She glanced at Moira. Should she tell her about the bodies on the beach?
No. It would only worry her more.
‘I think we should go with them. What do you think?’
Moira nodded faintly.
There was really no choice at all.
For some reason she had expected a long walk, dreaded it: her legs still felt as weak as ice cream. But the village was perhaps a mile from the beach, next to a slow seeping river with a wide jetty, and big sheds. No wonder the couple were nervous, she thought, as they walked up the narrow road, with the ‘mems’ so close to their homes and Japanese authority.
Children crouched by thatched stilt houses, looked at them curiously. Dogs panted in the shade.
The police station was the only concrete building in the village. Two bicycles were parked outside it.
The woman had melted away, somewhere among the houses. The man knocked, opened the door and bowed.
Two Japanese soldiers sat at the big wooden desk. One of them barked out an order.
The man rose from his bow, then pressed Nancy’s and Moira’s backs to make them bow too.
More words, sharp and angry. Both soldiers stood, seizing their rifles with bayonets fixed to them. The man said something. He backed out of the room without saying anything to Moira and Nancy. The younger of the soldiers followed him to the door, yelled at him, the words sharp, even if unintelligible. He shut the door and looked back at the women and the child.
Nancy rose from her bow. It had hurt her side. She hoped it hadn’t made it bleed again. It wasn’t going to do her any favours if the Japanese found one of their number had already tried to kill her. More words in Japanese. The tone was different now. The older of the soldiers — he looked no more than twenty, if that, while the other looked about sixteen — pointed to two chairs. They sat.
Two cups of water were placed on the desk. The older guard nodded to them to drink.
They drank.
To Nancy’s surprise, the younger officer held a banana out to Gavin. The baby took it, shoved it against his mother’s neck, then stuffed the remnants into his mouth.
The soldiers laughed.
It was such a … human … response that she felt like crying; she almost believed that maybe everything would be all right, that these men might even let them go, to try to make their way back home. She drank more of the water, watching them, put the cup down at the same time Moira drained hers.
The older one said something: obviously an order.
They stood, Moira holding Gavin. The soldiers picked up their rifles and nodded towards the door. They followed Nancy and Moira out into the hot sun.
Along the road again, out of the village, the soldiers with their rifles behind them. No one spoke to them, or even looked at them. The children had vanished. Only men looked from doorways now, bowing as the soldiers passed.
At least we don’t make people bow, thought Nancy, then remembered Moira and Ben’s major domo back at the plantation, politely bowing to guests as they arrived. Butlers bowed in moving pictures too. But they were paid to bow. Did that make a difference?
To one side of the road were patches of trees, too scrubby to be called jungle, and more of the long grass she’d seen by the beach, as well as a few coconut palms. The other side seemed to be a plantation, though the trees and vines were unfamiliar. Men who looked Chinese planted rows of seedlings in bare ground. Others chipped at weeds between rows of young trees. It was just as she had thought it might be — their overseers had changed but their lives had not, even though the new regime was only days old.
Once beyond the houses the guards’ demeanour changed. They lowered their rifles, wiped sweat from their faces and pushed back their caps. The older one held out his hands for Gavin.
‘I don’t think you should,’ began Nancy, but Moira had already handed him over.
‘Snommle ump,’ said Gavin, patting the guard’s cap. Despite his sunburn, he sounded happier than she had heard him since they had left Singapore.
The soldier bore the child’s weight easily. He made a face, laughed again when the baby smiled, said something to his companion. They walked on either side of Moira and Nancy now, talking between themselves. The younger soldier put his cap on Gavin’s head, to shade him from the sun.
Another mile. Her salt-soaked feet throbbed and Moira limped, her face flushed. Nancy wondered if she had ever been outside so long without a hat.
Another bend in the road. A tin-roofed warehouse stood in a clearing and a charred patch where something — or many somethings — had been burnt.
The soldier took back his cap. The other handed Gavin to Moira again. They raised their rifles and indicated to the women to walk in front.
The warehouse door was open. They walked inside, the soldiers still behind them, and blinked in the dimness.
Two women sat on bags at the back of the warehouse; a single soldier, no older than the other two, stood guard. He motioned with his rifle for Moira and Nancy to join them.
Had the other women come from their ship? Nancy didn’t think so. Both wore shoes and hats which they’d have lost at sea, unless one of the lifeboats had been usable and launched before the ship blew up. The first was young, in her twenties perhaps; the other was elderly, stout and red-faced, too many rings on her fat fingers that may have been a way to keep them with her like Moira’s pearls and brooch, which was still fastened to her limp, grubby dress. A case each and a roll of blankets stood nearby.
No one said anything. Which meant, Nancy decided, that the women had been ordered not to speak, otherwise they’d have acknowledged them at least.
They sat down, on the furthest sack.
‘Bibbole?’ said Gavin in baby speak to the soldier who had carried him. The man ignored him. Gavin looked at the other women then, disappointed in the possibilities for any further entertainment, settled on his mother’s lap and chewed her finger.
They waited, heat around them like a blanket. No air moved in the warehouse; neither did the guards.
An engine noise. The guards stood straighter as a car pulled up outside.
Two men in uniform, one older, obviously senior, his face with no expression at all. The other was forty perhaps, with glasses so like the Japanese in the newspaper cartoons that Nancy almost giggled.
If she had giggled, she would have cried. She bit her lip instead.
‘You will stand,’ said the man with glasses, in clear English, his accent educated and surprisingly like Moira’s. ‘You will bow to the Japanese officer.’
They stood. They bowed. Evidently the other women had bowed before, as none of them protested.
‘Pick up the suitcases. You will march outside in single file, and stand against the wall. You will not speak or you will be shot. You understand?’
Nods.
‘Argle,’ said Gavin.
The soldiers — and the translator — ignored him. Moira put him over her shoulder, where he would be less inclined to make a noise. Or maybe, thought Nancy, to prevent him from seeing what happened next.
Prison camp? Or are we too much trouble, four women and a baby on what was probably a small island? Was that why the women had been killed on the beach, to save the Japanese the trouble of guarding them?
They walked out into the sunlight. Stood against the wall, the sunlight striking their faces, except the two with wide-brimmed hats.
The officer snapped an order. The three guards raised their rifles.
Nancy closed her eyes, then opened them. If these were her last few seconds, she would live them all.
Overflow, she thought. Michael, remember me when you see the swans on the river. I hope they have a hundred cygnets, and their cygnets have more babies too. Babies that I will never have …
The officer snapped another order. Nancy watched him, seeing the river too, the young man sitting next to it, the swans and home.
Chapter 18
Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 16 February 1942
&n
bsp; Singapore Surrenders
The once-mighty Fortress Singapore has fallen to the Japanese. Of the thirty thousand AIF posted there, it is hoped that many, or most, have been evacuated, possibly to Batavia, but as yet there has been no word.
DRINKWATER, 16 FEBRUARY 1942
MICHAEL
He sat on the Drinkwater veranda, the Latin textbook forgotten in his lap.
Singapore had fallen. It seemed wrong to care so much about one person, when tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, were killed or missing. It was hardest, perhaps, not to know what to feel: you could not, should not, feel grief until you knew someone was gone from you forever. But he did feel grief, because she was not here. Was it irrational to feel cheated, because the promise of her arrival, and her safety, had not been met?
She should be here, now, down river, at Overflow. For he was still at home, had been saved from school by food poisoning.
Had he been saved by ice cream? The custard must have gone off in the heat before it had been frozen, because his parents and Mrs Mutton had food poisoning too. Food poisoning meant no train to school, and flat lemonade and grated apple and dry toast for all of them, prepared by Mah McAlpine before she headed off to the biscuit factory each morning.
He’d been up again after two days, but Mum and Dad and Mrs Mutton had been laid low for a fortnight. A fortnight of being able to look at familiar paddocks, gold and comforting, the hot air shimmering above the hills, instead of the claustrophobic walls of school.
Here, at home, it was possible to feel that Nancy might come riding along the river bend; that he might hear her laughter in the murmur of the river. School would not just be a wrench from home this term, but a cutting away of his links with her as well …
He’d taken over the apple grating, squeezing the lemons and adding sugar and boiled water, persuading Mrs Mutton to stay in bed too. He could tend his parents and Mrs Daggins was fine doing the rough alone, the bathrooms scrubbed, the floors mopped, before she went off to her half-days at the factory.
But Mum and Dad were now back to their usual selves. Which meant that tomorrow or, at the most, in two days’ time, they would drive him to the station and the train to school. Meanwhile, he sat on the veranda with his Latin grammar, trying to look studious, but instead looking at the hills, the road, hoping the telephone bell would ring or, better, a car come down the road and it would be Nancy, freshly landed in Sydney by the ship that had picked her up, she’d caught the morning train …
Even as he thought it a dust cloud appeared. A slow one. Horse, not motorcar. Mrs Flanagan with the mail. Mah McAlpine waved to him as she flashed past the veranda on her bicycle, on her way into town. ‘I’ll get the mail,’ she called. ‘Bring it to the house tonight.’
Michael nodded. Like most telephone calls, business letters went to the factory. There might be a letter from one of his mother’s friends in Sydney. If there was a letter from Jim, Mah would bring it down …
Mah’s bicycle flashed back down the drive again. She held a letter out, her face grave.
He ran down the steps. ‘From Jim?’ No, he thought, wrong-coloured envelope.
Mah shook her head.
He took the envelope. No postmark. Which meant this letter hadn’t been through the Post Office and stamped at Gibber’s Creek. Which meant it was almost certainly from Overflow, too far from town to have a phone. They’d have handed this to Mrs Flanagan, knowing that it would get to Drinkwater by mid-morning.
He said shakily, ‘Thank you.’
Mah nodded, her eyes kind. She said, ‘Tell your mother I’ll be over later. Take care, Michael.’
He nodded, hardly hearing her leave. He sat back in his chair and opened the envelope. Good paper. A teacher’s clear strong hand.
Dear Michael,
It is with a heavy heart that I must tell you we have had a telegram from Sydney. The Lady Williams was sunk in a bombing raid. The ships in its convoy picked up no survivors. Nancy’s grandmother says that we must not give up hope, and of course we will hope.
The sentence ended abruptly, as if the writer wanted to say more, but couldn’t. A new paragraph began:
The telegram arrived the same day as one from the army saying that Ben is ‘missing in action’. ‘Missing’ may mean that he has been taken prisoner, or even been wounded and no one has recorded yet that he is in hospital, which is natural with all that is happening right now.
We will not give up hope for either of our children, but thought that you should know.
Please give my regards to your parents. Forgive my breaking the news to you like this, but my family needs me at home now, and I did not want to delay telling you what we knew.
Thank you for your friendship with my daughter. It meant a lot to her. Her happiness was ours.
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Clancy
It meant a lot to her. She thinks that Nancy is dead, thought Michael, and her daughter-in-law and grandchild too.
No survivors. If there had been three … six … ten people who had escaped from the sinking ship … he might have hoped that she had been … mislaid … one girl among so many evacuees. But no survivors had the definite sound of finality about it.
No survivors meant dead.
He could not believe it. No, he would not — his mind accepted that it must be so. But his body felt she was alive. His eyes would not cry, nor his heart begin to grieve.
He had been so certain he’d know if Nancy died. Had thought that what she’d said, there at the cascades that early morning, more than a year ago now, had meant she thought that he would too.
He had been wrong. She was dead.
He had to go inside. Had to tell his parents. Couldn’t.
Instead he walked, almost blindly, down the stairs, around the house and through the orchard. Sheba trumpeted at him from her paddock. He ignored her, slipping through the next gate then under the barbed-wire fence, down to the river across the hill and hidden from the house.
His spot.
Not hidden from the world like Nancy’s. Just a place that was peaceful, without even sheep to overlook it, the redgums and the curve of reeds, the smooth face of the river.
He looked at the warm clear water above the sandy bottom, the darker water by the soil of the river bend, a pelican slowly paddling, dipping its head under as it fished. How long had his ancestors and hers watched this river? Tens of thousands of years? Hunted ducks or fished, and millennia later, used the water for their stock, to irrigate the lucerne his mother and old Mr Sampson had trialled, and that was now grown throughout the district?
My land, he thought. Her land. If she had to die somewhere — even at sixteen — and he knew that eventually, everyone must die — let it be here, where her bones would feed the trees, her spirit stay with the mountains and the river, where the black swans came in to land.
At first he thought it was a car horn, a honking far away. Then he realised it was coming from above.
He looked up.
It was a swan. It flew like an arrow across the blue, down to the river, landing heavily, gracelessly for such an elegant bird, before recovering and floating, neck arched, as if it had never been elsewhere than on this river.
The pelican watched.
His hands grew warm, and then his heart. He didn’t know …
And then he did. So deep it was impossible not to accept, to believe.
He watched the swan for one more minute as it ducked for food.
Then he strode up the paddock, to the house.
His mother was in the office. A pile of accounts sat on her desk, but her hands held Jim’s last letter. It had arrived a week before and been read aloud at the breakfast table. It looked like it had been read many times since.
‘Mum?’
She looked up at him. He felt the pressure on him to be two sons now, the slight hunger of her gaze. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m fine,’ he said shortly. He held the letter out to her.
She took it, read it, her face carefully not showing any expression till she had read it all. She stood, and put her arms around his waist. Her head only came to his shoulder now. ‘Michael, I’m sorry. So very, very sorry.’
‘Yes. But Mum …’ He bit his lip, trying to work out what to say. ‘Mum, I don’t feel she is dead.’
She nodded. ‘I know what it’s like. I … I never told you … I was engaged once, long before I married your father. He died in the Boer War. I couldn’t feel he was dead either. Kept thinking I’d look up and he’d be riding up the drive …’
No, she had never told him. One day he might ask more. Or wouldn’t, perhaps, for it was as his mother he knew her now, needed her now, not the young girl she had once been. ‘I don’t mean like that. It’s not a feeling. I … I know Nancy isn’t dead.’
‘What do you mean? Have you heard something else?’
His mother had been the one to tell him about the pelicans.
He said flatly, ‘I was just down at the river watching a pelican. A swan flew over and then landed on the river. And I knew. Nancy’s alive, Mum. She’s all right. For now, at any rate.’
Her face went blank, almost as if the real Matilda was far away. At last she said, ‘Why do you think seeing a swan means Nancy is all right?’
‘Because we talked about it, Nancy and me, down at the river. I told her what you told me about the pelicans. For her it’s swans.’
Her look was hard to interpret. ‘You remember what I told you about the pelicans?’
‘Yes. It … it works. Sometimes I see them and, well, I know. Her gran told her about the swans being hers. And just now, a swan landed on the river. And I knew.’
‘Knew. Or wanted to think you knew?’
‘Knew. I … I’d been thinking she was dead. She didn’t feel dead to me, but I’ve never known anyone who died. Mum … I need to go to Overflow. Need to tell them.’
To Love a Sunburnt Country Page 16
