by Kim Kelly
He has another chuckle at that, a gentleman’s sort of lazy chuckle, but I’m starting to like this bloke already. He doesn’t mind not getting bullshit.
‘What’s your current occupation?’
Good question. I stumble around it: ‘I manage a mine, coal, the Wattle, out of Lithgow,’ like I’m ashamed of the fact and add: ‘But I’m a miner, really.’
He squints at me and says: ‘What did you say your name was again?’
‘Ackerman, Daniel.’
‘You’re that chap who married Frank Connolly’s daughter, aren’t you?’
Jesus; I nearly jump out of my seat. ‘How do you know that?’
‘My father and Connolly used to meet at the track — hard not to follow the life and times of an eccentric such as Mr Connolly, eh?’
Not sure I like the sound of that; I feel a bit protective of the old ghost, who might well have to come back to murder me for what I am doing today. This Duncan chap sees, though, and says: ‘Besides, I’m a government engineer, roads and bridges, for the railways mostly, when I’m not doing this, and news travels round our industries, you know what it’s like.’
No.
‘Sounds like he was a good sort, Connolly,’ he adds.
‘Yes.’ Now shut up about it, and thankfully he does.
‘So, you’re a miner,’ he says. ‘Well, I have another coincidence for you.’
What next?
‘It so happens we’re looking for men who can handle explosives and tunnel and work with their eyes closed and one hand tied behind their back and not panic for anything. And I haven’t seen a soul today who doesn’t want to join the artillery or light horse, or who’s only good for it. Higgins, out the front, thought he was having a good laugh getting me to look at you, but sapper might suit you.’
I know I’m a joke but I don’t know what sapper means. ‘I don’t want to blow anyone up,’ I say.
‘No. Why would you? We need men for fieldworks, building and maintaining trench lines, bunkers, supply routes, bridges, that sort of thing, supporting the infantry et cetera, chaps who can get a job done quickly and regardless. But you’ll have to learn how to shoot people regardless too. It’s a hazard of the job, I’m afraid. Most men, when being shot at, will feel inclined to want to shoot back and live; best to know how to use a rifle in those circumstances, eh? Besides, you’ll do as you’re told when you’re told. Are you still interested?’
‘Yes,’ I tell him; can’t believe I’m going through with this, so I have to tell him something else first to see if he’ll still be interested. ‘You should probably know that my parents were born in Germany, in case that’s an issue for you.’
He pulls his head back in surprise. ‘Good God, you are a bit special, aren’t you. I think the question is, is it an issue for you? Is that why you don’t want to kill anyone?’
‘No.’ Dad would have no problem with the issue of my nationality. Mum, on the other hand, is going to be very unimpressed, but not, I don’t think, for any lingering allegiance to Deutschland. She’s just going to want to kill me. France, well, don’t think about that now. ‘Not at all,’ I say. ‘I wasn’t brought up German.’ Wasn’t brought up a subject of the realm either.
‘You’ll have to kill Germans if you’re told to, or we might be obliged to shoot you,’ he says and means it, then squints at me again: ‘You don’t speak the language?’
‘No, just bits and pieces.’
I can say to myself right now: Du muβt doch total blödesein: You must be right out of your mind.
‘Hmm,’ he says, ‘could have been useful if you had — though a chap like you will be useful anyway.’
A chap like me: what’s he when he’s at home? Not sure I like this bloke too much any more; he thinks he has me pegged so easily.
He’s still eyeing me, thinking. ‘Why do you want to do this?’
I tell him about Robby and the rest somewhere in Turkey; he says: ‘But you don’t want revenge?’
‘No. I just don’t want to leave it to the others.’
‘You’re not doing this for King and Country either, are you?’
‘No.’
And he laughs again, leans in and says: ‘Neither am I.’
I want to know what his story is, but the interview’s over. ‘Unless you’d prefer to wait until you’re of age, get a form, and get a new birth certificate. It’d be a good idea to get a new birth certificate anyway, without parents’ place of birth and without the extra “n”. A fair few good old Aussie German lads have been fiddling the facts to join up, or not, as they choose, no real law against it, but I’d say it’s best not to advertise it, eh. If you want to sign today, come back with your papers and ask for me.’
If I think about it any more, my head’s going to fall off my shoulders, so I do sign today, for the duration. It’s all done in half an hour: I tell the bloke at the pub up the road that I’ll write up the certificate myself thank you and the twenty-fifth of September is changed to the twenty-fifth of April and parents’ place of birth, Dresden, Germany, is changed to Lithgow, New South Wales. Too easy all round. It occurs to me that I don’t know a thing about Dresden or even really where it is, and I couldn’t give a rat’s; that’s how much it matters to me now, and how much it mattered to Mum and Dad to tell me.
Captain Duncan says as I hand them over: ‘We’ll see you on Friday, then, for your physical checks and balances, but I’d say you’re well in. Go home and spread the happy word. Good luck.’
Hmn.
‘Where am I going to be sent?’ I ask him, for what it’s worth; I don’t really care above the pounding in my head at what I’ve just done.
He says, dry as dust: ‘Where you’re told to go.’ As in: does it matter?
That’d be right. I nod.
‘Welcome to the worst job the army has to offer, Ackerman. And you can start calling me sir.’ Yep, and he means it. And he’s a nut.
And I think I might be a bit of a fully British subject now.
FRANCINE
The casualty figures thus far for the Gallipoli campaign are mysteriously absent from the newspaper reports; call me suspicious but perhaps that means it’s likely to be a terrible number. The handful of sad, brief little notices in the local paper telling of sons and husbands lost say more. I didn’t miss the one for RT Cullen; I’m sure Daniel knows, he must, and his silence says more than anything at all. Jingo-jangle higher than ever, though, for Our Brave Aussie Tribe of Achilles and his Kiwi-Polished Mates. It’s a glorious proof of nationhood, a moral victory for courage and great manhood, apparently. Seems it’d have to be, since from the start they were dropped off in rowboats at some impossible place to face immediate fire from a waiting enemy and didn’t mutiny. Even I can glean that there must have been some sort of strategic error there. But it hasn’t caused a mutiny here at home, either: recruitment is higher than ever, must be well past the quota now; does our Labor Government even have a quota any more? I pray every day for it to stop, as I pray every day for a baby. Prayers are the last resort of the hopeless, though, aren’t they.
I cut up the newspapers for the toot, as I’ve been doing before Daniel comes back every day, though he’s not home yet. Lamb and potatoes roasting happily with their sprinkling of the rosemary I’ve grown myself, and I take my sketchbook and pencil box outside onto the back verandah while I wait, but I don’t know what to do with it today. Sick of apples, that’s for sure: they’re beginning to bobble all over the place. Too busy with hopeless prayer, anyway, and low thoughts of all kinds about sad state of the world and my marriage. Telling myself over again that there’s no point me becoming morose too: chipper up, girl. Doesn’t matter that he forgot your birthday; you were never overly fond of birthdays anyway. Celebrations are only for the frivolous, aren’t they.
Just on sunset I hear the wheels of his bike scrape up the dirt inside the gate. There’s a magnificent feathery purple and orange arc above the hill behind the orchard and I stay here to watch it as he cl
umps through the house, amusing myself with the thought that it might only be the pollution in the valley beyond that makes the sunset appear so beautiful this evening. So said a recent science article in one of the papers, so it must be true: I’m seeing the colours refracting off the smoky fuzz of carbon something or other and other such gases that are no good for you in concentrated doses; just as well they are happily dispersing then: hmn, very chipper.
He comes outside and sits down on the boards next to me, his legs stretched out to the verandah edge. ‘Lovely,’ he says.
‘Isn’t it.’ Though lovely’s not a very Daniel sort of a word.
‘I meant you too,’ he says, and that makes me turn around.
He has an odd look on his face; I couldn’t pick what he was thinking if you gave me the word to describe his expression; I can’t ever pick what he’s thinking anyway. He takes my book from me and takes a piece of charcoal from my pencil box, and scribbles something on the paper; I can’t see it over his knees. He scribbles some more. He’s drawing something; I’ve never seen him do this before.
He hands it back to me. ‘There you are, Francine at nineteen. When exactly is your birthday?’
I think I say, ‘It was on the third,’ but I can’t be sure of that, because … it is me, a sketch of me, looking out at the orchard, though there’s no orchard in the picture. There are only a handful of lines. But it’s me all right. The image makes me shiver. I couldn’t ever draw anything so plain and clear; and I couldn’t ever draw him … not like this. I want to say: Why are you working at a mine at all? You should be doing this, you should be studying somewhere. But I begin to cry, and it quickly becomes big heaving crying. I can’t help it. This is such a tangled mess and I don’t know what to do to get us out of it.
He says: ‘Don’t cry. Please.’ But when I look at him, he is teary too. I have never seen him do this before either.
‘What’s happened?’ I ask him, hoping we’re thinking the same thing, but somehow knowing that we’re not.
‘I didn’t go to work today.’ A droplet slides halfway down his face and stops there but his voice is steady as ever. Blood drains away. ‘I went to Sydney and joined up.’
You what?
Stare.
Stare.
Stare.
He shoves away the tear and says: ‘I have to do this.’
No you don’t, not for any reason. ‘I don’t believe you.’ But I do, terribly.
‘Well, that’s what’s happened.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
He says something about Robby and his wife Cass but I’m not really listening. I say, last grasp of many to come: ‘So Robby decided to jump off a cliff and now you have to follow?’
‘It’s not as simple as that, it’s —’
‘Yes it is.’ Hysteria: thank God we have no neighbours. I am a feral cat on my hands and knees on the verandah. His drawing slides across the boards back at him.
‘It’s not.’ Fierce.
Don’t care: ‘I’ll go to the post office and telephone the barracks tomorrow and tell them you’re not twenty-one. I’ll tell them you’re a German spy.’
‘No you won’t.’
That’s true, wouldn’t want him to be carted off to Darlinghurst Gaol for interrogation, but: ‘You’ve betrayed me. You said never.’
‘That was before —’
‘Before what? Before devotion to misguided mates became more important than devotion to wife? You don’t even love me any more, do you.’ Oh, did I really say that? But I can do a lot better: ‘I’ll never forgive you.’
‘I’ll talk to you when you’ve calmed down.’ He stands up and starts to walk away inside.
I spring up and grab him by the shoulder, push him hard in the chest. ‘You’ll damn well talk to me now! You’ve barely spoken to me for months and months! You can’t do this!’
‘I have and I am.’ He’s holding me by the wrists, so easily, gently, hands too big for my bones.
‘No!’
‘Yes.’
Stare.
Stare.
Stare.
Still holding my wrists: ‘I’m going on the early train Friday morning.’
Yes. ‘You can let me go now.’ He does. I sink back to the boards. Unbridled self-expression complete. Just shock. One whole day left.
‘Not going going obviously.’ He sits down behind me. It’s dark, and cold now.
That’s right, I think, you’ll have to pass a medical examination and do your short course on how to kill and be killed first, to make sure you fit the mould. Unsocialise yourself and join the greatest union in the land. But I can’t say any of that. Most of what I am thinking I can no longer say, maybe even to myself. I want to moan: Why? Why? Why? But I do know why.
As his arms encircle me I become so very small. I’m still crying, but quietly, until the tears seem to be doing what they do without my participation.
I can hear myself ask him about Cass Cullen. During my fit he’d said something about helping her out: ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘You can arrange something through the compensation fund, can’t you? Those lawyers will do whatever you ask them to, regards that money.’
That’s true. There’s nothing to say I have to provide any proof of employment or documentation of any kind. I can just tell them to pay out for Robby and no one will be any the wiser. ‘Yes. I’ll organise it for her,’ I tell the apple shadows, then calculations needle through anguish: if there are too many Robbys from the Wattle, we’ll run down the fund; but then the longer the war goes on, the more money we stand to make. I’ll have to ask Stanley and Bragg to increase the profit percentage going to the fund, just in case.
It’s not like I need the money; I’m swimming in it. No one to spend it on but me soon, or Sarah if she needs anything, and she never does; she says since Peter’s been doing so well for himself lately in Newcastle, it’s hard enough trying to stop him from sending her money she doesn’t want. And now Daniel will be earning a wage again too: a grand six shillings a day, and being fed by the AIF, whether he likes it or not, while English Boys only get one shilling. One shilling? Massive calculations scream at me, and I want to scream back at them: No!
Instead I say: ‘I’ve heard army food’s appalling.’
He says: ‘Couldn’t be worse than yours.’
I turn around and hit him in the chest again, for being back, for five minutes, and now going away.
‘I’m an excellent cook, thank you.’
He squeezes me tighter. ‘You’re an excellent everything.’
Don’t you dare start the weeping again, Francy.
‘What on earth could the AIF possibly want with the likes of you?’ I ask him.
‘Digging holes, by the sounds of it; what else? Engineers, I think. Once I’ve learned how to shoot and stand to attention. They might decide against me after a week.’ They won’t. He adds: ‘A bloke who knew of your father recruited me.’
‘Who?’
‘A Captain Duncan, says his father knew him from the track.’
The Leprechaun lives. Never heard of this Captain Duncan but he’ll do.
‘Strange bloke,’ Daniel clarifies. Strangeness seems apt, while we’re shifting realities again.
I have every kind of emotion bursting as I kiss Daniel all over his face. ‘I’m sorry.’ For everything. Oh Daniel.
DANIEL
‘One day you’ll do something surprising, Daniel.’
Mum’s not angry when I ride round in the morning and tell her. She’s beyond disappointment with me, and she’s been talking to Evan. They were expecting it. Good thing everyone else knows what I’m about. She tells me: ‘Roy’s with the Engineers too, he’s just arrived in Turkey. He says it’s wonderful weather.’
My mother can put on sarcasm far too well. There’s nothing wonderful about any of this. And I’m scared already, but who wouldn’t be? Those that aren’t must be idiots. I don’t know the first thing about it yet
, but I write that down as rule number one from today.
Mum says: ‘Your father would agree with this commitment to your country.’
I nearly lose it.
But she adds: ‘And he would agree with me that you’re an idiot. Ein totaler Idiot.’
She goes to fill the kettle and when she turns back round to me she says: ‘You don’t owe anyone anything. If there is one thing I want you to get through your thick head before you die, it is that.’
She’s taking cups from the cupboard, but I can’t stay long. France wants a baby, and I’m not sure when I’ll get another chance. I’m not going to die. Thanks a lot, Mum.
FRANCINE
He’s being let out from imperial death practice for a whole day. I’ll meet him at the station tomorrow morning, me and Hayseed, come for Our Boy in Our Drab Khaki. I’ve never been so excited in my life. It’s been six long weeks and Miss Frankston at the library is sick of seeing my face: I’ve read every rubbishy novel in the place, and half of a compendium of Henry Lawson’s stories: I stopped at ‘The Drover’s Wife’ after it gave me dreams of snakes under the bed; I’ve read Bituminous Coal in the Western and Illawarra Fields, and the equally obscure Expressionism: Continental Art or Arrogance?, neither of which I understood much of, and I’m now working my way through A Critical Study of the Iliad & the Odyssey, and I can recommend that it is vastly more tedious than Homer himself. I’ll give it away, after it puts me to sleep tonight. I’ve given all our apples away too, a sack for every man and boy at the Wattle; it was snowing a bit, Christmassy, sort of, seemed appropriate. Mr McNally had dropped in with some more feed for Hayseed and agreed to help me bag them, after Sarah and Miriam and the seven imps had come round the day before to help in the emergency of picking them and eating some of them, but he wouldn’t take anything for it, or for carting them for me. Said: ‘Fact of ’em all’s too entertaining,’ whatever that means; he’s a very odd man: he has wrinkles so deep they look like blue tattoos, etching a scowl over his kindness, and his gruff, grumbly: ‘Good girl, Missus.’ My goodness wasn’t much more than a small thought: the orchard is so small, you couldn’t make a living from its twenty-nine trees yielding approximately two thousand seven hundred and forty-two fruits so far, give or take an apple. But dear God, has it been insurance in its provision of a little time-consumption.
