My Beautiful Enemy

by Cory Taylor

  ‘Where did he learn to talk like that?’ I said, once he’d gone to the lavatory. Riley was already out the door in search of food.

  ‘Up and down the highways and byways of America I suppose,’ said Matron Conlon, adding that he was lucky he hadn’t been shot. It was foolhardy, she said, to show up at the front gate of the camp in the dark without a word to anyone that he was coming.

  I found myself yearning for her to let him bunk down where he was, as if my future happiness depended on it. Less than ten minutes ago I’d been concerned he might disrupt my solitude, but now I worried that Matron would decide to send him to the Jap wing of the infirmary to be nursed over there. If that were to happen I wouldn’t see him again for days and his absence would be like an extra illness to add to my jangled nerves.

  ‘Which one’s his family?’ I said.

  ‘Ueno,’ said the Matron, as if she expected me to remember names, and when I looked puzzled she listed them. ‘Clancy, Frank, Shigeru, Tom, Setsuko, Nancy?’

  I drew a blank on all of them.

  ‘My compound?’ I said. Each of the four compounds contained about fifty family groups. I was assigned to Compound B where there was a mixed lot of Japs who’d been shipped in at the start of hostilities from places like New Caledonia and Batavia.

  ‘C,’ she said. I knew Compound C only by reputation. The men said it was the best-run compound in the camp, because the Japs there were trusted to keep things reasonable. Trouble in Compound C was apparently dealt with internally whereas trouble in the other compounds had a tendency to spill over. So far there had been no serious trouble in the entire camp as far as I could tell. The internees seemed content to be well fed and out of harm’s way. This pretty much described the guards too. They may as well have been in charge of a herd of fat cows, the way they conducted themselves. It was dispiriting, in that it was just what I’d come to expect of the army, laziness combined with low-level venality. It injured my vanity to be associated with the whole unedifying business.

  ‘He’s big for a Jap,’ I said.

  ‘He is that,’ said Matron in a dreamy way, because of the drink and because she was still half-asleep. ‘I haven’t met the father, but the uncle’s a big strapping man.’

  ‘Where’s the father?’ I said.

  ‘He was visiting his parents in Japan when they bombed Pearl Harbor and nobody’s heard a thing from him since that day.’

  ‘What were they doing in America?’ I said.

  ‘They’re a travelling circus,’ said Matron. ‘So I suspect they were travelling.’

  And then she said I should stop hanging around here chattering. ‘You’re missing out on your beauty sleep,’ she said.

  I refused to move. Riley eventually returned with a packet of biscuits and a can of Carnation milk, which he decided to heat up on the burner in Matron’s office.

  ‘Where’s he going to sleep?’ I said, hoping to catch another glimpse of Stanley before he turned in.

  ‘I’ll let him stay over this side,’ she said, ‘where you can keep an eye on him. Since you’ve nothing better to do with your time.’

  And that is how it all started, the period of my life I call The War, even if this is only a reference to my own personal victories and losses at the time and not to the larger catastrophe that produced them. As I tried to explain to Stanley, when we were both men on the verge of middle age, it wasn’t the historical events that continued to haunt me; it was the private world in which his life and mine had collided so painfully. That was a wound, I said, that refused to heal over.

  2

  I’d tried to warn May about my poor character when we first met.

  ‘I’m bad news,’ I told her.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said.

  I told her I’d been pronounced a juvenile delinquent at twelve and parcelled out to foster homes, which was a lie, and I said I’d run away from school to join the Air Force, which was the truth.

  ‘I should be blowing up Germany right now,’ I told her, ‘but they decided to keep me in reserve in case General MacArthur calls.’

  This was in January 1945, just after I’d joined the army. Less than a fortnight into basic training I’d snuck out of the Bonegilla barracks on a Saturday night to go to a dance in the town. May had spotted me across a crowded room. I looked like Errol Flynn on his night off, she used to tell me, and from the first moment I spoke, she said, there was only me in the hall and her, as if everyone else had just dropped through a hole in the floor.

  And I would tell her—because it was true—that she was the first girl I’d ever met who didn’t giggle and act shy whenever I looked sideways at her. On the contrary she’d stared me down with a solemn concentration I found very appealing. It had singled her out as the serious one in her group. I’d already decided that her friends were all spoilt private school girls slumming it in the Land Army. The ringleader Katherine had kept patting me on the knee and telling me I looked like a puppy she’d left at home in Toorak. May, on the other hand, had remained very quiet, looking sideways at me with an expression of something close to rapture.

  ‘I was drunk,’ she said. ‘Katherine had brought along some cooking sherry and we polished it off in the car before we even got there.’

  I remember while we were dancing she told me with some passion that I was bloody lucky just to be alive. She was leaning into my shoulder by then so I could see right down the front of her dress to where her breasts were squeezed together like two big melons in a sack.

  ‘You should bloody well count your blessings,’ she said. She smelled powdery, like my mother Doris, and she was pink and freckly like Doris too, in a way that made me instantly homesick.

  ‘What shall I call you?’ I said, on the way to getting drunk myself.

  ‘You can call me Miss Forbes,’ she said, grinning.

  Once we were back at our table I asked her about her family and she told me her father was in building and that she was the youngest of three.

  ‘Ian’s the eldest,’ she said. ‘He’s in an essential service so he doesn’t have to join up.’

  ‘What essential service?’ said Katherine.

  ‘Trucking,’ she said.

  Katherine burst out laughing and then apologised. ‘I thought you said something else,’ she said, placing her hand over her mouth to control her giggles.

  May reached over to slap Katherine on the wrist and then stared at me again.

  ‘My middle brother Owen is in a Jap POW camp somewhere,’ she said. ‘But we don’t actually know if he’s alive or dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘So am I,’ she said, her grey eyes brimming with tears. ‘I miss him all the time.’

  After that I saw her every few weeks on my day off because she was living in the town of Bonegilla in a boarding house and it was a good excuse to get away from the life of a soldier for a few hours. Also because she was easy to be with, very warm and what my mother would have called natural. She thought nothing, for instance, of kissing me on the mouth on my second visit to her room, or of placing my hand on her breast the next time I was there. When I took it off she was disappointed.

  I apologised.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault. It’s just that I feel like I can trust you.’

  I couldn’t think of what to say to her so I put my hand back on her breast and kissed her again and I kept doing that for a few minutes until she asked me to stop because Katherine might come back from her shower at any moment.

  She got up to turn the radio on and make us some more tea on the little burner the girls had rigged up in the corner of their room.

  ‘Why did you join the AIF?’ she said once she was settled back on the bed next to me.

  ‘Because I was too good-looking for the Air Force,’ I said.

  She smiled and I noticed the way it made dimples in the middle of her cheeks.

  ‘Did they chuck you out because of some girl?’

  I
decided to tell her the truth, or most of it.

  ‘I went on a bender with Nigel Rutherford after my first solo flight and broke my ankle falling off a stolen motor bike, so I missed out on graduating.’

  ‘Who’s Nigel Rutherford?’ she said.

  ‘A bloke I knew back then,’ I said. ‘A navigator. He’s in England now, right in the thick of things.’

  Her smile faded and she regarded me with her usual solemnity.

  ‘Does it worry you,’ she said, ‘the idea of fighting?’

  I wasn’t prepared for this. It was a fair enough question but so unexpected that I almost laughed.

  ‘I didn’t crash the bike deliberately,’ I said. ‘If that’s what you mean.’

  May watched me over the rim of her cup as she sipped her tea.

  ‘It’s just that you seem so nervous all the time,’ she said. ‘It’s like you’re afraid someone’s going to blame you.’

  ‘Blame me for what?’ I said. I was trembling by then, and my cheeks were on fire.

  ‘Whatever it is you’re hiding,’ she said in a hushed voice, as if we were plotters in some conspiracy.

  I can’t explain the bond that formed between me and May at that moment but I think I felt it more intensely because I was so friendless at the time, and because mention of Nigel and my time in the Air Force had only served to remind me how lonely and miserable I was in the army. It seemed the most punishing way a person could live, being marched up and down all day in the blazing sun and lectured on a dozen different ways to kill a man and make him stay dead. If I thought about actual warfare and what it would be like to put all this theory into practice, I realised why I’d always preferred the idea of bombing the enemy from a great height to the idea of meeting him face to face and stabbing him in his warm guts with my bayonet.

  ‘Are you calling me a coward?’ I said.

  ‘I couldn’t care less if you are or not,’ she said. ‘I just don’t want to lose you.’

  It was the kindest thing anyone had said to me in months and, to my eternal shame, I burst into tears and sat slumped against the wall snivelling and whining and feeling unbearably sorry for myself. May hugged me and stroked my hair and told me how she thought if I was killed in the war or taken prisoner she would feel like her life was over too. And that was when she told me she loved me and I kissed her properly for the first time, without feeling at all self-conscious or shy.

  Of course I regret now that I didn’t put a stop to things immediately; that way I could have saved us both a lot of pain. My only excuse is that back then I was too ignorant to think any harm could come from simply following the girl’s lead and giving her what she seemed to want, even if my own desires went largely unanswered. Moreover, the way I saw it I owed May for having rescued me right at the point when I thought the army might be doing me irreparable damage. It helped that she was nineteen, two years older than me, and also that she was the motherly type.

  Katherine had already warned me about what was going to happen next.

  ‘She’s always picking up waifs and strays,’ she said. ‘She takes them home and fattens them up and in a few weeks they’re unrecognisable.’

  ‘Do I look worried?’ I said.

  ‘Not worried enough,’ said Katherine. She didn’t like me very much. According to May, Katherine had decided I had tickets on myself.

  When May told me this I laughed because it was exactly the same thing my father had always said about me.

  ‘I was an arrogant little upstart,’ I said, mimicking my father’s fury at something I’d done or not done, ‘who didn’t know his place, and I was either in for a very rude awakening indeed, or I was going to get my comeuppance.’

  ‘Poor Arthur,’ said May.

  I told her not to feel sorry for me.

  ‘He actually did me a favour,’ I said. ‘He showed me what I was up against. It doesn’t always follow that parents love their children, or that husbands love their wives, because sometimes they don’t. Sometimes love has nothing to do with it.’

  May didn’t believe me. She shook her head to indicate that I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  ‘My family is everything to me,’ she said. ‘And I know they’re going to love you.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said.

  And I did, for my sake more than for May’s, because if they didn’t, and she was forced to choose between her family and me, she might abandon me as suddenly as she’d saved me.

  There is no joy for me in recalling any of these feelings now because they were of no real help to me once Stanley showed up in the middle of the night dripping wet from the rain. After that I was lost, my lack of character confirmed, all of my good intentions regarding May and her loving family abandoned in favour of my new fascination for a Jap boy I’d only just clapped eyes on. And worse was to come, because I reasoned that this needn’t matter, that nobody need know about my change of heart, since self-preservation dictated I keep it a secret—a philosophy I’ve stuck by ever since. It was as if my father’s dark predictions had all come true, though not in the way he’d envisaged. My long-awaited comeuppance had arrived. I was tempted to telephone home to let my father know how a Jap runaway had helped me see the light, and I would have, if I hadn’t made a vow some months before to never, ever speak to him again.

  3

  The day after the storm Stanley slept, and the day after that. Matron Conlon had prescribed him bed rest and three square meals a day, and he behaved like a model patient. I, on the other hand, was a terrible disappointment to her since I still couldn’t keep my food down properly. Every time I ate something my stomach heaved and my headaches returned so I was placed on a child’s diet of pureed vegetables and warm milk. Nevertheless, I managed to keep an eye on Stanley just as Matron Conlon had asked me to, hanging in the doorway of the reading room so I had a clear view of his bed. Occasionally I would replenish his water or help him to the toilet. Then I’d sit in the chair beside him and watch him drift back to sleep again. It was as though the effort to keep his eyes open for any longer than a few minutes was too much for him. He would do his best, even trying to make small talk, but then the lids would lower over his brown eyes and he would be dead to the world.

  I knew when he was dreaming: I would look up from my book and he would be murmuring something under his breath, his facial expressions turning frightened and comically sombre in turns. Sometimes it was hard to know whether he was asleep or awake during these dreams because his eyes would open halfway and he would say things that almost made sense. I’m not a Jap, he said once, which struck me as funny. Once he cried real tears in his sleep and called out someone’s name. I only knew it was a name because it ended with san, and I’d learned by then to recognise that word along with a few others some kids had taught me.

  I say his eyes were brown, but actually they were golden. With the sun shining directly into them they glowed like pools of honey and you could see the tiny flecks of green in them that seemed to have no business being there. Most Japs had dark eyes all identically shaped, I thought, so that I still found it hard to tell them apart or to read their emotions with any confidence. They didn’t like to look at you anyway.

  I’d noticed this with the kids who’d been to Japan for their schooling, as a lot of them had, especially the boys. Out of all the kids in the camp, numbering around two hundred, there were forty or so who’d been sent home to family members back in Japan at some point in their lives. For this reason they had different manners and gestures from the rest of them. They would refuse to see you, even though you could be talking right at them. I assumed this was something they’d been taught, although now I wonder if a lot of them weren’t merely shy. At the time, however, it struck me as impolite and I made it my business to tell them to meet my gaze and answer me clearly whenever I asked a question. I still thought it was my business to reform them. I believed that they were in need of instruction in the superior culture of men like me, who’d had the great good fortune to
be born British subjects.

  My youth and arrogance back then ensured that I lived by this ridiculous creed even after the British Empire had expired so spectacularly. It was many years before I realised the significance of Singapore’s fall, and many more years before I came to understand how fatuous my basic assumptions about the world had been up until that point. We’d all been lied to of course, the Japs included. They’d believed in their lies and we’d believed in ours. Stanley was the only person I’d ever met who appeared to believe in nothing at all but his own talent for survival.

  I quizzed Matron Conlon relentlessly, firing questions about Stanley at her every time she came to check on him.

  ‘Did he go to school in America?’ I said.

  ‘I expect so,’ said Matron Conlon.

  I showed her the contents of his suitcase. He’d carried at least thirty books back from Ballarat as well as letters and souvenirs from abroad.

  ‘Is the family pleased he’s come back?’ I said.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Matron Conlon. ‘It was them who moved heaven and earth to get him out of here. Wrote back and forth to the government for months. Got the camp commandant to plead their case.’

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘Because all of the kiddies are wasting their days here when they should be getting proper schooling,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen that for yourself.’

  It hadn’t occurred to me that this was what the kids were doing until Matron pointed it out to me. Even so I couldn’t muster a great deal of sympathy for them. I took it for granted that the point of being an enemy alien was that you be deprived of all the rights of ordinary citizens.

  ‘Are they all circus people?’ I said. I’d seen the circus posters in Stanley’s suitcase, as well as a scrapbook full of newspaper cuttings, some with photographs in them featuring Stanley as a small boy smiling out of a row of performers.

  ‘All the men,’ she said. ‘Not his mother. She was a farm girl, an arranged match I gather.’