Amongst the Dead (13 page)

A sustained round of applause indicated that I was about to go on. Brian and Glen returned, laughing, and with that look that actors get when they believe they’ve made a success. We didn’t exchange any words. I strode into the camp as if I were entering from the wings of a majestic theatre. Fulton, Andrew, Nicholas, Rufus, and Charlie were sitting on ammunition boxes in a semi-circle — each of them naked, apart from the boots. In top hat and tails, I felt perhaps a tad overdressed. They applauded politely as I assumed my stance. From the grins on their faces, I think that they were expecting me to launch into ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ and to entertain them with a bit of soft shoe. Instead, I pointed my finger sharply at Nicholas Ashe and said:

I scorn thy meat; ‘twould choke me, for I should ne’er flatter thee.

He pulled back as though I’d poked him physically, startled more by the sound of the words than their meaning, which I have no doubt escaped him. The grins left the faces of the others, too. I launched into the speech, gathering momentum as I went:

I wonder men dare trust themselves with men.

Methinks they should invite them without knives:

Good for their meat, and safer for their lives:

There’s much example for’t. The fellow that sits next him, now parts bread with him, pledges the breath of him in a divided draught, is the readiest man to kill him. ‘T’as been proved. If I were a huge man I should fear to drink at meals

Lest they should spy my windpipe’s dangerous notes.

Great men should drink with harness on their throats.

A crack of thunder made us all jump — thunder and bombs being closely allied in the ears — and a great wave of rain swept over us. My audience chose to retreat under the tarpaulin, suddenly alarmed by the prospect of getting wet. Brian and Glen, now disrobed, came out of the trees and began a farcical dance in the style of Isadora Duncan. The Nackeroos, now that the threat of Shakespeare had been removed, lost their fear of the rain, and followed Brian’s and Glen’s movements until all seven of them were prancing about the clearing in a grotesque, naked parody of modern dance. I stood watching from just inside the tarpaulin, my top hat still sitting firmly on my head. On the far side of the camp, Isaiah and Ngulmiri, standing well away from each other, observed what must have seemed to them to be an outbreak of madness. At one point, Fulton detached himself from the group and placed his hand on my arm.

‘Come on, Will. It’s fun.’

Not wishing to reinforce any misconception he might have about my being standoffish and stuffy, I stripped, and launched into an exaggeratedly interpretative routine. I found myself laughing along with everyone else, and this time of prancing in the rain, in the middle of nowhere, remains fixed in my memory as being amongst those rare and uncomplicated moments of pure happiness.

When the rain had passed, the camp became a quagmire, and there was nothing for it but to surrender to the inevitability of being filthy. It is amazing how quickly all the appurtenances and inhibitions of civilisation can fall away. A muddy hand wiped on a thigh, or rubbed through the hair, becomes clean enough. A body, however, simply becomes a palette on which different shades of dirt, grease, mud, sap, and even blood, mix, dry, and flake off, or stubbornly adhere.

In the late afternoon, Charlie left us.

The rations were unpacked and examined, and each man went about his appointed tasks. Andrew Battell was gripped by a fierce bout of shivering, and sat wrapped in his bedding in the impossible humidity. Fulton tinkered with the new radio-charger, Rufus began assembling bits and pieces for dinner, and Nicholas Ashe took each of their weapons, stripped them down, and cleaned them. Isaiah and Ngulmiri stayed close to the horses. I wandered over to where Isaiah stood and asked him whether he thought the Japanese could successfully invade this part of the world. He shook his head.

‘Croc get ‘im.’

The idea that Australia’s best defence was an ancient reptile didn’t inspire confidence.

‘You and Ngulmiri don’t talk. Different language?’

Isaiah shot a quick glance in Ngulmiri’s direction.

‘Taboo, boss. He married wrong way. Very bad.’

I thought of telling him that Brian had, in my opinion, married ‘wrong way’ too, but that I still spoke to him. When I looked from Isaiah to Ngulmiri I felt there was more there than I was capable of grasping, so I held my tongue. Whoever Ngulmiri had married, the problem went deeper than choosing a dull, vapid, vulgarian, as Brian had done.

‘Fires now, boss.’

I walked back with him into camp and he began to set half-a-dozen fires in a circle around a central fire. The fires weren’t for cooking — Rufus was busy concocting some sort of fried-rice affair over a primus stove — so I surmised that they were to provide smoke to keep mosquitoes and sandflies at bay, at least temporarily. Beside each fire he laid a bundle of damp branches. All day I’d been swatting flies, sandflies and mozzies, the last two in annoying but not overwhelming numbers. I knew this would change at dusk, and dusk was fast approaching.

‘Put your pants on, boss. Shirt, too.’

I took his advice, went to my kit, and got dressed. Rufus called out that I should put on two shirts and two pairs of pants.

‘Are you serious?’ I asked.

He shrugged.

‘These fuckers can skewer you through thick cotton, mate.’

There was a scurry in the camp as everyone hurried to cover every bit of his skin. We all donned mosquito gloves and our netted hats, and pulled thick socks over the cuffs of our trousers. I felt suffocated by my own clothes, but when the insects arrived I saw that there was no alternative if one was to remain sane. The fires were lit and a pall of smoke raised. We ate our meal inside the circle, although Isaiah and Ngulmiri took their food to their grass shelters and ate it there. The food was palatable, and Rufus’s bread was excellent. It was closely examined and given the thumbs up.

‘You’re a bloody good cook,’ Fulton said, and indeed Rufus had managed to coax flavour out of his mixture of rice, bully beef, dried vegetables, and herbs. I realised that the ‘Herbs For Victory’ campaign actually meant something. For each mouthful I lifted the netting that covered my face and, despite the smoke, which greatly reduced but didn’t entirely eliminate the mosquitoes, one or two of the creatures would zip in and find my cheek or neck. I wondered if Isaiah and Ngulmiri fared any better in their shelters.

‘Why don’t Isaiah and Ngulmiri stay and eat with us?’ I asked.

‘’Cause they’re fuckin’ niggers, mate,’ Nicholas Ashe said. ‘They shouldn’t even be eating our rations, I reckon. They should find their own fuckin’ nigger food.’

‘We’d be rooted without them,’ Rufus said.

‘We’d be rooted without the horses, too,’ Ashe said, ‘and I don’t want to eat with them, either.’

‘Surely they’re entitled to rations,’ Brian said. ‘And pay.’

‘They get paid,’ Ashe said sourly. ‘Five bob a week and nigger twist.’

‘So they get paid in a week what we get paid in a day. That doesn’t seem fair to me,’ I said.

Ashe made a farting noise with his lips. ‘Fair? You know what’s not fair, mate? The left-hand side of a black gin’s bum. That’s what.’

‘What’s “nigger twist”?’ Brian asked.

‘Tobacco,’ Rufus said. ‘It’s rolled up like a stick of liquorice.’

It was a strange sensation talking to figures whose faces weren’t visible and whose individuality was obliterated by their head-to-foot coverings. Nothing, however, could obscure the vitriol that seeped from Nicholas Ashe whenever he referred to the ‘niggers’. It became clear in the course of the conversation that he held in his dark heart a particular detestation for white men who married Aboriginal women. ‘Combos’ he called them. He’d only heard rumours that there were white women who’d taken up with Aboriginal men, but this seemed so outrageous a proposition that he’d assigned it to the status of myth.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked at a break in a diatribe about some bloke he’d met who’d turned out to be a half-caste, and nobody knew, and he’d actually bought the bastard a beer.

‘Brissy,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t wait to get out of there.’

Ashe’s attitudes didn’t seem to bother anyone else, and the only conclusion I could draw from this was that Ashe’s feelings were accepted as reasonable, or not so unreasonable as to be worthy of comment or dispute.

Andrew Battell took to his bed as soon as he’d eaten the few mouthfuls he could manage. The shivers had passed and been replaced by sweats, so his clothes must have been torture.

‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Fulton said. ‘He doesn’t want to be evacuated. We just have to wait for it to pass. We’ve all had a dose.’

There was a great deal of praise for Brian’s and Glen’s little magic act, and it was agreed that Brian made a satisfactory woman. No mention was made of my contribution. It had been cut short by the rain, so any legitimate judgement was impossible anyway. There was talk, too, of how close the Japanese were, and there was no doubt at all expressed about their intentions. Invasion wasn’t a matter of ‘if,’ but ‘when’. This certainty wasn’t good for the nerves.

‘I wouldn’t trust the niggers up here as far as I could throw them,’ Ashe said. ‘They’ve had contact with the bloody Japs for years.’

‘But why would the Aborigines want to be invaded by the Japs?’ I asked.

‘Dunno. Maybe they think the Japs will give them better tobacco. Who knows what they think, or even if they think.’

The fact that both Isaiah and Ngulmiri were within earshot was of no importance to Ashe. He didn’t credit them with feelings worthy of even the most grudging respect. He was of the view that, ‘You wouldn’t watch what you said in front of a dog, so why should you worry about the blacks?’

‘It’s a clear night,’ Fulton said. ‘We might be able to pick up Tokyo Rose.’

‘I don’t want to hear that shit,’ Ashe said.

‘So go to bed,’ Fulton said, and for the first time I heard in his voice a note that suggested the camaraderie between them might be fragile. I was anxious to talk with him about the three deaths that had so alarmed Army Intelligence in Melbourne. I’d have to do this discreetly because it was important that Fulton not know that the real purpose of this visit was to unmask a murderer, not raise their morale with vaudeville. Until I had a clear idea about what was going on up here, I didn’t want to expose Fulton to any unnecessary danger.

Glen, Brian, Rufus, and I brought smoking branches under the tarpaulin while Fulton fired up the battery-charger and settled himself in front of the radio. It would be a long night of transmitting and receiving for him unless the skies remained clear and free from electrical storms. The FS6 was capable of voice transmission over relatively short distances, but this was only used in emergencies, the outgoing signals being too easy to intercept and track. All other transmissions were done in ciphered Morse, which demanded great accuracy. Enciphering and deciphering were skills I couldn’t master. Fulton, however, was obviously at home with the FS6. He tinkered and fiddled until a woman’s voice broke out of the static.

‘Tokyo Rose,’ he said. ‘It’s not always the same person.’

I was expecting a sultry, come-hither voice designed to lure men to their deaths. Instead, a rather flat, almost officious, voice with an American accent told us, as if it were a news broadcast of an irrefutable truth, that the Empire of Japan considered the troops in northern Australia to be prisoners of the Japanese already.

‘We guard you with our bombers,’ she said matter-of-factly, ‘and General Tojo sends his regards and gratitude to the Australian government, which feeds you until our soldiers arrive.’

There was a moment of static, and Glen laughed — no one else did — and then she was back.

‘Australian soldiers, you are lonely where you are. Your girlfriends are not so lonely. Nice American soldiers look after her. Maybe they’ll marry soon. Boys in Darwin, ask the American soldier if he knows your girlfriend. Ask him how she is going. He knows.’

The transmission was lost.

‘Cunt,’ Rufus said.

‘Surely no one’s going to fall for that,’ Glen said.

‘If you’re tired, shit-scared, and miserable,’ said Fulton, ‘and you hear it often enough, you start to think about it.’

Certainly, Tokyo Rose had done something to the mood of the evening, and we left Fulton to his transmissions and his smoke-screen, and decided it was time to turn in.

‘Check your bedrolls,’ Rufus said. ‘Just in case. Snakes and scorpions. And when you hear Ngulmiri call out, don’t panic. He’s just letting any blackfellas who might come by know who he is and what his country is. It’s an etiquette thing, and stops any trouble.’

As I walked in my heavy clothes towards my date with scorpions, I realised that my dream of lush, benign rainforest was now comprehensively deceased. I carried a smoking branch with me, and when I reached the coffin of cheesecloth that Brian had erected for me, I gingerly lifted its edge and shone my torch through a cloud of mosquitoes to check if anything serpentine had crawled in. There was nothing there, so I waved the branch about to drive out any insects that had rushed into the space, and quickly stretched out on the bedroll, the branch still in my hand. The cheesecloth was thick — so thick that it wasn’t transparent — and smoke soon filled the small void. At least it had the desired effect of clearing out the mosquitoes, and I was able to release some of it when I tossed the branch away.