View from the Beach

by JH Fletcher

  Holding hands, Ruth thought. She should have checked out the old fort. That would have given her something to think about.

  She said, ‘I’m very sorry, ma’am.’

  ‘She’s got it in for you,’ Dougie said. But was displeased rather than sympathetic. ‘Where does that leave me?’

  ‘I’m off on Saturday,’ she suggested, ‘if you can get off then.’

  ‘How do you know she won’t mess you about again?’

  ‘I’ll make sure she doesn’t,’ Ruth promised recklessly.

  Dougie considered, then nodded. ‘Orright. Saturday it is.’

  On Saturday Ruth tarted herself up while Helen watched.

  ‘Nurse’s night out?’ Helen said spitefully.

  ‘You bet.’ Applying lipstick, examining the results in the mirror.

  ‘Better not let Matron catch you.’

  ‘What I do off-duty’s nothing to do with her.’

  ‘Don’t bet on it.’

  The Happy Dance Hall. Three-piece band, jam-packed dance floor open to the stars. They slithered and slipped, sometimes in time to the music, as they competed with other couples for available space. No room for fancy footwork here. Ruth felt Dougie’s sweaty hand on her back, envied those in civilian clothes. Later, up at the fort with a sea breeze blowing, it was cool enough.

  He had suggested it and she had accepted, apprehensively yet without hesitation, knowing what it might mean. Yet now he made no move. She waited, enjoying the breeze, while she left it to him to decide how to go about things.

  ‘You blokes don’t know how lucky you are to have all your hair cut off.’

  ‘Wouldn’t look right on a woman, though.’

  She teased him. ‘Put you off, would it?’

  ‘Nothing could do that,’ he told her solemnly.

  She looked at him questioningly; she had not expected seriousness.

  ‘I don’t think you know what the last couple of weeks have meant to me,’ he said.

  In the darkness she saw him smile, not the cheeky grin she was used to but something more tentative. For the first time since she had known him Dougie was unsure of himself.

  ‘Have they?’

  He dug out an unconvincing laugh. ‘I reckon …’

  And dried up.

  ‘Reckon? What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means I’m in love with you.’ Angrily he slung the words down at her feet.

  ‘Are you? Truly?’

  He stared through the embrasure at the sea. ‘A bloke’s a mug.’

  She had to say something. ‘Why are you a mug?’

  ‘Loving someone doesn’t love him …’

  She took a deep breath. From their first meeting he’d had such power over her. He knew so much more than she did about the world, about sex, about life. So sure of himself. Now this confident man had told her he was in love with her. It should have released her from his power but did not. If anything it increased his hold. She liked him, cared for him, wanted him. His love created an obligation that she should love him, too. Or at least try.

  Something in her spoke. ‘I never said I didn’t love you.’

  He turned to look at her. ‘You mean …?’

  ‘I might, I suppose. In time.’

  He wasn’t interested in might or might not. More and more, people were talking of war as a certainty. It was now that mattered.

  ‘God, Ruthie …’

  He held her hands, kissed them. His diffidence, so unlike him, convinced her. He was tentative with her, as though she were fragile, infinitely precious. Whereas she had a confidence she had never known before. She reached up, brought his head down to her, kissed him. Hard.

  There was a circle, infinitely small, infinitely distant, but growing, growing. It welled tentatively, drew back, came again, ebbing and flowing. Flowing.

  I feel, God knows what I feel. I cannot describe it only that from nothing it is growing to something. Small at first then large, larger, gigantic, relentlessly higher ever higher (Stop. Don’t stop) emotion and feeling climbing together, higher excruciatingly higher (ohhh) and still higher so that (ohhh) the world poised trembling on a peak, slid down, rose again, trembling so long so overwhelmingly on the peak of knowledge, existence sensation everything, light blinding, surge gathering, eyes blindly staring, body clamped tight clinging, oh and oh and oh …

  ‘Oh …’

  Panting, sweaty, exhausted, Ruth came back. Dougie’s weight was heavy on her, the ground scratchy beneath her. Above them the white wall loomed. There was a tenderness in her loins, her heart. She held him close.

  He shifted, looked down at her. ‘I love you,’ he said.

  Walking back down the hill he said, ‘There’s going to be a war. I’m sure of it. I would like us to get married. Just in case.’

  Ruth knew she was not ready for marriage but was reluctant to turn him down. ‘Maybe we should wait.’

  ‘Wait for what?’

  In the circumstances it seemed stupid to say they didn’t know each other but it was the truth. There had been belligerence in his question and it strengthened her determination not to let him rush her into anything. ‘Just wait, that’s all.’

  He sulked but she took no notice, only kissed him when they parted.

  ‘Shall I see you again?’

  She laughed. ‘You’d better.’ Gently she caressed the side of his face. ‘I said wait. Not no.’

  Dougie looked soberly at her. ‘I shan’t ever forget tonight. You want us to wait, we’ll wait. But I’m not giving you up. Not now, not ever. It’s you I want and you I’m going to have.’

  So strange a feeling, to find oneself adored. Her body was sore but glowing, alive with energy, yet the feeling had little to do with the body. It was not even love, at least not as she thought of love. Rather, it was something of the spirit, a communion that Ruth did not understand or wholly welcome but that undeniably existed. What had happened had changed their relationship and her world forever.

  ‘I’ll keep on at you,’ Dougie promised. It could have been a threat, the way he said it.

  ‘I want you to.’

  She reached up and kissed him quickly (to hell with Matron), turned and ran down the drive and into the hospital. Straight into Senior Sister Ogle.

  ‘Sister Ballard. I am glad I saw you. You need to get your things packed at once.’

  Ruth stared. ‘Why?’

  ‘You are posted.’

  ‘Posted where?’

  Back to Australia. She was convinced of it.

  Sister Ogle was not to be drawn. ‘You will find out. When you need to know.’

  ‘I have to tell someone.’

  Sister Ogle’s nostrils flared indignantly. ‘You are on active service. You do not disclose your movements to anyone. In certain circumstances to do so could be regarded as treason.’

  ‘What harm can it do if I don’t know where I’m going myself?’

  But it seemed that telling anyone anything was out of the question.

  ‘Would you pass on a message for me? After I’m gone?’

  But Sister remained implacable. ‘You had best forget all about that young man.’

  Ruth could not bear the thought of simply disappearing. A letter was suspect, the mailing box at the hospital was just outside Matron’s office, its contents open to inspection, but it was the best she could do.

  The scrawled note said little for fear of watchful eyes.

  I’m being sent away. I don’t know where. I’ll write.

  She entertained few hopes it would reach Dougie but at least she had tried.

  She put the letter in the box, packed her clothes as directed. The next morning she was driven to the airstrip. She boarded a stripped-out military aircraft that besides herself and the crew seemed to be carrying only a few crates and an unexplained bicycle. They roared down the runway, palm trees flashing past in an ever-increasing blur, the aircraft rattling and shaking as though about to fall to bits about them. At the very end of the s
trip it came unstuck from the ground and lumbered laboriously into the air.

  Malacca was gone.

  It was not Australia after all. The next day, after numerous stops, the aircraft came in low over a jungle-clad plain, featureless but for a broad grey river snaking its way between banks of olive green vegetation. Pointed domes and minarets rose towards a sky as grey as the river.

  On the ground at last, stiff and half-deaf after so long in the rackety aircraft, Ruth walked to a ramshackle hut where a woman in nursing uniform was waiting. The woman came forward to meet her.

  ‘Welcome to Burma,’ she said.

  ELEVEN

  Indescribable relief at the familiar accent. ‘I never dared hope I might find any Aussies here.’

  What comfort it was to know that even in a place like this she would not be entirely alone.

  ‘The only one,’ the sister promised grimly. ‘What you doing here, anyway?’

  ‘Got on the wrong side of Matron. You?’

  ‘Likewise.’

  A jeep was waiting. They clambered aboard, drove down a rutted track between trees growing close on either side, their branches festooned with creepers that hung in coils like entwined snakes. The trees permitted no light to pass between them, hinted at unfathomable darkness that threatened the sunlight. Which, in the clearings, fell upon them like a sword.

  ‘I am Sister D’Arcy,’ the woman said. Mid-thirties, features drawn and pallid, a tendril or two of mouse hair escaping from her hat across a forehead streaked with sweat. She turned her head and the jeep lurched as she aimed an uncertain smile that missed Ruth by a yard. ‘Marge,’ she supplemented.

  Ruth recognised it as an offering of friendliness, if not yet of friendship. ‘Ruth Ballard,’ she said. ‘What’s it like, here?’

  ‘Different,’ Marge allowed. ‘Quite a step from Circular Quay.’

  ‘Don’t we have any of our own blokes at all?’

  ‘A month back there were a couple of pilots. Dunno what they were doing in the jungle but.’

  ‘Then why are we here?’

  ‘God knows.’ Who was not telling.

  The track widened, became a road. The engine whined as Marge put her foot down. They passed between a scattering of wooden buildings, arcaded, bracketed by bamboo patches like explosions of jade light. Indignant hens catapulted before their wheels, a blur of brown faces watched. Ruth glimpsed a sign in some indecipherable script. Within seconds the houses were gone. The frowning trees returned.

  ‘Much going on?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  The road wound uphill, an endless succession of curves as tight as wire. As they climbed the trees thinned out. Marge swerved between stone gateposts that had once been white. A hundred yards further and they came out before a cluster of buildings on the crown of a hill.

  The buildings were dilapidated, insignificant. The immensity of the jungle surrounded them silently. From the passenger seat Ruth could see nothing but tree tops, formless, uniform-coloured, reaching to the horizon.

  ‘Welcome to Lai-hka.’

  ‘Sounds more like a disease than a place.’

  Ruth’s small joke died in the alien air. She could feel its indifference. The strangeness of the place menaced her.

  ‘Who else is here?’

  ‘Some Karen orderlies and their families. Otherwise no one.’

  ‘What are we supposed to do?’

  ‘We wait.’

  It proved better than Ruth had feared. There was a thin scattering of planters in the district. One by one they invited her to visit them, an evening meal they called dinner or lunch that was known, inexplicably, as tiffin. They examined her minutely but cautiously, as a new species.

  ‘I feel like a beetle,’ she told Marge when she returned to their hilltop. ‘One they’re afraid might bite.’

  ‘They’ll soon stamp on you, you try anything like that.’

  Nobody tried stamping but one man, fuelled by gin, tried his luck as they walked in front of his bungalow. Inspecting his orchids was what he called it and indeed there were orchids, purple and gold and green, tied like fleshy prisoners to wooden stakes set in rows. Ruth evaded the hairy hand, laughing, admired the orchids, the moment passed.

  ‘Bloody drongo,’ she said later. ‘With his wife on the verandah, too.’

  ‘New meat tastes sweet,’ Marge said.

  ‘Well, he’s not tasting me.’

  The clearing station, which was what its title proclaimed it to be, had ten beds. Mostly they were empty although from time to time one or other of the Karens, shy and silent, came in for treatment.

  ‘Only the women,’ Marge explained, ‘the men never come.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘They reckon white man’s medicine is best left to the women. Like church back home.’

  Back home.

  They never talked about it. Marge might have tried, had referred once or twice to Bowral, her home town, but each time Ruth managed to deflect her. It was not that she did not think of it; the yearning never left her, was bearable only because she had trained herself not to think about it. To let it out into the open would be like releasing a cancer into the light. Refuse to acknowledge it and with time it might go away.

  Instead she permitted herself occasionally to think of Malacca which, in retrospect, had acquired some of the less deadly attributes of home. Of Malacca and the people she had known there. Helen Mason, her cousin Peter, even Matron Ann O’Donnell. She permitted herself to remember Dougie, too, once she discovered there was no hurt in doing so. She remembered him quite clearly, the look of him, the smell of him, the colour of his hair and eyes. Her skin remembered the touch of his hands with a kind of wonder, as though everything that had happened between them had been no more than a dream. The shadowed white walls of the old fort; had she really lain on the turf and made love to a man she hardly knew? She had wondered enough times what she had let herself in for until the coming of her period had put her mind at rest.

  ‘What a mug,’ she told herself, thanking God she was off the hook. Yet was she? Dougie had talked of marriage. She had put him off but …

  ‘I said wait. Not no.’ Had not had the chance to find out what she had meant by it. She knew how he would interpret it, though. If he had meant what he said about wanting her so much he would have convinced himself they were engaged. If.

  ‘He’s probably telling some other girl the same thing this minute,’ she hoped. He had certainly made a play for Helen Mason, had even made a grab at her, if Helen were to be believed.

  But that had been before. Ruth had a hunch he really had fallen for her. In which case she would have some explaining to do when she saw him again. Unless by then she too wanted to get married.

  No sense thinking about it now. They were thousands of miles apart, separated by distance and the impending threat of war. She might never see him again. When and if she did she would decide.

  Marge D’Arcy had a young man. Which was how she put it. Marge tended to the scrawny, with very large teeth and that mouse-coloured hair; had never, Ruth was sure, lain on the grass beneath the ardent body of any lover. Had never had the chance, perhaps.

  ‘Bas and me shall be getting married,’ Marge proclaimed. A sweeping hand dismissed the jungle, the war, the unremitting strangeness of their surroundings. ‘When all this is over.’ Bas’s dad had a shop. Behind which the family lived and which in time Bas would no doubt inherit. Marge D’Arcy’s future was like a map with every road and junction already marked in.

  ‘A couple of kiddies is best, don’t you think?’

  Ruth had no views on kiddies, nor did she intend to trade the confidences that Marge so obviously expected.

  There was a photograph. A nondescript face, unmoulded, some years younger than Marge. Of course it could have been an old picture.

  ‘Not in the army, is he?’

  It seemed there had been a problem with feet.

  ‘Nothing serious,’ Marge hastened to assure. ‘No
thing crippling.’ She eyed Ruth speculatively. ‘Don’t you have someone special?’

  ‘No.’

  As final as a closed gate. On their lonely hilltop Ruth had ceased to believe in the reality of anything she could not see. A life beyond the routines they contrived to keep themselves busy had become inconceivable. Bas, photograph or not, did not exist. The Bowral shop did not exist. Dougie, the dream and potential problem that was Dougie, did not exist. Above all, Mindowie — the sunburnt acres, the undulating range behind the house, the faces of family and friends — could not be permitted to exist.

  What remained was the jungle, the active inactivity, the brooding rain-swept silences, the waiting.

  One day, without warning, the waiting was over.

  A rumour from one of the orderlies.

  ‘One of my sister’s brother’s uncle’s aunt’s cousins,’ Marge D’Arcy mimicked savagely. ‘You know what they’re like, can’t ever tell you things straight.’ Blue eyes popped. Her forehead looked sweatier even than usual. Ruth saw that Sister D’Arcy, contemptuous or not, was more than half-inclined to believe what she had heard.

  ‘What did they say, these distant relations?’

  ‘That the Japs are coming. The buzz is they crossed the border down near Mong Pan and are heading this way.’

  Mong Pan was a long way off. ‘Our blokes’ll chuck them out before they get anywhere near here,’ Ruth said.

  ‘Personally I don’t believe a word of it,’ Marge affirmed but the frightened eyes gave the lie to that.

  Ruth suspected the rumour was probably true. There was an atmosphere in the clearing station, an anxiety she had never felt before. No one said anything but she could feel brown eyes on her back wherever she went. Eventually she felt she had to say something. She was sorting bandages with one of the orderlies. There was no need to do it but it seemed important to observe, as meticulously as they knew how, the minutiae of each day. As though the steady accumulation of familiar tasks might stand between themselves and fear.

  ‘There is nothing to worry about,’ Ruth said. ‘You realise that? If the Japanese had invaded we would have heard something by now.’ She assayed a laugh, unconvincing in the moist, hot air. ‘I can’t imagine where these rumours come from.’