by Murray Bail
• 21 •
Cameronii
IT WAS necessary to pass through patches of masculine behaviour. Accounts of physical courage were always difficult to ignore.
A military trench threw a deep shadow across his mind, ready and waiting for his use. Each scenario was an all-too-easily imagined situation, activating in slow-motion a rehearsal of his own possible behaviour. A matter of remaining quick and calm at the same time, often in mud. No sign of a woman anywhere, no fluttering of the soft cotton dress.
These post-mortems on violence could easily turn into stories of importance. Even reduced to fragments, the way a rifle is dismantled, there is always the possibility of them tipping over into the depths of myth, a very deep echo effect.
Stories dressed in khaki had little interest for Ellen—just as in Sydney she’d barely glanced at the frigates and cruisers moored at Woolloomooloo. Now as he worked his way through the quota of them she sat cross-legged and, appearing to listen good-naturedly—though she was only demonstrating tolerance—bent her neck like a pale swan to examine her bare sole.
God knows, there is enough in the names of eucalypts to trigger quite a riveting recollection concerning war, and other examples of extreme (that is to say, normal) masculine behaviour.
There are at least forty species of eucalypts known as boxes: Fuzzy Box, Craven Grey Box, Molloy Box, and so on. In producing stories for Ellen the stranger sidestepped as too ordinary the possible connection between them and, say, the one about the abysmal Aboriginal southpaw with the tattooed bottle-blonde combing her hair in his corner, or Molloy, the Great White Hope from Lithgow, who retired from the ring without a mark on his face—even had all his own teeth—and became a prosperous tractor and used-car dealer in a country town, to then suffer a personal tragedy with his only son. Stories gather pace inside the ring, and spread to the outside.
As for the Spotted Gum (E. maculate), it is immediately apparent the mottled khaki-green trunk is a replica of the camouflage worn by the Australian army. It allowed the stranger to preface some stories with the observation that on the best authority, beginning with Captain Graves of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Australian troops had the worst reputations for violence against prisoners—worse than the Moroccans and the Turks. The reason might be that, beginning in the Great War, large numbers of volunteers came from the rural districts, where slaughter is a part of the working week. There was one countryman who managed to avoid both wars, he recalled (Ellen wasn’t concentrating), and on the river property he shared with his brothers he built the most melancholy memorial to the dead, a private bridge for the exclusive use of sheep.
Another obvious candidate for story-prompting was the bloodwoods, recognisable by their haemorrhage of red sap; Holland had a stand of about thirty down the southern end. Mention blood to a given man and infantry battles, car crashes, cut fingers come to mind, whereas for Ellen blood had a flowing, altogether more central meaning. There is a lean old soldier in Canberra with an incredible red face. As a young officer he had leapt into trenches in North Africa and New Guinea, and taken on the enemy single-handed. Bloodwood. On more than one occasion his rifle butt and he himself were splashed all over in blood. He had several wounds and medals to show for it. In civilian life, it was he who composed the printed citations accompanying awards for conspicuous bravery, a voluntary task he succeeded in completely monopolising. Over the years he developed a mastery of laconic description, which could withstand endless repetition: ‘under extreme…’, ‘although heavily outnumbered…’, ‘with disregard for his own personal safety…’, ‘returning under heavy fire…’, etc. And yet, like so many other physically courageous men, at home he was in constant retreat from his wife and four daughters, and found it easier to be out of the house when it came to matters of subtlety and principle; what might be called a jovial and popular ‘moral coward’.
They passed through the last of the bloodwoods. It was hot. As Ellen followed, she vaguely saw him as some sort of wandering warrior. That’s a good one—in amongst the gum trees, a wandering warrior. Isn’t that out of a heavy old volume fitted with a prohibitive brass lock? Sometimes Ellen concentrated on a figure leaning against a shell-blasted tree, covered in dust, weary from loss of blood; he could even be on horseback…
She still didn’t know his name. For a moment Ellen thought of asking her father if he knew him.
For that matter, why couldn’t Mr Cave be a warrior from distant parts? Under the eye of her unforgiving father he displayed a matter-of-fact calm, not a hair out of place. And there was a soldierly aspect in his complexion and bearing; his safari suit was distinctly paramilitary; so Ellen constructed, through half-closed eyes.
At the mouth of a gully spilling orange boulders was a tall and lanky tree, E. exserta.
Strolling past it he pondered its common name, ‘Messmate’. In the last war, he said, two Australian soldiers met on the troopship to the Middle East, and had a loud argument about racehorses. From that day they were seen as mates. The short one was hoping to be a dentist in Brisbane, his mate worked for a brewery. The easy depth of their friendship was noticeable when, after eating in the mess, they would go on talking and be the last to leave. There was no awkwardness. With them it wasn’t necessary to be always saying something. Although they didn’t really know much about each other, and didn’t ask, not wanting to get personal, they would go out of their way to help one another. Fruitcakes shipped from home in soldered tins, cigarettes and toothbrushes were just some of the things they shared. A street photographer in Jerusalem has them pulling faces in front of the canvas backdrop of a paltry oasis, one wearing a fez and the Queensland grin, draping an arm over the other’s shoulder.
Every few days the short one wrote to a girl in Brisbane he was engaged to marry. Holding her photograph at arm’s length his friend gave a low whistle, although even he must have noticed her prominent teeth.
The short one, the possible dentist, was earnest and almost pedantic, especially when recalling his fiancée waiting for him back home, while the one who let out the whistle was lanky, loud and easy-going, and passed easily through the world. He was called Brain which prevented him, as he said, from ever becoming an officer.
It wasn’t long afterwards, in the battle for Crete, the short one lost his right eye and hand from a grenade. Alongside him, his lanky friend, Brain, caught some shrapnel in the stomach.
Both were evacuated. In the military hospital they had adjoining beds, and the tall one began making a good recovery.
Needless to say, the severely wounded one, who was almost entirely obscured by bandages, and without an eye and a hand, was in no condition to write to his fiancée, let alone on a regular basis. Even when his friend placed a cigarette to his lips he had trouble inhaling.
Brain who was back on his feet took it upon himself to write to the fiancée. Without thinking, he didn’t bother introducing himself, using instead the familiar ‘I’.
In Brisbane, the young woman suddenly began receiving letters from a soldier with completely unfamiliar handwriting. After some hesitation, she replied.
She thanked him for his letters. She asked if by chance he knew her fiancé, a short man with ginger hair. Several times she asked. Aided by the irregularities of war—ships were being sunk every day in the Mediterranean—presumably containing his letters—he gave no answer. Instinct told him not to describe his friend’s terrible injuries. Instead he redoubled his efforts at amusing her. Gradually she began asking him about himself.
In that hospital with green walls the hours passed slowly. He’d seen war; and that was it. All he wanted to do now was return home. He told her of his plans to buy a country pub. He’d gone into it. Country pubs were surprisingly cheap. He sketched out a gentle life in tune with the seasons and the flow of shearers and commercial travellers. His letters were now running to a dozen or more pages. The young woman’s teeth so prominent in all their innocence receded, and he pictured only her good-natured squint and, fro
m his memory of the torn photograph, the flow of her hips.
Meanwhile, the would-be dentist remained on the danger list, and Brain, who gave false symptoms to the doctors to be near his friend, wheeled him out into the sunlight and sat alongside him in a cane chair and wrote the letters. On one of these brief journeys his friend groaned when he was bumped. Another time he felt for his friend’s arm, ‘You’re the best.’
Gradually, almost accidentally, the letters became brazen, highly suggestive. From his memory of the photograph he extravagantly praised her hips, and her feet, which were not even in the photograph, and offered speculations on her personality. In slow detail he stripped her of clothes, described her underwear, until she stood entirely naked before him, so he wrote. He was a soldier, and a soldier is expected to be brave.
Cautiously she responded. She made a light joke. But did he seriously imagine she would be offended?
No longer was his handwriting unfamiliar to her. The firm flow and the dark ink had an insistence page after page which matched the words, the thoughts he couldn’t avoid expressing. And since he was now writing every day she would scarcely recover from one set of long-distant daydreams, which read as persistent demands, before another would arrive, followed by another; or, because of the irregularities of war, a batch of seven or eight. To use a recent military term: a version of carpet-bombing, difficult to survive.
Slowly the badly wounded one recovered enough to be shipped home, although his eyesight was poor. Walking alongside as they carried him onto the ship his friend said he’d look him up at the end of the war. They shook hands and exchanged addresses.
At that moment—the worst possible moment—a crow began its desolate lament. Before Ellen could say anything the story-teller turned.
‘You could always begin,’ he smiled at her, ‘by looking in at the country hotels here and there, those with the deep verandahs. Examine the teeth of every fifty-plus woman serving behind the bar.’
Again this stranger on her property was leading the way; Ellen was conscious of following him—she could be somewhere else, doing other things.
They were a long way from the house.
Strolling on he didn’t appear interested in her; often he didn’t even bother to wave at the flies. And yet they had drifted about for hours together, without apparent self-consciousness, the way strangers sit comfortably together in a darkened picture theatre.
‘Shouldn’t you be getting back?’ he suddenly asked. ‘What’s the time?’
It was a question that didn’t require an answer; often these remain suspended as the most pleasant, open statements. What would she say if her father asked where she had been? Words and words, hour after hour, from tree to tree.
The way he was drawn towards one tree and not another was like a length of lead wire forming a triangle, pulling him in along a straight line. As Ellen entered the stories, or his sketches for stories, she saw how they grew from the names of the eucalypts, usually the less fancy common names. And if many of the stories were based on the flimsiest foundations, or even a complete misreading of a name, it hardly mattered.
Here out in the open was a E. cameronii, fairly tall, with grey fibrous bark.
He pulled off a strip of its soft bark, which produced a cloud of dust.
They remained within the frail shade of the cameronii, which actually resembled a photographic negative of foliage, and the way he began moving in and out of the shade suggested he had realised a story, another one from his dwindling stock of war stories, stories of violence, which are grey-dark stories. And Ellen was not yet sure grey was a colour she liked, whether for a ship, a pair of shoes, a dress—masculine, metallic. There were a few exceptions, of course, such as certain winter skies and the soft feathers of the galah which bleed so harmoniously into pink.
Stories she felt drawn to were not grey stories with slabs of black, but those that involved the green, red and strong blue gusts and geometrical switches among three people, so deep and shocking she simply had to scribble them down in her journal.
With her fingertips Ellen touched the beauty spots distributed over her cheeks.
‘Small town in the Republic of Ireland,’ he began, ‘by the name of Lifford.’
Such a genial, abbreviated beginning avoided other fruitful possibilities: ‘It was a rainy night in Boston,’ for example; or, ‘Strange sensation then (August 26)’, not to mention ‘The Marquis left at five.’ Still, in his favour, he had made a harmless exaggeration: Lifford is really a village, not a town. Slate roofs, wet streets, unusually erratic schoolchildren.
‘Lifford, as one glance on the map will tell, is like unhappy towns in Poland and Czechoslovakia. It has the misfortune to straddle the border between two countries…’
In Lifford, some houses had their front lounge-room in Northern Ireland, and the bathroom and back garden in the Republic. An invisible dotted line ran through the town and people’s lives. Aside from anything else it aggravated savage loyalties. A young man called Kearney had grown up in Lifford, one of five Catholic children. He was very clear on what he wanted to do. Like many of the young men he wanted to leave Lifford. But even Dublin to the south seemed on the other side of the world. Although he was out of work he began saving for a motorbike. Kearney was a drinker. To take out the Protestant girls from the nearby farms he crossed the border at night. He kissed them behind trees and stone walls. A great one for cracking jokes. He had a big mouth. At night in the fields and lanes he saw men he recognised, as well as strangers with weapons and cars without lights; he saw a dead British soldier in a culvert, and a Protestant still twitching, wearing a cloth cap.
Some older men suggested he think about keeping his mouth shut, and that he leave the farm girls alone. If he was warned he took no notice. He was told again.
Kearney was returning to Lifford one night from seeing a girl back to her house. This girl who lived in Northern Ireland had allowed him to undo the front of her blouse. As Kearney crossed back into the Republic he was whistling, both hands in his pockets.
A man lighting a cigarette stepped out in front of him. Others came forward. Kearney looked around and tried to bluff. In daylight or inside a bar he could have charmed them. A fist or an axe-handle struck the side of his head with terrific force. It seemed to break his head open. There was another blow in his face, then others, still more from other sides. He felt his nose go. To gain sympathy he fell to the ground, and curled up, where it was worse, for it attracted their boots. So many parts of him were cracking, splitting. He felt himself going. He was only dimly aware why. He remembered feeling relieved: there’s no pain. He also wondered about his motorbike. Less than an hour ago these hard teeth had touched the pale breast of the solemn farm girl, and now Kearney cried out as they snapped and bits of them fell inside his mouth.
In the struggle one side of his body was beaten up in Northern Ireland, the other in the Republic. His ribs broken and lungs punctured on one side, the fractured cheekbone, fingers and ankle on the other.
One side of his body was beaten black, the other blue. One eye closed.
Kearney was left half-dead, half-alive. Not even he was sure. Early in the morning he was found by the milkman lying in a puddle, more dead than alive.
It was as if—from that day on—one part of his feelings was dead, the other alive. It was pleasant talking to Kearney, for a while. He didn’t express an opinion, he didn’t take sides. One part of him would think one thing, the other part the opposite. On the one hand this, on the other hand that.
With a disability pension he moved to Dublin. There he drifted into photography.
For a person who adopted a neutral position on any given situation a career in photography was ideal, and after easily handling an apprenticeship as a police photographer, his extreme qualities of dispassionate even-handedness were recognised by Fleet Street, and Kearney was given the difficult assignments of civil wars and famines and executions in Africa and South America, assignments which had wrecked
the peace of mind of others before him. Kearney showed no feelings about what he saw. His black-and-white photographs became famous in the Sunday magazines for their harsh objectivity.
