The Thompson Gunner

by Nick Earls

His eye blinks and blinks as blood inks it in darkly. There’s noise all around us. I’m standing over him, my gun in my hand. I’m stuck. I can’t read his expression at all, but that’s the blood. It should be fear with him in that position, he should be unable to feel anything but fear, but that’s not why we came here today. I want this to stop.

  Paintballs hit my back like fists.

  I settle for some more laps later, since I’ll go crazy if I stay in my room until the show, and I don’t feel like drinking. I swim freestyle, up and down, ten long strokes a lap, ten long hard-working strokes till my muscles burn and can pull me no further.

  Elliott was taken to the nearest medical centre at high speed, a tea towel and a wad of bandage clamped to his face by Trent’s gloved hand, a sheaf of incident report forms in a folder beside them. The rest of us drove back into Perth on the bus.

  And the bush gave way to suburbs and then the city, and I reminded myself that I have a job to do tonight, an audience ahead of me with expectations. There’s plenty to think about, to focus on. It was hard, though, to put that blinking blood-filled eye out of my head, and the sharp cracking sound that came when I hit him, when he was on his knees.

  Elliott explained that he had tripped while running with the flag, and had struck his head when he fell. He wanted to walk back to the carpark but his knees went wobbly on the way and he had to be helped.

  I have no idea how I’m going to describe this to Emma when the time comes. He should have picked golf. Not that I play, but I would happily have caddied. I wouldn’t have beaten anyone up if we’d played golf. Or mini-golf. I’m always up for that, and happy to play whether I win or lose.

  When I’m out of the pool, I call Elliott and get his voice-mail. I apologise, again, and I tell him I’d like to buy him breakfast in the morning, if he’ll let me.

  Back in my room, there are messages from Claire and Felicity, checking how I am today and saying I should call if I want to. ‘Everything’s under control,’ Felicity says. ‘I hope you managed to shoot a few of those TV people.’

  When we next talk, Emma will ask how paintball went and I’ll say ‘I whacked Elliott in the face with a gun’ and she’ll say ‘I’m sure it was an accident’ and I’ll have to say No.

  I whacked him in the face because the moment called for it, inexplicably, and that’s just how it was. My gun jammed. Elliott had the flag. Something like that.

  Tomorrow night I’ll be on a plane home. There’s one more show to get through, and the canoe race, and a dinner. Murray will be in Brisbane now, I suppose, ordering takeaway and hoping for good sleep before his day with Elli tomorrow. A good sleep in an otherwise empty bed.

  Christchurch — five days ago

  IN VANCOUVER I ate raspberries from the Granville Island markets. I bought a punnet for four dollars and I hadn’t eaten such fresh raspberries since I’d left Northern Ireland, not that I could recall. And the people I worked with were as nice as they’d been on my previous visit, but they said I looked tired and they’d heard we’d had a big week in Calgary and Banff.

  I could have done without the Rob Castle posters as I walked around the island. He’d been there in August, and August was long ago.

  They were right – I was tired and I was losing the capacity to hide it. The hotel gym was an exercise bike almost rusted through in some places and a stepper gone lame on one side, so I caught the ferry and ran around Stanley Park, breathing in the cool, wet, temperate air among the big trees. And the temperature fell quickly as the light went, but the run didn’t shake the listlessness, and I faked it for my show as best I could and the next day I left Canada for New Zealand.

  Christchurch brought me closer to home, and to realising properly that home, when I arrived, would not be the place I had left.

  On the last of my three nights there, I went to a fan’s house for dinner. Her name was Jill and she had seen my short-lived TV show when it screened in New Zealand, as well as some of my regular guest appearances before then on cable. ‘I got $2.42 for that,’ I told her when I replied to her first email a year ago, ‘so I’m glad someone was watching.’

  That email had invited me to her husband David’s birthday, since it was his fortieth and she wanted to line up some kind of surprise. It couldn’t be me that weekend, but I’d made it now, weeks before his forty-first, and David had a roast under way and he put a glass of wine in my hand as soon as I walked in.

  The house was built for a colder country than home, with somewhere to put your boots just inside the door and fireplaces everywhere. They had two children, a girl aged eight and a boy aged six, and the house was warm and full of Lego, colouring-in pencils and story books. They had a roster magneted to the fridge – soccer, ballet, piano – and two very fluffy cats with a birthday the day after mine. I don’t know if the house always felt the way it did then, but that night it felt perfect. I wanted to tell the kids how lucky they were, but there’s never any point in that, so I read them a story instead when the time came for them to go to bed.

  I found myself late in the evening talking to Jill and David about how New Zealand wines are among the best in the world, the very best, as though that was half an excuse for drinking so much, and they looked at me slipping lower in the seat, jet-lagged and drunk and dull-witted and they said, ‘You must have an interesting life.’ And a bunch of interview anecdotes circled in my head and nearly made me cry.

  Forty minutes later, back in my room at the hotel next to the one once stayed in by Bill Clinton, I washed some clothes in the bath, I took a last look at the cold empty square, I imagined the porch light going out at Jill and David’s and I fell asleep missing them already. And I dreamed, of course, because I do that often when I’m jet-lagged and I’ve been drinking.

  And I woke and flew on, to the next country, where I broke my tooth and slept again, at the wrong time, over the desert. Still dreaming, with nothing any clearer.

  ‘Why did your family move to Australia?’ Of course they asked that. We had a long talk about our lives, and it’s a part of mine.

  I told them the six-line version of the story, and that I’d been their daughter’s age at the time, perhaps a few months older, and Jill said, ‘Well, you’d remember quite a lot then. You would have done, what, three years of school there? Assuming it’s the same kind of system.’

  Ballystewart — 1972

  ‘MY DAY AT THE BEACH’ was typical of our school story topics. They never gave us much to go on.

  We had a beach just near us, but one you would hardly choose to go to. It was all stones and thick black bladdery weed, and somehow we all got the idea that it wasn’t the kind of beach that was meant to be in the stories. The teacher was looking for sand, buckets and spades, an interesting bleached starfish or sea urchin. She held up a picture book with that kind of beach scene on the cover and said we could use it for inspiration if we had no ideas.

  I did my best. I started with the beach in the picture, though I don’t think I’d ever been to one like it, and I had sandcastles being built and plenty of fun going on before I brought in the squadron of Spitfires and the bullets kicked up the sand and smashed down the sandcastles and killed some people, left them lying there in shapes you wouldn’t lie in. Not like sleeping, definitely dead. So I came up with plenty to write about, what with the shot people and the blood in the sand, and the description of the planes, which I knew quite well.

  I thought I’d done the job, and done it to quite a high standard, and the teacher called it ‘vivid’ after she’d read it from beginning to end, but then she said, ‘Now try a different kind of day. Maybe there’s a girl who finds something in a rockpool – a fish, a lost piece of jewellery. Maybe she’s a girl your age. That could be quite a story.’

  So I thought about it, and I came up with one idea to do with the jewellery and pirates, but then I decided my girl would be a fighter in the French Resistance being tailed by the Gestapo. And, just when the Gestapo think they’ve got her, just when they’ve chas
ed her down and got her cornered on this beach, she finds a grenade in a rock pool and blows them to bits. That way I still got to use some of the best parts of the first story, the parts about the blood, as well as the idea about a girl finding something in a rock pool.

  And the teacher thought about it for a while and said, ‘That’s good writing. It’d be interesting to try something less dramatic some time. A description of a sea anemone could be nice.’

  But I couldn’t see it. And I had no idea what a sea anemone was, anyway.

  My school report that term said, ‘Margaret has a very active imagination, and she writes well.’

  The French Resistance figured in quite a few Commando comics. They wore berets, they rode bikes, they kept their guns hidden. Commando comics were always clear in the way they defined different groups of people.

  Mark Macleish said we were like the Resistance, not in every way since we didn’t have the Vichy French and the Germans to deal with, but I knew what he was saying. We had no uniforms, the guns were hidden.

  In one Commando comic, the Resistance took a baker’s lorry and attacked a Gestapo headquarters and killed an officer. There were dreadful consequences, but they had to do it. In another, the Germans strung two of them up from the blades of a windmill, so maybe they were Dutch Resistance that time. In Commando comics you would only get windmills in Holland, even though there had once been one in the next village down the peninsula from Ballystewart. I never felt the same about windmills after reading that story.

  The other thing I remember about the Resistance is that they were often betrayed. They had some of the bravest fighters of all, but also some of the worst traitors.

  We had a housekeeper, Mrs Tannock, who came in a couple of days a week. Once, when I was drinking milk and eating toast and my mother wasn’t there, she said to me that my father was like a fine English gentleman. I knew that, didn’t I? That people thought well of him, and knew he believed in everything he should, but he wasn’t really part of all this.

  ‘There are some things your mummy and daddy wouldn’t understand,’ she said, ‘and I think you know what they are. And I think you know how to keep secrets. You’re one of us, so we know you’ll keep them.’

  My father wasn’t English – he was never English – but I knew what she meant by ‘fine English gentleman’. My father had had another life somewhere else, my only life had been in Ballystewart. I had to be ‘one of us’ because it’s what I was. It was the only place in the world that meant home to me. It was a natural thing, to take the Webley when it was offered, and natural for Mr Macleish to offer it to me. I finished my toast and I finished my milk and I told her I knew, and that she was right. I was good with secrets.

  That was almost the whole conversation. My mother came back into the room not long after, but Mrs Tannock and I were already talking about school, and the conversation about secrets would have had no detail to it anyway, however long we might have talked. I assumed the details, then and since, and no doubt accurately.

  I nearly blew it once though, maybe more than once.

  We read about the guns that were under the Macleishes’ barn. There were books in the school library that had information about them, and we would read them at lunchtime on wet days. There was a lot I didn’t understand. The Sten has forty-seven parts, two of them machined and the rest stamped or pressed. But what did that mean?

  One afternoon after school we had a plumber in and he was doing something with a pipe under the sink in the bathroom, so I asked him what the difference was between machined and stamped and pressed. Some of the important parts of the Sten were metal tubing, so he seemed like someone who might know.

  My mother walked in as he showed me his spanner. He pointed out the mark that ran long the edges of it like a seam, and the lettering on one face of it. He was starting to tell me about the different ways metal is handled in order to make things. My mother had brought him a mug of tea. I told her we were doing the Industrial Revolution at school – which we honestly were – but if my question had been about the Industrial Revolution I would have asked her, and she knew it.

  Two months later we were gone.

  I might have dropped some clues, that might have been one of them. To this day I don’t know. Her answers about us leaving have always been more general – my father’s job offer, the fact that her skills were sought after in Australia then too, and it was a better place to bring up a child. A better place. That’s a very general way of putting it, but it’s how it’s always been put.

  The children’s TV programming was interrupted one afternoon with a newsflash about a bomb. It might have been at a place called the Abercorn, but it could be that that’s not it at all. The name’s in my head, though. I was watching a cartoon when they broke for the news, and it had the typical footage of splintered timber and fallen masonry, but this time more casualties than usual. They might have let this one off without a warning.

  I was there with my milk and toast and suddenly my mother was in the doorway and saying ‘What’s going on?’

  And I told her, ‘The plastic bags are for the bits of bodies,’ since I took her question to be specific and that’s the part of the story she’d walked in on, police and emergency workers sorting through rubble and bagging remains.

  Then I remember footage of a woman – who I now realise was a teenage girl – with blood running out of her hair and down her face. She was saying that she was looking for her friend but she couldn’t find her. She kept wiping at the blood, as if it was rain, and looking around with only her missing friend on her mind.

  She said, ‘We weren’t supposed to be here, but I made us come.’

  The way I remember it, it wasn’t long after that that Paul Macleish suggested a trip to Belfast. Take a look around, visit a few people. Mark asked him who we would go with, and he said, ‘I can drive a tractor, so I can drive a van. I’ve been doing it at night you know, lately.’

  I don’t know how old he was. I thought he was a man. Maybe he was just sixteen, thinking about it now. Maybe not even that. I don’t know.

  Perth — Sunday

  ELLIOTT, a sumptuous serve of the full buffet breakfast in front of him, is talking animatedly, saying I was ‘fucking brilliant’ and he hardly felt a thing anyway.

  ‘Maybe we should have owned up to it,’ he says. ‘There’s a life ban for that, for hitting someone with the gun. Trent told me. I asked him. Imagine that, a life ban. Imagine how that’d work for us.’

  He has three stitches in his right cheek and the early stages of a black eye. And, for anyone of note who can’t be here, he already has the photos to prove it. We might not have owned up to it yesterday, but there has been some fresh thought given to the subject overnight, and not to anything as small as admitting it at the time, out on the course. Elliott is loving the idea of going very public, exactly when it might do us the most good.

  I could hardly speak when we pulled him up from the ground yesterday, and I don’t think I was any help. He was stunned at first, perhaps simply physically, but I don’t suppose what had happened made a lot of sense. Trent lifted his mask off cautiously and Elliott blinked his good eye and tried to focus, and he started telling his story about falling, perhaps because the real story seemed too implausible, maybe even to himself at first. It was a blur and I hit him hard, and in the head. I don’t know yet if other people saw it or if they didn’t. No one talked on the bus as if they did, and a full minute might have passed before I took the shots in the back, but I can’t be certain.

  Two tables away, three comedians are eating breakfast by the plateful, going back for thirds of pancakes. I’ve never been so antisocial at a festival, never in my life. One of them was on the opening night program with me, and I haven’t spoken to him since.

  Elliott is waving a big piece of sausage on a fork.

  ‘The eye hardly opens,’ he says, as if I’m unaware and it’s news we’ll both love. ‘I’m not faking that. I emailed the pictures to Sydne
y this morning. The guys are on their way home now and I know they’ll be stoked. And the bruising’ll probably only get uglier over the next day or so. The doctor said it won’t scar much, but it might scar a bit. And if anyone asks me I can go, “That’s where Meg Riddoch hit me with a gun.” How excellent is that? Decked, by a girl, with a gun. And you’re the girl. Hilarious.’ So I’ve become Elliott King’s favourite war story, and all I did was snap in the heat of the moment and hit him with a toy. ‘You were like a fucking soldier out there,’ he says. ‘Like the SAS. We’re going to have to feminise you so you can play the part.’

  ‘Go easy on that face,’ I tell him. ‘Grin any wider and you’ll snap a stitch.’

  I can’t go hitting people. It’s not what I should do. I don’t know what was on my mind at the time. It was a kind of panic attack, perhaps. I was on my way out of there, not going for the flag.

  The waiter is asking if I’d like a second latte. Elliott says he’ll have another, sure, he’d love another, and he’s scooping up omelette and filling his mouth.

  I put the idea of tumble turns back in my head, and the mystery of my inability to line the end of the pool up from any distance away. I can see my hand, breaking the glassy surface of the water, bubbles bursting away from it, but the wall is too hazy for me to measure how far it is, every time, until I’m upon it. Is it something in the water? My goggles?

  ‘The buzz about this show will be so big when we put the photos out there,’ Elliott says, his next mouthful of omelette still not all swallowed. ‘Maybe we’ll do it just before we go into production, or maybe right before it runs.’ He stops. He’s thinking about magazines, his best victim shot next to a story about my dark side, and its impending release. ‘Hey, I heard about that NW piece last night. Was that all bullshit or . . .’

  The look he gives me says he can go sensitive right now if I need him to, and we can’t have that so I tell him, ‘Pretty much. I guess I’ll be home tomorrow so I’ll find out, won’t I?’