This Red Earth

by Kim Kelly

  The door of the ute opens and he staggers out holding his side. I jump up: oh no all over again, something has happened to him, something really dreadful, before I see he’s laughing: laughing so hard no sound is coming out.

  ‘I fail to see what’s amusing here, Mitchell.’

  When he can manage it, he smacks his pristine moleskin knee. ‘You’ve got no idea what you look like.’

  ‘What do I look like?’ A smirk betrays my indignation, as another gust wants to knock me sideways.

  He says: ‘You – you looked like a little red rock. I come in and I’m thinking what’s that on the ground by the shed? Then it moves. It’s Dette!’ He starts connipting again; a proper laugh. I’ve never heard him really laugh before. It’s a wonderful sound.

  Until he says, over the wind: ‘You’re beautiful, Dette. Just beautiful.’

  Heat rises up from my toes, scoops through my belly to land in my cheeks, unwanted. Don’t look at me like that, Mitchell Lockhart. I’m not ready yet. Not ready for that sort of thing, not at all.

  I use the excuse of the dust storm to avoid him by going off to the camp to check on Mrs Zoc, though it’s only Tuesday, and Ken, on the gate, is saying: ‘Miss Cooper, you know that’s not possible. I’ll get into trouble.’

  I call on my own bit of redoubtability: ‘Don’t be boring, Ken, I have to speak with Mrs Zoc now – I won’t be here on Sunday. It’s urgent. I’ll tell the Red Cross you wouldn’t let her speak with her advocate, that’s against the Geneva Convention recommendations, and then you’ll be in trouble with more than just Major Payne.’

  No idea what I’m talking about, but it works. ‘All right, just for ten minutes.’ He lets me through and it’s not long before I hear: ‘Bella! What a storm was that, ah?’

  ‘Mm, it was.’

  ‘What has happened?’ She’s spotted my long face before I’ve even let it fall.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I tell her. ‘Mitchell. Funny feeling for him, baaaa, don’t know. Strange.’

  ‘Ah! No, Bernadetta. No!’ Mrs Zoc is as horrified as I am. Good, that’s what I came for: to be put right off. She says, two hundred and fifteen percent certain: ‘You must not lose hope for the one you love. God would not take your mama and your papa and Gordon too. It is not possible.’

  That’s just what I don’t need. I say: ‘I have to let him go, in my mind. The suspended grief is making me a madwoman.’

  ‘Si, it does do that,’ she nods; she’s worn these shoes herself. ‘But don’t you let him go. Think about him. Dream about him. Write about him, bella. That is what you must do. Tell him all of the things you would tell him if he could hear you. Talk to him. He will hear you and he will come home.’

  And then I will be as whacky-doodle-do as you. I tell her: ‘I’m going home myself, on Friday. Colin’s back – Colin Quinn. He–’

  ‘Si!’ she claps her hands for joy. ‘If that stupido boy can come back, Gordon can come back too. But can you do me a favour, please, at home? Put some poopy through my garden and turn it through the soil. I think I will be home in one year myself. Maybe not this spring, but the next one.’

  Of course you will.

  But still, something makes me lug my Good Companion onto the train with me on Friday. Write to him. Yes, not a bad idea. I should write to him. Write him a long goodbye.

  After I spend the trip thinking about Mitchell, about how like Rock he is if I’m not looking at him properly, the width of his shoulder, his stride, the tea-stain tan of him, and the sense it would make if we – what? I would be Mrs Lockhart’s daughter for real then, and I could help him out at Hell. He needs a wife, to look after him, if not mend his fences. Could I love him in that way, though? No. It is a thoroughly horrifying idea. He’s like a big brother to me; and he’d always be second best, wouldn’t he. I would be the worst wife in the world for him. But his crooked lion smile, calling me beautiful, calling me Dette, the way he does, makes my belly flip. Because I want to be loved, I suppose. Because I miss Gordon, and I’m becoming desperate to relieve the ache of it, even as I can’t let go of my charms that bind me to him: my jasper B, my hair comb, Mum’s wedding band. Round and round it goes. Fifteen hours, all the way to Central and onto the tram. Whatever happened to that girl who didn’t want to marry anyone at all?

  Arrival in Coogee gives me something else to think about. The beach is empty and not for winter coming. It’s three o’clock on a Saturday, a perfect sunny autumn afternoon, and barbed wire’s been strung along the sand, all the shop windows newspapered and duck-clothed, the Niagara shut up with a sign in theirs: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. THANK YOU. The balcony of the Aquarium hall is blacked out, as is the ballroom of the Bay. Because the Japanese are coming.

  Hatred like nothing I’ve ever known fills my chest. I hate them so much I could shake apart with it. You’re not going to take my home, Japs, I promise the surf off Wedding Cake. I wish I could fight them, show them just what I think of them. Of their new world order, destroying all of mine. They tied their hands behind their backs and ordered them to march. I hate you. I yell it into my centre as I take the steps up Heartbreak Hill. I hate you.

  ‘Bernie! Hey, Bernie!’ I hear behind me. My heart lurches as I turn on the steps: how long has it been since anyone’s called me Bernie? ‘Slow down, will you!’ It’s Colin, jogging up to me, grabbing my Good Companion and my suitcase with manners he has somehow acquired over the past three years. ‘You walked straight through me outside the Bay,’ he says, giving me an awkward kiss on the cheek, all beer fumes and cigarette smoke ingrained in the wool of his tunic.

  ‘Did I? Sorry, Col.’ I take in the sight of him, the look in his eyes, a tiredness, not quite my old blockhead boatie boy. But he is here: I suddenly realise how marvellous that is. ‘You’re home, you are. Well done.’ I drop my hat box on the steps and hug him, because he’s here. ‘It’s wonderful to see you – welcome home.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He hugs me back, a bit too long.

  I pull away. ‘Your mum says you got a medal – what was that for, drinking?’

  ‘Nah.’ He looks away, up the hill and starts walking; doesn’t want to talk about it, but it’s not like him to avoid a brag. Probably got it for something awful. I feel awful for mentioning it; only got a handful of days before he’s going to be sent back to it, likely New Guinea, to fight the blooping Japs for real. Everything unspoken slips between us like a third party; he doesn’t mention Dad, or Mum, and I’m grateful. More so that I think he was looking out for me down at the Bay, waiting to walk me up so that I wouldn’t be alone.

  Here, at the doorstep of our gumdrop green Arcadia, where I see the garden has been well cared for, banksia rose clipped back; Mrs Zoc’s yard too, hibiscus nicely pruned. The work of Mrs Quinn and Mrs Cronin, I’ll bet. That’s so good of them. It gets me in the door, and I know there’ve been Catholic Daily angels busy in here too – everything smells fresh and clean. I put Good Companion down on the kitchen table and see the hamper that’s been left for me: steak and kidney pud, baked beans, orange cup cordial, a precious block of Cadbury’s …

  My eyes well up with all my good fortune at having so many good people in my world.

  Colin leans on the ice chest. ‘So, you and that Brock fella didn’t get married?’

  I stare at him: blockhead. Doesn’t he know Gordon hasn’t come back from Rabaul? Probably not.

  I say: ‘No, we didn’t.’ Then something makes me say: ‘Not yet.’ Something else again makes me add: ‘Come on, let’s get to your place. I want to thank your mum and then get skunked.’

  ‘Fair dinkum?’ Col likes that idea; still thinks he’s in with a chance with me. Incurable blockhead, and I’ve never been skunked in my life. I think I just need something, out of all my wanting, to give way.

  By the time we walk down to the Quinns’ flat on Dolphin Street, the party is in full roar, or at least Mr Quinn is, Belfast brogue unintelligible. ‘Barrrdat, Barrrdat, love.’ He envelopes me with his whiskey embrace, push
ing me down the hall into the tiny lounge room, tinier for its black-papered window and crammed with Colin’s three older sisters and their families, his little sister Maureen and her gaggle of friends. Mrs Quinn’s brother, Slick Mick Heggarty, is here too: he deals in sly petrol coupons, and possibly sly chocolate, under the counter of the Oceanic, and tonight he’s managed to squeeze in a three-piece ensemble here – banjo, fiddle and accordion reeling madly.

  ‘Just a small party, Mrs Quinn?’

  She laughs, revelling in the very centre of it, all her chicks in the roost. ‘Oh love, it’s so good you could come. Don’t you look a treat.’ Thrusts a lemonade shandy in my hand.

  Then another. I think she’d like her Col to be in with a chance too.

  Halfway through the third, I raise my glass to him across the room: Yep, I reckon I’m skunked. Enough to have a dance with you.

  Some time, I don’t know what time the next morning, it happens. Something breaks open inside me, in the kitchen as I’m bolting the chocolate for breakfast, and I sit at the table, with my headache and sore throat from yacking above the music, and I raise the case off my Good Companion.

  I’m still wiping tears from my eyes, laughing blarney tears, from last night, Slick Mick recounting the time my mother hit him across the head with a bag of onions in the street for selling her fake Solvol soap during the Depression that took the enamel off the sink never mind the skin of her hands, when the words come, just pop into my head.

  I roll a sheet of paper in round the barrel and I type: She looked out from the cliff top at the end of Arcadia and wished she could fly.

  It’s so quiet after the full stop I can hear the sea crashing into Gordon Bay.

  And then it begins to pour out of me, out through the wound in me. I punch and punch the words down, letting them tear out of my grief, my anger, my powerlessness. I don’t know what it is I am doing, apart from … telling my truth. Because I must. Through these bursts of words. My words. And it feels like I’m flying.

  Because I am.

  I am the sun, she told the sea, flying far, far across you to kiss his shoulder and turn his skin the colour of the land. My country. Our country. In this house, love trees growing together, in the desert by the sea, fishing on the rocks under the island, his hand moving over the golden honeycomb sandstone, moving over me.

  I am the earth, she told the sea. We are the earth, the sun, the moon and the stars, exploding across the sky, across the universe, to be beaten into these pages as words shouting out of my core, pages that will be swept up in the wind and spun into dreams by a thousand steely winged gulls who will take them to him, protect him, wherever he is, and bring him back to me.

  In ten million tiny glass pearls of truth, fragile and indestructible, bring him back to me. I will write and write and write for him, for our lives. I will write and shout for him across all land and sea and I will not sleep. I will write and call and call and call until I am awake inside this dream. Until he is here with me.

  And I do. Turn the paper over. I stay inside this dream all day and into the night, and just when I think I might put some baked beans on the stove, I hear a long, lonely boom noise followed by a pop pop popping that makes me get up and look out the back door. A searchlight beam sweeps across the sky a few times, from the direction of town, and although it’s probably just some sort of military exercise, setting the dogs off, a thousand woofs and yaps, I let myself imagine it’s the Japanese tonight. They’ve come – they’re bombing the Sydney Harbour Bridge and picking their way across the Eastern Suburbs to Coogee, and I’ll be here to meet them.

  I let the anger roar through me and out of me, roar onto page after page, all the way into the morning, when I run out of paper and have to go all the way up to the stationers at the Spot and empty my purse of coupons to get some more. Cheap and nasty typewriting paper, too. Rationing, for everything: hate the Japs some more.

  When I get back, the telephone is ringing, ringing, ringing. I look at it: how many times did I stand here talking to Gordon, twirling a lock of my hair, or watching this phone in its little recess in the hall, waiting for it to ring? I don’t want to pick it up now; I don’t want to hear it’s not him. But whoever it is, they’re persistent. Pick it up.

  ‘Oh Bernadette, I thought you’d never answer!’

  It’s Mrs Lockhart. ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask her; she sounds a bit frantic.

  ‘Are you all right there, dear?’

  ‘Yes,’ apart from being a madwoman, caught up inside this strange dream. ‘Why?’

  She says: ‘The Japanese submarines, in the harbour–’

  ‘What?’ The chill roars straight into my bones. ‘That was them?’

  ‘Is everything all right, dear?’

  No. ‘Yes, I’ve just been up to the Spot.’ Just another day out there, it seemed. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Mina Carlton’s just telephoned me, she didn’t have your number there–’

  ‘What? What’s happened?’

  ‘Her sister-in-law, Gilly Cruickshanks, she’s over at Point Piper, and she’s said they came right in and blew up a ferry, little submarines. They fired some shells over and one hit a corner shop at Rose Bay, but none of them exploded, although some poor fellow broke his ankle falling down the stairs with the fright of it. But you’re all right, that’s the main thing. You are all right, aren’t you, dear?’

  No. My fist balls: come here and fight me, you creeps. But I say to Mrs Lockhart: ‘Yes, I’m all right. Is the CWA meeting cancelled, though?’

  ‘Oh no, dear,’ Mrs Lockhart says emphatically. ‘Take more than a couple of submarines to put the girls off. Anyway, Mina said they couldn’t hit a warship at Woolloomooloo, and that’s a fact. Now, you telephone if you need to, and keep those curtains drawn in case they get their eye in. Please.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Bye bye now, darling.’

  ‘Bye bye.’

  I go back to the kitchen, but I don’t sit down right away. Submarines, sneaky little submarines, creeping like slimy eels through the depths of the harbour in the night. I want to blow them up, but instead I take Mum’s good Noritake tea service out of the dresser and take it out the back and smash it to pieces. And then I write about that.

  I smash it into the keys until Colin knocks on the door in the evening to tell me his leave has been cut short. I let him hold me too long on the doorstep of Arcadia; I let him kiss me, and I kiss him back, kissing Gordon. That’s awful, but that’s what I do. I pretend he’s my Rock, though he smells of Turf cigarettes. I tell him: ‘Come back in one piece and I might give you another one.’

  ‘See you, Bernie.’ The look in his eyes calls me cruel. I am.

  ‘Bye bye.’

  Then I sit back down and write about that. I write about kissing Gordon. For days. The Japs don’t return for another go and I keep writing about kissing as if that is going to keep them away. There were twenty-one Navy boys on that ferry they blew up. All gone. I write until I find I’ve written fifty-three pages. That’s almost half a six-penny. But this isn’t any six-penny. I’ve got no idea what this is.

  I’m not altogether certain of the date, either. So I turn on the wireless, for the first time since I left Hay, just as the beeps go for three o’clock. ‘Good afternoon, boys and girls. Today is the fourteenth of June, 1942, and welcome to the Children’s Hour.’ I’ve written fifteen days away. And I’m suddenly very tired; it’s the CWA meeting tomorrow and I’d better get some sleep. I’ve slept of course, but only inside the dream, a restless, feathery sleep. Now I curl up on the sofa, let the soothing wireless man tell me a story. It’s the adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie today, the little gumnut babies setting out in search of humans … cicadas singing through the hot, hot night, drifting out through the bush … Where are those terrible humans?

  I’m running late, already nine o’clock, running up George Street, missed a tram, coming up to the corner of Goulburn Street, when I wonder if I should send my pages of m
adwoman dreaming to Wonder Publications, ten doors up that way. Don’t be a dill: the only person who might be interested in what you’ve done is the censor. Get on the next tram and jump off at Broadway, hurtle into the conference as the great flock of matching hats and gloves is about to sit down to business.

  Mrs Carlton catches me from behind as Mrs Wassell waves to me from a table at the rear. ‘I thought you’d never show up, Bernadette – here, quickly.’ A uniform is thrust into my hands, olive drab, just my colour, blawch, and five minutes later I’m on the stage, the flash bulb is going off in my face and I’m smiling for Australia. For the Australian Women’s Land Army, and very pleased about it too.

  My mind, though – it’s back at the kitchen table, with my heart. My dream: corellas swirling through the leaves of my vanilla love trees, bursting out of my soul. It’s all I want to do. The only place I want to be.

  GORDON

  ‘So, you’ll be applying to come to California with us, won’t you, Brock?’ Charlie Sherbel comes up behind me in the canteen queue. He’s more excited than usual, because in his mind he left sometime yesterday. Who wouldn’t want to go to Berkeley University to study atomic energy with the United States government paying your way? Me, probably.

  I say: ‘I don’t know, Charlie.’ I want a practical application for revenge, but I don’t think I’ll find it in a laboratory. I’d go over there and look at the cyclotron particle accelerator and go, geez isn’t that amazing. Smashing an atom. How about that. And then I’d want to get outside and use it. But how are they going to use this energy? This destructive potentiality? A couple of the chemists here are convinced that the radioactivity will be dispersed over land to make the soil infertile. Charlie is just as convinced it’s going to be made into a super-incendiary bomb. But it could really be a death-ray gun for all anyone knows. I don’t think I can sit and do lab work, probably recording endless data on U-235 extraction, without knowing what it’s for. This is why I’m a geologist and not a physicist. I am also a bit ragged. I still can’t sleep properly. I wake up in the night running along the back of the plantation and I can’t get back to sleep. Caught up in the canes. I need to get going with something. But I don’t know what. Go and get rejected by the army again.