A Distant Land

by Alison Booth

  Cambodian troops found several bodies in the area, including that of a Caucasian man. Two Cambodian army officers examined the body of the man and subsequently identified it as Mr Cadwallader, 26 years old.

  Zidra’s hands were shaking so much that she dropped the sheet of paper onto the desktop. ‘No, no!’ she shouted. Tears blinded her, and she began to feel the peculiar numbness and dissociation that was shock. Her throat felt so constricted that she could scarcely breathe. After wiping the back of her hand across her eyes, she picked up the bulletin and read on:

  Mr Cadwallader was covering a battle on Highway Four about 55 miles south-west of Phnom Penh in which Communist forces overran Cambodian positions. Cambodian army officers said that his body bore a single bullet wound in the head. His body was cremated on the spot in accordance with Cambodian military procedure.

  The remains were brought to Phnom Penh and examined by a pathologist at Calmette hospital. Mr Cadwallader was appointed United Press International bureau manager in Phnom Penh in June this year.

  The death of Mr Cadwallader brings to at least 14 the number of correspondents killed in Cambodia since Prince Norodom Sihanouk was ousted in March 1970. Nineteen are still listed as missing.

  At this point the room began to swim and Zidra felt her legs give way. Just as a black screen began to roll slowly over her eyes, she thought she heard Joe Ryan’s voice calling out her name. Relentlessly, remorselessly, the blackness scrolled down. By the time her body hit the floor, she was no longer conscious.

  Chapter 14

  Replacing the receiver, George felt only disbelief. He stood perfectly still, staring at the wall. They must have made a mistake. It wasn’t his son they’d found but someone else. It was one of those other correspondents thronging into Indochina who’d been shot in the head, and not Jim.

  It was this disbelief that allowed him to go back into the lounge room. Eileen was sitting on the sofa, her head bent over her embroidery, the lamplight illuminating her dark hair in which silver threads shone. She looked up at him, as she always did after he’d taken a phone call. The question was unstated but it was there just the same: Who was that on the phone, George?

  Sitting in the armchair opposite her, George moved his lips but no sound emerged. He swallowed before croaking, ‘It was someone from somewhere. I’m not sure where. Someone official.’

  ‘What do you mean, someone from somewhere, someone official? Pull yourself together, George, and tell me what’s up.’

  He shut his eyes and took a deep breath. He wasn’t going to be able to protect her from this news.

  Her voice, high and shrill, sliced through his shock. ‘Is it Andy?’ she shouted. ‘Speak to me, George.’

  ‘Not Andy,’ he said, his voice breaking. There was no gentle way he could break the news to her. ‘It’s Jim,’ he said. ‘Jim’s dead. They’ve identified his body in Cambodia. He and some other journalists got stuck between the lines in a battle. He got shot.’ He wouldn’t tell her yet about the bullet in the head. It sounded like a cold-blooded killing, probably after the fighting was over. And he wouldn’t tell her yet that the Cambodians had already cremated the body.

  ‘No, George, that can’t be right.’ Eileen’s hands were shaking, he observed with detachment, as if he were not a part of this tableau but instead someone else looking on.

  He turned his head, and at once his eye was caught by the framed photograph on the mantelpiece. Jim at his graduation from Oxford, smiling at the camera. The scarlet gown suited his olive skin. They’re a bunch of wankers here, he’d told his father once, laughing. It was the sight of this photo and the memory of Jim’s words that were George’s undoing. His shoulders started to shudder and his breath came in spasms. A strange bellowing sound seemed to be coming from his mouth. No, no, no! He covered his face with his hands, not wanting to expose his grief. If he exposed it, Jim’s death would be real. If he could suppress it, Jim would be saved. Then perhaps the present could unravel, and they could begin again on some new trajectory in which Jim would return.

  Yet that wasn’t right, George knew. Within his chest he began to feel a frightful pain, as if a piece of himself were being wrenched out. This agony was far worse than anything he’d ever experienced and he didn’t know how he could deal with the loss.

  Jim was dead. His beautiful boy was dead. The person he’d loved unquestioningly ever since his birth. The person whom he understood best. Had understood best. It should have been him to die first and not Jim. He was two and a half decades older. George would willingly have given up his own life so that his son could survive. Such a waste of a young life; such a waste of all that brilliance. Jim’s future gone, all their futures gone. The injustice and futility of it all.

  Now he opened his eyes. Seeing Eileen’s face close to his, he judged she hadn’t absorbed the news. She was in shock, her reaction was yet to come, and he had to be ready for it. He wiped his hands across his eyes. A moment later she stood up. He watched her square her shoulders. He watched the colour drain from her face. He watched her walk across the room to the mantelpiece. She picked up the photograph of Jim and looked at it apparently calmly, though George could see that her hands were trembling still and her face that ghastly shade of white.

  Slowly she raised the photograph above her head and then she hurled it into the fireplace. It landed with an almighty crack. The glass shattered, shards spilling everywhere. ‘Gone!’ she shouted, her voice breaking. ‘Gone, gone, gone!’

  Next she leant towards the porcelain vase in the middle of the mantelpiece. Although George could see what was coming, he was too slow to reach her. Already she’d picked up the vase.

  ‘No, Eileen. You love that thing.’

  She raised it above her head and hurled it across the room. ‘My son isn’t dead!’ she shouted as the vase hit the window frame and shattered into tiny pieces. As she reached for the framed photograph of a smiling Andy in his army uniform, George seized hold of her wrists. Though she fought like a wild animal to be free, he put his arms around her.

  And then, after a minute or so, it was over. Limp in his arms, all her fighting spirit had gone. He hugged her to him, this rag doll who was Jim’s mother, and listened to the heart-wrenching sound of her sobbing.

  Chapter 15

  Zidra woke with a start and the impression that it would be preferable by far to remain in a state of unconsciousness. Quite why she couldn’t remember. She felt woozy, as if her brain had been replaced by some spongy material, and her throat was so dry it was a struggle to swallow. Only when someone took hold of her hand did she open her eyes. Her mother’s face was just centimetres away from her own; she could see the tiny pores around her nose and the fine lines around her eyes.

  ‘Where am I, Ma?’ She blinked; the light was so bright it hurt her eyes.

  ‘Don’t you remember, darling? I collected you from the hospital yesterday and afterwards we drove to Paddington to collect some of your clothes and then we came home. I forgot to pack your nightie though. That’s why you’re wearing one of mine.’

  Zidra didn’t care whose nightie she was wearing. She had no recollection of being in hospital. Shutting her eyes, she kept a tight grip on her mother’s hand, its skin slightly roughened from so much outdoor work.

  ‘You’re in your bedroom at Ferndale, Zidra. The doctor prescribed some sleeping tablets. You took two last night when we got home. That was the recommended dosage, but perhaps that’s one too many. You’ve slept for fifteen hours, can you believe? It’s ten o’clock in the morning and I’ve brought you some tea.’

  ‘I don’t remember anything much.’ The notion of tea was appealing but she felt too tired to sit up. Then a memory surfaced, a memory of the bulletin she’d seen lying on the foreign editor’s desk. A memory that she had to suppress. It wasn’t real; it hadn’t happened.

  She relinquished her mother’s hand a
nd rolled onto her side to face the wall.

  ‘Do you remember what happened, darling?’

  ‘A bit.’ Her voice faltered.

  ‘You collapsed at the Chronicle. Joe Ryan found you and called an ambulance to take you to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Then Joe rang me, and Peter and I drove up to Sydney. You spent a couple of days in hospital. You were out to it for most of the time. You’ve been suffering from some sort of temporary amnesia, apparently. Plus the drugs they put you on in the hospital, I suspect.’

  Now it all came flooding back, those two drugged days and nights in hospital. Pushing away food, unable to do more than gaze at the ceiling, lacking even the strength to weep, let alone to speak. Only when her mother had appeared by her hospital bed had she been able to cry and then she’d sobbed for hours. Fate had so cruelly taken Jim away and had cheated her of all hope. On the trip down to Ferndale she hadn’t wanted to talk, hadn’t been able to talk. All she could recall of the journey was lying on the back seat of the car and staring at the roof.

  ‘Joe Ryan’s called a couple of times to ask after you. He’s said it’s okay for you to take leave for as long as you need.’

  ‘Thanks, Ma.’

  ‘He’s a kind man.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And that American man’s been phoning too.’

  ‘You mean Hank?’

  ‘Yes, Hank Fuller. He said he’ll call again.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to him.’

  ‘What am I supposed to say to him?’

  ‘You’ll think of something. Say I’m sick. Lost my voice. Got the flu. Any damned thing.’

  Zidra and her mother sat in silence on an ancient wooden bench in the garden and sipped their tea. The late-afternoon light angled through the trees, which cast long shadows on the rough grass. The air was becoming cool and Zidra pulled her kimono more closely around her shoulders. At the cliff edge, on the far side of the home paddock, seagulls were crying and wheeling in ever-widening circles. The light was so harsh that you couldn’t escape it. You couldn’t escape it but it clarified things somehow.

  You’ve got to take one moment at a time, Zidra thought. Focus on this moment. This nowness. Get through this moment, and then the next.

  Her mother said, ‘I’ll always be here for you. Always. Wherever I am.’

  ‘I know that, Ma,’ she said, lightly touching her arm.

  Chapter 16

  A day at a time. Take things a day at a time. That’s what George told himself when he awoke each morning. After struggling to find the energy to sit up, he would lower his feet to the floor and take those few steps into the bathroom. There he would splash cold water on his face before going into the kitchen to boil the kettle for his and Eileen’s morning tea.

  Sometimes he’d forget where he was or what he was doing. Hands on the kitchen table to steady himself, he would let the torrent of memories flood over him. Recent memories hurt more than the past and the newest memories were the biggest torment. If he’d known that the hours at the airport were the last he’d spend with Jim, he would have worked harder to make them better, to tell his son how much he loved him. How he’d given his father’s life meaning. That’s what he should have done instead of allowing Eileen to fuss over trivial matters. Instead of going off by himself to the bar to get away from Eileen’s anxiety, with that pathetic pretext of getting Jim another beer, though he’d said all along he hadn’t wanted one. When the flight to Saigon had been called, Jim’s schooner of beer had been hardly touched. This image haunted George. It was a symbol of something but he didn’t understand what. Now, as he braced himself against the kitchen table and listened to the hiss of the gas under the kettle, the image of that glass of beer moved him to tears.

  As the days dragged by, he forced himself to shift further back into the past and away from those recent times in which his own sins of omission seemed to overlay everything. Several afternoons he left work early, leaving the shop in charge of his assistant, whom he still thought of as The Boy although he was over forty. He never told Eileen of these lapses, nor of his need to wander alone around the edges of the lagoon, and up and down the beach. He experienced an urge to revisit all those places that had been a part of Jim’s life when he was a boy, and a part of his own life too. But he no longer felt any desire to take out the dinghy; no desire to row upriver and drift down with the current; and no desire to dive into the depths of the celestial hemisphere on clear nights. His telescope remained untouched in the shed. Although he would sometimes pick up the little book on the constellations, he would never open it. He handled it only because Jim had given it to him the Christmas before he’d sat for his final school exams.

  At times he felt he couldn’t face those kindly people who came into Cadwallader’s Quality Meats, offering their sympathy along with their money when he gave them their neatly parcelled rump steak and sausages.

  Mrs O’Rourke was an exception. Her son Roger had been at primary school with Jim and Andy, and she’d been the first person into the shop after the news of Jim’s death had appeared on the front page of the Burford Advertiser. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she’d said, her eyes brimming with tears. Thanking her, George had looked away to hide his own. Roger had been a National Serviceman, called up in the birthday ballot and packed off to army training. Later he’d been sent to Vietnam. The night before he’d left, there’d been a function in the church hall to celebrate; in those days people still thought the Vietnam War was a Good Thing. Several years later Roger was dead, killed in the Tet Offensive, his name added to the list on the war memorial in the centre of Jingera.

  Worse even than the heartfelt but awkward words of some of the town’s people was the absence of words, from those choosing the easy way out, choosing to say nothing in the face of his grief. Yet what could anyone do? What could they say?

  You just had to take things a day at a time and hope that the pain would lessen as the weeks passed by.

  After taking another afternoon off work and spending it wandering around the lagoon edge, George ended up sitting on the sand not far from the headland. Seaweed littered the beach, dumped by the storms of the previous night. Earlier that afternoon it had rained, and his clothes were still damp. He stared at the aquamarine breakers as they rolled inexorably in and felt the humidity rising in almost palpable waves. By late afternoon the sun had broken through the thick clouds and suddenly a fragmented rainbow appeared over the ocean.

  Then he knew he had to pull himself together. There were things he had to do. He had to begin to talk to Eileen again. That morning, before he left for the shop, she’d told him they needed to discuss the memorial service. At the time he hadn’t really absorbed the detail of what she’d been saying.

  There would have to be a memorial service, he knew. Everyone expected it. Eileen wanted it; he wanted it too. It was to be a celebration of Jim’s life. Watching the surf breaking on the sand, George remembered the afternoon of that terrible bushfire back in 1957, when the entire town had been evacuated onto the beach. Jim was only a boy then, and George had thought he’d lost him. Peter Vincent had eventually tracked him down, covered with ash. Even at that age Jim had done what he wanted, and afterwards it always seemed to be the right thing. He’d been lucky every time, until ten days ago in Cambodia.

  George stood up, brushing the sand from his trousers. At the footbridge over the lagoon, he wiped his bare feet with a handkerchief before pulling on his socks and shoes. He was bound to have left some trace of sand somewhere, which Eileen would spot when he got home. He didn’t care about the prospect of being roused on any more. Some things just didn’t matter.

  As he climbed the steps to the back verandah, Eileen called out, ‘Is that you, George?’

  ‘Yes.’ After leaving his shoes at the back door, he trod heavily into the kitchen.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said.<
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  Sitting down opposite her at the kitchen table, he stared at the mound of empty pods and the bowl of shelled peas.

  ‘St Matthew’s Church,’ she added. ‘That’s where the memorial service will be held.’

  ‘Is that so? When?’

  ‘Next week.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we wait until Andy gets back?’

  ‘That’s not till mid-November. That’s much too long to wait, George. I just can’t bear to let the days go by without any sort of service. We owe it to Jim. Weren’t you listening this morning when I told you all that? You agreed, don’t you remember? And anyway, Dr Barker’s arranging to hold another memorial service in early February at Stambroke College. He rang you only two nights ago and you told him that was all right. Andy can come with us to that.’

  ‘The army mightn’t let him take leave again.’

  ‘I’ve already checked. They will.’

  ‘I see. You might have told me.’

  ‘I did. This morning. For the second time. And I’ve asked the Reverend Cannadine to officiate next week.’

  ‘So it’s all signed and sealed. But perhaps you can tell me what on earth’s wrong with the regular cove.’

  ‘He only comes here once a month. He hardly knows us. That’s why I asked the Reverend Cannadine.’

  ‘He’s from Burford.’

  ‘I’m aware of that.’

  ‘I don’t know him and neither did Jim.’

  ‘I do though. We became quite friendly after I got involved in the Aboriginal Housing campaign.’

  ‘I see,’ George said and looked at her closely. That pinkness in her cheeks might have been a blush or the heat from the oven behind her. More likely was that Eileen still had a crush on the good padre. George had suspected this for nearly a decade, though he’d never met the cove. It was certainly the case that Cannadine was very handsome, at least according to those photos that appeared regularly in the Burford Advertiser.