by Mandy Sayer
Here, among these villagers, she enjoyed an exhilarating anonymity: she had no name, no nationality, no sex; she wasn’t even human, but some supernatural creature free to shift shape, to sing and move in any way she wished, and she found herself sauntering around the fire, gazing into watchful eyes, her voice modulating up from the tones she’d once sung in, inventing themselves into something uniquely her own.
When she held her last note, it was the only sound that could be heard on the side of the mountain, and when it ended everyone sat in a captivated silence. At first she wondered if she’d offended them, or if they’d been disappointed in her performance. But Wanipe finally broke the silence by clapping slowly and, one by one, the others joined in until the whole village exploded with the sound of applause.
After that, the show slid into one long jam session of native drums and flutes, traditional dancing and soft-shoes, four-four jazz rhythms on saxophone and harmonica played against the complicated time signatures of the village musicians. Women were suddenly bedecked in headdresses made from the plumes of birds of paradise and men rubbed pale mud onto their faces and arms until they too looked like ghosts from the sky. Children ran up to Pearl, lifting the skirt of her dress to see if she was a boy or a girl and finally she didn’t care anymore and lifted the hem above her waist and danced about with the other women, flashing her bum and the triangle of blonde pubic hair. After that, she played her alto behind the relentless beats of the drums, trying to find a way into them, and be at one.
21
The next morning, two elders led the trio back along the top of the range to help them get their bearings. A small group of children followed along behind. The elders tried to shoo them away but they refused to return to their village until Charlie gave them his tiny hand mirror. When they reached a chasm lined with limestone and ferns, the men pointed to a track that led down to a valley patched with native gardens and kunai grass. On the other side stood another range of slate-coloured mountains, the tops ringed by clouds, with rivers running out of them, as if they flowed from heaven. It was a poignant parting for all of them, and already Pearl was nostalgic for the most fun she’d had since her journey had begun. In a way, it reminded her of home, her own family, when they’d push back the furniture, crowd around the piano, and sing, dance and perform for one another. Now that she wasn’t performing she had turned back into a man, wearing a khaki uniform, steel helmet and army boots.
They were on their way to the mobile medical unit stationed about eight miles from the foot of the mountain, and were hoping to make it by dusk. Marks and Farthing would be flown in from Nadzab on a supplies plane to rejoin the band after three months of rest and treatment.
The descent took them down another steep track, and they paused regularly to ease the cramps in their legs, the splintering pains that the Allies had nicknamed ‘laughing knees’. Coming upon the mounds of three Japanese graves freshly dug into the side of the mountain, they noticed the site was marked with nothing more than a piece of sapling and some carved ideographs.
After they passed the graves, Charlie complained that he was feeling sick. At first, Pearl thought it was vertigo and told him to stop looking down at the valley. Sometimes the incline was so vertical that Wanipe had to carry the dog in his pack. The track snaked around limestone slabs, over streams, between the thick aerial roots of trees. Every one hundred feet or so they’d have to pause and rest because of the cramps forking through their legs like a series of electric shocks. It was during one such break that Charlie suddenly bent over and vomited. Pearl and Wanipe traded worried looks; they both knew what Charlie’s symptoms implied, but neither wished to admit it. They heard the whistle of a shell and then the distant purr of Bren guns. Charlie began to suffer from dizzy spells and was having trouble keeping up. They stopped again, passing him water.
While Charlie rested, Pearl and Wanipe bathed in a stream that coursed down the range, washing mud from their hands and faces. The water was cold and bracing. Pearl still wore her uniform and scrubbed it with a cake of soap. It had begun to rot from the daily rain and perspiration but she still tried to keep it clean. When Wanipe emerged from the water, he disappeared off the track and into a thicket of trees. Pearl and Charlie waited fifteen minutes, half an hour, and still he didn’t return. Pearl was growing anxious, but said nothing to Charlie, who was resting against a fallen log, looking up at the sky, where dark clouds were gathering.
Wanipe finally came striding into the clearing. Cupped in his hands were several betel nuts that he’d traded for a pack of cigarettes. He told Charlie to chew on them: they would stave off the cramps and give him energy.
As the party set off again it began to rain and the track grew wet and slippery. The nuts did indeed revitalise Charlie and he was able to walk at a fairly even pace. Even so, the afternoon storm slowed their progress and Pearl suspected they wouldn’t make the medical unit by sunset, that there’d be another night spent in the damp jungle, with Charlie sick and snipers about and virtually no rations left. They laboured on for another twenty minutes, watching the sun fade behind the jagged mountains that were now grey and austere in the twilight.
Wanipe and Pearl built a lean-to out of vines and palms, then settled Charlie on a bedroll inside it, with a blanket and plenty of water from a nearby stream. They were hoping a long rest would revive him enough to make it to the hospital base the next day, but Charlie was up half the night, vomiting and shitting outside.
By morning, he was so weak he could hardly walk. He stuck his head out of the lean-to and began dry retching, having nothing left in his system to expel. Wanipe and Pearl briefly considered making a stretcher from a groundsheet tied to two branches and carrying him the rest of the way, but they knew they couldn’t manage both Charlie and their own gear. Charlie lay back down on the ground and suggested that they go ahead without him, that they could return later that day unencumbered by instruments and supplies, with a proper stretcher and a couple of other people to help them.
This alternative seemed more plausible, though Pearl was uneasy about leaving him alone, particularly since he was so ill and weak. She insisted he keep the last of the emergency rations—a few biscuits and the last remaining anti-malarial tablet—and refilled his canteen of water from the stream. When it came time to go, she found excuses for delaying their departure, placing a wet rag on his forehead to cool his fever, rummaging in her backpack to leave him the last of her cigarettes, making a pillow with her own blanket and slipping it beneath his head. She and Charlie had been inseparable since that chilly dawn down at the Woolloomooloo wharf the year before; he’d shadowed her every move, as she had shadowed his. She felt guilty, somehow responsible for his illness, as if she herself had accidentally caused the contamination.
‘I wouldn’t have got this far without you,’ she admitted.
‘Come on, soldier,’ he chided.
‘I mean it, Charl. You’ve been the best.’
She was still fussing over him, smoothing his blanket up to his chin.
‘Hurry up and piss off,’ he urged gently. ‘I want a real doctor looking after me tonight, not some dickhead jazz muso.’
She laughed in spite of herself and tweaked his nose. He smelled of stale vomit, but she leaned over and kissed him on the lips. He kissed her back and she felt the sweat from his upper lip bead her own.
***
The tracks were always longer and rougher when she walked on an empty stomach; the sun was hotter and her backpack was heavier. Sometimes she grew dizzy and spots whirled in front of her eyes like bright, nervy insects, but she didn’t stop walking for fear that she’d never start again. By mid-morning she and Wanipe could hear grenades exploding in the valley and the hammer of machine guns. Pup was suddenly anxious at the sound of them and ran in circles, barking back. They followed a river north for about two hours and finally the mobile hospital appeared, a camouflage of green tents and a couple of circular huts between clusters of trees cloaked in leaf mould and v
ines. A narrow airstrip lay behind the camp, though no planes were on the runway.
‘Malaria,’ declared the CO, Nevins, when Pearl described Charlie’s symptoms, explaining why they hadn’t arrived two days ago, as scheduled. He was a squat, pear-shaped man with tobacco-stained teeth and a nasal voice. ‘Don’t worry about him being left with so little food. He won’t keep anything down anyway.’
While Nevins organised two carriers and a stretcher to accompany them back to the lean-to, Pearl and Wanipe found the mess tent, where they each ate a plate of bully beef and boiled taro from a local garden. After her stomach was full, Pearl felt a sense of warmth moving through her body, a kind of tranquillizing of her muscles.
When she reported back to Nevins in his hut, the party’s movement orders had been phoned through from Lae, and he had them written out on a piece of paper.
‘There’s a couple of units somewhere up on Mount Hagen, about forty miles from here,’ he said. ‘They’ve been isolated for weeks. We’re the closest post.’ He looked up from the report.
Pearl, standing at attention, nodded uneasily.
‘One lot are guarding the airstrip. The other lot seem to be missing. They’re our most forward unit, Private. But two days ago they lost radio contact and we don’t know where they are.’
Pearl knew what was coming, but dreaded it nonetheless.
‘I’ve asked some of my men to try to locate them, but to tell you the truth, son, I’ve got a textbook snafu on my hands here. More than twenty wounded to every medic.’ He paused and offered her a cigarette, which she accepted.
‘You can still do your little show for the troops up there. You’ll just have to find them first!’ He chortled and some smoke escaped through his nostrils.
She looked down at her muddy boots, ambivalent about going on to Hagen without Charlie, even in the company of Farthing and Marks, who were due to arrive the following morning on a plane. As far as she was concerned, it wouldn’t be a show without Charlie. Perhaps the Hagen trip could be put off until he’d recovered; perhaps with the right medication and treatment the malaria would subside.
Nevins eyed her rotting shirt and trousers. ‘And you might as well go to the requisition hut and get a new uniform. That one’s falling off you.’
She obediently collected the new uniform before setting off to pick up Charlie, but decided not to bother changing into it until she’d returned to the medical post. A stretcher was found and they set off at once with two carriers, each with a bone as long and as wide as a cigarette piercing the base of his septum.
The trek back took less time now that Pearl and Wanipe walked on full stomachs and were unencumbered by their backpacks and instruments. The only things they carried now were their rifles. The gunfire in the hills stuttered intermittently, growing louder and more frequent as they headed south, causing Pup to whine with anxiety. Pearl wondered why she was the only one from the original troubadour band to have been spared from contracting malaria, when one by one the others had been struck down as surely as victims of a plague. The only thing she could put it down to was all the quinine she’d been forced to take back in Sydney, when Hector and her mother had been convinced she was going mad.
Sunlight filtered through swirling mountain mists, making the forest seem otherworldly. A small bird of paradise crossed their path, its plume a fan of iridescent blue. There was a hint of smoke in the air, the aroma of burning wood, and water dripped from the leaves of trees, even though it hadn’t rained all day. They could hear a flutter of wings above the branches, and the high-pitched voices of native birds carolling to one another.
Once they reached the foot of the track that wound up through the mountainside, Pearl pointed to the clearing, to the lean-to which was now only about fifty yards away. The four trekked up the path together in single file, the excited dog at her heels. She could smell the vague stench of vomit and as she got closer she saw flies buzzing around the hole Charlie had retched into the night before. But as she got closer still, she saw a long slick of blood trailing through the flattened grass and disappearing up into a thicket of trees. She bolted towards the lean-to, and there was confronted by a scene so shocking and grotesque, so utterly impossible, that everything inside her suddenly stopped: her breathing, her heartbeat, her sense of hearing.
Charlie was lying face down on the ground, arms splayed. His buttocks, the backs of his calves and his thighs had been sliced off. Tendons and blood still oozed from his open flesh and pooled against the blanket, while hundreds of flies swarmed across and around him, hungry for his remains.
22
She awoke to the sound of a man shouting orders and the rhythm of marching feet. She could hear them turning when they were told to, stopping, starting again, like some lead-footed chorus line. Her head throbbed in time with the tempo of the march and for a while she wasn’t sure if she were dreaming it or not. She tried to open her eyes but the right one hurt badly.
When she opened her left eye and saw the morning light, her most recent memories flooded back, along with a throbbing headache. The trek back to Charlie. His tortured body. The way something had snapped inside her and how, gripped by a kind of fury she’d never known before, she’d wailed, stabbed the air with her rifle and run into the thicket of trees, following the trail of blood. She shot at everything she saw: trees, bushes, rocks, the sky. The last thing she remembered was Wanipe tackling her from behind, her head slamming against a rock, and then everything went black and silent.
She now found herself looking at the thatched ceiling of a hut. Wanipe was sitting beside her, like a guard.
‘Wake,’ he murmured. ‘Wake.’ The dog jumped up and nuzzled her neck. Wanipe slipped his hand beneath Pearl’s head and raised it. He lifted a canteen to her lips and she drank the water down thirstily.
‘Well, that was a stupid thing to do, Willis.’ Her CO, Rudolph, was standing over her. She hadn’t seen him since they’d left Nadzab.
She groaned with shock. ‘The Japs killed Styles. They ate him. They ate him.’
Rudolph gnawed on his bottom lip but said nothing.
The sun was now shining directly into Pearl’s one good eye and she was forced to close it. Her head was pulsing. She moaned again, trying to get the image of Charlie’s ravaged body out of her head. If only she hadn’t left him at the clearing that morning, if only she and Wanipe had carried him to the hospital.
‘What would happen if we all just acted on instinct,’ continued Rudolph, ‘did what we wanted to do? This army runs on strict discipline. We can’t have men running off willy-nilly, acting on their own interests. Being a soldier’s not so different from being a musician. To do it well, you’ve got to follow the rules. Remember your training, soldier.’ He paused, obviously waiting for a response.
She kept her eyes shut, craving oblivion again.
‘I know you can hear me.’
She cracked open her eyes. They were welling with tears. Sunlight angled through the doorway of the hut, throwing Rudolph’s shadow across her body as she lay on her bedroll.
‘The good news is that all you seem to be suffering from is concussion.’
‘So what’s the bad news?’ she choked out.
‘Farthing and Marks have taken a turn for the worse. They’re now on a hospital ship heading back to Sydney.’
She licked her dry lips. ‘They’re still alive . . .’
‘Barely. I’ve only flown in on the supply run. You think you and the native can handle the Hagen mission on your own?’
The Hagen mission. She’d forgotten all about it. With Charlie gone, she certainly didn’t feel like carrying out the orders. She hadn’t been trained in combat, could barely hit a target. Hagen was the highest and one of the most remote mountains on the island.
‘We’ve got to find that unit,’ said Rudolph. ‘There’s been no radio contact for days.’
She tried to demur, but Rudolph wasn’t listening. ‘Of course you can rest up today. There’re some Americans holdi
ng the airstrip up there and they’ve got a radio. But they’ve lost most of their men and can’t leave the strip. When you find the lost unit, you just have to lead ’em back to the strip and radio back here to camp.’
She shifted, trying to think of a way out. Nearly all her muscles ached.
‘I’m told that it’s an Australian unit,’ continued Rudolph. ‘The rumour is that they’re being led by a crash-hot black bloke!’
Pearl propped herself up on one elbow, wondering if she’d heard right. ‘A Negro with a group of Aussies?’
Rudolph shrugged. ‘Probably just a native. Now come on, Willis. I want you up and out of bed by tomorrow. It’s not like you’ve got malaria.’
Rudolph sat down by the doorway and lit a cigarette, drawing on it heavily.
Pearl stared at the ceiling and considered her options. Of course it was possible that James was up on Mount Hagen with the Australian unit, but highly unlikely. In fact, there was no guarantee that he had even survived his desertion from the US Army. Still, she’d come this far, with so little encouragement.
Pup leaped onto the bed, tail wagging, and licked Pearl’s face. In her innocent optimism, the dog suddenly made Pearl feel ashamed of her own self-pity and resignation. Charlie would have urged her to go on, to follow this lead.
The next day, in the mess hall, Rudolph placed his tin plate of food beside hers on the trestle table and clapped her on the back. Though nothing was said, Pearl sensed it was a kind of forgiveness, an absolution from her dangerous, random shooting rampage of the day before. She realised then that Rudolph was more of a musician than a military man, more of a creator than a destroyer, just like her, and like James.
