by Robert Gott
This startling little aperçu was delivered as if he were repeating a fact so immutable that it had declined into a truism. I was wrong-footed by it, and I could think of nothing to say. He took my silence this time to mean that I could find no objection to his observation.
‘Ashe seems the more likely of the two, doesn’t he?’ Brian said.
‘The three.’
‘All right, the three. Ashe still seems the most likely.’
I agreed with him, and said so, but cautioned against allowing a prejudice against Ashe to obscure details that might implicate Rufus or Fulton.
‘Frankly,’ I said, ‘I don’t like Ashe, but if there’s one thing I’ve learnt since becoming a private inquiry agent, it’s that the key to the murder lies in the relationships between those around the victim. We have no idea how things stood between Rufus and Battell, for instance. Did they know each other before they became Nackeroos?’
‘Given that this is the fourth death, trying to find a personal motive might be misleading.’
I agreed with him. Four deaths in a secret army unit like the NAOU looked more like politics than the mundanity of jealousy, rage, or revenge.
‘Should we speak to Glen about this?’ Brian asked.
‘No. It was made clear to us in Melbourne that you and I are the only people privy to this information. I don’t doubt that Glen can be trusted — I’m sure that they wouldn’t have sent him up here if they didn’t have confidence in him — but our instructions were unambiguous, and designed to protect him. You haven’t told him anything, have you?’
‘Of course not,’ he snapped, and I was reminded that it didn’t take much to fan that little ember of resentment between us into a flame.
The column came to a halt — not suddenly, but gradually. The pace at which we were moving precluded any movement having the weight of suddenness. Ngulmiri, it transpired, had seen a bee. This didn’t immediately strike me as a compelling reason to stop. By the time we’d made it to where Rufus and Fulton were standing, Ngulmiri had taken off in pursuit of the insect.
‘Sugarbag. Sweet, that one,’ Isaiah said.
He and Ashe stayed with the horses. The rest of us followed Ngulmiri’s darting form to the base of a spindly tree. He shimmied up it, and plunged his hand into a busy hive.
‘My god,’ I said, ‘won’t he be stung?’
‘They’re native bees,’ Rufus said. ‘No sting.’
In no time at all, great chunks of oozing honeycomb were gathered onto pieces of bark and, although I was reluctant at first to try it, one mouthful was enough to convince me that the ferocity of this frightening land was softened by the comfort of unexpected and sublime sustenance. We took a generous quantity back to Ashe and Isaiah. It had to be eaten on the spot — we didn’t have any way to store it, and it wouldn’t have survived the greedy attention of flies anyway.
Ngulmiri collected a sticky supply of black wax from the hive, as well as honey, and I was surprised when he applied this to his cheeks and ripped out his growing beard by its roots. Brian, thinking of his next performance perhaps, smeared a small amount on his own stubble, and when he couldn’t bring himself to rip it off, Ngulmiri stepped in and deftly removed it. Brian let out a yowl, and refused any further depilation. He was left with an irregular patch of bare skin on his chin, from which pinpricks of blood seeped. I told him that he should disinfect the area unless he wanted to run the risk of developing impetigo. Ngulmiri laughed at his squeamishness and, with the help of a mirror, returned his own cheeks to the desired glabrous state, leaving his goatee untidy and untouched. For good measure, he dabbed the beeswax on his chest and made that hairless as well. It was a revelation to me to observe that human vanity is not confined to what I’d been raised to know as civilisation.
There was more rain that night, and black spots of mould were erupting on shirts, trousers, boots, and bedding. Even Brian’s satin sheath, which he’d folded tightly and packed carefully, was under attack. Ngulmiri again disturbed my sleep by calling out at intervals, and the disconcerting howling of dingoes made the horses whinny with alarm. I had by now become relatively used to the conditions, and resigned to the fact of being wet, hot, and frequently weak with exhaustion
The following morning, Glen asked, ‘What day is it?’
Fulton, who’d been up late again sending signals, said that it was Sunday, 1 November.
‘It’s my birthday,’ Glen said.
‘I’ll make you a loaf of birthday bread,’ Rufus replied.
‘What’s the difference between birthday bread and ordinary bread?’
Rufus shrugged. ‘It’s made on your birthday. You can have ersatz birthday eggs for breakfast, too, if you like.’
‘I’m twenty-eight years old,’ Glen said to no one in particular, sounding like someone out of Chekov.
‘And never been kissed?’ Ashe said.
‘You’re not volunteering, are you Ashe?’ I was pleased to note the dismissive little edge in Glen’s voice, as if he disliked Ashe as much as I did.
We’d been walking that morning for a couple of hours when I noticed a painful spot on my calf; then, as soon as it had made its presence felt, every step increased the nuisance, until my trousers assumed the abrasiveness of a rasp. At morning tea I rolled up my trouser leg and found an angry, red swelling, unpleasantly responsive to the slightest pressure. Fulton looked at it and diagnosed an ulcer.
‘It’s not an infected bite,’ he said. ‘Too big. It’s not good, Will. Ulcers up here are a bastard to treat.’
The rest of that day’s walk was agony as my whole world shrank to the dimensions of the putrefaction bubbling in my leg. So distracted was I that I paid scant attention to the landscape we were passing through, and by day’s end I could barely recall it at all. After dinner, which I forced down, I thought I was becoming feverish, and retreated early to the hideous chrysalis of my bed. I didn’t announce that I was ill. Andrew Battell’s killer mustn’t know that I was in any way vulnerable. I barely slept, and when I did I was plagued by dreams of lepers: a small group of them were shuffling towards me, their arms outstretched in a welcoming gesture of acceptance. Waking from these fitful sleeps offered little relief, for the rain was falling not with soothing coolness but with hammering aggression, and I couldn’t shake the anxiety that the swelling in my leg wasn’t an ulcer after all, but the first sign of disfiguring leprosy.
When I looked at my leg in the morning, the ulcer had formed a pus-filled crater. I dusted it with disinfectant powder and bandaged it carefully, using a frugal length from the supply we’d brought with the rations. This turned out to be pointless, as we’d gone very little distance before we were knee-deep in runnels of water and mud. My discomfort was soon so apparent that Fulton suggested I ride one of the horses and, as there was no danger of it breaking into a gallop, I said I’d give it a go. The ulcer, however, was in precisely the wrong place for sitting astride a horse. It rubbed viciously against its flank, and I had to dismount almost immediately. Nicholas Ashe helped me down and expressed sympathy. He wanted to know how bad it was, and asked if he could take a look at it. Suspecting that he was determining how weak I might soon be, I told him that I was fine really, and that I could certainly walk without assistance.
I noticed that Brian stayed close to me for the rest of that day, and that night he suggested that we swap beds, so that if anyone made an attempt on my life he’d find himself grappling with a robust Brian instead of me. I found this gesture unaccountably moving, and I had to turn away from him to prevent his seeing that my eyes had filled with tears — a surge of emotion I put down to my rising fever.
The sky on Tuesday morning was heavy and dark. I pulled the filthy bandage away from the suppurating ulcer and could barely bring myself to look at the pulpy mess it revealed. The inescapable fact was that my leg was rotting. I could smell it. Isaiah
passed me and looked down at my calf.
‘Piss on ’im. Fix ’im up short time.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You piss on that one. Good medicine. Start. Wait a bit, then piss on ‘im.’
He rolled up a trouser leg and pointed to a small, shiny scar.
‘Fixed that one up, you bet.’
It was a measure of how desperate I’d become that, far from recoiling from this bizarre therapeutic advice, I was prepared to do exactly as Isaiah suggested. I was a little wary of accepting uncritically the idea that the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years might come down to urinating on one’s own leg; but I’d run out of options, and that made this one viable. I wasn’t, however, prepared to do it in the public gaze, so I hobbled out of sight, took off my boot and sock, exposed the ulcer and, standing on one leg, directed the mid-stream flow onto it. It was excruciating. Doing this several times a day was going to require a very particular kind of discipline.
That day’s walking was relatively easy. We crossed a large expanse of open ground, broken here and there by the perpendicular of a ghost gum, its trunk bone-white against the blue-black of a heavy sky. On their way up from Flick’s Waterhole, the Nackeroos had buried a cache of tinned food and fuel near one of the gums, and we ate from this rather than further deplete the fresher rations. Towards nightfall we came upon a wide billabong, aflame with lilies. It would have been a vision of paradise were it not for the smoky haze of mosquitoes that floated at its edges. Unfortunately, we were obliged to spend our nights near water to allow the horses to drink. Without this necessity the evenings might have been almost tolerable.
I’d treated my ulcer three times in the course of the day and, although I wasn’t expecting a miracle cure, I was expecting something. It didn’t seem to me to be any better. Indeed, it was appreciably worse. I couldn’t think clearly — the pain was now so relentless and awful that it obliterated the possibility of reflection and deduction. Brian told me that he’d spent the day observing Nicholas Ashe and Rufus Farrell, and hadn’t noticed anything about either of them that was diagnostic of a potential for multiple murder. I became impatient with him — a shortness that came from my pain — and pointed out that psychopathy wasn’t a nervous tic that would manifest itself while a man was walking beside a horse. I apologised immediately, and reminded myself that Brian hadn’t had my experience in pursuing the murderously inclined.
I wouldn’t have thought it possible that the rain of the previous night could be equalled, let alone surpassed. The chest-rattling thunder and white blasts of lightning may have made it seem more extreme, but the force with which it fell and fell that night was staggering. There was a distinct possibility that we’d drown in our beds.
It was still raining at dawn, so breakfast was peaches. Building a fire was impossible, and Rufus wasn’t prepared to wrestle with the primus stove under these conditions.
Fulton complained that the rain and the electrical interference had made telegraphy difficult, and that he’d spent much of the night trying to unravel static. He was jumpy, and said that there was an unusual amount of radio traffic, as if something serious was unfolding. He said he recognised the touch of the operators he usually had contact with, and that the bloke at Roper Bar was stabbing the Morse with uncharacteristic urgency.
‘They’re dots and dashes,’ Brian said, expressing precisely what I wanted to say. ‘How can you tell anything from that?’
‘I can tell,’ he said simply. ‘Morse is a language, and it has nuance.’
I’d been astonished to hear the word ‘pejorative’ echo across the Timor Sea, and I was only marginally less astonished to hear ‘nuance’ uttered here, wherever ‘here’ was.
I became conscious in the course of this conversation that there’d been a noticeable diminution in the pain radiating from the repulsive crater on my calf. I looked at it: although it still seemed angry and proud, there did appear to be a less extravagant crème anglaise of pus at its centre. My spirits rose, and as we walked out of the night’s bivouac, despite the ground having dissolved into a foul mousse, I was confident that I wouldn’t find the day as difficult as the day before. My optimism would turn out to be misplaced.
Glen’s voice struck the first discordant note.
‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ as he attempted to secure straps on one of the horses. He held up his fingers and flexed them. They looked perfectly normal to me, but Glen insisted that they’d swollen to grotesque proportions.
‘This happened in New Guinea,’ he said. ‘I swell in the heat. They’re useless, just bloody useless. They’re not fingers, they’re balloons.’
Given that there didn’t seem to be any discernible injury or infection, his fury at his newly clumsy digits struck me as self-indulgent.
‘Try pissing on them,’ I said.
The disgust on his face was almost comic, but understandable. I hadn’t shared with him the secret of Isaiah’s urine therapy, so my terse suggestion must have sounded callous. We were all a little on edge, our nerves tautened by the possibility that the Japanese had launched an invasion during the night. Conversation was rendered impossible as the rain intensified, and the going was so slow that staying where we were, I thought, would have been the sensible thing to do. Fulton was anxious not to lose a day, and to get to Flick’s Waterhole as soon as possible. I suspected that he’d heard something amongst the previous night’s static that he was keeping from us.
Late in the morning our bedraggled convoy was halted by a wide, swiftly flowing creek — that, at any rate, is what Fulton called it. It’s a measure of how frayed my temper had become that I found this designation irritating almost to screaming point. Any sensible person would have called this a river. It wasn’t a creek, I held, if crossing it could kill you.
The roar of the water now competed with the rain, and instructions had to be shouted. The horses knew that they’d be expected to swim, and they were dangerously jumpy. Fulton stripped off his clothes and entered the water.
‘It’s fast,’ he called.
When the water reached his shoulders I could tell that it was an effort for him to keep his footing. In the centre he was obliged to swim a few strokes to get over the deepest point, but despite being a strong swimmer he was carried several feet downstream. From the look on his face when he found his feet again, I could tell that swimming against the current had used considerable reserves of his energy. I wasn’t a strong swimmer — I was capable, but not strong — so watching Fulton hadn’t been reassuring. To my surprise, he returned, and when he’d recovered his breath he said, ‘It’s do-able. The horses should be fine.’
The plan was to ride one and lead one, and the expectation was that the process would take at least a couple of hours, with each of us swimming back to collect the remaining horses.
Urging the Walers into the flow was surprisingly straightforward. I felt secure astride my mount, and it and its companion experienced no difficulties. This was true for all the horses in the first group. But I found returning to the crossing point both strenuous and frightening. The fact that I survived it had nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with luck. It was almost as if the creek took a breath just as I reached the deepest part, and the current eased sufficiently to allow me to swim without being swept downstream.
It was when we were taking the second group of horses across that disaster struck. I’d made it safely to dry land and looked back in time to see a great surge of debris-laden water rise like a liquid escarpment and fall with hideous force on Brian and the horse he was riding. They were pushed with astonishing speed out of reach and out of sight. The creek resumed its steady flow, and the sense that it had chosen Brian out of us all was inescapable. It took a moment to fully comprehend what had happened. We were agape. I looked at Fulton foolishly, as if I thought that he should be doing something to retrieve Brian. De
spite the beard and the hairy chest, his rain-soaked face betrayed him as the young boy he still essentially was. His eyes were shocked and desperate, and he watched the water with impotent despair.
I scanned the banks. Glen and Ngulmiri were yet to cross. Any attempt to follow Brian on dry land would be frustrated by the thick scrub that grew along the creek’s edges. The openness of our crossing point was the exception, not the rule. All this I took in in a matter of seconds. My decision to enter the creek and allow it to carry me in the direction it had thrust Brian had nothing to do with courage. It was more like rage — an irrational anthropomorphising of the creek into an entity whose bullying indifference to decency needed to be challenged. It was anger, not love, that propelled me into the brown swell.
I swam to the middle, and was immediately and efficiently relieved of the need to swim, except for an occasional stroke to prevent myself from tumbling out of control. The Nackeroos were soon lost to sight, and the folly of what I’d done struck me forcibly even as I struggled to remain buoyant.
I had no idea how far downstream I’d been carried. The inexorable, terrifying, and impersonal force of the water made time and distance meaningless, unless some witness on the bank were able to say, yes, he drowned at precisely this moment and at that spot. Even though I wasn’t struggling against the flow, I was struggling with it, and I knew that exhaustion was close.
Then, by chance, I saw Brian. Water had washed into my eyes, and the grit in it had forced them closed. I opened them for the briefest of moments, and saw his body caught in a tangle of overhanging branches. Bizarrely, his horse stood on the bank nearby, its load intact. Using reserves of strength I didn’t think I had, I pushed myself out of the deepest part of the creek and found my feet. The walk against the current in the shallows wasn’t dangerous, although every step sank into mud, and every withdrawal sapped more of my energy.
When I reached Brian there was something so inert in his attitude that I thought he must be dead. He was stuck fast in a web of thin and whippy branches; I couldn’t see what exactly was supporting his weight, so I assumed a sharp, sturdy bough must have skewered him somewhere. With trepidation, I touched his chest and looked closely at his face. He was bleeding profusely from a head wound, and his expression was hidden by blood.
