A Distant Land

by Alison Booth

  ‘Yeah, I do. And I remember the fuss at home afterwards.’

  ‘Who’d have thought that would lead me to Vietnam, eh? Though I remember you saying, “What if there’s another war?” and I thought nothing of it.’

  ‘No one would have predicted it.’ Yet Jim didn’t really mean these words; they were untruths to soothe Andy. Taking the long view, he felt that his country was always moving in and out of wars. Britain’s wars. America’s wars. There might be no end to it.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve served my apprenticeship now,’ Andy said. ‘I’ve done my time and more. Now we’re withdrawing from Vietnam, I could stay on in the army for a bit, but I’ve had enough of it. Can’t wait to get out, in fact.’

  ‘What’ll you do?’

  ‘What I’ve always wanted to do: set up a carpentry and joinery workshop. Only I’m going to do it in Burford, not Jingera – there are more people there. Then I’m going to find a nice girl. Make some nice furniture and, after a while, nice babies. And I’ll surf on Saturday mornings with my mates. You know, the funny thing is that I used to want to get away from this place but now I can’t wait to come home.’

  ‘Mum and Dad will love that.’ Jim gazed at the four headlands to the north, layered like stage scenery and receding into a distant haze. This had to be one of the most beautiful places in the world, he thought.

  ‘Yeah, they’re pretty stoked about it.’

  ‘They know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’ve kept quiet about that. I’ve been back for three hours and they haven’t mentioned it.’

  ‘That’s because they’ve been too busy celebrating your return.’

  Was there a trace of bitterness in Andy’s voice? No, he was imagining it. Andy stubbed out his cigarette and soon after took another from the pack. While he was struggling to light it, Jim said, ‘What was it like?’

  ‘What was what like?’

  ‘What was it like for you over there?’

  ‘Grim. You’d know that, after your experiences. And grim coming back too. You should have seen the reception we got when we docked at Fremantle and Adelaide. Anyone would think we’d committed crimes instead of simply doing what the top brass told us we had to do.’ Andy was jiggling his leg up and down – something he never used to do. ‘The pollies got us into the bloody war and the pollies are taking us out of it, and we’re none the wiser about any of it, apart from its stupidity.’ He took another hard drag on his cigarette and sucked the smoke deep into his lungs. After exhaling, he said, ‘Anyway, I don’t really want to talk about it. Except I’ll tell you one thing that’s really stuck in my mind.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s what’s happening to the kids. We visited a couple of orphanages, me and one of my mates. Thought it was the least we could do. We went with loads of toys but the kids were mostly too far gone for that.’ After stubbing out his half-smoked cigarette, Andy flicked it over the cliff edge. Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his knees. ‘There were starving kids lying three to a cot. There were hopeless-case kids abandoned to dying rooms.’ For a moment Jim thought Andy was crying but he was wrong: the emotion in his brother’s voice was anger. ‘There were kids with injuries from claymore mines. Kids with napalm burns that they weren’t ever going to recover from.’

  ‘We’ve got to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’ Even as Jim said these words, he felt their futility. Was making war – and suffering from it – the inescapable human condition? At his most optimistic he hoped not, even though his reading of history suggested otherwise. Even though he planned to spend the rest of his life working for human rights, because warring was the human condition. More and more often since his time in captivity he thought of the moral dilemma of killing in war and not killing in peace: how did people manage to turn that ethical switch on and off? It was impossible to do so without triggering inner conflict of the sort that Andy was clearly struggling through. War made monsters and victims out of us all.

  ‘How can we possibly make sure it doesn’t happen again, Jimmo? We don’t run the bloody show.’

  ‘We draw attention to it. We vote. We have demonstrations. Look what the moratorium marches are achieving.’

  ‘All they’re doing, from my perspective, is drumming up hatred for the soldiers. Makes us feel like shit. Makes us feel we were responsible for those kids.’

  ‘You weren’t.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know the half of it, Jimmo.’ After another pause Andy said, ‘Once, years ago, Roger and I talked to his dad about what it had been like in the Second World War. “What’s it like to kill someone?” That’s what Roger wanted to know. “I never saw anyone close up,” his father said. “I was in the artillery, the big stuff, no face-to-face combat. We fired at a target and never saw the casualties.” Then after eighteen months his dad was injured and sent home. He was the bloody lucky one.’

  Andy’s leg was jiggling up and down worse than ever and the fingers of his right hand were worrying at the matchbox. Eventually it broke, and he stuffed the fragments into his pocket. After this he said, ‘Some things I can’t get over. Like Roger O’Rourke’s death, for instance. He was blown to pieces, you know. They bundled up as many bits of his body as they could find, but that wasn’t enough, so they added a sandbag to make the weight right. Then they flew the coffin home. His parents don’t know about the sandbag, of course, but all his section knew.’

  Andy stood up on the narrow ledge so abruptly that Jim automatically reached out to steady him. ‘Don’t worry, Jimmo,’ Andy said. ‘I’m not going to jump. Life’s much too precious to throw away like that.’ He bent down to pick up a pebble; perhaps that was his intention all along. After tossing it from palm to palm as if testing its weight, he flung it over the cliff edge.

  When he turned to face Jim, his lips were smiling but not his sad and bloodshot eyes. ‘No more of this morbid stuff, eh?’

  ‘Time for a schooner or two at the pub before tea,’ Jim said. ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘Bloody good idea. You’ve been back a whole afternoon and you still haven’t shouted me a beer.’

  Jim led the way through the cemetery. Past the Catholic precinct, where a part of Roger O’Rourke lay buried together with a bag of sand from a distant land. Briefly Jim struggled to think of who it was who wrote, ‘There is some corner of a foreign field That is forever England.’ It was Rupert Brooke, he remembered. Now there was a corner of a Vietnamese field that was forever Australia. And so too, right here in Jingera, there was a little corner – a bag or two of sand – that was forever Vietnam.

  He carried on, past the Protestant precinct, past the graves of the other Jingera casualties from all the wars in distant lands that Australia had been involved in. Just before the gate, he waited for Andy to catch up.

  A sea hawk sailed into view. Wheeling around the cemetery, it was gliding on some updraft. Slowly it floated south, over the long white crescent of Jingera’s beach and the bushland dividing the ocean from the river, and towards the distant headland barely visible in the late-afternoon haze.

  Without warning the peaceful afternoon was shattered by the roar of a mortar attack. Jim flung himself to the ground. Face in the grass, arms crossed over his head, eyes firmly shut, he knew the drill. His heart was thudding and sweat was beginning to trickle down his back as he waited for the hammering of the helicopter engine that was heading their way. At any moment it would begin to swoop overhead. At any moment he would hear the sound that he dreaded, that he’d heard so often: the staccato burst of machine-gun fire.

  Instead he heard the liquid notes of a bird calling and the regular pounding of the surf, and he opened his eyes. He was lying face down on the sweet-smelling grass in Jingera cemetery, thousands of kilometres away from the jungles of Cambodia. The mortar attack that he’d heard was the sound of a car backfiring, that was all
. The helicopters would not come again. The impermeable green jungle was not imprisoning him. Slowly he inhaled and exhaled, and soon his heart rate slowed. With unsteady legs and trembling hands he struggled to his feet.

  Andy was nowhere to be seen. Presently Jim spotted him, metres away, crouched behind a tombstone. He might have been tempted to help Andy to his feet if their shared past hadn’t taught him the value of looking the other way. This didn’t prevent him hearing though. So harshly was Andy’s breath rasping in his throat that you might think he was suffering from an asthma attack if you didn’t know better.

  To distract himself, Jim looked at the tilting gravestones and afterwards at the cobalt sky overhead. His eyes slid over the unrelenting blue, towards the paler haze to the east and the smudged rim of the shimmering indigo ocean. As soon as he could no longer hear Andy’s breathing above the thump of breakers, he opened the cemetery gate and waited.

  He didn’t mention the car backfiring and the mortar attack, and neither did Andy. Side by side they walked down the hill, past the primary school and into the sphere of raucous laughter drifting out from the pub.

  Here Jim saw Andy straightening his shoulders, saw him bracing himself, saw him shrugging on insouciance as he might don a jacket. When it was done, they walked together through the open doorway and into the bar.

  Chapter 42

  Standing in the hallway at Ferndale, Zidra peered at her reflection in the mirror. She was pleased that she hadn’t thrown away the black linen dress after the memorial service. She’d only got as far as bundling it into a carrier bag, together with those frivolous black sandals, and stuffing the lot in the bottom of her wardrobe ready to take to Vinnies. The dress was gorgeous, she now decided, and she didn’t look too bad either. Maybe her hair had gone a bit fluffy, but that was the sea air for you.

  She walked out the front door and stood on the top step of the half-flight leading down to the gravel drive, dotted as always with weeds. Golden light saturated the landscape. The afternoon sun, percolating through the pine trees, cast long shadows. A light breeze fingered the pine needles and made the shadows dance across the drive, as if they too wished to take part in the evening’s celebrations.

  From the shed came the cough of the car engine as it started and then a splutter as it stalled. A moment later it started again, and Zidra saw her mother slowly backing the Armstrong Siddeley out of the shed. She seemed oblivious of Peter, who was standing nearby with his arms outstretched to demonstrate distance from the corner post. They had been performing this pantomime for as long as Mama had been driving, for almost as long as they’d been married. They would carry on doing it all their lives, moving side by side through the years that remained to them, always connected but often moving independently. Peter would forever demonstrate distance from the corner post as she backed his precious car out of the shed, his car that he hadn’t driven himself for years, ever since he’d got vertigo driving down the escarpment. Some legacy of his bailout from a burning plane during the war, Ma had said. And just as reliably she would ignore him. She would back out as if he were not there and would miss the corner post by a few millimetres, no more – so close you would be left breathless if you didn’t know how perfectly judged it was.

  The moment concentrated, it hardened, it passed. The image crystallised into a structure that Zidra would carry with her all her life. It had meaning; it had clarity. The stability of her parents’ marriage and, at the same time, the independence of each: this was what she wanted with her own marriage to Jim next April.

  Just as Zidra was about to shut the front door, the Ferndale telephone stammered into life. She hesitated for an instant, wondering if she should leave it. At the third ring she put her handbag on the floor inside the hallway and ran to pick up the receiver.

  ‘Hello,’ said a male voice that she didn’t recognise. ‘I’d like to speak to Zidra Vincent please.’ He pronounced her name to rhyme with ‘cider’.

  ‘Zidra speaking,’ she said, emphasising the short first syllable of her name.

  ‘Vance Butterworth here.’

  Her heart skipped a beat. Though she’d never met him, she knew who Butterworth was: a retired businessman, on countless boards, and trustee for umpteen charities.

  ‘Joe Ryan gave me your parents’ number. Said you’d be staying there for a few days. I’m really glad to have got hold of you. I expect you can guess why I’m ringing.’

  There was a pause in which she swallowed so loudly Butterworth could surely hear the gulp. Leaning her elbows on the hall table, she wondered if she was about to faint: the walls were shifting about in an alarming way.

  ‘I’m phoning to tell you that you’ve won the Wheatley Award,’ Butterworth said. ‘The committee agreed unanimously. That was a quite splendid piece of work you wrote on internal security. Splendid, we all thought. So congratulations, Zidra!’

  Surely there was a mistake; someone was pulling her leg. She slid her back down the wall and sat on the floor with her legs stretched out in front of her. Only thus supported did she try to speak, managing a small croaking sound.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Butterworth said.

  ‘Yes,’ she succeeded in saying at the second attempt. ‘But can you repeat that? There’s a lot of background noise.’ The pounding of blood in her eardrums was louder by far than the tooting from the Armstrong Siddeley outside.

  After Butterworth had finished, she said in a rush, ‘Thank you so much, Mr Butterworth. This is a great honour. I’m astonished, of course, but absolutely delighted.’ She was wittering on, she knew, like one of those society matrons she used to interview for the social pages, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  When at last she paused for breath, Butterworth managed to interject. ‘Call me Vance. And of course we’ll expect you to come to the award ceremony.’

  Nothing would keep her away from that, she thought. Nothing. After a few more words they hung up. Outside her mother was impatiently honking the horn again. Ignoring this, Zidra dialled Joe Ryan’s number. One of his sons answered and went to find his father. While Zidra waited, she did a little jig up and down the hallway as far as the phone cord would allow her. She’d won! A woman like her, a woman everyone but Joe Ryan thought would be unable to hack it off the social pages.

  ‘Vance Butterworth has reached you then,’ Joe said without any preamble. ‘Or is this just a social call?’

  ‘Yes and no. Did he tell you why he wanted to talk to me?’

  ‘No, Vance is much too discreet to let a seasoned old editor like me know before telling you. We journalists can’t be trusted to keep a good story to ourselves, can we?’

  Zidra laughed.

  ‘That’s the girl. It’s good to hear you laughing again. There were times I thought you’d forgotten how, before a certain Jim Cadwallader came back from the dead. But are you going to tell me why Vance was so keen to reach you? Or do I have to guess that you’ve won the Wheatley Award?’

  ‘You have to guess,’ she said, laughing again. ‘You have to guess which one.’

  ‘Well, I know it’s not for photography because Chris won that. So let me see, what else do you do? Maybe a news story. Best news story. For your exposé. Am I right?’

  ‘You’re right, Joe.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Zidra. This will give us something to skite about in Monday’s paper! I’m so pleased.’

  ‘I want to thank you, Joe. For everything you’ve done for me.’ Her voice caught; her damned vocal cords always gave away her emotions.

  Yet there was a catch in Joe’s voice too when he answered, ‘No worries, Zidra. This is what makes our newspaper good. Stories like yours. People like you.’

  ‘Editors like you.’

  ‘Well, blimey, don’t get too carried away. But I reckon I might crack open the champers tonight to celebrate. Enjoy your engagement party, Zid, and mind you�
�re back here before too long. You’ll have a bit of catching up to do.’

  ‘It’s not an engagement party, Joe. It’s a welcome-home celebration for Jim.’

  ‘Call it what you will, I’m drawing my own conclusions.’ With that he rang off. She pictured him standing in the hallway of his house in Randwick, smiling in that lopsided way of his, before going off to pull out the champagne from the fridge in which he would have placed it hours ago. ‘Be prepared’, he often said. ‘For the good as well as the bad’.

  Collecting her handbag, together with a measure of composure, she stepped outside into the late-afternoon sunshine.

  ‘Hurry up, Zidra. We don’t want to be late for the party,’ her mother called.

  ‘We won’t be.’ After opening the back door of the car, Zidra sat on the battered leather seat. ‘I was on the phone,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ve just heard I’ve won the Wheatley Award.’

  ‘That’s nice, Zidra,’ her mother said as she negotiated the driveway, which had become rather potholed after the heavy October rains.

  ‘You’ve what?’ said Peter, swivelling his head like an Aunt Sally at a fairground.

  ‘I’ve won the Wheatley Award,’ Zidra said, rather more loudly this time.

  Her mother braked suddenly and shrieked, ‘You’ve won the Wheatley! My daughter’s won the Wheatley Award!’

  ‘Take it easy, Ma,’ Zidra said, as the car veered off the drive and onto the rough grass.

  ‘I knew you’d make a fantastic news journalist, didn’t I always say that, Peter?’

  ‘You did, Ilona. You’ve always said that.’ Peter was laughing and at the same time gently turning the steering wheel so the car drifted back onto the drive before coming to a stop.

  But you never said it to me, Zidra thought, although at the same time she was thrilled with her parents’ faith in her. At this moment she remembered the folder of cuttings she’d discovered under her mother’s sewing basket the night after the memorial service. Of course she wasn’t going to dwell – or not for long – on why her mother chose to tell Peter of her pride in her daughter rather than herself, or why she kept the file of clippings hidden. Maybe you became secretive if you survived what her mother had, or maybe she just hadn’t wanted to pressure her daughter.