Nightingale

by Fiona McIntosh

  ‘Stupid bugger. Don’t you know that every fella needs a girl dreaming about him when he goes off to war? And who are you going to dream of? Your granny?’ Spud chortled. ‘Come on, Heartthrob. Let’s at least make these girls happy with us,’ he said, cocking his head towards the horses.

  It had been a wet Christmas Day and the camp had turned into a mud pool; the humid conditions of New South Wales were an unpleasant contrast to the dry summer of the Flinders Ranges. They discovered they were both South Australians and footy lovers and shared a loathing of each other’s clubs. It’s all they needed in common to become best mates. Jamie had started calling his new pal by an appropriate nickname and Spud had done the same for him, although Jamie could wish his was anything but the one Spud had given him.

  Spud was talking footy now, he realised. ‘. . . didn’t lose a single match last year, Heartthrob, just you remember that. And then you make sure you recall last year’s Grand Final when your blokes gave it up like the ladies they are.’ Before Jamie could respond, his friend had added, ‘Champions of Australia, mate.’

  Jamie sighed. ‘Guess there’s no one to play in any matches this year,’ he noted, offering Spud the jam that his mum had sent in a parcel.

  Spud pulled a spoon out of his pocket and dug it into the tin, then smeared jam onto a half slice of stale bread that he produced from another pocket. ‘They may play this year but I reckon they’ll have to suspend the comp after it.’ He bit into his breakfast, speaking as he chewed. ‘There’ll be no teams, no crowd – we’ll all be dead.’

  ‘Don’t be morbid, Spud. I plan to survive.’

  ‘You will, Heartthrob. Not me. I’ve been unlucky all my life.’ He didn’t sound bitter. ‘These bastard flies,’ he spat. ‘I’m eating them now.’

  ‘It’s all these corpses. We’ve got to do something about it.’

  ‘I am,’ Spud said. ‘I’ve made a bet with Swampy. You know Johnny Turk on that bush, whose face is turned our way?’

  Jamie blinked.

  ‘Well, I reckon he’ll be purple by tomorrow but Swampy reckons it’s a couple of days yet. I’ve got my last bit of tobacco riding on that one. Knackers is happy to lay down his new fruit cake from home that he’ll be black in four days.’

  It was a macabre pastime but the gallows humour helped to not only pass the hours between surviving to another dawn, but keep the fear of death or terrible injury away . . . and the increasing thirst. It wasn’t the pathetic lack of food that got the men down so much as the spartan supply of water. Jamie was sure that if you offered the men a dixie of fresh water to a loaf of bread or pot of boiled potatoes, they’d take the water each time. But the water had to be sailed in, hauled up the cliffs in carts and then hand-carried in pots by soldiers, dodging machine-gun strafing and sniper bullets. He began to wonder how they were ever going to manage when the summer really kicked in. The worst months beckoned; dysentery was rife and surely going to get worse. Poor Kenny Pidgeon was sleeping by the latrines, his running belly was so bad. He’d lost perhaps two stone already and was too weak to make the journey over the ravines to the medical officer. Jamie had shared his water rations with the ailing man yesterday. Spud hadn’t approved, giving him a lecture that every man must take care of himself first. Jamie didn’t bother arguing that he’d been raised differently. If Kenny didn’t improve over the course of today, he was going to carry the sick man to the medical tent on the beach.

  He pointed towards no-man’s-land. ‘Those bodies are going to make us all sick. It’s why the flies are so thick.’

  ‘There’s talk of clearing them,’ Spud shrugged.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, I heard about it during my crap. They’re hoping to organise some sort of truce. The lieutenant called it, um, an armistice. Guess we’ll hear about that soon enough. Is it time yet?’

  Jamie glanced at his pocket watch. ‘Few more minutes,’ he said, in no hurry to go on sniper duty.

  ‘Enough time for another cuppa if one’s going,’ Spud said.

  As his friend left, Jamie nodded and carefully returned his father’s watch to the safety of a pocket. The old man had given it to him when they’d driven their horse and cart to Quorn in the mid-north of South Australia and the railway line that would take him into Adelaide. They’d had to overnight at the large Transcontinental Hotel across from the station and Jamie recalled the packed public bar, brimful of laughing young men, all of them heading in the same direction as him, most of them standing with male members of their family. It had felt strange to be alone with his father amidst the laughter and jollity and he was unsure of what to say. His father sipped his drink quietly, standing at the furthest end of the bar, neatly licking the creamy froth of the cold beer from his lips.

  ‘You’ll be all right, won’t you, Dad?’

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ he answered in his usual dry tone. ‘You go do your duty. You can pick right up where you left off. Fencing repairs never end, as you well know.’

  Jamie nodded, sipped his beer mournfully, wishing he could share in the fun of the others around him or drag a smile from his father . . . some show of emotion.

  ‘How was your young lady?’

  Jamie looked up, surprised by the question. ‘Oh, you know, she likes the idea that I’m going to be in a Light Horse Regiment but she’s not happy about having to wait.’ He gave a single shoulder shrug. ‘I mean about getting engaged. She isn’t fussed about the ring yet, but says she wants to tell everyone that we are planning to get married.’

  ‘Does she make you happy?’

  Jamie hesitated. This was a most unusual conversation to be having with his father.

  ‘Does she make you laugh?’ his father continued. ‘Do you think about her when you should be thinking about your tasks? Does the sun remind you of her smile, the wheat fields of her hair?’ He poked Jamie’s chest lightly. ‘Does it hurt in here when you are apart?’

  He met his father’s hard stare and knew it was a moment for honesty and still he couldn’t give it. ‘I don’t know.’

  William Wren’s mouth twitched, the vaguest of smiles beneath his bushy moustache. ‘No need to rush in then, son. How did you leave it?’

  ‘I said it was best to wait until the war was over. See how we both feel.’

  His elder nodded. ‘You’ll have seen plenty by then and no doubt be changed by it. You’ll know yourself a lot better.’

  His father’s remark sounded cryptic but he was clearly speaking from experience, having served in the Boer War. Jamie had let the comment sit between them until his father’s beer glass was empty. He drained his own.

  ‘Right,’ Wren senior said, glancing at his pocket watch that Jamie never saw him without, except when he pulled on a nightshirt and turned in and then it sat at his bedside, ticking away the hours to 5 a.m. when his father habitually rose to beat the worst heat of the day. ‘We might as well go to the platform. The train is about ten minutes away.’

  It was as though their movement towards the pub’s door was infectious because a stream of men began to flow behind them in the direction of the weatherboard station and its platform. Women in their Sunday best long dresses and broad-brimmed hats were standing beneath the shade of the huge Moreton Bay fig in the forecourt, more out of habit than need, for it was not a hot day. He could hear an occasional soft sigh of laughter but mainly the women were subdued.

  He’d followed his father around onto the platform, checking he had his ticket, which they’d bought the previous evening, safely stashed in his pocket. People gathered beneath the verandah awning and he could hear last snatches of advice from fathers to sons, while the womenfolk predictably began to drag out handkerchiefs. His mother had offered to make the journey to Quorn but Jamie had preferred to enjoy a final family meal in the home he’d been born in and to remember his tall, slim mother in her apron, near the stove, forever producing delicious food from her range for her five hungry men.

  It had been backslaps and fierce handshaking from
his elder brothers, who made jokes about the French women who were going to fall in love with him, reminding him to keep score of the hearts he broke and the Germans he killed. He’d ruffled his youngest brother’s hair before going out on the verandah to watch him ride off to school, his dog Bingo chasing after him, barking.

  Finally it was just him and his mum. They’d stood by the large, scrubbed pine table in their kitchen. After the activity of a noisy breakfast, all he could remember hearing in that wrenching moment of farewell was the solid tick of the clock above the mantelpiece surrounding the Metters wood stove; the clock seemed to be marking time with his heartbeat as he reached for his slouch hat, signalling it was time to leave. His mother had wiped her hands nervously on her apron as he stepped forward to hug her. She had accepted his squeezing embrace, hung on to him far longer than she normally would when saying goodbye, and when his mother finally let him go she had reached out to caress his face. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so openly affectionate, but her large brown eyes were damp and he realised she was smiling with an effort.

  ‘Now you take care of yourself, Jamie Wren. And you come home to us?’

  He nodded, swallowing away the sudden claustrophobic sensation in his throat.

  ‘I need you to promise me,’ she insisted.

  ‘I promise, Mum. I’ll come home.’

  ‘Not in a box, mind. It will be all my birthday gifts for the rest of my life to see you walk through that door.’ Laura Wren had stepped back then, her hands gripping his arms that were slack either side of his broad chest. She nodded, as though fixing a final image of him in her mind as she shifted a swatch of his mid-brown hair to get a better look at his eyes, which she’d said on occasion reminded her of unshelled macadamias, the delicious nuts that she’d only eaten once but had never forgotten, their richness encased in burnished green-brown shells. ‘You’re a good boy, Jamie. Don’t fall for some French girl, either. We need you here.’

  Curiously, saying goodbye to the one border collie not working this morning was the hardest farewell of all for Jamie. She leapt up from where she’d been waiting patiently since breakfast, and gave him her special grin, mouth open, tongue lolling, tail thumping the boards. He’d won her as a pup at the local tombola night three years earlier. William Wren had said if he was going to bring home another mouth to feed, he’d better make her earn her keep and so Jamie had been given the task of training the fluffy black-and-white pup that simply wanted to chew everything or sleep. She was so small he called her Pipsqueak. Years on she had become a valuable working dog, one of their best, but from today she’d have to get used to his brothers issuing her commands. Her expressive, chocolatey eyes suggested that she already knew.

  ‘I’ll be gone a while, Pippy.’ She panted her understanding and stroked a paw across his bended knee. He took it, gave her a scratch beneath her chin and then leaned to kiss her head, glad his father wasn’t around to see it. ‘Look after them all, Pippy, and watch out for those snakes in the tall grass, all right?’

  He’d got lost in his memory of farewell and it was his father being hailed by another man that dragged him back to the present. William Wren was shaking hands and nodding at Jamie. His companion cocked a thumb over a shoulder to where another young man was kicking at a stone, among a group of women. Jamie didn’t want to talk to anyone or be introduced. He suspected his father had already guessed this.

  He let his gaze be drawn to the north where his family lived and stared at the tracks that ran across the dry, rusted earth and tricked his eye into believing they met at the base of the range, purple in the distance with highlights of gold slashes. It was as though a careless painter had daubed odd splotches of yellow paint and yet he knew those he loved were beyond that rise of craggy hills where the scudding drifts of frothy clouds seemed to part right where his family’s property was. A small misshapen oblong of piercing blue sky opened right above where he pictured the homestead, Bingo probably barking at a sleepy lizard from his vantage on the wide, shady verandah.

  He heard his father clear his throat and blinked away from his sentimental thoughts. The other fellow had drifted away and William Wren was pushing something into Jamie’s hands.

  ‘You’ll need this,’ he said brusquely.

  Jamie had stared at it, confused. ‘Won’t you?’

  His father had shaken his head. ‘I can tell the time from the sun.’

  ‘So can I.’

  ‘Not to the minute and you’re going to need this to make sure you keep good time for when you’re on duty.’

  ‘Dad, it’s precious. Too —’

  ‘I won it playing cards.’

  Jamie remembered now how shocked he’d been to hear this. ‘I thought . . .’

  ‘Yeah, well, you know what Thought did, son. It’s not mine. Originally belonged to a fellow called Bailey. He was a good man, useless at cards, though, and best he lost to me because I was his mate during the war. I always intended to give it back but he took a bullet to the belly from an Afrikaner musket.’ Jamie remembered how his father’s voice had taken on an uncharacteristically wistful tone.

  Jamie weighted the silver watch in his hand now, recalling how it had felt then on the station platform, with the pressure of his father’s hand on top of it. ‘It kept me safe and now it’s going to keep you safe and bring you home to your mother. She knows you have to go, son, but it doesn’t make it any easier for her.’

  ‘How about you, Dad?’ he’d found the courage to ask as the train wheezed into the station and everybody seemed to move at once.

  ‘I’ll be fine. Your brothers can manage.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant —’

  ‘I know what you meant,’ his father interrupted in a gruff voice, fixing him with a stare. In that pause Jamie understood that even this conversation was hard for him and about as close as Jamie might ever get to revealing William Wren’s closely guarded emotions. ‘Take the watch. Keep your head down. I know you’ll make the Wren name count for something over there.’

  Whistles had blown and doors had begun slamming closed. His father hadn’t hugged him, but he’d shaken his hand tightly and hadn’t let go quickly, William’s lips thin and working hard to keep all words contained behind them. Jamie had turned and felt his father squeeze his neck gently in the way he used to when Jamie had been a boy. The affection in that heartbeat had been unmistakable.

  ‘OP time, mate,’ Spud said, kicking his boot and dragging him fully into the present. ‘When you write next, tell your mum I love her jam.’

  All the men took regular turns at the observation post at the parapet. Their only defence was sandbags at the lip and the Turks had the high ground, so periscopes were their only way of assessing the enemy camp.

  ‘Come on, let’s head to the shooting step. See if we can’t catch us a couple of Turks.’

  Jamie buttoned the watch away and with it his memories as he fell in step. Swampy and Dickie Jones pushed in front of Spud.

  ‘Hey!’ Spud said, shoving Swampy.

  ‘Let them go. Age before beauty, eh?’ Jamie mocked.

  ‘Beauty was a horse, mate,’ Jones chortled.

  ‘Oh, so you can read, Jones? That’s a surprise,’ Jamie remarked.

  Just then a bullet cracked into the sandbags above Spud. ‘I swear they can see me,’ he growled.

  Impossible though it seemed to Jamie, the smell of decaying corpses was even worse here than further back in the trench they’d just navigated. The zigzag design hadn’t made sense at first but it soon became evident that if the Turks did overwhelm one end of the trench, the enemy couldn’t see past more than a few feet.

  These tiny salients, jutting out into no-man’s-land, cut so close at times to the enemy trench that they could hear the Turks talking. He’d heard rumours that in other places the trenches were close enough to touch a Turk’s head. It made no sense if you could shake hands with your enemy. Was there any point to this war? One fellow from the opposing trench,
with some sort of penny whistle, was beginning to play his instrument alongside Jamie’s harmonica most evenings. It made beautiful, haunting music and the pipe’s mellow timbre complemented Jamie’s melodies; its owner was clearly adept, weaving lovely notes and trills around the mouth organ’s slow, sad meanderings.

  ‘Play us a jolly tune,’ Swampy was always asking but Jamie didn’t seem inclined. It didn’t feel right to him, given how many dead lay all around them. But the Turkish piper and he understood one another, and their combined breath wove songs of regret and sorrow that did feel right on behalf of the fallen.

  Jamie watched Dickie Jones take a trench-fashioned periscope, which comprised a broken piece of shaving mirror attached to a length of timber, and gingerly position it just above the parapet. Swampy meanwhile took position on the fire step with the trench’s single periscope rifle and began sighting through it. Spud was standing right below them, giving Swampy a bit of a baiting.

  Jamie tuned out and began to wonder if his father secretly worried about his middle son’s safety. Maybe his mother had been right all along that his father loved his sons as much as she did. He just doesn’t know how to show it to you boys, she’d said on several occasions.

  Jamie heard the sound of the shell arriving but barely had a couple of seconds to register that Spud and the others couldn’t. In that heartbeat of realisation, death arrived laughing at them. The explosion rocked the land around them like the jellies his mother used to unmould on his summertime birthday in February, arriving quivering to the table in a rainbow of colours that were now echoed in his dazed vision. His sight cleared into the stunned silence that followed the explosion before sound too gradually filtered back and so did his wits.

  He was buried to his shoulders and most of this end of the trench, where they’d been joshing just seconds earlier, had entirely collapsed. He could taste the sand from the bags, spitting and coughing, and as he blinked away the initial stupor he realised he was staring straight at the sightless eyes of Swampy. He could see his mother’s apricot jam still clinging to the side of Swampy’s slack mouth, except his body was no longer attached at the shoulders. Meanwhile the slumped form of Dickie Jones, still holding his periscope, was in the near distance.