whack the files with, that he’d just made a big mistake with the rest of the human race, that’s all. And gallop she did too. Nothing she liked better. She said it made her feel alive. And I knew what she meant, because that’s exactly how I’d felt out sailing with Marty on Mr Dodds’ boats, with the wind in my face, and the sails straining above me and the salt spray on my lips. My longing for the sea never left me.
Aunty Megs had a good quick end, the best you can have, the doctor said when he came. She’d gone out with her torch to check her family of animals in the compound as she always did in the late evening. I was sitting, stargazing on the verandah when she came back. She sat down beside me, and said she thought she smelt rain in the air. Then she fell silent. I thought she’d gone to sleep – she’d often do that out on the verandah on warm evenings. And in fact that’s just what she had done. She’d gone to sleep, but it was the long sleep, the final sleep.
The whole town came up to Marty’s hill the day she was buried, and there were dozens of bushmen there too. I don’t think I quite realised until then just how much she was loved. I put her ashes next to Marty’s, a photo of Mick with them. When everyone left I stayed up there and recited the whole of The Ancient Mariner for them both. As I walked away I felt like an orphan all over again, a grown-up one maybe, but an orphan just the same.
Things Fall Apart
If there’s one part of my life I’d like to forget entirely it was the next fifteen years or so. I suppose you could call them my years in the wilderness. I shan’t enjoy writing about them, but I’ve got to do it. Like it or not, I can’t just miss it out. Luckily for me, quite a lot of it is lost in a fog of forgetfulness. Perhaps that’s what happens sometimes. Perhaps it’s an automatic survival system that helps you muddle through. Maybe the memory just says: that’s enough. I’m overloading with pain here and I can’t cope, so I’m switching off. But it doesn’t switch off entirely. So you remember, but thankfully only dimly, through the fog. Sometimes, though, the fog does clear, and you see the icebergs all around. You can hear them groaning and grinding and you just want to sail through the field of icebergs and out the other side, or you just long for the fog again. I’ll tell you about the icebergs now. And like most icebergs are, they were unexpected and very unwelcome.
After Aunty Megs died I stayed on living at the Ark, doing what she’d done, living as we’d always lived. I didn’t need much in the way of money. I had milk and eggs and vegetables. I lived a bit like a hermit. I rarely went into town and no one came to see me. I wasn’t unhappy, not even lonely.
But then of course I wasn’t alone. I had the animals, and like Dr Doolittle I talked to them. I think I talked to Big Black Jack more than I ever talked to anyone else all my life. He was probably over thirty years old by now, so I didn’t ride him much any more. We’d go out for walks, the three of us – Barnaby, Big Black Jack and me. He’d walk beside me, his whiskery old face close to mine and we’d talk. Well, I’d talk. And I talked to the family of animals in the compound as well. Aunty Megs wouldn’t have approved of it of course. You talk to them, you only gentle them she’d said. Gentle them and they won’t survive in the wild. But they seemed to like me talking to them, and they went off when I released them just the same, and most of them didn’t come back. So it was fine. Everything was fine, for a short while at least.
Then the strangest, saddest thing happened. I went out into Big Black Jack’s paddock one summer morning, early, carrying a bucket of water to fill up their trough. I did it every morning, and usually Big Black Jack and Barnaby would come wandering over for a pat and a few words, and a drink of course. This particular morning they didn’t come. So I went looking for them. I found Big Black Jack lying stretched out dead on the ground, with Barnaby standing over him, his head hanging. It took me all morning to bury Big Black Jack, Barnaby watching me all the time. He never drank a drop after that, never ate a thing, just stood by where I’d buried Big Black Jack and pined away. He was dead within a couple of weeks.
I was out there burying him in the paddock when I heard a car coming down the farm track. The man in the suit said he was a solicitor from Sydney. He was perfectly polite and proper. He simply told me that I’d have to move out. There wasn’t any great
hurry, he said. I could stay a couple more months. Then he told me something that shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did nonetheless. Aunty Megs had had a son (the boy in the photo I’d seen all those years before, the boy she wouldn’t ever talk about). There’d been a falling out years and years ago, the solicitor said, and they hadn’t spoken since. Aunty Megs hadn’t left a will, so everything she owned, the house and the farm and the furniture, it all went to her son. That was the law. The son it seemed wanted nothing to do with the property. He just wanted to sell it. Of course I could stay if I bought it. I told him I didn’t have the money for that. Then I asked him what would happen about all the animals. He said they belonged to the son as well, everything did.
I didn’t stay two months. I didn’t stay two weeks. I stayed just a few days. That’s all it took. I gave the nanny goat to the next-door farmer, and walked out into the bush every day with an ever-decreasing cavalcade of little animals following me. The last one to go was a joey. I’ve always wondered if I rushed him, whether he was quite ready. He was very small, but very independent minded. When he hopped off behind a bush, I turned and walked away quickly. I looked around once only, and he was gone. I hope he was all right.
I left the next morning, passed by the hill, Marty’s hill, Aunty Megs’ hill, to say my last goodbyes. I promised Marty I would go looking for Kitty one day, and I told Aunty Megs that all her family of animals were back in the wild now, where they belonged. Then I went on my way. I had a small suitcase, with a few clothes in it and one photo of us all together. And I had my lucky key round my neck. I did not look back.
I went to Sydney again because I had only one thought in my mind now: to go to sea. I got lucky – or so it seemed at the time anyway. I found a job straightaway on a fishing trawler. I didn’t think twice. I just signed on. We’d be fishing the Southern Ocean, for tuna mostly. I didn’t care what it was for. I was just so happy to be out there again, to feel the heaving seas about me, to watch the birds sailing the wind above me, to see the stars. You can see them better at sea than anywhere.
Then we began fishing. Most people have never seen a tuna that wasn’t in a tin. I certainly hadn’t, not before I went fishing for them. If they had, if they’d seen what I saw during the months and years that followed, they could never take the tin off the supermarket shelf, let alone eat the fish inside. A tuna is a beautiful shining creature, for me the most magnificent of all fish, and huge too. Day after day out on that trawler, I’d watch them lying there on the deck, suffocating to death, bleeding to death, thrashing about in their pain. And they weren’t alone in their suffering: albatross, turtles, dolphins, sharks – they were all dragged up out of the ocean, and caught up in the slaughter.
No one seemed to mind what we were doing, just so long as we brought enough tuna back to port. And I didn’t just stand by and watch. I was as guilty as everyone else. Massacre, murder, call it what you will, I was part of it. I played my part. But it paid well, and I was at sea where I wanted to be. I took the money. I stayed at sea. But I wasn’t proud of myself, and the longer I stayed the more troubled I became by what I was doing. None of the others seemed bothered about it. On the contrary, the more we caught, the happier they were. They weren’t bad blokes. They were just trying to earn a living like me.
We all got on well enough. When we weren’t fishing or sleeping or eating, we were gambling. I liked gambling. I liked it a lot. I liked it too much. It made me feel like I was one of them. I was good at it too. And besides, it was totally absorbing. It took my mind off everything else. But each game was only a brief respite. Soon enough I was back up on that deck doing my killing.
I stuck it out as long as I could, but after a few years I’d had enough. Just the sight of another dying tuna made me feel physically sick. One night, on the way back to port, I was lying in my bunk unable to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I could see a tuna thrashing about on the deck in its death agony. I knew I couldn’t do another trip. I clutched my lucky key and swore to myself that as soon as I got back to Sydney, I’d do what I should have done years before, what I’d promised Marty I’d do. I’d go to England and look for my sister, Kitty. I had every intention of doing it too, but the others wanted a night out on the town, and I went along. By the time I left the casino in the early hours of the morning, every dollar I had earned was gone. There was no way I could pay the plane fare to England.
I find it difficult to explain to myself all these years later why I did what I did next. I think I must have had just three things on my mind – I needed money, and I still wanted more than anything to be at sea. And I didn’t ever want to go fishing again. I remember walking down a street in Sydney, my suitcase in my hand. I happened to look up and saw a face smiling down at me from a poster. The man was in uniform, a naval uniform, and he looked just like Mick in that photo of him back at the Ark. He wore the same uniform too, the same peaked cap, the same Royal Australian Navy badge. The sailor inside the recruiting office – that’s what it was – beckoned me in. It was as simple as that. And as usual, I thought my lucky key had done it again. I’d join the navy, I’d have regular money in my pocket, I’d be at sea. Perfect. I signed on the dotted line, and within a couple of months I was back on board ship, a very different kind of ship, a destroyer.
I never read newspapers much, hardly ever watched television either. I didn’t pay much attention to the world outside, not in those days. If I had, maybe I would have seen it coming. A couple of years later and we were sailing off to war – the Vietnam war. Another kind of murder, but people this time, not fish.
The Centre Will Not Hold
Most of the world is now too young to remember the war in Vietnam. Wars become history all too soon and are forgotten all too soon as well, before the lessons can be learned. Which is why we have more wars, and always more wars. But they are not forgotten by those who fought in them. I don’t forget the anger of our guns, the shudder that went through the ship when she was hit, the silence that followed and the cries of wounded men. They called it “friendly fire” afterwards. We were bombarded by our own side, an “unfortunate” mistake they told us. It felt a little more than unfortunate at the time. Good men died for nothing that day, and I was lucky not to be one of them.
These were times I do remember, only too well, but don’t want to have to think about. I don’t want to write about them either, but I can’t pass by Vietnam as if it never happened, as if I’d never been there, been part of it. Not because I’m proud of it. On the contrary.
There were long months of boredom at sea, long nights sweating below deck. I can still remember how excitement turned to fear in my stomach when the guns first fired. I can still see Dickie Donnelly from Adelaide – we only just celebrated his eighteenth birthday – lying there on the deck, his eyes looking up at the sky above him and not seeing. There wasn’t a mark on him. It must have been the blast that killed him. I was holding his hand when I felt the last breath of life go out of him.
But, apart from Dickie Donnelly, most of the dying in that war was done far away, on the shore. I discovered it’s a whole lot easier to do your killing when you’re miles away from your target. You’re in your ship, way out at sea, and you just fire the guns. You don’t see where the shells land.
So you don’t think about it, because you don’t have to, at least not to start with, not until you come face to face with it. After Dickie Donnelly, I couldn’t put it out of my mind. This was what our shells were doing to the enemy, to the Vietcong, to the North Vietnamese. They’d be young lads, just like Dickie, with mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, an enemy I’d never even seen. And I was firing the guns that did it. All I’d ever done while I’d been at sea, it seemed to me, was killing.
I couldn’t wait for the war to end, to get out of the navy. Sickened and sad I turned my back on the sea, for ever I hoped. I had come to hate the sea, the place I’d always loved, where I’d always longed to be. For me the sea had become a place of blood.
I went inland after the navy, bummed my way around, picking up any work I could find. I went gold mining in Western Australia, worked on a cattle station in the Northern Territories, spent most of my time branding cattle. I did seasonal work picking grapes in vineyards outside Adelaide, in the Clare Valley it was. And after that, I was a jackaroo for a while on a sheep station near Armidale in New South Wales. After that I never wanted to look at another sheep in my life. Back-breaking work,smelly work. At times I felt like I was back on Cooper’s Station.
I couldn’t settle anywhere, not for long. I kept moving on, moving on. I wasn’t leaving anywhere. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was just drifting. I still wore Kitty’s key around my neck, never took it off, not once. But I’d long since stopped believing it was lucky. I wore it, mostly out of habit, and maybe because I still thought that I might one day be able to go back to England and find Kitty, find out if she’d ever existed even, find out what the key was for.
But I never did it, and I know why. I was frightened, frightened of discovering the worst – that she never had existed, that I’d made her up so as not to feel entirely alone in this world. I still thought about the key, though, when I caught sight of it in the mirror as I was shaving. I thought about it every time I touched it. But any real hope I had harboured of actually ever doing anything about it was fast fading, along with my sanity. My centre would not hold.
I don’t know why it happened when it did. None of it really makes much sense to me even now. If there was a physical cause that triggered my troubles – and when it comes to health, I don’t think body and mind can be separated – then it might well have been lack of sleep. No matter how exhausted I was after a day’s work, I couldn’t get to sleep. I’d lie there, not tossing and turning, just thinking. And no matter how hard I tried, my mind kept coming back to it. It was always the killing. It was the shining tuna lying on the deck bleeding, fighting for life, Dickie Donnelly’s last breath warm on my hand.
The Classic Morpurgo Collection (six novels) Page 48