Homecoming

by Adib Khan

  Martin was already suspicious of Erin and Gail, and envious of their greater boldness and imaginative daring. But he said nothing as they sat down. Quietly the three children waited for their parents to arrive.

  They were not disappointed. Simon, coming in, turning, seeing it, railed against this lack of respect for the Queen of Australia. He went on, until Martin and his sisters squirmed with secret pleasure.

  Then, uncharacteristically, Megan lost her patience. She suggested that whichever ‘ghostly entity’ was being ‘so wicked’ would probably ‘cease its nefarious activity’ if Simon stopped ranting against it in such an unseemly manner.

  ‘Mum!’ Gail objected. ‘Dad has every right to be upset!’

  ‘She’s our Queen!’ Erin chimed.

  ‘Symbol of our cultural heritage!’ Martin added.

  Simon glared at them, taken aback by this unusual demonstration of support. He knew that at least one of his children was involved in this mischief, but he took Megan’s advice and fell silent. Immediately after dinner, Simon relocated the photograph to his bedroom where it hung straight without being disturbed again.

  WHAT REALLY INTRIGUED Martin about the Norman invasion were the massive cultural and social changes that were wrought by the outcome of a single battle, which itself had probably been determined by some strategic blunders by the Saxons. He spent long hours thinking about the way the Saxon troops were manoeuvred after their earlier victory at Stamford Bridge. Could they have rested more before their hurried journey south? Had King Harold made a tactical error in not waiting for the Normans to move further inland before engaging them in combat? Then the Battle of Hastings seduced his imagination. And that such a monumental event could be interpreted and transcribed into words from a tapestry!

  Martin graduated to the State Library. There he sided with the Saxons, partly because they were vanquished, but also on account of his own surname. He daydreamed about the possibility of being a descendant of King Harold. Simon had scoffed at the idea of anybody being able to trace their lineage as far back as the eleventh century, but secretly he was curious, and there grew in him a sense of proud affinity with the last of the Saxon kings to rule England. This he shared with his son. For them both there was something grandly tragic about a warrior king holding his ground as he was hacked to death by his adversaries. Martin dismissed the ‘arrow in the eye’ theory about Harold’s death. It lacked the appeal of the image of a doomed monarch holding his position and valiantly swinging his sword as William’s soldiers closed in on him for the inevitable ending.

  It was then that it occurred to Martin—building a model of this battle scene, complete with men from both sides, would be enormous fun.

  He took meticulous care with the details of the landscape. He altered the configuration of Telham Hill several times and fussed over the placement of the hoar apple tree on Caldbec Hill. It took more than two years for the boy to finish the project. Even Simon was persuaded to spend a few hours each week in the garage helping. Perhaps it was possible that their identity connected with that memorable year. Simon was painfully aware that nothing of the family could be traced beyond his great-grandfather’s rather shady life in the dockyards of Liverpool.

  As the model neared completion, Martin devised a war game. On the weekend of his nineteenth birthday, the Battle of Hastings game was inaugurated at a barbecue. His friends chose sides and military leaders were appointed. They fortified themselves with chops, sausages, steaks and quantities of beer.

  According to Martin’s rules, the severity of the damage inflicted on the opposition was dependent on the roll of a pair of dice. This was undertaken with considerable mirth and eagerness. The battle raged deep into the night.

  Next day, when Martin felt well enough to emerge and begin a clean-up, he discovered that many of the plastic and wooden soldiers had been mutilated. Arms, legs and heads had been snapped or cut off with knives. He was angered by the senselessness of it all. It appeared now as though the game had been played in a spirit of grim brutality.

  ‘Great party, Martin!’ Simon was at work with a broom and dustpan. ‘Everyone had a good time.’

  Martin looked at his father. A good time? Doing this? He surveyed the little figures scattered on the floor. But by late afternoon, he had calmed down. He harboured no resentment towards his friends. It was, after all, a game. He would replace the broken pieces.

  NOW, SO MANY years later, it all lies like a covered corpse—Caldbec, Senlac and Telham Hills, their surrounding fields and ridges dotted with trees made of wooden sticks, cardboard and paper, and cluttered with formations of Fyrds and Housecarls, plastic soldiers from the Franco-Flemish division, Bretons, Poitevins and Manceaux. Martin spies a Norman knight flat on his back under the table. He can’t guess how the little man fell off the board. The red and blue gonfanon is partly torn in the middle but still attached to the lance, shaped from a toothpick, glued to the tiny hand.

  A smile curls the corners of Martin’s mouth. One of the unfortunate ones, he imagines ruefully. Poor bugger! Probably brought down by a blow from a broadaxe or a thrust of one of those Saxon swords with the three-lobed pommel: intense pain, disbelief, a few laboured gasps, instant replay of a short, monotonously tailored life, perhaps a vision of floating ethereal beings…oblivion. Lucky in some ways. No post-traumatic stress disorder, no psychiatric care, no pills to counter the rashes, aches and nausea. An absence of nightmares. Guilt-free and without recollections.

  Martin holds the model soldier between the thumb and index finger of his right hand and tries to stand up. His knees creak and collapse under him. He grips the edge of the table with his left hand and manages to lift himself slowly. ‘Raise the Titanic!’ He breathes heavily. ‘This is pathetic!’ Upright at last, he lifts a corner of the tablecloth and rolls the tiny figure onto the faded felt surface.

  A pair of sixes and half a dozen opposition soldiers die. A six and a five and it’s an extra move up or down the hill. Pair of fives and two arrows find their targets. He remembers the original rules which had to be modified. His mates insisted: killing had to be made a lot easier. Fortunately they had abandoned the idea of using red dye to indicate the spillage of blood. Cleaning up after the game would have been impossible.

  Martin has often resolved to take the rectangular board with all its accessories to the tip. Its presence, even in a room that he rarely enters, reminds him of that dangerous state of mind that associates combat with the naively heroic. Before he had left for Vietnam, war was a distant occurrence involving people with whom he had no connection.

  He remembers feeling a dutiful sadness about the massacre at Gallipoli and the catastrophes of the Second World War. The ANZAC day march to the Shrine of Remembrance had been a yearly affair. Just a boy, Martin had rubbed his eyes and stifled yawns as they walked along St Kilda Road at dawn, while his father whispered praises of the diggers and the national spirit of courage, fair play and compassion. If Simon was at all aware of the darkness of war, he demonstrated no qualms about the brutality it entailed. Stoically he accepted the view that war was an extreme condition of suffering. Because of a knee problem, he had not seen active service during the Second World War. He could only imagine the stench, the mangled bodies, torn limbs and noise.

  Martin knows now that in battle a soldier cannot even hide in the sanctuary of his mind. At best there are precious moments of recollection, images of home, before a shell explodes or a man is blown to bits. At that point, if one is still alive, it is only to be intimate once more with fear. It is then that a man knows about truth, knows about the silent and indifferent universe. About violence and futility.

  THREE

  The phone rings in the hallway.

  Martin feels a moment of expectation. He wonders if it is Frank. This time, he resolves to listen and offer an apology for being intrusive in his son’s personal life. But he is yet to understand the wisdom of Frank’s decision to quit his lucrative job in Melbourne and settle in the small town o
f Daylesford. As for Frank’s new partner, Martin determines that he will meet her, as if to demonstrate his acceptance of his son’s advice against carrying obsolete hang-ups into a new century. Three partners in three years. The accelerated attrition of relationships. We live in a world of flux. Warning. Advice. Observation. Can a lifestyle become a disease? No one’s found a vaccine yet, Frank had joked.

  Before Martin can reach the phone there is the click of the answering machine. There is professional calmness in the voice of the nurse. The message is brief. Colin is in hospital again. Martin picks up the pile of poetry books and thinks about the way his friend has been.

  TALL, THIN, UNSHAVEN—young. Colin was never comfortable in uniform, with a bonnie hat pulled low over his forehead and cradling an M60 machine gun in his left arm. He was a slow mover with a troubled look on his face, as though he were perpetually stuck in a nightmare. Colin never laughed or smiled at the lewd and racist jokes. He did not join in the improvised games of cricket and football, nor did he gamble. When he spoke, in moments of quiet desperation, most of the men tended to shuffle away, leaving Martin and one or two others to listen and be perplexed. Colin raised questions about the future lives of those soldiers who might survive and return home to Australia. As the war sank further into the entrails of chaos, he spoke of the struggle ahead, to readjust to what now seemed to be a make-believe world with civic and social rules. It all left Martin confused and angry. This was man’s natural habitat, Colin insisted: an arena where men were free to correspond with the primate within them. ‘War merely opens the channels of communication with what we really are. Instinct cannot be civilised. It is resistant to the evolutionary process,’ he once said to a group of bare-chested soldiers wolfing down their lunch. They stopped eating and burst into laughter.

  ‘You’re full of shit, Colin!’ one of them drawled. ‘Shit mixed with words that no one wants to hear.’

  Another soldier laughed. ‘Bullets, Col! Bullets! They hum and sing, hurt and kill! That’s the language we understand.’

  It was not as if Martin had willingly sought Colin’s company. He was uncomfortably aware of this shadowy figure who spent most of his spare time by himself, either reading or gazing at the horizon. It was after a mortar attack by the Vietcong that Martin noticed a change in Colin, a calmness that was inexplicable in the ensuing chaos. No longer aloof, Colin was pitching in enthusiastically to clear away the rubble, speaking to wounded soldiers and helping the medical team with writhing and whimpering men.

  The next day Martin approached Colin. ‘I notice you spend most of your spare time reading.’ It was a strange observation under the circumstances. They were preparing to launch a counter-offensive.

  ‘Yes.’ Colin looked warily at him. ‘It’s a kind of breathing aid in a dark and airless tunnel. It’s reassuring.’

  ‘You don’t read magazines, and I’ve never seen you with a paperback novel. So what are those books?’

  ‘Poetry,’ Colin replied. ‘But I am quite sane, contrary to what you may hear. Well, as sane as anyone here can be.’

  Martin sat beside him on a tarpaulin-covered crate of ammunition. He offered Colin a cigarette.

  ‘Do you read? I mean stuff other than detective stories and those girlie magazines the blokes’ve got?’ Colin asked tentatively, blowing rings of smoke in front of him and then cupping a hand under them until they vanished.

  ‘History mostly.’

  Colin looked sharply at him.

  ‘I don’t seem like the sort, do I?’ Martin smiled broadly.

  ‘Have you ever tried reading poetry?’

  ‘Haven’t touched it since Form Four.’

  ‘You make it sound poisonous. Maybe you should give it another go. It’s much easier to handle than guns and grenades. It doesn’t sit on your conscience.’

  ‘I didn’t understand much of it,’ Martin blurted. ‘Most of the words made no sense.’

  ‘But how did they feel? Did you let the words seep into you? Or at least wash over you?’

  ‘Huh? In school I’d read five or ten lines and then spend half an hour trying to figure out what they meant.’

  ‘Like things we sometimes do in life, eh?’

  ‘Pardon?’ Martin wanted to disengage from this conversation. It was making him feel uncertain and inadequate.

  ‘How much of this do you understand?’ Colin made a sweeping gesture with his hands. ‘Supposedly we’re among our own in this camp, and yet don’t you feel awed by it all? Lonely and lost, as though you’ve taken a wrong turn in a nightmare and missed the exit? And beyond the sandbags and the barbed wires—how much sense do you make of what lies in the jungles and those hills? Of what you have to be and do to survive?’

  ‘Don’t bother thinking about it.’ Martin stood and crushed the cigarette butt with the heel of his left boot. ‘Reason, logic—they’re irrelevant here. I eat, shit, sleep sometimes and do everything to stay alive. I react to the danger that’s out there. It’s in the shape of men and women, even children, who look different. They are different. That makes it easier to treat them as enemies.’

  Colin ignored the rising note in his voice. ‘Here, try this,’ he said boldly, thrusting a book into Martin’s hands. ‘Go on! It might help you to cope with this cursed abattoir.’

  Wordlessly Martin accepted the poetry anthology. For the next few days he allowed it to languish in his knapsack, but this was a childish retaliation against Colin’s pushiness. His curiosity was aroused by the suggestion, implausible as it had sounded, that poetry could be a wise and consolatory companion.

  Other than one’s pillow, there was nothing else that was comforting here. The chaplain was well intentioned but powerless, sincerely mouthing words that did little to dispel fear or make one believe that God was competent enough to sort out this mess. A man could weep silently against the lumpiness of his pillow at night, like a child crying on an unfamiliar woman’s bosom, and then feel guilty about it the next day. In a soldier’s world, the display of emotion was a betrayal of toughness and the vigilant guardianship of a way of life.

  One evening, Martin flicked through the pages of the anthology, pausing in places to read a few lines at random. Finally he chose a short poem on the transience of love and disciplined himself to read it slowly. Some of the lines had a peculiarly seductive ring about them. He remembered what Colin had said and resisted the urge to discover their literal meaning. He lingered on the words, repeating them in a whisper, emphasising what he felt were the accented syllables, varying the tone and pitch of his voice. There were vague sensations. Doors opened on to a misty landscape.

  Martin read the poem again, this time sharing its anguish. He reflected on the dilemma of the lovers, indifferent to the sudden explosion that briefly lit up the fear-haunted night. He read several other poems. I am learning to be a reader, he thought. A proper reader. Another shell detonated, close to the northern fence. There was gunfire. The night sank into an uneasy silence. Gradually Martin drifted off to sleep.

  The next day the Vietcong attacked. Against a continuous barrage of artillery and mortar fire, there was little the Australians could do except crouch in the trenches and shelter behind the sandbags. Occasionally they fired into the dense foliage to deter the enemy from trying to overrun their position. It was only when the F-4 Phantoms screamed over their heads to strafe and bomb the jungle and the hills that the attack subsided.

  That evening’s quietness was a subtle form of torture. Even an extra ration of food did little to lift morale. Men cleaned their boots, clipped their fingernails and read old letters. Card games were subdued and the troops betted heavily on cockroach racing.

  Martin skipped the evening meal. He went to bed early as he was rostered for patrol duty at dawn. He wanted to be up before the sergeant came bellowing in his ears and kicking the bed.

  He slept briefly dreaming of a picnic with friends. The war was over and the villagers were no longer secretive and hostile. There was cold beer and fish in the st
ream. Someone started a fire and they all talked about eating barbecued fish and drinking beer all afternoon. There was no one to shoot at them from across the river. They shared a drowsy feeling of contentment. ‘I’ve a catch!’ Martin called. ‘It’s a big one! Give me a hand!’ Everyone thought that it was a large fish straining the line. A crowd of locals gathered on the bank to watch, among them some old people who could not resist giggling. The troops pulled in the body of an Australian soldier, shot in his left temple. They reached for their guns and scrambled for shelter. Suddenly someone in the crowd spoke in broken English. ‘War with us over,’ the woman said, directing her voice at the river. ‘You kill no more Vietnamese. Now you fight yourself.’ She pummelled her chest with tightened fists. ‘Inside.’

  There were other voices. Apparitions. He heard himself talking. Then someone touched him. ‘Wake up! Martin! Wake up!’

  He shouted incoherently. The haze cleared. Colin was standing next to the bed, leaning on a crutch. Martin tried to speak but dizziness choked him. He could only point at the crutch with an unsteady finger. Someone handed him a mug of coffee.

  ‘Nothing too serious. Shrapnel wound in the left leg. I dipped into my share of luck!’ Colin smiled. ‘What was the nightmare about?’

  ‘Fishing,’ Martin mumbled.

  ‘Did you catch a crocodile instead?’

  Martin glared at him.

  ‘Sorry.’ Colin noticed the book of poetry next to the pillow. ‘Did you read any of it?’

  ‘What?’ He was still in a daze.

  ‘Did you read any of the poems?’

  Martin nodded and, almost reluctantly, strung together some lines:

  ‘Come to me only with playthings now…

  A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes