Amongst the Dead

by Robert Gott

  I thought I’d made a sensible decision in replacing obscure Shakespearean gems with crowd pleasers like Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ and Henry V’s ‘Band of brothers.’ I began with my back to the audience, and when I faced them, ready to intone Hamlet’s meditation on life and death, I’d produced a virtuosic flow of tears. Given Hamlet’s state of mind, I thought this was a not-unreasonable interpretation. The audience, so swift in embracing Brian’s and Glen’s tomfoolery, were at a loss how to respond. They obviously had failed to grasp that this was acting, and saw only a grown man in a tuxedo sobbing his way through some of the most beautiful lines in the language — lines that were largely, it seemed, incomprehensible to them. What kind of education leaves a person ignorant of ‘bare bodkins’ and ‘fardles’?

  I paused at the end of the speech to collect my breath, wipe my eyes, and mop my streaming nose. I’d given them a magnificent display of a racked and tortured man. An audience with even a scintilla of sensibility would have needed a moment to compose itself as well. The only discomposure I could detect amongst them was barely controlled sniggering and the spectacle of a number of fellows whose heads were bowed in what I could only resentfully interpret as embarrassment.

  I was tempted to give them a piece of dire doggerel, which no doubt they would have lapped up with the gusto of a dog eating its own vomit, but I felt an obligation to expose them to the great rallying call of Harry Hotspur. Here, surely, they would find some resemblance between their own situation and the outnumbered English. In a practical demonstration of courage in the face of overwhelming odds, I decided to move amongst them as I spoke. The verse tumbled from me, the movement to the crescendo of ‘For England, Harry and Saint George,’ unstoppable and electrifying. For a few moments I was Henry V.

  To this day, I’m not sure who it was who hit me. At some point in the speech I placed my hand upon a Nackeroo’s shoulder — a little touch of Harry — and squeezed it in what any normal person would have felt as a fraternal gesture of solidarity and comfort. In a blur of movement, whoever it was leapt to his feet and slammed his fist into my face. I reeled back and fell awkwardly into a soldier who wasn’t pleased to receive my weight. He pushed me away with unseemly roughness, so that I fell forward into the chest of a brute who steadied me by grabbing the front of my tuxedo before placing his greasy plate of a hand over my face and shoving me with such force that I felt something tear in the muscles of my neck. I crashed onto the ground on my back. I lay winded and in a state of mild shock. Around me there was an unhurried dispersal of the audience, as if the assault they’d just witnessed was of so little moment that, as soon as it was done, their attention was directed elsewhere. My well-being, and the savage injustice of the attack, were of no interest to them whatsoever. One or two men even stepped over me on their way to whatever duty they were due to recommence. It was Nicholas Ashe who helped me to my feet.

  ‘You need to learn how to do something useful, mate. Can you juggle?’

  ‘No,’ I said calmly. ‘I do not juggle. I don’t ride a unicycle, I don’t swallow swords, and I don’t balance crockery on a stick. I’m an actor, not a member of a travelling freak show.’

  I said this more to soothe my own feelings than to educate Ashe. He greeted my words with a derisive little snort and walked away, but not before tossing the word ‘fairy’ in my direction. I took a step after him, and became aware that the slightest movement of my head to the left or right caused an excruciating bolt of pain to run through my body. I stood, rigid, and gingerly experimented, now oblivious to the movement of soldiers about me. My neck couldn’t possibly be broken. I was fairly certain that a broken neck would be rather more discommoding than whatever damage I’d sustained.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said someone behind me. I would have turned my head to acknowledge the speaker’s words, but I was obliged to slowly turn my whole body. To my astonishment, the speaker, his hands on his hips, and a broad smile on his face, was Archie Warmington.

  ‘I thought you were rather good, Will. Really. I could see exactly what you were trying to do.’

  He lit one of his aromatic kretieks and offered one to me. I declined by shaking my head, and very nearly passed out in the process.

  ‘I think the fellow who hit you first was drunk on a bit of NT champagne.’

  ‘Champagne?’ The possibility that champagne might be available at Roper Bar was so singular that it momentarily drove out any curiosity I had felt about Archie’s presence.

  ‘Not real champagne, of course,’ he said, in that beautifully groomed accent of his. ‘The sad and desperate stir a teaspoon of Salvital into a glass of methylated spirits, and knock it back while it’s still fizzing. It does awful things to people; makes them deaf to poetry, apparently.’

  ‘What are you doing here, Archie?’

  He expelled a cloud of clove-scented smoke into the air.

  ‘People who know these things think I’ll be more useful here than at Ingleburn.’

  He put his arm around my shoulder and propelled me towards the cookhouse.

  ‘You need a cup of tea.’

  ‘I’m just about ready to try the methylated spirits.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Will. I’m sure that’s not the worst reaction you’ve ever had.’ He paused, and considered the unfortunate and logical extension of his observation.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, Will. That wasn’t quite what I’d intended to say.’

  ‘I must reluctantly admit, Archie, that the glories of Shakespeare’s verse have proved to be damp squibs beside the explosive appeal of a man in a dress.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Brian,’ and he looked at me with great sympathy. ‘Brian, of course, has the rare gift of glamour. The rest of us are merely lumbered with varying degrees of ability.’

  Not belonging to any specific platoon, Brian, Glen, and I drifted about the camp at Roper Bar and found a spot to call our own. Neither Brian nor Glen mentioned the incident that had effectively immobilised my neck, but they did express sympathy for the obvious pain I was in. I read their silence on the matter not as discretion, but as the impious acceptance that violence against my person was the proper, acceptable, and inevitable consequence of my performing. Fortunately, the pressing issue of a murderer amongst us occupied my mind so fully that all else seemed trivial, and I didn’t press for further comment.

  As always with Glen, wherever a group of men gathered he saw an opportunity to relieve them of any money or valuables they might be carrying. He went off in the direction of the cookhouse, wearing only a pair of ragged shorts and carrying a pack of cards. A Nackeroo with only a watch to wager would be asking somebody else for the time before Glen was through with him.

  ‘Archie being here is a surprise,’ I said to Brian.

  ‘I thought he might turn up. He hinted at it back at Ingleburn.’

  ‘He didn’t mention anything to me.’

  Brian looked at me in a way that came perilously close to condescension.

  ‘Well, why would he?’

  ‘Why would he mention anything to you?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he?’

  This conversation was doomed to plunge us back into pointless childhood bickering.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Obviously, learning how to walk in heels encourages confidences.’

  ‘That’s not all it encourages,’ he said, and laughed. He narrowed his eyes at me, daring me to satisfy the curiosity he knew he’d piqued. I’m always reluctant to play into other people’s hands in this way. I can’t bear to offer them their smug, little victories so easily. Which isn’t to say that Brian wasn’t right on the money about my curiosity. Only it wasn’t just curiosity, exactly. It was more like astonishment, disbelief and, it grieves me to say, a small stab of distaste, which a psychiatrist would no doubt have diagnosed as deeply resisted jealousy. It wasn’t. I mention it onl
y to dismiss it.

  ‘Ashe is our man,’ I said firmly, signalling that whatever the nature of the relationship between Archie Warmington and my brother, it was of no further interest to me. ‘There is not a single appealing quality about Ashe.’

  ‘Didn’t you warn me just the other day not to let prejudice blind one to the facts?’

  ‘His repellent personality is a fact. He’s so careless about disguising his personal ugliness that he’s exposed himself as capable of any outrage. His complete lack of remorse for anything he says or does is chilling.’

  ‘I’m willing to go along with you up to a point, but I think we’re going to need stronger evidence than his indifference to your acting before we can present him to Army Intelligence.’

  ‘He’s killed four people, Brian. This isn’t about a bad review.’

  I didn’t storm off, but I left with pointed vigour, and headed for the latrines. These were a short walk into the scrub. Situated amongst saplings, they offered no privacy of any kind. Half-a-dozen bisected oil drums sat over a narrow pit of some depth — at least twelve feet, I calculated. The smell wasn’t as bad as I’d expected — the pit had been recently set alight, and the pungency of burnt oil suppressed more offensive odours. I understood why some men called them ‘flaming furies.’ There were two Nackeroos perched on drums when I arrived, airily blasé about their grunting, straining evacuations. They were chatting amiably, and said ‘Gedday’ when I joined them. Not wishing to appear sheepish or coy, I dropped my trousers and sat beside them.

  ‘You’re that actor bloke,’ one of them said. Obliged by my neck injury to stare ahead, I said, ‘Yes,’ and smiled warmly. The smile, of course, went unseen, and I was conscious that my rigid, forward-facing posture might be misconstrued as pomposity or rudeness. Before I could explain that my inability to turn towards them was the result of pain, not snobbery, one of them said, ‘Well, fuck you. You were shithouse anyway.’

  They both stood up and, with one or two further words of criticism, they left. I think it was the injustice of it, but the words of these two young men — words that might never have been uttered had I been able to look at them — cut me more deeply than a bad review in the London Times might have done. I prayed that no one else would come along. Within seconds, two more Nackeroos arrived.

  ‘I can’t look at you,’ I said, pre-empting any trouble. ‘I’m not being rude. I’ve hurt my neck.’

  ‘What makes you think we’d want you to look at us, your majesty,’ one of them said, and they both laughed until their laughter and flatulence merged into a hideous symphony. I couldn’t wait for this day to be over.

  I slept quite well that night. The meal we ate was comparatively acceptable, and the rain held off until almost dawn, even though thunder rolled and clapped intermittently. It wasn’t long after breakfast that the news that a Nackeroo had shot himself passed through Roper Bar with the speed and efficiency of an urgent telegraph message.

  ‘Who? Who was it?’ everyone was asking, and people started naming this person or that, as though they might be likely candidates — a telling reflection on the number of highly strung men in the camp.

  Archie Warmington found us and, indicating that we were to ask no questions, led Brian, Glen, and me to a place on the far side of the latrines. Fulton and Rufus Farrell were there before us. I wasn’t immediately sure who the figure slumped at the base of the thin tree was. His head was thrown back, and his features were distorted by the shattering passage of the bullet that had ripped through the roof of his mouth and exited through the crown of his head, taking much of his skull with it.

  ‘It’s Ashe,’ Fulton said. ‘Must’ve gone troppo. Didn’t seem the type, though.’

  ‘They never do,’ Archie said. He crouched in front of Ashe’s body and stared at it.

  ‘Did anybody hear anything last night?’ he asked.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Glen said. ‘This is a long way from camp, and there was lots of thunder.’

  Archie nodded.

  ‘Still, we should ask around.’

  No one disputed Archie’s assumption of authority on this matter. His age, his manner, and his rank meant that we all deferred to him as a matter of course.

  ‘You were the last group to have anything to do with Ashe,’ he said. ‘Does this death surprise any of you?’

  Rufus cleared his throat. ‘If you’d asked me yesterday if I thought Nick Ashe would ever top himself, I’d have said no. But look at him. He’s still got the gun in his hand, so now I think, yeah, why not?’

  It was only then that I noticed the pistol, and noted as well that the left-handed Ashe was clutching it in his right hand. I held fire, knowing full well that the person who’d shot Nicholas Ashe was either my brother Fulton or Rufus Farrell. I stole a glance at each of them. Both had shaved off their beards, and their youthfulness suddenly struck me as the ideal blind for ruthlessness. It now seemed so obvious. The real world here was reflecting the great tradition of murderers in fiction in which the least likely is almost always the most likely. The only difficulty was in determining which of the two was the least likely. They each had a claim on that position.

  Archie made a quick assessment in favour of suicide. There was certainly no evidence that Ashe’s body had been dragged from elsewhere to its final position, although the heavy early-morning rain would have washed out any marks. The gun was cold, suggesting it had been used some hours previously and, as far as I could tell, the body was free of insect infestation, due no doubt to the rain.

  ‘His family needn’t know the truth,’ Archie said. ‘The news will be bad enough without adding to it. They’ll be told he was hit during a strafing run by a Zero. It’s better for them to hate the Japs than to hate us for letting this happen.’

  I was shocked by Archie’s matter-of-fact dismissal of the truth as an inconvenient threat to the morale of Ashe’s family. He noticed.

  ‘This bothers you, Will?’

  ‘I think that the truth should be told. Yes.’

  He nodded.

  ‘But we don’t know what happened here. We don’t know the truth of this.’

  ‘We know he wasn’t strafed by a Zero,’ I said evenly.

  ‘He’s dead. I want to find the kindest lie. If I tell his parents that he committed suicide, or even that he might have committed suicide, I’m passing on an uncertain assumption, which is a species of lie. Whatever I say, whatever approach I take, leads to the one indisputable fact I do know — that Nicholas Ashe is dead. Knowing exactly how he died is of no use to his family. If they believe he died being a soldier, then they’ve been lied to, yes, but they’ve also been given a gift.’

  This was pure sophistry, but I could see that those around me had swallowed it whole. Archie Warmington dropped a notch or two in my estimation.

  That Ashe had taken his own life had been accepted by everyone at Roper Bar by lunchtime. In the closed world of the Nackeroos, it had also been accepted that this fact should remain at Roper Bar.

  Ashe’s death had put something of a dampener on the camp, and Glen, with uncharacteristic sensitivity, decided to postpone any further dexterous swindling. This meant that I couldn’t get Brian alone to discuss how we should proceed, and I could see that he was as anxious to discuss it as I was. I caught his eye when Glen insisted that they practise an illusion which he’d felt hadn’t gone as smoothly as he’d liked during their last performance. They wandered into the scrub, and I sat making a desultory attempt to stitch together my increasingly ragged army-issue shirt.

  ‘Poor Cinders,’ Archie said, and sat beside me. He lit a kretiek. ‘This is beautiful country, don’t you think?’

  ‘There are a lot of creatures that live in it that rather take the shine off it.’

  ‘Are you talking about insects, or me, or both?’

  I put down my needle and thre
ad.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about you, Archie. I didn’t like Nicholas Ashe, and I’m sure the family that produced him is as unpleasant as its progeny, but they do have a right to the truth, even if the truth is that we don’t know for sure whether he took his own life or not.’

  ‘It’s the “or not” that’s a bit of a worry, isn’t it?’

  I suddenly wondered whether Archie had been briefed by Army Intelligence, despite our having been told that Brian and I were the only two privy to the situation up there. If he was with Intelligence I’d let him show his hand before revealing mine. I’d look unreliable if I shared sensitive knowledge before being cleared to do so. It was essential that I proceed on the assumption that Archie was precisely who he seemed to be — a senior officer, albeit a rather odd one, in the North Australia Observer Unit. Nothing more and nothing less.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The “or not” is awkward because murder seems an extraordinary thing, even in the middle of a war.’

  ‘He was well-liked, I believe.’

  ‘Not by the Aborigines.’

  ‘And not by you.’

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting that he was killed by one of the Aborigines.’

  ‘And I wasn’t suggesting that he was killed by you. I’m actually pretty sure it was suicide, and I think we should leave it at that.’

  ‘Fine,’ I lied. ‘I’ve got no argument with that.’

  There was silence between us for a few moments. When he next spoke, Archie’s voice was almost wistful.

  ‘I wish I had my paints here. I’d like to get these colours on paper.’

  ‘You paint?’

  ‘I try. Watercolour. I picked it up in Bali. I was there in the thirties, at a place called Ubud.’