Love in the Years of Lunacy

by Mandy Sayer

  ‘I’ve lost my lip a bit,’ said Pearl in a low voice, preparing Charlie for the inevitable moment when he realised she couldn’t play very well at all. ‘I haven’t really played or practised for ages. It’s amazing how quickly it goes.’

  ‘Modest, too!’ declared Charlie. ‘A man after my own heart. Do you dance?’

  Pearl stared back at him. Was he thinking that she could perform a dance routine during the concert? ‘No,’ she replied. ‘My mother’s the dancer.’ She went to cross her legs but stopped herself, remembering that it would seem too girlish. Instead, she raised her leg and rested an ankle on her knee.

  At midday they joined a queue that snaked out of a wide doorway. The line moved forward and she and Charlie edged into the mess hall for lunch. The room was long and wide, with panels of etched glass and mirrors between the windows. A stage, framed with deep red velvet curtains, stood at the other end, but instead of a ten-piece orchestra playing light dance music, a team of men on mess duty doled out food onto a parade of upturned tin plates. A five-tiered chandelier gleamed above what had once obviously been a polished dance floor; now, long trestle tables and fold-out chairs stood against it and the wood was covered with dust.

  It was when Pearl passed one of the panels of etched glass that she felt a quiver of recognition. She paused and glanced back. The glass was tinted pale pink and the figure etched into it was a woman in robes with a garland of flowers for a crown. Pearl picked up a tin plate and followed Charlie up the set of wooden stairs to the stage. From there the former ballroom looked both sad and elegant, like a palace whose king had suddenly gone bankrupt. The glass panels and mirrors glistened in the noonday light, radiant with refracted light from the chandelier, and she felt another flicker of recognition. She couldn’t be certain, but she had the distinct feeling she’d been on the ship before, when she and her mother had returned from their season at the Panorama Hotel in Ceylon. Pearl even remembered some of the repertoire: ‘Shuffle Off to Buffalo’, ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’, ‘42nd Street’. She and Clara had worn matching gold outfits and identical red wigs.

  Blue, she could see, was standing at the end of the queue; his head was bowed and he was twisting a button on his jacket. Pearl held out her plate and three ladles of brown sludge were dropped upon it. She followed Charlie down the stairs at the other side of the stage and they sat together at one of the trestle tables on the dance floor. The food was terrible—a fatty, half-warm stew—but Pearl ate it all because none of the men she knew cared what they ate and they all consumed twice as much as she did. While she chewed she gazed at the etching of the woman in the robes and had a distant recollection, more like a dream than a memory. She had been pressed against a similar panel and kissed by a man three times her age. While her mother had dozed in the library after the last of the singing guests had woven out of the room and down the red carpet to the whisky bottles in their berths, an Indian steward had put his lips on Pearl’s and moved his tongue around in her mouth until she thought she would suffocate. Afterwards, she had fled, never telling a soul about it.

  During the afternoon, she and Charlie walked circuits around the ship, while others cleaned and polished rifles, arm wrestled or did push-ups. The ship was so crowded there was not enough room to perform military drills. Pearl considered this a blessing, as she wasn’t confident about performing drill. She simply hoped that, when the time came, she could fake it by mimicking the others.

  Everywhere was the smell of the sea and the stench of vomit, as one soldier after another bowed over the railing and puked into the Pacific. It was the only thing that was allowed into the water, as any discarded garbage might form a trail the enemy could follow. Some men speculated on the probability of being sunk by a Jap torpedo or bomb. They were mostly short odds.

  When twilight edged into the horizon, an announcement made over the loudspeakers ordered all on deck to extinguish every light, match and cigarette until further notice the following morning. There was so little room onboard that many soldiers had to sleep on the deck itself, or on the dance floor of the ballroom. One unit bedded down on the tiled bottom of the drained pool.

  After dinner, Charlie and Pearl joined Blue in the tiny cabin. They found him in his underwear, already asleep in the bottom hammock. Charlie yawned, stripped down to his underpants and singlets, and crawled into the middle one. Pearl locked herself in the bathroom. The sight of her clipped hair in the mirror was still a shock—she did almost look identical to her brother. She cleaned her teeth, removed her boots and gaiters, and then—what the hell, she thought—unbuckled the belt and lowered her trousers. Fortunately, the tails of Martin’s shirt covered her crotch and would make it difficult to detect what she lacked down there.

  She returned to the cabin and flipped off the light. She’d made it through the first day undetected, but she knew whatever lay ahead would be much more challenging and hazardous. She tried to comfort herself by thinking that she was only a little behind James in their separate journeys to New Guinea.

  ‘Night,’ she said gruffly to Charlie, as she climbed into her swaying hammock.

  On the second day, the concert party CO, Art Rudolph, marched the unit of musicians onto the deck for an Abandon Ship Drill, while the crew lowered grey lifeboats. They were told that under no conditions should any man jump directly into the water. In case of an emergency, they were to abandon the ship by way of knotted ropes that were tied between the upper and lower decks. The first time she tried it, Pearl lost her grip, and found herself dropping onto the broad shoulders of the band’s drummer, which sent them both tumbling onto the deck below.

  In her spare time she walked around the crowded deck with Charlie and Blue, trading jokes and looking for enemy submarines. One afternoon they saw a big black shape rising out of a swell about two hundred yards away. The alarm was raised, torpedoes were aimed, anti-aircraft artillery was held in position. After a few minutes, however, the big black shape emerged on a wave and the tail of a whale forked up and flipped in the air, before sinking back into the ocean’s depths.

  Art Rudolph scheduled the first concert for the afternoon of the third day at sea. There was a hasty rehearsal in the dining room, during which he mostly talked them through the arrangements. The musicians filed out onto the lower deck and set up in the shade of one of the ship’s huge chimneys. Pearl pegged the music to her stand so it wouldn’t blow away. So far, she’d managed to look, talk and behave like her brother: earlier that morning, she’d slipped the blade from Martin’s razor, soaped up her face and, with the cabin’s bathroom door ajar, pretended to shave herself; when she rolled a smoke she let the cigarette paper dangle from her bottom lip, pasted by a slick of saliva as she kneaded the tobacco between her fingers; she often sat with her elbows resting upon her widespread knees as she played two-up with anti-aircraft gunners; and of course she swore as loudly and broadly as the best of them. But she hadn’t played jazz in any serious way for almost a year now. Compared to the lightness of her old alto, Martin’s tenor saxophone was heavy in her hands, with wider spaces between the keys, a slightly bigger mouthpiece. And she’d never grown used to playing outside, preferring instead the perfect acoustics of the Trocadero or the dining rooms of posh hotels. Still, it was a relief to be part of a band again and, as the musos tuned up and quietly ran through bits of music to themselves, a quiet thrill rippled through her.

  Some players sat on ammo crates, but most reclined on faded deck chairs left over from when the ship had been a luxury liner. Rudolph whacked the air with his baton and counted them in on Benny Goodman’s ‘Stealin’ Apples’, which wasn’t too difficult, as it was a piano-led introduction and the brass section just had to play harmony. But the second verse contained some fast, synchronised sax riffs and she found herself struggling with the fingering. She faked it, and merely pressed the keys, but didn’t blow into the mouthpiece, allowing the alto and baritone to carry her through. Fortunately, Rudolph didn’t seem to notice. A few soldiers were already throw
ing off their hats and jitterbugging together, while others leaped into the empty pool and glided across the cracked white tiles, turning it into an impromptu dance hall.

  Everyone was in full military uniform, though it was so hot that most of the musicians had unbuttoned their shirts and rolled up their sleeves and trouser legs. Pearl felt exceedingly self-conscious, not only because she was having trouble keeping up with the music; she was also the only one who remained fully clothed, with sweat patches spreading across her uniform. She feared she must seem ridiculously modest or fastidious—or just plain stupid.

  The drummer was keeping the beat on the ride cymbal but Pearl couldn’t hear it properly because the wind kept carrying it away. When she had to stand up and take a solo on ‘Two o’Clock Jump’—a song she’d played countless times at the Troc—she sensed the tempo escaping her, as if riding away with the sea breeze. She was running out of breath and the tenor was too big and heavy in her hands and the sun was in her eyes and she was perspiring so much her uniform was wet and pasted against her skin.

  ‘I’ve heard better solos from old coots in the Salvation Army, Willis,’ the CO said after the concert had ended and he’d summoned her to his cabin. ‘I bet you didn’t play that drivel at the Trocadero.’

  Her face flushed and she could sense tears coming on. The snorts and stares from the other band members had been humiliating enough and she’d barely made it through the final tune. The alto player, Moss, had remarked, ‘The great Trocadero tenor. Couldn’t even fart in tune!’

  Only Charlie had been sympathetic, slapping her on the shoulder afterwards and reminding her it happened occasionally to every muso in a new band.

  Rudolph rested his hands on his hips and demanded to know if she’d been drinking.

  She bowed her head and shook it.

  The CO began pacing his tiny cabin, bumping into his own hammock each time he turned.

  ‘Well, you might think my band is some two-bit outfit touring the arsehole of the earth. But let me tell you something . . .’ His index finger jabbed the air. ‘Soon we’ll be playing for soldiers who’ve been taking Jap bullets for years, sleeping in mud and living on biscuits. And let me tell you, fuckwit, if you can’t deliver the performance of your life every time we do a concert, I’ll have you transferred into some service unit faster than you can say sayonara, and you’ll be stranded on some remote island cleaning shit from latrines for the rest of the war.’

  Instead of wasting time playing two-up or circling the deck, Pearl spent the next few days locked inside a linen press, practising scales and runs, rehearsing the band’s repertoire, trying to get her lip back. She struggled with the additional weight of the tenor saxophone—quite a bit heavier than the alto she’d always played. It felt like an anchor hanging from her neck. She also had to adjust herself to the tenor sax’s lower pitch.

  The press reminded her of the time she and James had made love standing up in the linen closet of the Booker T. Club, at the beginning of their affair, when she’d been shaken by the sensations that had shimmered through her body. Inside the tiny room she annoyed no one with her noise. And besides, it was a relief to be away from the scrutiny of her fellow soldiers. Blowing into the mouthpiece for hours each day, she coaxed back her embouchure, strengthening and tightening the muscles around her mouth and lips. She repeated the breathing techniques James had taught her, and began practising slowly again, as he had advised, repeating each tune she knew in every major and minor key. At night, lying in her hammock, her jaw throbbed and her mind was riddled with jazz phrases that kept repeating themselves. And on top of that were her obsessive thoughts about James, about where he was now, what he might be doing, and how he’d react when she finally tracked him down.

  Charlie thought she was nuts, rehearsing inside a closet in order to sound good for a bunch of men in the jungle, but the truth was that the effort afforded her a deep, visceral pleasure that was almost erotic in the way it exhausted her each day.

  On the fifth afternoon of their journey, she was sitting next to Charlie in the ballroom, eating the usual slop they dished up. The inside of her lip was cut from a splintering reed and she could taste her own blood mixed with the fatty mutton. Gazing up at one of the etched glass murals, she again experienced that quiver of recognition, the memory of being pressed against it with the steward’s tongue in her mouth. She could no longer contain her curiosity; she had to know if this was the same ship she’d travelled on with her mother. So after they’d scraped their plates, Pearl suggested to Charlie they go exploring down into the bowels of the ex-ocean liner. He smiled and his eyebrows arched with excitement.

  She led the way out the door, along the hall, following the numbers on the doors of the berths until she found a staircase that took them down into a grinding underworld of engines, steam and machinery. It smelled of diesel oil and sometimes the tart, chemical odour of bleach. They walked along galleries, down metal staircases, the temperature rising the further they descended, as if they were inching their way into hell. On the sixth level below deck the engines groaned like dying animals. The navy hadn’t bothered applying the same monotonous grey paint to everything down there, and dry green flakes peeled off the walls and stuck to the soles of their boots. She reached a waist-high metal gate that looked familiar, and vaguely remembered a sign that had once hung from it: passengers strictly forbidden beyond this point. She pushed the gate open and counted the doors on her left until she reached the fifth one. She opened it and entered a tiny cabin with a narrow single bed and a sink. Yellowing newspapers and magazines from 1939 were strewn across the carpet. The upper corners of the cabin were netted with sagging cobwebs. When she walked into the cabin she was surprised to turn around and see the outline of her boots imprinted in the dust on the floor.

  She rushed to the bed, and pulled back the mattress: there, carved into the wall, were the initials PW, and a crooked semiquaver. Eight years before the unused berth had been her secret hideout. While Clara had caroused with wealthy patrons on the ship, she’d slipped down here to play on her own, listening to every creak and rumble of the liner, pretending she was a stowaway.

  She pushed the mattress forward again and was straightening up when she felt a pair of arms engulf her from behind and push her face-first onto the bed. She struggled, cried out, turned onto her side. Charlie was suddenly all over her, kissing her neck, kneading her arse, trying to stick his tongue into her mouth. He was breathing heavily, the bulge in his pants pressing against her. She shoved him away but he seemed to take it as encouragement and lunged forward again, his full weight against her, biting her earlobe and neck.

  She cried out in pain and when he jolted his head back she raised her fist and punched him hard in the face. Without a sound, he rolled over and hit the floor. They both lay still for a moment, Pearl shocked by what had happened.

  ‘But I thought this was what you wanted,’ said Charlie, rubbing his eye.

  Pearl was breathing heavily. She didn’t know what to say. ‘I’m—I’m not like that.’

  ‘It’s always the blokes who are secretly scared of being queer that hate queers the most.’

  ‘I don’t hate queers. I don’t hate you.’

  ‘Well, then . . .’ Charlie got to his feet. His eye was already beginning to swell. ‘You led me down here. You led me on.’ Then, to Pearl’s great surprise, he undid his trousers and let them drop to his ankles, revealing a hard pink penis about the length of her hand.

  ‘That’s how much I want you,’ he said in a quiet voice.

  Pearl flushed with embarrassment and was overcome with pity for him, for all his furtive desires, for the lies he must have had to tell for years, and for the ones he would have to keep on telling throughout his life. He wasn’t so different from herself, or even James—an outsider pretending to be an insider. She scooted forward and stood up. His erect member was nodding at her impatiently. Mimicking Charlie, she undid the buttons of her shirt to reveal her bandaged chest, then she unbuc
kled her belt and let her trousers and underwear drop to the floor.

  ‘You still want to do it?’ she asked.

  Charlie stared at the blonde triangle of hair between her legs. His face paled and he stopped breathing. His eyebrows fluttered then his cock sank into a limp, tiny finger, pointing at the ground.

  13

  After eight days at sea, the troop ship anchored in Port Moresby just before daylight. All the soldiers fell in and formed lines across the deck. Sequins of moonlight shimmered across the harbour, the only illumination against the blacked-out town. The air was heavy with humidity and already mosquitoes were nipping at the hands and necks of the troops as they crawled into the rocking barges. Pearl sat clutching her rifle as they were ferried away from the troop ship, both terrified and exhilarated. The breeze smelled of rotting fish. The stars above her were so bright and iridescent they looked like a mosaic of diamonds—so much sharper than in the sky over Sydney.

  It was a relief to have finally told someone about her real identity. Back in the tiny cabin, when she’d explained why she was dressed as her brother, why she’d taken such a risk, Charlie shook his head and murmured, ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’ He squeezed her arm and assured her that he’d keep her secret and guide her through the rigours of army life. He explained that queers, too, were banned from the military, but he and his friend Blue had been getting it off for two years, since their first tour of New Guinea.

  ‘Sometimes you get so scared,’ he said, ‘the only thing you can do is fuck.’

  The relationship, however, had been severely tested since Blue had been sent back to Australia and hospitalised. Charlie added that now, when they made love, Blue would sometimes begin to weep. He could offer no explanation for his tears, and it made Charlie feel powerless to help him, as if Blue were a man teetering on the ledge of a building, just out of reach.