Archipelago of Souls

by Gregory Day

  Jerome poured us all another drink and said that as far as my theory on Poms was concerned he agreed but that my theory of the horizon representing death didn’t apply on King because of the constant looming and roughing of the horizon due to the ever-developing weather. This may all be true, I agreed, but by this time my die was cast. I had shown my hand in a way no one saw coming and in doing so destroyed my prior identity as a lonely mute.

  As it turned out, with my toothache slowly reorganising its attack, I had set out on a forty-eight hour bender amongst the locals there at the pub. By the end of that first night I was in no state to ride, and after holding forth on the type of island individual who is the exception and wants to leap over the horizon even as a child – an idea concocted I’m sure from my own mood of wanting to leap over the pain of my tooth – I had taken a room upstairs for convenience, and it was there I stayed in a state halfway between convalescence and further deterioration for the next two days.

  They were in fact the days when I first grew more friendly towards Lascelles, in part because of his sympathy towards the soldier settlers that until then I had loathed. Working at the post office nearby he was often in the pub for one reason or other, and certainly every day for the nutrition of his curried sausage. When I finally emerged in the bar just before lunch on the day following my arrival, with a hangover pounding now more than my molar, which was still no slouch nevertheless, he shouted me a tomato juice and helped me decide on a course.

  I still remember the coppery gong of the old clock in the bar, which like so much of the better style of furniture on King was salvage from an early shipwreck. As it rang out for midday sharp I had found Lascelles and Jerome yarning in there alone and blurted out that I was in need of a dentist. Pushing the tomato juice across the bar Jerome assured me with a grin that there was one ‘due any day’. Even the earnest Lascelles had a laugh at that joke. It seemed as though the history of dentistry on the island was about the same as the history of saints around the lakes back near Colac: there wasn’t any. Or rather, as mine host was at pains to point out, dentistry on King involved a tradition of communication between species. Apart from the infrequent visits of the ‘school dentist’ from Launceston, whose foot-operated drill was the stuff of nightmares, it was a matter for Jim Robbins the vet.

  ‘Either that or you wait for the next boat to Melbourne. I think that’d be the Princess in a fortnight.’

  I had immediate visions of horse teeth the size of house planks being pulled by tug ropes while a spare bone-saw lay ready in case it was needed. I downed the tomato juice in one gulp, and must have looked bloody awful because Jerome immediately served me up another.

  Jerome, who ran the pub until the ’50s when he settled with his horses on land near the racetrack, now began to tell me of all the troubles teeth had caused in the island’s history, going right back to the Carrick which had wrecked in perfect weather near a creekmouth on the east side when the skipper, apparently tormented by toothache, had lost his bearings. That was in the 1890s and, just like the ship, the island had struggled for dental expertise ever since, with at least a handful of people succumbing to torturous infections and actually passing away. One Moira Jones, Jerome informed Lascelles and myself, had gone under from an infected tooth as recently as ’42, right about the time of the Jap air raids on Darwin. Her twin sister Jean could still be found across the road working as the bookkeeper at the co-op.

  Well, this was a pretty mess I’d got myself into. I’d never considered, when I opted for the Roaring Forties as my place of exile, that I’d end up dying of toothache.

  Lamely, I slumped onto a stool and pushed the second tomato juice away. ‘Give us a beer, would you,’ I said to Jerome, in a tone without much going for it.

  Lascelles’ counter lunch was brought out about then and he wasted no time in pushing his serviette into his collar, removing his postal visor, and tucking in. Jerome Sleeves, obviously a bit stymied by my slough of despond, reverted to his red ledger of accounts, which lay open by the telephone lectern on his side of the bar. So the three of us sat in our own preoccupations, Lascelles’ cutlery clinking efficiently as both Jerome and I toted up our respective damage.

  When he’d finished his lunch however, pushing away his gravy-smeared plate with a grunt of satisfaction, Lascelles got up from his stool to come and sit beside me. I groaned, but, in actual fact, I had only myself to blame: I had cycled into town and opened my trap, and followed up that morning with a hung-over confession of my pain. For Lascelles, this turn of events, which he never could have predicted from our previous meeting, when I’d been so curt, was both a boon and a monty.

  ‘Wesley, if I may. Do you know what Dr Freud says about the dreams we have when our teeth are falling out?’ he asked.

  I think I just stared at him. Perhaps I said, ‘Beg your pardon?’

  ‘Yes, I am interested in the principles of modern psychology and, as an approach to dental difficulties here on the island, I think there’s a case to suggest it could be of practical use. I know it’s proving a great success in the treatment of shellshock in England and can’t help but wonder, given what Dr Freud says about these dreams of teeth, whether it could be of some use in your case.’

  I shook my head slowly, half in flabbergast and half because I didn’t want him to register my interest too keenly. And pointing at my jaw, I said: ‘This is no dream, Lascelles. You can take my word for it.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ he exclaimed, patting his visor nervously where it sat shining in his lap. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest that. But if Freud is correct then by inference a little dissection, not of the tooth but of the . . . state of mind, may help alleviate the symptoms. Just given the fact that Jim Robbins works better on beef cattle and in the dairies than he does on you or I.’

  Lascelles guffawed, sending spittle flying as he did so, very pleased with his joke, perhaps even more so by the fact that he’d been able to make one.

  ‘So what does Dr Freud have to say then. About teeth?’ I asked.

  Lascelles checked himself. Perhaps he was surprised at my readiness to inquire, or perhaps, like myself the night before, he felt he’d been tricked by the naturally convivial atmosphere of Jerome’s bar into an uncharacteristically fair dinkum display.

  ‘Well, it’s just a thought you know, my way of assisting a soldier settler in need.’

  ‘I’m not a soldier settler.’

  ‘No, well . . .’

  ‘I’m far from settled.’

  There was a pause then, in which he reverted to type, fingering his visor, not knowing how to proceed.

  ‘That’s why I’m interested, I s’pose,’ I added, to help him out. ‘So what’s the go with Freud?’

  Lascelles took a breath. ‘He says the dream of teeth falling out is the dream of repressed desire.’

  At this Jerome turned, gave us a slow, thinking look, and said: ‘But your tooth hasn’t come out has it, Wesley? It’s stuck in there, isn’t it? Bet ya wish it would fall out.’

  I looked to Lascelles and he nodded in compulsive jerks for at least ten seconds, rapidly thinking it over.

  ‘Yes, yes, Jerome, of course you’re right. But I suppose my point is just that the teeth can symbolise the field of desires, and be affected as such. Do you see?’

  Jerome frowned, scratched his curls, and with a hint of bemusement at what John Lascelles was attempting, turned back to his accounts.

  ‘So what do you suggest then?’ I asked dismissively, but betraying the rightness of the chord Lascelles had struck with his courageous approach.

  ‘Well, oh dear, I don’t really know,’ he replied, smiling humbly. ‘I presume you’ve already had a lot of time to yourself, time for reflection. I have an idea that writing helps. Anyway, it’s something to think about. The body sometimes lags behind the soul.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ I said, thinly.

&n
bsp; Lascelles smiled, suddenly more relaxed. He sniffed with satisfaction. ‘Well, it’s a bit like the mail,’ he said. ‘More often than not it’s a letter that announces a change on the island. But the actual person who brings the change comes later, the physical body on the boat, having firstly prepared everyone by post.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘It’s just that the mind leads as a rule. Thoughts and words. And the body has to follow. That’s what separates us from the apes.’

  I thought back to the day when Lascelles and I had first talked beside the Norfolk saplings out on the street. How I had noticed the intense deliberation in his movements. Every footstep a decision made at the end of a long debate. But what had appeared as a nervous affliction back then was now something different. He was a thinker this bloke, some kind of intellectual in exile, a cerebral man attempting to help. He had surprised me.

  ‘So yes,’ he said, ‘perhaps your body’s struggling to keep up with your feelings. And it’s all coming out in your teeth.’

  I spent the rest of the day drinking to ward off the throbbing but when I woke up the next morning in the hotel, I was surer than anything that the alcohol was just a short-term fix. And given that I was not prepared to submit myself to the calving tongs of Jim Robbins the vet, I had to take an even bigger risk. Even through the fug of my hangover, Lascelles’ approach to the problem now sounded true. So true, in fact, that it outweighed all the tales of tooth-deaths on King that I’d first heard from Jerome, which were followed up and embellished by various drinking partners in the evening. My sad-sack spree in town was over. I had to get back to Wait-a-While and work it out for myself.

  It was in the days following, as I sat on my arse under the bullnose staring out to sea, that I registered consciously for the first time what a single image in the mind can do. I took a glimmer on the water on an otherwise nondescript Tuesday morning, a soft brief streak of light offset by a hue of crowding clouds, and used it as anaesthetic, drill, and forceps combined. And once again the truth of this, like any truth of the earth, was deeply stratified. As quick as I saw this glimmer in the east and had applied it, I saw Leonie’s solitary face, in my mind’s eye, hovering like some angel out over the strait. And in the time it took for that crowd of clouds to cruise and occlude the emblem, I had accepted my medicine and set to administering it.

  I rubbed that streak of soft light into my gums, I gargled with it, and lay it out in front of me, a shining silver road to walk on. I had to accept the possibility of a future, and, even more, I had to humble myself to the possibility of a destiny ahead. Or die. The tooth could kill me, if I let its furnace spread. Or, I could take that beautiful balm out there on the eastern sea, with its mass of ropey white tendrils, its quiet wisdom constantly switching like the wind in my mirror-mind between human love and elemental light, between lips I could kiss and an ocean streak, and I could live.

  At the time it seemed the wildest risk in the world. The wildest risk, just to live. And then, would she accept me? Could she, with all that must be taking place in that bruising farmhouse surrounded by Brangus beef?

  Lascelles was right, the body sometimes lags behind but conversely the mind can too. Whichever comes first, the fumbly words of desire or the throbbing tides of pain, they must find a way to be unified, in this life at least, on this earth.

  It came to me, in my state of relief and the lessening throb, that I should try again to write down the details of the night of the evacuation and beyond, to lance the wound, so I didn’t lug that tragic burden into every meeting I had with Leonie. If I ever saw her again – for at that time it seemed possible that I mightn’t, that her father had warned her against it, or that she herself had backed away with fright – she would want to know what ensued in the tale I’d begun to tell her. This way I would be lighter in the telling. And, if it came to it, I could hand her the pages and she could read about it herself.

  And so I sat at the raw wood of the table in my hut on Wait-a-While. I began to write it down, not as romance this time but as a true-feeling record, unbeknownst to me beginning this habit, this necessity of telling, that has returned again like an ever-replenishing zephyr in my sails since that day when we buried Lascelles.

  Two

  Fire in the Cave

  XVI

  In the end there was nowhere else to take Private Perry Coghlan. Nowhere else to go myself. There was no sign of Vern and Mug. No sign of anything but the aftermath of battle and evacuation.

  We picked our way back through the creekbed to the villa. Eventually, in dry clothes – a black collarless shirt and Cretan bog-catchers, also black – Perry Coghlan and I sat by Uncle Tassos’ fire in the yard drinking heavy coffee. Adrasteia was nowhere to be seen.

  Perry was telling Tassos how there’d been hundreds snaking silently down to the harbour and along the mole earlier that night, hundreds milling at the embussing point. But due to the turps the evacuation when it eventually came had pockets of mayhem. There’d been a couple of ‘man overboards’ as they climbed the scramble-nets up onto the ships. One broken leg. Eventually, after most had been ferried out to the cruisers waiting offshore, Perry himself got on one of the destroyers, not long after 1 am. A furphy was out already that the ship he got onto, the Imperial, was damaged when it had come under fire during the day, on the way over from Alexandria.

  As soon as they boarded the ships a lot of the blokes were hit with the exhaustion they’d been keeping at bay with the grog. Perry was one of these blokes and he headed straight below decks with a mug of RN kai. He fell sound asleep to the burr and judder of the engines.

  Next thing he woke in queer silence. In the murk below decks there wasn’t a soul anywhere, and when he found his way up top there was no one on deck either. They were way off the coast but going nowhere. And hundreds of men had vanished into thin air.

  Last thing he’d known the Imperial was motoring off, hand in hand with the others, crawling with men: Pommies, Black Watch, Aussies, Kiwis, in all states of disrepair.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ Perry kept asking Tassos and I, swatting away the smoke of the fire.

  I already knew that Tassos had mysterious sources on the island but how could he know what happened at sea? And yet now I saw Perry’s surprise at Tassos’ accomplished English, as he calmly offered a possible version of events.

  Most likely, he said, after being strafed on the way over from Alex, the Imperial had stalled in the bay. Perhaps everyone had to jump onto another ship and leave the Imperial behind. They blew it up before they left, rather than leave it in enemy hands: a perfectly good RN destroyer which, with a bit more time under different circumstances, would be easily recommissioned.

  But Perry wouldn’t hear of it. He would have woken, he said, with all the movement, the engines of the other ship drawing up alongside, and how do you get hundreds of men from one boat to another in the middle of the night without making a racket? That was fair enough. Also – I recall this clearly now, what he said, so early in the piece – he wasn’t the only one asleep in the bunks down below, so why was he the only one to be left behind to sink with the ship?

  Tassos pursed his lips, as if in agreement. We smoked in silence. A shadow passed across the open doorway leading from the courtyard back into the kitchen. She had returned. I felt immediately nauseous. I peered towards the doorway, but Tassos’ smoke got in my eyes.

  *

  With the shock of the cold night sea, the physical effort of his daylong float and swim back to shore, the jolt of what had happened, Perry Coghlan wasn’t handling things well.

  His face kept contracting into the same long and angular wince. He was a thing folding in on itself, his face agitated with a nervous tic.

  I wanted to pick his brain about which units were on which boat, in case there was any news about Vern or Mug. But when I asked the questions Perry muttered only that he couldn’t remember.
His thought process was shot, his memory jammed. Tassos encouraged him to eat but each time he refused outright.

  It wasn’t too long before tints of a new day began appearing in the sky beyond the courtyard wall. I suggested Perry get some sleep. The little soldier from Tumut shook his head. ‘Nah,’ he said. But Tassos left no room for argument. The tough old Greek hoisted Private Coghlan up from the bench by his armpits and led him upstairs to lie down.

  I remember when Tassos came back sometime later the birds were singing. But he was frowning. Sitting by the fire mouth he began stoking it furiously, feeding it with juniper sticks, so that any smoke disappeared into a spitting bright orange flame.

  ‘You want breakfast?’ he asked, gruffly.

  I nodded, tired, knowing I wouldn’t sleep.

  He pulled his cast-iron pan off the hook on the trellis above his head and set it in the fire mouth. From the ammo box where he kept his food under the bench he miraculously pulled out four eggs and set them on the wooden plate next to the fire. From his trouser pocket he drew a handful of thyme and flung it into the pan. With a small brown amphora he poured the oil. The pan crackled and spat like the flames beneath.