A Needle in the Heart (14 page)

Kaye, who could hold a tune, and had started to play the piano, said, yes, all right then, she would like that.

Ethel Floyd had had her twenty-fifth birthday by the time Lester Cooper left town. That was surprising to some who knew the Floyd girls. They were generally snatched up by the time they were twenty. You’d think, her friends said, that Ethel would have found herself someone, with all those young men coming in from the country. You’d think she’d be in clover.

‘It’s a holiday tomorrow,’ Selwyn said, the evening before the Anzac Day parade, when the shops would be shut. ‘You can stay in bed all day if you want to.’

‘That would be so nice. I love sleeping in,’ Ethel said, giving him the full benefit of her white smile and running the tip of her tongue over her top lip. ‘Could you possibly give me a lift home?’

‘Now?’

‘My ride’s staying late tonight.’ She meant the woman at the bakery who gave her a lift home after work most days. ‘They’re short staffed, so she’s got to stay late and clean up on her own,’ she explained.

It was still daylight in Ramparts. The sun had a marshmallow tinge as it dipped towards the hills, a soft centre that was irresistible. In the main street, some bunting and flags had been hung, so that there was slightly festive air about the place. Selwyn wore a red poppy in the buttonhole of his charcoal suit. The clock on the tower struck five, and the men who worked for him filed out, the grease monkeys wiping their hands on rags as they left the building. They called
goodnight
as they left, their eyes appraising Ethel. A mechanic called Sid winked at her, as if Selwyn wasn’t there.

Selwyn glanced across the square, the gardens edged with
marigolds
and late dahlias. The heads of the flowers swayed very gently in a breeze that was so light he felt as if he could just drift off in it. There were days when Selwyn Swanson felt that he had everything
in his life, and not very much. He wanted, as badly as he had wanted anything for some time, to be part of this evening, to not let it slip by, before he went home to vegetable rissoles and cabbage. It was a surprising time of day to take his car out of the yard, when his house was a hundred yards down the main street. He saw his men trooping into the Red Barn Arms for a round of drinks, or two or three, in anticipation of a day off. They didn’t look back, not even Sid, a man he kept his eye on.

‘It’ll only take five minutes,’ said Ethel.

‘Well, come along then,’ said Selwyn. ‘I need to call down and see Os Cooper, so it’s not out of my way.’

‘Are you going to repossess?’ She stretched herself against the leather upholstery of his car.

‘He’s not a very smart farmer these days. His stock numbers are down.’ When she didn’t say anything, he said, ‘Find yourself some music on the radio.’ He watched her out of the corner of his eye, steering the car lightly with the fingertips of one hand, his other brushing against hers as he changed gear. Hogsnort Rupert and his band were playing ‘Pretty Girl’. Ethel rocked backwards and forwards in her seat clicking her fingers. She chewed gum, open mouthed. Selwyn opened the car window so that the breeze raced through, stronger now, cold on his face, as he pressed the accelerator, picking up speed. He felt suddenly youthful and so joyous.

Anzac Day morning broke with a thin ribbon of light along the eastern skyline, the beginning of a day so clear that the men of Ramparts would say for years afterwards, you could put a ring around that one, 1972. Most of them were used to dawn light, not like those chaps in the cities who give themselves heart attacks just getting out of bed so early for the one day of the year to go to the dawn parade, as if they had never been soldiers. All the same, there was a quality about the air that made it easier to inhale the first gasp of cigarette smoke, as their utes roared into life and headed towards town. You could hear the dogs barking for miles.

Bloody good turnout, the members of the Returned Servicemen’s
Association said to each other that morning. Bloody tremendous. The men who had been to the wars were assembling for the march to the cenotaph, three or four old men on sticks who’d been in the Boer campaign shuffling into line in front, followed by the First World War veterans, then what Os Cooper thought of as the young ones, like himself, who’d gone to the second war, in the rear. He had heard young fools say that there was nothing great about any war, but he didn’t see it like that. Instead, he saw it as a time when he had gone beyond Ramparts and fought for his country. Blood, sweat and tears, as Churchill had said. Sure, he’d been wounded but he’d seen foreign countries, been to England and seen the King and Queen, and none of it would have happened had it not been for the war. I’ll take you to England, Vonnie, he said. I promise you, when we retire that’s where we’ll go.

The truth was, he couldn’t see himself retiring for a long while yet. The farm wasn’t doing as well as it should: this spell of fine weather was great for folk in town, but the drought was getting to farmers like himself. He’d had to put on more fertiliser than he could afford, and the grazing he was renting down the road for his herd was costing him an arm and a leg. And the beautiful morning darkened as he thought of what the loss of an arm really had cost his farm, and how there were days when he wondered why he bothered, why he went on at all, now that his boy had gone. But no sooner than the cloud had settled he was being clapped on the shoulder by his old friend Harry Salter, who’d stood alongside him at El Alamein, and he thought about the night they’d crawled back to safety under the stars of the North African sky, that campaign, and others that followed, and how they’d been delivered safely back home.

‘How’re you doing, old cobber?’ Harry was saying. He had tears in his eyes and Os could see that the more time passed the more it meant to you, to have served your country. Harry passed him a tot of rum out of the same hip flask he’d had out there in the desert.

‘Bit of trouble brewing,’ Harry said.

‘What’s up?’

‘Kids,’ said Harry, tapping his nose with his finger.

At that moment, before Harry could explain, the order came to fall in. It was given by a younger man in army uniform who carried the rank of colonel. This man was a teacher, in charge of the school cadets, standing at attention in their shorts and battledress jackets. Os didn’t like the way some of them had hair showing under their caps and some of the senior boys had fluffy sideburns jutting down the sides of their cheeks. He wondered if this was the trouble that Harry was referring to.

‘It makes me sick,’ he muttered, to nobody in particular.

‘What’s that, mate?’ Harry said.

‘Nothing.’ But he was thinking again about Lester, and how proud he used to be on Anzac mornings when they went into town together and marched down the street to the beat of the same drum. He was sure Vonnie knew where their son was, but she didn’t talk about what she knew and he was damned if he was going to ask her.

The parade began to march down the street, past the Red Barn where they’d all gathered on the verandah when they were about to leave town for embarkation all those years ago, and everyone — the old people, and the farmers who were running the place while their sons went to war, and the women and children — had shouted and waved flags and cheered them on, and again, when they came back, and he thought how quiet it was up there this morning, with not a soul on the balcony. They marched down along past the undertaker’s and the bakery shop and the tractor and farm machinery shop where that bastard Swanson thought he was God, until they were in front of the monument, and the school teacher colonel made a short speech. Os couldn’t help smiling to himself, looking at the bulge where his gun was supposed to be. Lester had once told him that the colonel didn’t really have a gun in his holster, because he didn’t have a firearms license that covered Anzac Day: it was actually a school staple gun with the end taped over. If there was trouble, the colonel would be sweet Fanny Adams use to them all. But it was still not apparent to him where this trouble might be coming from.

He straightened his neck, wishing he could rub it where it ached. The night before he’d had a peculiar experience at the crossroads
near the farm. He’d closed the stock in the rented holding paddock down the road, and was just driving back when Swanson had come towards him doing seventy-five on the straight, not looking where he was going, Willie Floyd’s girl sprawled all over the front seat beside him with a silly look on her face as if she was having her twat rubbed, which she probably was; he’d put enough bulls to cows in his time, he knew the look. He’d had to pull up, slam the anchors on. Although he didn’t crash with Swanson, he thought his head would go through the windscreen. Swanson had put his arm up over his face, while the girl had slid under the dashboard. As if he wouldn’t have known Swanson in his dark-coloured Mercedes.

There had been a brief hiatus, a moment when he contemplated the whisker that stood between the two vehicles, and then Swanson had reversed out of it and taken off, leaving tyre marks on the road. Os could feel where the whiplash had caught him though, a sharp stab of pain that hadn’t gone away in the night.

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.

Fine familiar words. Os concentrated on them, turning his eyes away from the school group. Vonnie had told him to stop worrying about Lester. Give him time. You were a hothead too. She meant the way he’d married her when they were eighteen. His mother had been furious. She’ll have found someone else when you get back from the war. But of course Vonnie hadn’t. She wasn’t that kind of woman.

So where the hell was Lester now?

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

The moment when old men cried, in spite of themselves, tears dribbling down their furrowed cheeks. The service had reached the laying on of wreaths, the town dignitaries coming forward to place circlets of flowers at the foot of the cenotaph and, just then, a commotion began to ripple through the crowd.

It was then that Os could see the trouble.

A group of young people was coming up from behind the parade, holding handfuls of flowers in their hands. The flowers looked as if
they had just been picked and he noticed that the last dahlias in the gardens were half-stripped.

Now Os thought about it, he had seen a bunch of kids in the distance a few days back, over at the old motor camp. Hippie kids, girls in caftans and boys with long shaggy hair round their shoulders. They had parked a painted bus by the water, and some of them were swimming in the river. He thought they had moved on, because the next day they were gone and he hadn’t seen them again.

There were eight or ten in the group, although afterwards he couldn’t have told you how many exactly, because they moved so fast. But he saw that the girls were barefooted and smiling, that their dresses were muslin and flowing, and that they wore garlands in their hair. The young men had peace slogans emblazoned on their jackets and wore beads. Men wearing beads, for Chrissake, with hair down their backs like girls, and soft bushy beards — the only way you could be sure they were men, if that’s what they called themselves. And one of these young men had a hook where his hand should have been. Not covered up, or tucked away in his pocket, but out where you could see it, with the sun glinting on it and making it shine.

They didn’t say anything and even he had to admit they seemed peaceful enough. One of the young men (not Lester), seeing the crowd advancing, stood up from placing his flowers, and called out. ‘We’re just remembering the dead in Vietnam,’ he said. ‘It’s the Vietcong’s war too.’

Now the group was set upon on all sides, hit and jumped on, and the very old men were waving their sticks and calling out in quavering voices to the younger ones to take them and thrash them, and one of them shouted out to the colonel to open fire. Os locked eyes for just a second with his son and he knew that he, rather than Lester, looked away first. There were sickening thuds, a trail of blood where one of the group ran from the scene. Above the shouting the town bugler was tootling away, playing ‘The Last Post’ as if nothing had happened. This was the moment Os had been waiting for, the part he liked best; only this morning all he felt was a sick despair, deep in the pit of his stomach.

A red and black mosaic in his head, shot through with pure transparent arrows.

At the blinding of the light.

His boy, Lester.

When it was over, the men who were standing around in knots rather than in line, looked at each other and shrugged. It was like the war. After the moment of exhilaration, when the fight had gone out of them, there was nothing much to be done. They started to drift towards the RSA clubrooms. Nobody came near Os, until he was standing alone in the square; then Harry came back.

‘Come on, Os,’ he said. ‘It’s not your fault. Come and have a drink.’ He held out his flask, and Os took it, draining the last sweet dregs with gratitude.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got the heart for it.’

‘Nobody will hold it against you.’

‘I should never have let him have that tap.’

‘You’ve lost me, mate,’ said Harry. His eyes strayed restlessly towards the clubrooms.

‘It was the tap outside the cowshed. It was stuffed. I thought the thread was done for. He said, “Can I have it, Dad?” I said, “What the hell d’you want a worn out bloody tap for?” He said, “They’ve got their uses.” He didn’t say he was going to screw it down over a shitload of explosives.’

‘Bang bang,’ said Harry.

‘Yeah, something like that.’

‘I’ll have one for you,’ said Harry.

‘Thanks, mate,’ he said. Harry was the sort of person who would come back for you in battle, he’d always known that. Funny that they had to be here, in the town square of Ramparts, before it happened.

Os pulled his keys out of his pocket and walked unsteadily towards the ute. Standing between the line of cars and trucks, he saw Lester waiting for him.