by Derek Beaven
‘Quite,’ said the captain. ‘I was torpedoed myself. In the Atlantic. But the less said about that, frankly …’
She forced another morsel of food between her lips, but her throat resisted. She thought she heard Robert’s voice seeking her out through the noise and chatter of the tables. Not what it said, but the tone, a haunting, tender note in the lower clef that her ear was attuned to and waited for.
She looked back behind her at last, but could not see him. And she dared not continue so, craning her neck, staring.
‘How did you manage during the storm?’ Mary enquired of her. ‘It was maddening, wasn’t it? There was nothing anyone could do.’
‘I’m afraid the fresh air was the only thing keeping me afloat. That, and the horizon. As long as I could see what was going on I was all right.’
‘Didn’t trouble me at all.’ The young man at the end of the table spoke between them again. ‘I must be a naturally good sailor. By the way, I see from the papers the Italians have been up in the Himalayas looking for the abominable snowman. Once you start something, everyone wants to get in on the act, don’t they?’
At coffee, Penny wanted to ask Michael Canning, as of a father, about the endurance of love and the power of abstinence. Why, how it binds us together here, she suddenly thought: abstinence. Michael liked her, found her attractive. He flirted easily. He was boyish, charming, just out of range of his wife. It meant nothing. It meant nothing that he admired her bare neck and her bosom, set off by her best evening dress. She thought not of the snowman nonsense, but about an abstinent yogi, called into being by some earlier chance remark of Michael’s. She imagined him naked amid the Tibetan snows, eyes crossed and crazed, intent on melting the ice. On his forehead, in rare coloured earths, the design of the Union Jack.
Magic was what worked. She wanted the voyage to go on for ever, like a dream of the Sleeping Beauty. She wanted to go on to the deck and meet Robert, to talk under the stars, luxuriating in the savour of the strange Islamic town they had visited together only a few hours ago, as it rose off the flat, salt land. She had heard for the first time the muezzin.
I am a dangerous woman, she thought, on the instant. In future I shall cover myself up. She felt herself confused and for a moment floating.
Later, in her cabin, she tried the de Beauvoir, and put it aside. She spent some time staring at herself in the mirror, taking off her make-up. Then she opened her journal, designed, originally, as a surprise present for Hugh at the end of her journey. She was amazed to find herself write: I do not regard myself as the spoils of war.
She closed the book in a hurry and placed it under the mattress of the lower bunk as if to smother it; but it lay beneath her in the dark like a piece of pitchblende, refusing to keep shut up its dangerous emanations.
PART TWO
Cargo
20
AND NOW I have another memory that haunts me. It insists, and will not be put off – though it feels like an ending. Maybe under the skin of my whole account lies an invisible tattoo, done in hatred. Hatred is very dense, much heavier than gold, denser by far than lead. Where it lies compacted, the world’s story is altered. Its emissions are lethal.
And the memory I have is like a radiographer’s plate. It opens a flood of sorrow, a storm, shifting what we were carrying. The child I was seems to whisper directly in my ear. I begin to recognise myself as prime material, for Penny’s thoughts smack of my own world: armaments and men.
One year on then, my mother pulled back the thin curtains behind the settee. She would draw them across every afternoon. Otherwise the late sun through our wide veranda window made the room such an oven we could hardly breathe. Hugh Kendrick sat down. Over his shoulder I watched the big heatball beginning to redden above the crossing at the end of our street, where a freight train was trundling at walking pace. The street was made of hard mud, broad for a street, though beyond the railway lines it narrowed to a mere track. Our house occupied its own corner; the window looked straight down at the crossing’s alternating lights. Today the warning bell seemed loud and insistent enough to make almost no distance of the intervening two hundred yards. Neither did the train show any sign of coming to an end.
For hours the sky had plugged light into ground hard as rock. Now it was nearly evening. The street’s surfaces were turning to rouge and umber, and the low white fence strips made stark perspective lines. Set well back on plots to either side, the bungalows, cheaply built, crouched under tin overhangs. Their shadows had just now opened to the angled glare. But the straw-coloured yards seemed all the more scorched. Cleared only lately from the wild, the settlement looked flat and discouraged, like the vegetation, as if day were a fist.
On the T-shape of dirt roads outside our own front patch stood Hugh Kendrick’s borrowed car. It was a new Holden. Just over its saloon top the red lights on the crossing posts flashed side by side, backwards and forwards, reflecting in the shine. Meanwhile the bell clanged and the freight train’s wheels still rumbled their undernote. These endless hauls picked their way down from Alice Springs like iron caterpillars, and bang, banged each segment painfully over the joints. A couple of neighbouring dogs were barking incessantly, set off by the continuing alarm.
Hugh Kendrick was fingering the brim of his hat. His news was frightful. Their regular family car was destroyed; and with it their life. Backlit, his face was darkened. He had been in some hotel, drinking more than a little. I smelt it in the air he breathed out. Erica served tea from her jazzy red cane table, making little half-phrases. The din from outside sounded like my heart.
‘They were lovers, do you see. Can you believe that? Penny and this Robert Kettle. They met on the ship it seems, on the way out. They were lovers. Well. Perhaps you knew all along. Perhaps everyone on that damned … All the time I was waiting for her in Adelaide. All that time.’
Erica said nothing to engage him, placed the teapot and sat, fussily arranging her skirt.
For a moment Hugh’s horn-rimmed eyes rested on me. Then he continued: ‘I knew there was something wrong, of course, at first. The whole move would be a change, a shock. One makes allowances. Some readjustment was to have been expected. And men the …’ The vacancy filled the room. ‘But I thought we’d coped with all that. To be honest I believed the whole business was behind us. As far as I could see we were jogging along comfortably. Nice home. The two boys. New country. Time the great healer, eh? Out of the blue last week, she takes me car. Goes off with him, just like that. After all these months. It was a plan. They’d worked it out secretly, against me, against the boys. That’s what I can’t understand, you see. It’s not just for my own sake – a woman like that can bring the whole family down, can’t she?’ He looked up. ‘She left a note. They must have been meeting all along, of course. Behind my back. Keeping secrets, betraying me, acting the whole time as though she … It was found burnt out …’ And then he broke down, in the tone of a child about to cry: ‘It was found burnt out at Kingoonya. I bought that car before she came out. For my wife. For the family.’
‘Kingoonya?’ Erica repeated blankly.
Not far from our house ran the so-called Great North Road. Hugh’s gesture indicated through the wall that strip of fraying tar. ‘It’s three hundred miles up. Half-way to Alice. Where the Stuart turns you can go straight on. There’s a small town, no more than a way-station, really. Just past that. They must have driven her car – ours – off the road, splashed petrol from a can and set light to it. They didn’t mean to be found. They didn’t want to be traced.’ He took his hand off the hat to adjust his thick glasses.
‘Goodness. More tea? It must have been terrible for you.’ Erica had no idea, about anything it seemed.
He found his pipe. ‘D’you mind …?’
‘I don’t mind, of course. Mr Ch … My husband may be coming a little later.’ A hand to her curls. ‘I’m expecting a telegram any moment. He’s been away on business. On duty. The Pacific, you know. South Seas.’
; She had no idea. She was stupid deliberately, obsessed with her looks and her pretty blonde hair. It was her strategy. She still thought Chaunteyman would come good – that he adored her after all and meant what he said.
Hugh Kendrick licked dry lips, made a noise in his throat, and pressed his face with both hands, still holding the pipe. ‘It took a while for the military to notify … One burnt-out Holden looks very much like another.’
I had guessed we were to be abandoned here. We received money, and promises, with diminishing frequency. Surely Mr Chaunteyman had left the country for good. And us in it. I knew his heart – it was to be expected. In my view he stood smooth and revealed for the fork-tailed villain he was. I had conjured him up with my damned blue suitcase and look where it had landed us. We had been betrayed.
‘Do you see?’ Hugh Kendrick leaned and sipped again at his tea. The audible creak of iron brakes from the freight train. The heavy frenzy of the bell.
He lit up the pipe and puffed between bared teeth. ‘Penny, my wife, together with her lover …’ He spat the words. ‘They went on. They burnt the one car and went on in Kettle’s old station-wagon. With intent, do you see? An army transport driver came forward, once I raised the alarm. He reported seeing them. Passed them on the edge of the Prohibited Area. The testing grounds. It’s signposted quite clearly. The direction he gave could only mean they’d entered the contaminated zone. And that, I’m afraid, was the last …’ And he broke down again, quietly this time, into his hands. Clenched in his grip the pipe’s new-lit bowl smouldered close to his cheek.
It was not the first I had heard of my friends since the voyage. Erica and I had met the Kendricks once in the winter – when the nights might frost but the days were oddly warm. It was at some function at the Weapons Research, inside the wire. Mr Chaunteyman took us. Penny’s eyes had lit up with the sudden gleam of recognition: ‘Why, hallo! Surely you’re …? Didn’t we …? Good Lord! This is Hugh – my husband.’ But I was allowed hardly any time with her, and Robert was far away. I had to play outside with the children where the concrete backed up against the perimeter.
Now in the silence that followed Hugh Kendrick’s words, the image came to me of my two shipmates, sprawled at some dreadful noon in the Great Victoria Desert. I knew about the contamination. I had kept my ears open – at school, in the street, in delicatessens, those Australian milk bars. The testing grounds to the north were common knowledge. But with so many new lives and livelihoods dependent on the one industry there were no questions. We slept in a strange land far from home. Every now and then the desert visited us a little with a dust storm. Penny and Robert had gone up there – where the train had come from. They had exposed themselves to whatever had been done to the ground. And they had not come back.
And so for reasons of his own Hugh had traced our address and driven the half-hour from the Kendricks’ Adelaide home to this nowhere township. He wanted something from Erica. His eyes craved information, or absolution. Because we were all linked by the Armorica, the subject that was always dropped. We would tell him nothing.
Erica declared she was horrified. ‘We heard an item on the radio. I’d no idea it was someone we knew. If there’s anything I can do. Surely the authorities …’
Only yesterday Hugh had received a phone call at work. A spotter plane had sighted a likely vehicle. ‘Some of the military are going in. Soon. Protective clothing … But after all this time, I … Oh, God. I couldn’t stay in the house. And Robert Kettle would have known the country, been there once or twice. Some miles after Kingoonya there’s the army track that takes you all the way. Fall-out levels; he’d have known about it. People are kept away. Do you understand? They seem to have deliberately … He … But of course that wouldn’t kill them.’
‘No?’ Erica enquired. ‘Then they might be all right?’
‘We don’t know the effects. It isn’t the … radiation as such. That could even take years. We don’t know how it operates. We’ve no data, except Japan. What they’ve done, it’s a gesture. It’s just a stupid gesture. They’ve gone up there to … it’s so irresponsible!’ His anger burst through again. ‘Without water, the heat. There’s no settlement, no shelter, nothing. This isn’t England, you know. If they’re not found, the heat …’
‘We do know, Mr Kendrick,’ she said. ‘We know the outback is a killer. How long is it altogether?’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean … It’s been a week since that driver saw them. A week without water. I want to know why. I want to know what went on. The police said after so long there was very little likelihood, even if they’d had the sense to stay in the car …’
I am running out of my mother’s house. The fly-screen slaps shut behind me.
21
On the veranda I pause, gulping air, relieved to escape from the two of them. But I have come out unarmed, except for the sheath-knife at the back of my belt. Something substantial would be better. I possess my own rifle, nearly. Point two-two. ‘A guy at the base heard you were keen. I’ll bring it for you. Knock over a few rabbits, son, shall we? Soon?’ – Chaunteyman. But Erica is yelling for me. If I go back she will keep me there.
So I am out of the gate and running towards the tracks. Along past the unbuilt plot on the near corner. I could reach out and spike my hand on its thistles five foot high. They are thick, baked razor sharp, hard as wire. In my head clangs Hugh Kendrick’s phrase: ‘One burnt-out Holden is very much like another’.
A woman pushes a pram along the hard dirt at the other side of the road. Another stands in her yard taking down clothes from a drier. It is nearly six. Soon the hotel bars will close and the men arrive back in cars, an hour and a half’s cold beer on board. Beyond these fences lie lonely fields of scrub, a sea dried to zero. We are in a God-forsaken place, a ghetto for Pommie trash, I heard one Australian say. Hugh Kendrick traced us and has forced himself out here to find us. We feel awkward about his coming; we have been told not to talk about the ship. Erica hopes he will not notice the giant cracks already in our walls. The place is no place at all. I have a knot in my tongue.
I pass Garrity’s house as the last of the freight train hammers so desperately slowly at the crossing. Chaunteyman is uppermost in my mind. ‘It’s the new frontier, kid. Hey, Erica, the northern hemisphere’s played out. I feel out of sorts there, y’know. I’m a rover; what you call a free spirit. Even in the States a man like me can barely draw his breath any more. Take my word for it. A guy with a horizon in his eyes still. I want us to make a really new start. And a woman as beautiful as you has no business cooped up in that smoky little slum they call England.’ Trash.
Perhaps Mr Chaunteyman had hopes, believed what he told us. It does not matter. From this minute none of that matters. Penny and Robert are dead among the crows. That is why I am heading towards the exchanging red lights, the bang-clanging of the bell. I have no father. My mother’s face is cracking. There is no way home. It must be my fault. And at the hub of it all is the night of the ship. My heart foams with hatred.
I arrive breathless just as the conductor’s van has passed. It dwindles into the distance as I cross. Then I scamper to the garbage dump on the other side. At last the ringing leaves off.
The sun is very low, partially obscured. It leaks brilliant cloud-strips. The westward landscape is the colour of resin, and runs away quite flat. Trees are black outlines, here and there, and a solitary wind pump stands, dark-etched in the middle ground. Bits of sombre hedge mark off the distance.
It is the dump I have been seeking. Snakes live in the wrecked cars and Kelvinator fridges. There are rugs, oil drums, and rolls of grown-over chicken wire. Defunct furniture is heaped in mounds of ash and soil. ‘Snakes?’ people say. ‘It’s quite a habitation for them down there.’ I draw my knife. I am searching for the smashed car I and Garrity set up here just before Christmas – our crib.
Garrity has never seen television. I have educated him – the dump is our Colorado and I know intimately its infested range
s, mesas and canyons. But some days a truckman comes down to shift rubbish about, and bulldoze. So the bad lands might well have changed. The light is fading; quite soon it will be dark. All the familiar landmarks have disappeared. Walls of earth loom in unexpected scarps; there are ups, and drops, squeezed like volcanic folds. And wisps of dust blow in my eyes from the tops, for just now a breeze quickens. It is a strange pilgrimage, miniature and gritty, my trek across these stinking dunes.
Then, while I am in the central valley under a hang of car fronts, a cloud before the sun splits. The Rockies of chromium and rust on my left blaze up as if on fire. The dump is beautiful and terrible. It is the playground of children I am not supposed to mix with – and Erica has forbidden it me. Under blinding skies I have already searched it for treasures: imported American goods – prime among them a ripped wireless, half buried in earth and smelling of rot, which lies in my bedroom.
Up one of the steepest mounds there is the hint of a path. And, having gained enough height to command my private desert, I can rest a moment to see our township itself the other side of the tracks. Beyond that the eastern hills are genuine purple; they take the colour each evening, and stretch off towards Mount Lofty and Adelaide. But so beautiful, Erica says, the hills. And they are truly hard to believe, even after my whole year here, glowing like a tinted photograph. There, on the level plain before them, the freight train crawls south. It glints in the distance, running between the township and the Weapons Research Establishment, where the men go to work.
But with time and light failing, I can only resume my quest and search over the next ridge, sheath-knife in hand. I find at last the wreck my friend Garrity and I used for a ritual. Down in the dump’s trough it is directly in front of me, beyond an overturned utility van. It is a hulk: a fire-damaged Holden saloon with a bashed-in roof. There is nothing so special about that. In this country every car is a Holden of some kind; by and large, there is only one make. I think of identical shapes and configurations. Miles away to the north, Robert and Penny set fire to Hugh’s car. Further on still they are even now lying in Robert’s.
