Amongst the Dead (10 page)

Sister Lucille greeted us effusively, and led us to a small, barren courtyard where the beginnings of an audience had started to assemble. They chatted amongst themselves, and the evidence of the awful infection that afflicted them was immediately apparent in the faces of only one or two of them. There were Europeans, Malays, Chinese, and Aboriginal people amongst the small crowd, and they sat together in the democratic intimacy of the ostracised and the diseased.

Sister Lucille found a gramophone and set it up in the dirt at our feet. Thus far, neither Brian nor I had said a word to any member of the audience, despite their sitting or standing in close proximity to us, and I assiduously avoided catching anyone’s eye. A dark-haired, fair-skinned man in his early fifties, supported by crutches, broke from the group and swung towards us.

‘Welcome,’ was all he said before retreating. I don’t know whether it was our sensibilities or his that he was protecting, but he proffered no hand for us to shake.

‘Thank you,’ Brian said, and then, addressing the audience, he repeated loudly, ‘Thank you.’

I moved the gramophone a safe distance from us and wound its handle. I suddenly felt sick with nerves, and wished Glen was with us to dazzle these people with the impossibility of his magic. I placed the record on the turntable and lowered the needle to its spinning surface. The opening bars of ‘In the Mood’ crackled forth, and Brian and I assumed our positions. It wasn’t a perfectly executed jitterbug, but it was all right. The dust rose around us, and the sweat poured off us, and our audience called out for more; so we rewound the gramophone and did it again.This time we improvised new steps, and I tossed Brian over my hip as if he weighed nothing. We stood panting, vaguely astonished that two men doing a competent demonstration of an American dance could provoke such applause and laughter. Brian raised his hands, and they fell silent. He walked around the edge of the half-circle they’d formed, catching people’s eyes, drawing their attention to him, and creating the impression that something significant was about to happen. At the far corner of the arc he began to speak the opening lines of ‘The Geebung Polo Club.’

‘It was somewhere up the country in a land of rock and scrub,’ he said, and he looked about him as if this were the very land in question. He gestured to great effect, and spoke the verse with startling and hilarious clarity, assuming the poshest of voices to describe the Cuff and Collar polo team, and reverting to an exaggerated drawl to bring the Geebung Polo Club to life. Until I heard Brian perform it, I wouldn’t have picked Paterson’s poem as anything more than faintly amusing doggerel. But, whether they understood it or not, his listeners laughed themselves silly.

Brian bowed and handed over to me. I decided to change the pace, and sang for them, in my light tenor, one of Feste’s songs from
Twelfth Night
. I think perhaps I ought to have sung, ‘What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter.’ It was only after I’d launched into, ‘Come away, come away, death, and in sad cypress let me be laid,’ that I thought it wasn’t absolutely on the money. I noticed conversations breaking out before I’d quite finished. The applause was merely polite, which I resented. It’s never pleasant to be patronised, but to be patronised by lepers is really beyond the pale.

‘I think we’ve lost them,’ I said.

‘We?’

‘They’ve been sitting in the sun for a long time.’

We were rescued from the need for further discussion by a part-Aboriginal girl who approached us, one arm held from sight behind her back, and said, ‘Show us. Show us that one. That dance.’

‘All right,’ Brian said before I could stop him, and he began organising the audience into laughing pairs. Over the next two hours, we painfully taught those who were willing the rudiments of the jitterbug, and both Brian and I became so engrossed in the task that all squeamishness fell away, and I forgot myself to such an extent that I placed my hand in the leprous hand of an elderly Malay woman, and danced closely with a European woman whose face bore no resemblance to what it once must have been. She didn’t speak, and I had to overcome her reticence by almost forcing my attentions upon her. It must have been a long time since anyone had touched her, and I don’t know whether her streaming eyes were a symptom of her condition or a response to physical contact.

At the end of the lesson, in the heat of the courtyard, in the mean shadow of the lazaret, we all lined up, and Sister Lucille wound the gramophone. As the music began, our large group began to move, not quite as one, and although we couldn’t boast the precision of Busby Berkeley, when the needle slid off the record we were all aware that something remarkable had happened. I stood, grinning helplessly, absurdly prouder than if I’d delivered a perfect soliloquy from the London stage.

A man standing beside me passed me his water bottle, and I automatically and gratefully took a full swig. I passed it back to him and he took it in a hand that was misshapen, scaly, and missing two fingers. All my joy vanished in a rush of bile and panic as I realised that, for all intents and purposes, I’d swallowed leprosy. My horrified reaction wasn’t something I could disguise, but if I hurt the man’s feelings I was suddenly past caring.

I said nothing to Brian, believing childishly that silence might somehow quarantine me against the pestilence I’d imbibed. He was beaming, although his face soured when he saw mine.

‘Jesus, Will,’ he said. ‘You’re a mean bastard. We just did something good. Nothing’s good
enough
for you, though, is it?’

I wanted to explain when I saw how badly he’d misread my response, but I was so stricken that I could do nothing more than stare at him, thereby confirming his ugly, misguided beliefs about my flawed character. He shook his head in disgust and accepted the congratulations offered by Sister Lucille.

We returned to Darwin in the same small boat that had taken us to Channel Island, and Sister Lucille returned with us. She never stayed on the island overnight. There was a nun who lived with the lepers, but she was away and not expected back for several more weeks.

‘Does she have leprosy?’ I asked, and marvelled at the awful sound of the question. Sister Lucille knitted her brows as if she disapproved of the inquiry.

‘No. Why?’

‘I was just wondering. I don’t know very much about it, that’s all.’

Brian chimed in with, ‘Will probably thinks he’s caught it.’

‘If it’s any consolation, Will, even if you have caught it, it can incubate for thirty years before it appears, but you won’t have caught it. It’s not like you had any contact with body fluids.’ There was a steely little quality in her voice that came, no doubt, from countless ignorant inquiries and assumptions about the people she nursed.

‘I shared a water bottle!’ I blurted.

Sister Lucille and Brian exchanged a glance, the meaning of which I couldn’t read, but I had the impression that Brian’s face arranged itself into a smirk before he turned it towards the approaching wharf.

‘I’ve caught it then, haven’t I?’ There was an involuntary catch in my voice.

Sister Lucille reached behind her and produced a water bottle.

‘Is this the one?’

‘It looks like it.’

‘This was provided for your use and for Brian’s. It might have been passed to you by a patient, but he wouldn’t have drunk out of it.’

My relief was so overwhelming that I felt my eyes water, and I looked down to disguise the fact.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘he might have taken a swig. We’ll know in thirty years' time. Did you drink from it, Brian?’

‘No, no, I didn’t. So, if it wasn’t full …’

‘You’ll be disappointed to hear that it was full,’ I said, but I couldn’t remember whether it was or wasn’t, and I was aware that my voice expressed this slight doubt. Brian reached out and took the water bottle from Sister Lucille. I thought he was going to take a swig, which would have been a reassuring gesture, but instead he removed the top and emptied its contents over the side.

‘Just to be sure,’ he said.

This was a small, unnecessary cruelty whose roots must have lain coiled somewhere in childhood. He watched me as the water trickled out, and he must have been satisfied with the effect because, as he replaced the cap, he smiled at me in a way that suggested the evening of some score. In Brian’s head there was a tally board, and only he was privy to where each of us stood on it. I decided then that, at some point, I would demand to know.

When we disembarked at the wharf it was late in the afternoon, and we were surprised to find Corporal Glen Pyers waiting for us. We were even more surprised to discover that he was surrounded by our kit.

‘Will’s got leprosy,’ Brian said, ‘so resist the urge to kiss him.’

‘We have to hurry,’ Glen said. ‘The boat has to leave now.’ He indicated a ketch that hadn’t been at the wharf in the morning. It had seen better days. It had a single mast at the bow end, and railings that were bent out of shape and which came no higher than the thigh — clearly not a safety feature, unless the boat’s owner was a dwarf. There was something approximating a cabin, and in front of it I could see the bent back of a man arranging something in the hold. There were many boxes and drums on the deck, and when he straightened to pull one towards him, he saw Glen and called out to him.

‘Righto! Let’s go.’

I’d been looking forward to going to the pictures that night. There was a movie house in Nightcliff that hadn’t been bombed, and it was showing
A Yank in the RAF
— an appalling bit of rubbish, no doubt, but starring Tyrone Power, an actor I was always interested to see. Glen bustled us onto the boat, which smelled unpleasantly of fish and rot, and our feet had barely touched its deck when its ancient motor turned over and caught with an unhealthy splutter. The master of this tub was busy behind its wheel, so introductions were delayed until we were out of the harbour and chugging across Port Darwin towards Larrakeyah Barracks. We rounded Emery Point, headed up Fannie Bay, passed East Point, and sailed out into the Timor Sea. With the boat set on a secure course, our captain called to Glen and told him we’d be there by morning.

‘And where,’ I asked patiently, ‘is there?’

‘While you two were healing the sick,’ Glen said, ‘I was helping load this thing with supplies.’

We were sitting on the deck near what in a grander boat might have been called its prow. Glen indicated the fellow behind the wheel at the stern.

‘That’s Charlie Humphries. He’s a Nackeroo who sails this thing around the coast, as far as the Roper River.’

We waved to Charlie Humphries, who touched his hat in reply.

‘So we’re on our way then,’ said Brian, ‘to where Fulton is.’

Glen nodded.

‘They’ve set up camp somewhere near the mouth of the West Alligator River. There are half-a-dozen blokes there, and when they’re not scared shitless about the Japs, they’re bored shitless waiting for them. We’re going to cheer them up.’ He paused and looked directly at me. ‘Apparently.’

I didn’t bite, and in fact bestowed a smile upon him before standing up and making my way perilously to Charlie Humphries, from whom I hoped to gain some useful information about what lay ahead.

I introduced myself and he pushed his hat back on his head, nodded, and said, ‘You fellas are actors, is that right?’

I was immediately defensive and said, rather more snappishly than I’d intended, that we all fought our own war in the best way we knew how. He suggested that I might like to keep my hair on, and that he hadn’t used the word ‘actor’ in any pejorative way. I was so startled to hear the word ‘pejorative’ in the middle of the Timor Sea that I immediately apologised for my tone. I’m always taken aback when people around me express a familiarity with their mother tongue that goes beyond a vocabulary sufficient to secure them a feed or a fuck.

I looked more closely at Charlie Humphries. I think he was well short of thirty, although the creases around his eyes were deep. His colouring, fair and more suited to the limpid light of Ireland, had become adjusted to the fierce tropical sun, not by freckling or tanning, but by roasting to a sort of permanent sunburn. His reddish, blond hair grew high on his forehead, and was dark with sweat where it emerged from the band of his hat.

‘So where are we headed?’

‘West Alligator, mate.’

‘Sounds rather confronting.’

‘They’re not after tourists, mate. The only things that live there are mosquitoes, sandflies, crocodiles, and Nackeroos. I’m happy to drop these supplies off, and I’m even happier to get out of there.’

He paused.

‘So you see, I have a high level of job satisfaction.’

‘And you do this on your own?’

‘Not usually. I’ve got a blackfella who helps out, but he’s off doing some ceremony business, as he calls it. Someone died, I think.’

To my ear, Charlie Humphries' speech sounded as if he’d made a conscious effort to rough up properly acquired vowels. I suspected Jesuits in his background.

‘Why did we have to leave so urgently?’

‘It’s a tidal river, mate. To get up it far enough, you have to catch the floodtide. You ever seen any of those tides, mate?’

I indicated that I hadn’t.

‘They can be bloody scary things. I’m hoping this one doesn’t knock us around too much.’