by Jack Twist
Chapter 7
I see the rest of that night now, in a kind of kaleidoscope, nebulous flickers and patches, through eyes that were struck with fear and fatigue. Most of it sitting in the Land Rover, staring into the blackness, positioning myself so that I could see behind me with a quick glance at the mirror, anything resembling a vehicle coming along the road. I imagined that in the first instance Jake Klein would direct a search vehicle to Muc Thap, Lin’s home town.
But there was nothing and silence and darkness, accomplices of some unknown danger,played on my mind. Around midnight, with fatigue encroaching, I started to feel bad tempered. Holding a spare shirt over my nose, wanting to sleep but afraid to, I cursed my luck at having been on a day off when this job came up, and then my luck at having scored an overseas posting instead of a year’s delivery duties back at Enoggera, as a friend of mine had. I even cursed my luck in the first place, way back, when my birthday number was drawn out of some officially prepared government box in Canberra.
The baby’s birth interrupted my self pity. Sensing some new development in the sounds and movements of the women, I went inside, in time to see the old grandmother dragging the baby out of its mother. She laid it on the mat between her legs and took hold of the cord. Lin was a grey colour except where the blood was oozing again from her head wound. It made a pool beside her face. She clutched Abbie desperately and I remember her whisper. “Your father .... your father ... you must help ...you must ... “
As I left the room the old man was sitting in the darkness of the back area smoking a pipe. I nodded to him and he looked up at me calmly. Three or four kids were asleep on mats on the earth floor and that was the first time I saw Mai. In the flickering light from the bedroom I would have put her age at about eleven although she may have looked older than she was because I never once saw her smile. She was sitting up on the mats where the other children slept, her still, dark eyes watching me.
Outside I could just make out what looked like a group of kids moving down the road through the village. They were very quiet and kept suspiciously close to the shadows of the houses but when I checked the weapons both were there.
Hours they seemed, that passed then. At one stage I removed the bloodied seat cover from the back seat and added it to the clothes on the lieutenant’s body. It helped dull the smell and I sat down in the front again. The first of the baby’s cries was little more than a squeak, frantic and demanding but without the significance of a real cry. It went on, shrill, above the muffled sounds of the women. And then more silence, the house as still and dark as the night.
Struggling with sleepiness, in a search of something to occupy my mind, I found a footy pick slip in a shirt pocket and turned on the dashboard map light. Anything to stay awake. The absurdity of trying to pick winning football teams from games in Australia
in the coming weekend, given where I was, didn’t occur to me. Some rituals are sacrosanct.
But I couldn’t concentrate, even on that. Besides, I needed Tony Carmody’s help with the Melbourne VFL selections, since we agreed he would help me with those and I would do his for Sydney Rugby League games. Discussion often degenerated into one of those arguments about football codes, with nothing resolved, like disagreement over religious faiths. I usually descended into accusations of Melbourne football insanity, especially when Greg Urquhart, who had played at A grade level in Perth, got involved, with the sort of presumed authority that only he could.
Tony claimed that he and his fiancee, Christine, would take the football season into account when they planned the date for the wedding, and it was not altogether a joke. More evidence, I told him, of Victorian madness.
I couldn’t imagine wanting to begin a life of wedlock at twenty-two and I’m sure Tony wondered about my trips into town, but if I thought him too conservative, and he thought me irresponsible, it was never spoken. I realised early on that if I kept in touch with anyone after Vietnam, he would be one.
When Abbie came out I sat leaning against the front wall of the house, falling asleep.The smell from the body had begun to permeate the seat cover and I had moved away from the vehicle. The baby started crying again.
Without seeing her face I could sense that her calm of the early evening was now gone. She seemed tense and exhausted. “She’s gone,” she said, her voice trembling. “Lin’s gone. It was just too much. Oh, God, she suffered to give that baby life. The baby seems okay. A little girl. They’re trying to feed her with some sort of goat’s milk mixture. But Lin is dead. My friend. Such a good friend. In all my life I’ve never ... What she went through just then. The struggle was enormous. You know? Just...my God, she suffered.”
When the baby cried again she turned and seemed about to leave but then slid slowly down the wall and sat beside me. Her head drooped. Her hands trembled as she put them around her knees.
“You must be very tired,” I said.
She nodded slowly. “How are you doing?”
“I got a little sleep before.”
“God. What a night.”
“Day and night,” I said. “Seems like forever since we set out.”
“I’d love to lie down for a little while. But I keep thinking of what poor Lin just went through. They’re amazing, you know. Their calm through all of that. Poor Lin.”
“I’d offer you the back of the Land Rover, but it’s not too nice over there now. We’ll go at first light, heh? I’ll have to get that body taken care of as soon as possible tomorrow.”
“Yes, yes.” She was nodding slowly. “And that’ll give me time to make sure the baby is okay.” She turned. “I want to take her with me.”
“The baby?”She looked at me and nodded again. “You want to take the baby, on her own?”
“Yes. With no mother she might not survive here.”
“But ... what about the grandmother and ... and the goat’s milk? Won’t they want to look after the baby here?”
“Yes, but it would be too difficult. And I told them I would take her to a hospital and that my father will look after everything. Lin’s sister is very concerned but they don’t have any choice, really. I have to take the baby to a hospital, at least until she’s a little older. Until we’re sure she’s going to be okay.”
From inside the baby squeaked again. It seemed to have increased its urgency and its strength already.
“I’m sure we wouldn’t be taking you out of your way. If we leave the baby here she may survive, she may not. In a hospital she will for sure. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. She just needs the proper food and care. These people don’t have the facilities, the time. It’s risky. I know it’s what my father will want. He’ll see to it, you see. And it really is nothing after what Lin went through.”
Even without knowing all that lay behind this nobility of spirit, I couldn’t deny the reasonableness of her plan, but really, I just wanted to get out of there without the burden of a baby.
“Can we go soon then? As soon as you’re ready? If Saigon’s just over that mountain, we can’t miss it, even at night. We’ll get help for the baby sooner and I can maybe get the body seen to before the sun gets up too far.”
“Well, okay. If you’re sure. We’ll leave as soon as they’ve prepared the baby’s milk and got some sort of clothing on her. But you know, I’m sure there’ll be a search party along this road very early in the morning.”
“We may not even need them if we leave soon enough.”
“Okay. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t possibly leave without giving that baby the best chance she’s got. Such as it is.”
As she stood and brushed the dust off the seat of her flying suit she stared down at me. Even in the darkness her eyes looked scared. She was tired and upset and struggling to maintain her control but there was a determination about her as well.
She went back inside and I got up and paced over to the vehicle anxiously, wishing there was something I could do to speed things up. I just had to wait. I was pleased
when she appeared again soon after but she was walking slowly and put her hand to her forehead as she approached.
“They’re not quite ready. I’m afraid there’s another thing. Can we take another passenger? Just a little girl. One of the kids. They want to have one of them go with the baby so they know where she is. I guess the adults can’t afford the time. We could fit her and her bicycle in the back seat easily enough, couldn’t we?”
“Bicycle?”
“Yes. It’s only small, like her. So she can get back home on her own.”
Anything else? Her dolly? A rattle for the baby? But I said nothing, not wanting to show my selfishness in the face of her requests which were all quite proper and noble.
“And can I borrow one of your water bottles for the mixture?” I emptied my water bottle and gave it to her. “Thanks. They’ll be ready in a minute.”
I nodded, hiding my concerns as I clipped the spare water bottle to my belt. I had no choice but to agree to her requests. The exigency demanded it. And then there was simply the girl herself, the sincerity in her voice and her words, as she stood there in the hot indiscriminate darkness asking for my assistance, her eyes as prepossessing as ever, for all their concerns, and for all my accumulating fears.
“The little girl,” she said. “Mai. She’s also Lin’s daughter.”
“Another one?”
“Yes. Though to a different father.”
