This Red Earth

by Kim Kelly

  Clutch at my jasper B in my pocket. He’s not still in Rabaul. He can’t be. Wish I could fly, for real. Gordon James Brock. I might wonder how it is that Mrs Lockhart knows his middle name is James, along with how she knows the PM’s wife, if I wasn’t so at sea.

  No. I refuse to believe this. I’m not going to lose Rock too. Not here on the teal velveteen, not at all. Simply not going to happen. It can’t.

  GORDON

  AUSTRALIAN SURRENDER!

  USE THIS TICKET SAVE YOUR LIFE YOU WILL BE

  KINDLY TREATED

  Follow these instructions:

  Come towards our lines waving a white flag

  Strap your gun over your left shoulder muzzle down and pointed behind you

  Show this ticket to the sentry

  Any number of you may surrender with this one ticket!

  Sing your way to Peace pray for Peace

  ‘Sing your way to peace?’ I say to Johno. ‘Who is this designed to appeal to? The Salvo band?’

  He’s shaking his head, looking at the reverse of his copy of the leaflet. It’s got a photograph of a naked woman on it. She’s a bit blurred and soggy, but she looks a little like Jenny Fitzgerald out at Yarranbulla. Only at about the age of twelve. Not the type of girl you want to see naked.

  Johno says: ‘They don’t know us, do they – should’ve put a photo of KB lager on it and we’d come out with our hands up.’

  That might be funny on a different day, and if the words under the photo didn’t say: Do not run and hide! There is no escape! You will starve in the hills! There is no food or water on this island! This is an outright lie: apart from the volcano, the surface of this island is made almost entirely of food and water.

  But the Japs can say whatever they like, can’t they. Best estimate is they outnumber us at least five to one. Within about ten minutes of landing, they overran all AIF resistance from Nordup to Rabaul, resulting in the command: ‘Every man for himself.’ Those of us hiding in the tunnel never moved earth faster. And now the fastest runners among us have got here. To this swamp. Not hiding very well behind some liana hanging off a fig on the southern verge of the North Road. Thirty-three of us, mostly from Sid’s company, plus a couple of bank clerks, half-a-dozen mining personnel and one vulcanologist. All equally being eaten alive by mozzies and leeches while we consider the fact that we’ve got no idea what to do now.

  My rifle is already pointing well into the ground behind me per leaflet instruction as I say to Johno: ‘Maybe we should just get it over with, go back into Rabaul and surrender.’ My plan from the outset. Let’s stick to it.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Reinforcements will come. A ship will come for us.’ He’s desperate for that to be the case. We all are. How could it not be the case? He says: ‘We should get up into the hills above Kabakada, terrain we know well, and stay there, near the village, till we’re rescued. And if not … then we’ll talk about surrender.’

  ‘Surrender?’ Sid overhears that and comes over to us. He’s recovered from his initial panic and some kind of delusion has set in. ‘Surrender? We will die fighting or we will die cowards. We are going to head south through the Baining Ranges, down to Wide Bay, to regroup with the main AIF force there.’

  I look at Johno, who’s looking down at his boots. This is the last order Sid received by radio phone under Tunnel Hill; just before ‘Every man for himself.’ Just before the line disappeared. But Sid’s sticking with it. We won’t be, though. The Baining Ranges are mountains, big and steep and in parts impassable mountains cut through with equally impassable rivers, and the one place on this island where you might actually have difficulty finding food apart from crocodiles. We wouldn’t be regrouping with anything other than harpy eagles waiting to pick over our bones before we got anywhere near Wide Bay, who knows how many trackless miles away, on the south-east edge of the Gazelle. Johno is having trouble with the idea of disobeying his commanding officer, though. So I do.

  ‘We would be better off continuing west. It’s country we know, there’ll be plenty of food, and native assistance.’

  ‘Native assistance?’ Sid laughs at me as if that idea is madder than his. He thinks they’re all dumb animals.

  ‘Yes, native assistance,’ I say. While they might not owe us anything, the To boys of the village aren’t likely to turn us over either. At least they won’t shoot us on sight. I tell him: ‘We’ve got good relations there.’

  Sid narrows his eyes at me as if he’s going to put me in my place, say I’m a coward for not wanting to die. Shouldn’t I be ashamed of myself when he last saw my dad firing his way up that gully at Anzac Cove? But something stops Sid saying anything at all. I feel it too. There’s a strange sort of calm come over me. Maybe I’m deluded myself.

  I say, ‘Good luck, then.’

  Johno and I start walking. The rain starts sheeting down, again. Errol Flynn calls out to us: ‘See you in San Francisco, fellas.’ He’ll take the others through the ranges if anyone can. Only Sven and Ernie Turner follow us.

  We keep to the trees of the verge, and after a while Ernie says: ‘I hope the girls are all right.’

  No one answers that. The nurses. Six of them. They’d have been caught when the Japs came over from Nordup. I know one of them, sort of. Tina, a girl from Yass. She’s the sister of a bloke I once met when he was jackarooing up at Coolabah. I can’t think about that.

  I listen to the sound of our boots working the mud, through the rain, west through the mangroves, and I hope that we’ve made the right choice. I wonder what Dad would think, and I don’t know. I didn’t last see him firing up any gully. Fighting for his country. Whose country was that exactly? Not our country. I last saw Dad on Nymagee Street, when he dropped me off for the train to Sydney. Walking off. Back to the ute. Walking off from all this shit. I keep seeing that roof of the post office flying up in the air. Whoever was in there, they’re not there now. Is Dad not there either? Maybe he died a long, long time ago. It’s sad. If I die now as well, there’ll be no one for the authorities to send the notice to.

  BERNIE

  ‘Oh, for the love of MacDuff, I am the lad’s next of kin,’ Mrs Lockhart hisses at the Commonwealth Bank officer on the other end of the line, in Nyngan. Since it seems, after three days of berating the Minister for Customs, Gordon’s name does not appear on any passenger lists, she’s now trying to discover when he last used his savings account and where, and the bank officer is unmoved by the Lockhart name. ‘Must I speak with the manager? When you can simply verify my bona fides with Mrs Emma Wells – you are aware of your own customers, aren’t you? Mrs Wells lives at Kyra via Mundaroo Road, this side of Armageddon, on the – Well, good, thank you.’

  She looks at me, worried as I am now. ‘He’s going to look it up.’

  I look at her, in a flummox of wonder. Mostly at next of kin. Is that just another fib of expedience, or … I look at the photograph of Mitchell on the bureau; he’s about sixteen or so, holding up a big fish. Is there a reason he and Gordon look quite similar in their Scotch twill, other than hailing from places called Hell and Armageddon?

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, back into the receiver, with a sigh. ‘Thank you, no, that is all. Good day.’

  I continue to stare at her, and she glances away, out at the willows, her cheeks are flushed.

  ‘What?’ I beg her. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘The second of January,’ her voice rasps around it, hand at her throat, and she swallows hard. ‘It appears that he last made a withdrawal on the second of January. From the branch in Rabaul.’

  ‘The second?’ I hear my own voice is brittle and shrill with denial, pleading: ‘But that means he still might have got out.’ There was a story just yesterday in the Grazier, the manager of the Bank of New South Wales and his accountant, they made a daring dash for it during a rain squall as the Japs landed on the beaches, on the twenty-second, got out on the last copra boat, in the nick of time. Twenty days after Gordon went to the bank. He has to have escap
ed too. And somehow escaped the attention of the press as well as Customs for having done so. Or I can come around to reality: ‘That’s possibly as fantastic as your being his next of kin, isn’t it.’

  Her hand stays at her throat and she swallows again, looks away again into the willows, as if she’s trying not to dissolve.

  Breathtaking. ‘You weren’t fibbing?’

  Small shake of her head. ‘No, dear.’

  ‘Oh.’ Float for some time on that sound while the universe breathes out, here on the teal velveteen.

  Then she says to the willows: ‘I don’t suppose it matters to say it now.’ Then she says to me: ‘Gordon is my first cousin once removed. He is my cousin’s boy.’

  I can only assume: ‘Mr Brock is your cousin?’ But I can’t fathom it: why would that be something to be kept secret? I look at the ram on the mantelpiece: squattocratic snobbery against poor relations? No, not from this redoubtably generous woman.

  ‘Oh. No, dear.’ Mrs Lockhart smiles, that fondness in it she has for Mr Brock, but then her green eyes fill with some awful sadness. ‘No, dear. My cousin Caroline is the cousin I’m referring to. On my mother’s side, Caroline Forrest. Young Gordon’s mother.’

  Can’t help the gasp at that: Rock doesn’t know anything about his mother, except for the great slamming tragedy of her death that made it impossible for his father to talk about her, and here I am sitting with her cousin, Bess Lockhart. But dying in childbirth, that’s not a terrible secret, either; it’s an all-too-common tragedy, especially for rural women who can’t get to a doctor. I whisper: ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘As you would know, dear, grief is a strange beast.’ She warns me: ‘You must never judge another for it, for what they do, in grief.’

  I shake my head; I wouldn’t dare judge another for that: don’t have a glowing record of stoicism myself.

  ‘After little Gordie was born, Caroline had trouble,’ she speaks to the willows again. ‘She was out at Still Waiting on her own with no help, and Ross – Mr Brock – he wasn’t well himself at the time. Not long before the baby came, Ross went walkabout for a few months. You mustn’t judge him, mind, he suffered so – his debts were mounting from that piece of old toast he was sold for land, on top of all he had endured already. But he steadied when the baby came, he was happy and full of renewed hope, that the rain would come and everything would work out. Then, when Gordon was only just a little more than a month old, the rain did come. Ross got caught fencing over the other side of the Bogan in flood, and he didn’t get home that night, and when he got home the next morning, she was gone.’

  Gone? Gone where? Gordon’s mother is alive? No, that’s not what the flood behind Mrs Lockhart’s eyes is saying: there will be no happy ending to this story.

  ‘She took the baby to a neighbour’s, down to Emma Wells nearer town, said she had to go into the shops quickly for peppermint water for him as he had an upset tummy and she didn’t want him jolting about on her back as she rode. But she didn’t go into town; she went across to Gunningbar Creek, tethered Louie, her pony, on the bank, and that was that. They found her the next afternoon, a mile or so south of Overflow. You mustn’t judge, no one can judge her.’

  I shake my head again: I never will.

  ‘She was a clever girl.’ Mrs Lockhart smiles at that memory of her cousin. ‘A qualified nurse, she was, just about to go overseas with it when she ran into Ross at Bathurst Hospital, it was just before Christmas 1916. He was being discharged from the army, sent home from the shellshock, you know. She was full of hope that love could cure anything. That’s what she wrote to me. Love can cure anything. She’d last seen him at a dance in Bourke, and now he’d come home thin and troubled and she was going to cure him, restore him. He was a good man, Bernadette. But afterwards, well, women talk – he had a temper. It wouldn’t have been easy for Caroline. Far from it. He was an angry man for a few years there. And you can’t blame either of them. The war ruined them both.’

  Mrs Lockhart looks up at the Tom Roberts lovers on the wall opposite, holding hands by the river, but she’s looking through them, to some other place. ‘I should have done more. I should have gone up to help; I should have brought little Mitch up to her, to show her the pleasure that comes of mothering, given time. But I didn’t. Remember, we didn’t have the rest homes for mothers back in those days – not at Dee Why, not at Leura or anywhere. And I was newly widowed myself, caught up in my own …’

  I reach for her hand in understanding, a lot now, about Mrs Lockhart’s hard-wrought redoubability, and we sit for a long time, both staring out into the willows, into the Murrumbidgee glittering beyond them, until she takes her hand away, with a firm pat on mine. ‘It happens most to the clever ones. The cleverer you are, the more you think, and the more you think, the more easily it can all overwhelm. Always been glad I’m not too clever myself. Now,’ she stands up, smiling over and through all our worry, ‘I’ve got some curtains to make, dear, behind in my schedule with all these interruptions. Why don’t you get out from under my feet and go into town, go to the pictures, take your clever mind off things.’

  I take the hint that Mrs Lockhart would like to be alone for a time, but I don’t go into town. I don’t want to see Huckleberry Finn again, or a film involving aeroplanes, which is just about all that’s ever showing at the Majestic now, from romance to newsreel. Don’t want a hamburger at the Manhattan, either. I want the Americans to come, for real.

  So, I put my cossie on and go down to the river, slip into the cool and plunge right under, and in amongst the minnows I wonder if I’m clever enough to believe that these little fish might be able to carry my thoughts to him, through the sea: Come home to me, I’m your next of kin. Come home for me.

  Hear me.

  Somehow.

  I straighten my body in the water, diving deeper, my arms outstretched as far as they can go. I can stretch further through this teal dream. For the love of all our parents I will stretch further and make our promises come true. I am strong. I am unbreakable. If I hold myself firmly to these convictions, to this courage; he will come home. The Americans will come and bring him home. Singapore will hold, the Americans will come, we won’t be invaded by the Japs, and Rock will come home. The war will be finished and we will be married and I will be a geologist’s wife and every breath I take for the rest of my life will whisper my gratitude.

  GORDON

  ‘Birua, birua,’ To-An keeps telling me. Enemy, enemy, he’s going off his head about it. But he’s pointing at me.

  ‘What? Where?’ I don’t know what he means.

  He smacks his forehead with frustration, saying something in Kua-Nua next, which I can’t understand at all. I’ve gone for a short walk with a shovel, and Johno is not fifty yards away, at our camp above Kabakada, but To-An needs to get the message across right now.

  He slows it down for me, in pidgin: ‘Him get kakaruk, him get pigs, takem all, takem marys, four marys, crazy fellas. Birua, birua, you fella takem, white man takem–’

  White man. Now I understand him, and share his alarm. We, crazy white men, have gone into the village, taken the chooks and pigs and four women. But we, white men, can’t be that stupid, can we? To make sure, I say: ‘No, this isn’t right. They must be Jap fellas, him birua, him enemy. Him takem.’

  ‘No, no, no.’ To-An smacks his forehead again: You idiot, boss. ‘You takem. You fella.’ If that wasn’t clear enough, he looks away as he adds: ‘Jap fella good fella, givem tabak. He pay more better for work.’ The Japs give them more tobacco and better pay. Of course they do. ‘You fella go. Go! Now! Duk-duk makem poison long, you fella.’

  We’ve got to go, the duk-duks have put a curse on us. And To-An doesn’t want to catch it. He’s probably come here against the wishes of his elders too.

  I nod, while the rest of me gets on with screaming: WHAT? NO! GO WHERE?

  He says something in Kua-Nua again, but doesn’t have time to explain it. He grabs my arm. Go now, his black eyes
are drilling into me. Shaking me. ‘Bird. Look bird. You follow him – him belong you.’ Then he lets go of my arm and disappears back into the trees.

  I don’t look for any bird. I’ve never moved so quickly across fifty yards, and when I get back to our camp, to Johno and Ernie and Sven, I’ve never talked quicker. We’ve packed up in about two seconds and we’re off: south. The only place we can go now where we will be able to keep hidden: the Baining Ranges.

  Johno is upset. ‘Fucking AIF fucking bastards. No fucking discipline. Not a fucking brain between them. Fuck. Fuck them.’

  Sven tries to quieten him down. ‘It’s okay, Johno.’

  ‘Fuck off. It’s not okay.’

  No, obviously, it’s not. We walk on in silence, at a fairly quick pace.

  After a while, Ernie says: ‘Well, there are some interesting quartz formations in the Moai-agi Gorge that will be good to see.’

  That makes me laugh. Like a crazy white man.

  ‘Not flaming funny, Brock,’ Johno chucks it back at me. I’ve never seen him angry like this before. Like he might actually flatten someone. ‘You think that the Japs will continue to be nice to Little Black Sambo after we’ve all gone? And before we die, I’d like to remind you that they have a name. The To-Lai. They’re called the To-Lai. Right?’

  ‘Right.’ I’m not entirely sure what he’s on about, and I’m not going to argue. It’s been a difficult a few weeks. Waiting for nothing. No one’s coming for us. Just the Japs. From Johno’s previous gathering of intelligence, from Kabakada, there is a small mountain of forty-four gallon drums at Rabaul now. The place is one big airfield. Whatever’s happened out there beyond this island, they’ve got their high octane, and New Britain is some kind of base for them. I understand the attraction now. It’s the geographic centre of the Southwest Pacific – if you include Sydney.

  We keep up the pace. And the silence. The jungle isn’t too thick here, but it won’t stay that way for long. Johno keeps looking up at the sky. The day before yesterday he saw what he thought might have been a couple of Wirraways come over, but they were too far away to be sure. There was some anti-aircraft fire and a couple of explosions that could have been bombs dropped or planes shot down. He scrambled up one the tallest of the palms with the binoculars, but couldn’t see. It’s hard to credit what’s gone on, or what hasn’t. Have we been cut adrift? Not just us on New Britain, but Australia itself? Is my country being invaded by the Japanese right now? My actual country. How can I put my hands up to that? But what can we do to fight them here? We have three rifles, two cartridge belts and one spare box of bullets, between four of us. One of us can’t fire two in a row, and another, Ernie, really is gun-shy; one of his schoolmates was killed in a shooting accident, hunting deer in the Snowies. And for Johno I know it’s worse: for him, New Britain is his country. Or has become his country. I don’t know why. I’d better ask him about it sooner rather than later, hadn’t I.