by Cory Taylor
‘There’s a lot to be said for older women,’ said Bryant.
McMaster was gathering up the cards. He stared contemptuously at Bryant over the top of them.
‘You can’t help yourself can you,’ said McMaster.
‘Not if it’s on offer,’ said Bryant.
‘That includes taking advantage of a woman who is mentally unstable?’ said McMaster.
‘She made up for it in other ways,’ said Bryant, taking a long drink of rum then sloshing some more into everyone else’s glasses. As he put the bottle down he looked straight at me and grinned. ‘It’s all those acrobatic tricks she learned in the circus.’
Donohue leaned across to me grinning. ‘You missed a bit of drama the other night,’ he told me. ‘Stanley’s mother showed up on the doorstep here with hardly any clothes on. Asking for Bryant.’
‘Riley told me,’ I said, even though he hadn’t. My stomach churned as if I was about to be sick.
‘Bet you he didn’t tell you what happened next,’ said Donohue.
‘I don’t want to know,’ I said. I was having trouble staying in my seat. The night was chilly but I’d broken out in a sweat inside my uniform.
‘She was an eight,’ said Bryant, running his tongue along his top teeth and sucking his breath in at the same time.
I don’t really know what happened next. I must have jumped up and thrown my whole weight at Bryant because he fell back in his chair and knocked his head on the floor and suddenly there was blood all over his shirt and he was screaming at me, calling me a fucking faggot cunt and swinging at me with his fists. He landed a few cracking punches before McMaster and Donohue managed to pull him off me and after that I passed out. I woke up half an hour later in the infirmary with a fractured collarbone and a broken nose and a right eye that refused to open. It was a miracle, Matron Conlon told me, that I hadn’t lost it altogether.
Bryant was apparently even worse off. He hadn’t fully recovered after banging his head—he kept vomiting and lapsing in and out of consciousness—so they’d trucked him all the way to Bendigo to have him looked after there. I was glad, although I didn’t tell that to Matron Conlon because I knew she didn’t approve of violence.
‘He had it coming,’ was all I said, before she told me to stop talking and get some rest.
For the next couple of days I lay in bed and waited for Stanley to come and see me. When he failed to show up I fell into a state of such dejection that even Matron Conlon could no longer stand it.
‘I suppose you’re missing your sweetheart,’ she said to me on the third evening. She was changing the dressing on my damaged eye. ‘Would you like me to telephone and tell her you’re on the road to recovery?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She’ll only worry.’
‘I hear you’re getting married,’ she said.
I nodded.
‘You’re too young if you ask me,’ she said.
A lump rose in my throat and my chin started to tremble. Matron Conlon cupped my face in her hands.
‘I think you need to tell me what’s going on,’ she said, staring hard at me out of her rheumy eyes. ‘What on earth convinced you to take on the likes of Bryant? The man’s built like an ox.’
‘I wasn’t thinking,’ I said.
She let go of my face and finished bandaging my eye, then patted the top of my head as if I was a much younger boy.
‘There are easier ways to get out of the army,’ she said. ‘You’re lucky you’re not up on a criminal charge.’
‘Can you get a message to Stanley?’ I said, blurting it out. It had occurred to me that I may not have a chance to see him again if things turned out badly with Bryant.
‘Sure I can try,’ she said.
Stanley appeared in my doorway the following day. I was climbing back into bed after a trip to the toilet—taking it in stages, like an old man.
‘You want a hand?’ he said.
He was dressed up, in a tie and a lightweight grey suit that was one size too big for him. He wore a pair of filthy sandshoes. My first instinct was to cross the room and put my arms around him, but there was another patient in the six-bed ward, an asthmatic named Ryan, and I was afraid he might see us.
‘No thanks,’ I said. I settled myself under the covers and motioned for Stanley to come closer. ‘Shut the door,’ I said.
He kicked the door closed and came over to stand beside me.
‘What happened to you?’ he said.
‘I cut myself shaving,’ I said. I didn’t want to tell him about my fight with Bryant, or what had provoked it.
He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one.
‘Thanks,’ I said. He lit both cigarettes at once and handed one to me. All the time I was trying to control the urge to take hold of his hand.
‘I guess this is goodbye,’ he said, flashing me a ravishing smile.
‘I’m not dying,’ I said. ‘Just wounded in action.’
‘I can’t stay long,’ he said, turning his head away. I admired his smooth jaw and the line of his chin.
‘Why not?’ I said.
I didn’t want him to leave. I wanted him to climb into my bed so I could lie with him the same way I had before. I wanted him to kiss me again on the cheek.
‘Compound meeting,’ he said.
‘What about?’
‘The latrines. It’s always about the latrines.’
He took a couple of long drags on his cigarette before he spoke again.
‘How was Melbourne?’
‘Fine.’
‘I was wondering if you’ve read anything, or heard anything,’ he said.
‘What about?’
‘Closing the camp,’ he said.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘But if I do I’ll let you know.’
He turned to face me. His smile had vanished. He put his hand over the top of mine and stared at me with such heart-stopping earnestness I thought I would faint.
‘I’ll always remember you,’ he said. ‘I want you to know that.’
He leaned over and brushed his lips against mine. ‘Sayonara,’ he said.
I tried to stop him from walking away. I struggled out of bed and followed him to the door, grabbing hold of his jacket and tugging to slow him down, but he was too quick for me and he shrugged me off. Just as he opened the door into the reading room Matron Conlon appeared on her way out of her office. She looked at Stanley, then at me standing behind him, tears brimming in my one good eye.
‘I told you to cheer him up,’ she said.
Stanley didn’t say a word. He marched out past her office and turned the corner into the laundry. I heard the tin door slam behind him.
‘Get some slippers on,’ said Matron Conlon.
I stared down at my bare feet.
‘I don’t want you catching pneumonia on top of everything else.’ She stepped forward, put her arm around my waist, and guided me back to my bed.
‘Are you two still friends?’ she said, tucking me in.
I couldn’t bring myself to answer her.
Eventually, when my eye became infected, I was sent away from Tatura to a veterans’ hospital in Heidelberg, where May visited me every other day and lectured the doctors on how to save my sight.
My army career ended as ignobly as it had begun, with me laid up in yet another hospital bed contemplating this latest demonstration of my poor character. When my dishonourable discharge came through at the end of October I showed the papers to May and told her I would understand if she wanted to change her mind about us getting married. But May just folded the papers and told me she didn’t give a damn what the army said about me.
‘I’m glad you’re out of that place,’ she said. ‘Now you can forget about the war and start to live your life.’ She proceeded to tell me how the wedding plans were shaping up and how I would need to get fitted for a suit as soon as I was out of hospital.
‘I’ve already got you a shirt,’ she said. ‘I bought it the same time as I bought Ian’s.’
‘I’m sorry for being so useless,’ I said. ‘I haven’t even bought you a ring.’
‘We can choose one together,’ she said.
As soon as my army pay came through I gave it to her to cover the cost, except that even then I had to borrow an extra hundred pounds from May’s father to get her the ring she wanted.
‘I’m very grateful,’ I told Mr Forbes at the wedding. ‘I owe you a great deal.’
‘Don’t you forget it,’ he said.
His eyelids fluttered as he gazed across the heads of all the wedding guests. Ian stood beside him in a shirt that matched mine but was considerably bigger. A loud, brash man, he was as gregarious as his father was reticent.
I asked Ian if there was any advice he could give me. ‘You’ve known May a lot longer than I have,’ I said.
He chuckled and took a sip of his beer. ‘She’s an open book,’ he said. ‘What you see is what you get. And then some.’ He made a gesture over his own considerable paunch to make fun of May’s ballooning belly.
May appeared from behind me and linked her arm through mine. She’d changed out of her voluminous wedding dress into something low-cut and blousy that showed off her milky bosoms. ‘What lies are you telling him about me?’ she asked her brother.
‘I’m just telling him what a child you are,’ said Ian.
May beamed up at me and clung even tighter to my arm. ‘That’s why I need a big strong man to look after me,’ she said.
‘Where?’ I said, glancing around me as if I was looking for someone. ‘Is he in the room?’
Of course I meant it as a joke and everyone laughed. But at the same time I was only putting into words what I really felt. I’d married May for a number of reasons, but none of them had anything to do with feelings of power or adequacy.
‘Bad boy,’ said May, pinching me on the cheek. ‘I might just call the whole thing off.’
‘Too late now,’ I said.
I wrote to Stanley at the beginning of December to tell him how sorry I was that I hadn’t been able to see him again before leaving the camp.
They turfed me out of the army while I was still in the hospital. McMaster sent me my things, so I have your stories. Please let me know if you’d like me to return them to you at any time, or if there is anything else you would like me to get for you. I will try my best to help you in any way I can. I’m living with my wife’s family at the moment but from next month May and I will be moving to a new place. Please write, Arthur.
And then I printed out the address of the house that Mr Forbes had bought for May and me to live in. It was two streets away from Ian’s truck depot in Hawthorn.
Before I posted the letter I included a photograph I’d taken of Stanley and some of the kids all gathered around the net on the tennis court at Tatura. I wrote Always in my thoughts on the back and slipped it into the envelope before taking the letter down to the post box at the end of the street on my way to work. Ian had hired me to drive deliveries around the city, mostly furniture for offices and shops, occasionally heavy machinery for factories that were either closing down after the war or switching to civilian manufacturing.
I think that first Christmas with May and her family marked the beginning of my posthumous life, the one in which I was a new man, unrecognisable even to myself. There was nothing exceptional about this feeling of estrangement, this sense of suspended reality. Every man expecting his first child must feel that his life is about to become unfamiliar and difficult to chart. But added to that there was the sense that the aftermath of the war was likely to be cruel and prolonged. Owen had not come home and the exact manner of his death was still unknown. May continued to cry whenever his name was mentioned. At the same time as I grieved for her I also mourned for my own losses. I waited for news of Stanley like a dog waits to hear the sound of his master’s voice.
That was what I was doing on the occasions when May caught me out and asked me where I’d gone. I wish I could bring you back was how she put it, as if I was a man who’s heart has stopped beating.
‘I married you,’ I told her. ‘What more do you want?’
To which she always replied the same way. You, she said. I want you.
Of course I knew what she was getting at, never more so than on the day she gave birth to our son. I visited her in the hospital and she showed me the sleeping baby. My first thought was to bolt. I had a vision of myself fleeing the building and running all the way back to Tatura to tell Stanley it was a boy.
17
Stanley finally replied to my letter on May 16th, 1946, almost a year to the day since the first time I’d met him. I have kept this letter, along with the photographs of him I mentioned before, because it reminds me of how my life turned so suddenly to ruin on the day I received it.
Dear Arthur,
I don’t know if this letter will ever reach you but I must write to ask for you to help me. As you can see I am still in camp with my family but I am trying to get out so I can travel to Melbourne and meet you. My plan is to work for the Americans in Australia and after to go back to America where I know very well. Also I have a cousin in Chicago who is attending a college, which is my dream as I told you. Unfortunately I can convince nobody here at all. The authorities says I must stay with my family and depart back to Japan with them. But this is not my wish. I have no life in Japan and no money and no job and Japan is a ruined country as you know. I beg you to talk to Colonel Hollows and tell him you know my real character and that I am not a dangerous person.
Your true and faithful friend,
Stanley Ueno.
The letter was weeks late arriving. I didn’t finally receive it until late September after it had coursed through all the official channels before washing up on my doorstep like a bit of debris from a shipwreck. By then I was well advanced on the project of rehabilitating myself. Marriage was to have been the start of my new life—my chance, as the Forbes family put it, to settle down and build something solid and respectable. I knew they were right, just as I knew I could throw it all away at any moment, given a good enough excuse. In this sense Stanley’s letter was exactly what I’d been waiting for. I read it through three or four times while May was in the backyard hanging out the washing. I could see her through the kitchen window pegging my work shirts together in her methodical way, with their arms dangling down like dead men. By the time she’d lifted the empty wash basket onto her hip I was resolved to go.
I spent that day searching high and low for enough fuel to get me to Tatura, then I made my getaway the following morning, while May and Stuart were still asleep. Before I left I wrote my wife a note saying there was something I had to do. I’ll explain everything when I get back, I lied. I scribbled her name on the front then stuck the note under the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. The truck was parked out in the backyard. I threw my bag in the passenger side and climbed into the driver’s seat. Before I turned the ignition I sat for a while staring at the sleeping house and wondered, yet again, why I was like this. Other men stayed where they were and endured—that was the difference between them and me. For a whole year I’d tried to settle down and turn myself into a blameless family man, and by and large I’d succeeded. Except that my wife wasn’t a complete fool. For all the time we’d been married, and even before that, May had sensed I was faking.
‘Are you sorry we met?’ she said. It was one of those weekends soon after Stuart’s birth when we’d argued for two whole days—about small things: the lawn, the leaking bathroom tap, the baby’s refusal to sleep.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.
‘Sometimes it’s like you’re not even here,’ she said. She had Stuart in her arms. He was whining and flailing his arms and legs like a helpless beetle. ‘I mean you sit there in your chair but you’re miles away.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
She stood up and started to rock the baby violently.
‘I wish I knew how to reach you,’ she said.
I hid behind my newspaper. ‘I don’t have to listen to this,’ I said.
May tried her hardest to make me. Persistence was the principle she lived by. She’d married me against the advice of her parents just to prove a point. She was going to keep us together come hell or high water, because that would show how strong she was, and because she loved me, which was the really agonising part.
‘I loved you from the first moment I saw you,’ she told me. She said it so often it became a kind of joke between us.
I knew what that was like, because it had happened to me. It was like being upended all of a sudden, having your internal organs forcefully rearranged. I had only to remember the exact moment Stanley had taken his hat off in the hallway of the infirmary for my blood to halt in my veins.
‘Do you love me?’ she said.
I told her to stop asking me that. I said there were countries where the word for love was hardly spoken but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It was something I’d made up to impress her with my sophistication about these things. Why she didn’t slap me in the face I can’t imagine.
‘Do you love Stuart?’
‘That’s a ridiculous question,’ I said. ‘There isn’t a word that describes what I feel for Stuart.’
‘You never touch him,’ she said.
It was true. I wasn’t a demonstrative father. I preferred to watch the baby rather than to hold him, and sometimes, if he was in any pain or discomfort, I couldn’t even bear to watch him. But this was not from a lack of love. It was from a fear that I might damage him.
Years later Stuart would always swear that he could remember the day I left him. He said he’d woken in his cot and watched through the window as I drove away. But I never believed him. I told him his mother must have filled him in on the gruesome details way after the event, because he’d only been a baby at the time.
‘I refused to sleep in my cot after that,’ he said. ‘I would only sleep in her bed.’
‘That’s your story,’ I laughed, meaning to make things easier between us. Except that my attempts at humour never worked. He didn’t find anything amusing about my desertion. For him it would always be a betrayal, whereas for me it went beyond that. That I was so eager to sacrifice my family for Stanley’s sake went to the very heart of my madness back then.
