Amongst the Dead (6 page)

It was Brian who stopped the show. The moment he walked on stage next to Glen — who looked like a poor man’s Mandrake — was the first time I’d seen him in full costume. His hand rested on Glen’s arm as he crossed to the centre of the stage, and he moved with the fluid grace of a woman who, if she knew anything at all, knew that she was sufficiently beautiful to snag the glances of watching men. Glen manipulated ropes, cards, coins and silks, and brought a member of the audience to the stage where, with Brian’s help, he divested the hapless private of his watch, his wallet, a filthy handkerchief and a gold chain. The audience howled when Brian wove himself around the victim and, in one quick, deft movement, seemed to reach into the soldier’s trousers and withdraw a fully extended, army-issue condom, creating the bizarre impression that the soldier had come to the concert wearing it. His protestations only made the crowd laugh louder. Brian didn’t speak a single line, which preserved the spectacular illusion of femininity he’d created. Unlike Lon, who appeared later as Lola, Brian hadn’t chosen to play his role as burlesque, but had attempted the infinitely more difficult task of causing an observer to ask, ‘Is he, or isn’t he?’

Afterwards in our tent I was unstinting in my praise, and I think Brian was pleased to hear it.

‘I saw everyone today,’ he said. ‘At the hotel.’

He waited for a moment, hoping to elicit a response from me. Having already bolstered his ego, I decided against giving him this small satisfaction. When it became clear that I had no intention of asking after their welfare, he volunteered, ‘They’re all fine. I thought they might want to know how you were going, but nobody asked.’

‘I see,’ I said, ‘and you thought it was important to tell me that.’

He must have realised suddenly that he’d been guilty of an undeserving meanness — and whatever flaws might be found in his vast catalogue of them, meanness wasn’t one of them — because he tried to save the situation by saying, ‘I just meant that they didn’t say anything nasty, so that’s a good sign.’

‘No, Brian. There’s nothing nastier than silence.’

I slept well, despite being vaguely troubled by my acting troupe’s snub.

The next morning, the Third Division Concert Party was loaded into three trucks and a parlour coach. The stage had been dismantled during the night, mostly by a working party whose brawn we wouldn’t have access to in Mt Isa. We’d all be expected to help put together this cumbersome structure and then to pull it down, almost immediately.

I’ve never been particularly good at small talk, so the two-day journey to Mt Isa, crammed into a bus with perhaps twenty others, some of whom had taken a set against me, promised to be something of an ordeal. The promise was soon realised; but well before we’d arrived in Mt Isa, conditions on the bus had become truly awful and the lack of goodwill had become general.

All conversation in the bus died when we entered Mt Isa. I say ‘entered,’ but it isn’t the kind of place you enter. More correctly, we passed through a cloud of roiling dust into a world that struck me as so ‘other’ as to generate an uncertain, but definite, fear in all of us. The presence of the American military was immediately apparent. Trucks ground their gears and blew their horns with abandon. The most astonishing thing of all was the unexpected realisation that the US army was populated by black men. We’d seen only a few of these fellows in Melbourne, but here in Mt Isa they seemed to outnumber white soldiers ten to one. It was explained to me later that the Australian government had reluctantly suspended the White Australia Policy on the understanding that black Americans would be relegated mostly to the back blocks; and if the streets of Mt Isa were any guide, the American administration was keeping its end of the bargain.

I don’t think I will ever again experience the strange contrast of noise and crowds to the utter desolation of the surrounding landscape.

The dust that blew into the bus like smoke was so thick that I couldn’t understand how, whenever we breathed it in, it didn’t simply turn to mud in our lungs and drown us. The bus crawled through the vehicle-clogged streets towards the racecourse where we were to spend the night, and where we were to raise our theatre for one performance of
Camp Happy
to an audience of, obviously, mostly Americans. Conditions at the racecourse were appalling, but the necessity of putting up the theatre denied us time to assimilate this fact until the prospect of sleeping in the open, in the dust, could no longer be ignored. It wasn’t the sleeping arrangements that stunned me initially. It was the flies. No plague in Egypt could compete with them.

Having been raised with fastidiousness about germs, I considered each individual fly to be an explosive threat to good health. To be covered in them from head to foot as they sought out moisture around my nose, lips, eyes, and ears, on any exposed skin, and anywhere on my clothes where there was the promise of sweat — and I was sweating profusely, the heat being intense — was horrifying to me. It was a sudden leap to go from hunting down a single fly in a room to be swarming with them like a piece of carrion. I was afraid to open my mouth lest dozens of them crawl inside, and I knew that many of them would have come from the pit toilets that must have been dug to accommodate this influx of soldiers.

Nevertheless, it is amazing how quickly one becomes inured to something as disgusting as insistent flies. It was impossible to keep them at bay, so eventually they crawled with impunity, depositing microbial horrors where they willed.

The theatre was more or less raised by nightfall; so, after a stomach-bogglingly awful meal, it was decided that, as this was to be our only free night in Mt Isa, we’d wander into what passed for the centre of town. This turned out to be more complicated than anticipated, though. Mt Isa wasn’t a sleepy little town. Its position as a railhead meant that thousands upon thousands of tons of equipment were routinely unloaded here for transport north by road into the Territory. With tons of war materials came thousands of personnel, and the Americans didn’t travel light. Mt Isa had become a de facto military base, but a posting here was no picnic. The black soldiers were acutely aware that many of their white colleagues were idling comfortably in towns on the east coast, an option that was largely closed to them because of their inconvenient colour. Consequently, the mood in Mt Isa was unpredictable, and we were told that it was inadvisable to venture off the racecourse without carrying a sidearm at the very least.

Whether or not it was true that we could expect every G.I. we met to be armed with a knife or a razor, it was bound to have a discouraging effect on easy social intercourse to imagine that a wrong word might lead to an open jugular. Brian blithely volunteered that I was handy with a gun, and someone produced a Luger — borrowed with permission, I was assured, from a captain who was confined to his patch of bare earth by a ferocious bout of diarrhoea. I strapped it on reluctantly, but I could sense that it improved my standing amongst my fellow actors immediately. I thought perhaps I might contrive to be armed during any further discussions about scripts.

Everything about Mt Isa was gruelling. Walking to the main street was gruelling; finding a place to buy a beer was gruelling; buying the beer was gruelling; even drinking it was gruelling. There was too much of everything — too many flies, too many people, too much heat, too much dust, too much noise, too much aggression, and too much boredom. No wonder that the main streets were jammed with M.Ps. in jeeps, usually travelling in groups of four, and almost all of them black.

I didn’t start the fight, but in retrospect I probably shouldn’t have fired the Luger. It was really Glen’s fault. Somehow our small group ended up outside the American PX, which had been set up in a large tent on a vacant piece of baked earth in the main street. (There can’t be too many towns that boast vacant, blasted blocks in their main street). The crush here was awful, and Glen saw an opportunity to fleece some doughboys of their dollars. He did spectacularly well, aided by the inebriated state of his victims, but the entertainment to be derived from watching cards vanish and your sure bets fail is short-lived when money changes hands. The G.I.s weren’t as gracious about losing as the diggers on the train had been, and they were losing more, and to an undeclared enemy.

Before I really understood what was happening, American soldiers began to coalesce on one side of Glen, and Australians on the other. It could only end badly. Glen was sitting down behind an upturned crate on which he was laying out his cards and conning his audience into laying their bets. Perhaps from his position he couldn’t see that sides had formed because, instead of packing up his deck and retreating, he asked smugly, ‘Anyone else?’

A soldier pushed his way to the front of the group and stood before Glen. He was tall and lean, and so dark that it took a moment to register that he wore a neat moustache. Everything about him was neat. He seemed to repel the dust and grime that clung to the rest of us. I was lost in admiration.

‘I would like to place a bet with you, sir,’ he said, in a voice that bore no relation to the black-American caricatures familiar to me from the movies.

‘I’ll be happy to take your money,’ Glen said, and all the invisible ties that bound us were pulled a little tighter. You could see it as people tensed, or became suddenly more attentive. Glen was oblivious, concentrating no doubt on setting up his trick.

‘Here’s the deal,’ he said. ‘You choose a card from this deck, and show your buddies, but don’t show me. Put it back in the deck, I’ll shuffle, and you think of a number between one and fifty-two. Can you manage that?’

The ties tautened.

‘Tell us the number you thought of, I’ll hand you the deck, and you start turning the cards over one by one until you get to that number. That’ll be your card. You turn them. I won’t touch them. Do you reckon you can do that?’

Before the soldier had a chance to reply, Glen produced fifty American dollars, dollars he’d won earlier, and slammed them on the crate.

‘Tell you what. That’s fifty bucks, fifty-until-recently-Yankee bucks. If this doesn’t work, the fifty is yours. All you have to do is put up ten. You could win fifty, but you can only lose ten. That too complicated for you?’

With frightening civility, the soldier said, ‘I’ll risk five dollars. That’s all.’

‘No worries, mate. I’m glad to see that you understand it is a risk.’

‘Yes,’ he said ominously, ‘it is a risk.’

Glen was a good magician, but his instinct for danger was poor. He held the deck towards the soldier, who took a card from it and made a show of displaying it to a few men nearby. He returned the card to the deck, and Glen began to cut and shuffle.

‘OK,’ he said, still shuffling. ‘Think of a number and tell us.’

‘Twenty-eight.’

Glen furrowed his brow in a bad approximation of concern, as if this was the one number he’d hoped not to be chosen, and continued shuffling. He handed the deck to the soldier and said, ‘Start turning them over, Private. When you get to the twenty-eighth card, that’ll be the one you picked.’

Slowly the count began. What should have been a simple entertainment was mutating before our eyes into a bitter contest. When the twenty-sixth card was turned, the air was electric, and I prayed that Glen had been sufficiently canny to get the trick wrong and lose the fifty dollars.

The soldier turned over the twenty-seventh card, and Glen said, ‘Before you flip it, tell us all what card you picked.’

‘The two of hearts,’ he said, and his carefully modulated voice did nothing to calm my nerves. On the contrary, his self-discipline was terrifying, and he turned the card with agonising deliberation.

It was the two of hearts.

There was a moment when all those assembled might have laughed and applauded. It ended when Glen folded his arms in the smug certainty that he’d made a fool of not just this soldier, but all of them. My mouth became dry and I began to breathe with shallow, rapid inhalations.

It was the flash of what I took to be a knife, or a vicious razor, that caused me to draw the Luger from its holster. The effect was as if I’d taken a cattle prod and poked each and every G.I. in the groin with it. They recoiled, and a cry went up from somewhere amongst them that the ‘Ossies’ (with the ‘s’ over-emphasised in that frightful American way) were about to fire on them. The inevitability of a riot breaking out struck me so forcibly that raising the gun and firing two quick shots in the air to quell it seemed to me to be entirely reasonable. However, the crack of the Luger had the perverse effect of galvanising Glen’s audience into violent unanimity, and they surged towards us with fists flailing.

I was one of the first of our group to be knocked to the ground and trampled mercilessly beneath heavy, U.S. army-issue boots. I curled into a ball, protecting my face and head, and so didn’t see the rapid arrival of numerous M.P.s, who brought the situation under control with ruthless efficiency. I heard gunshots, but was distracted from any proper assessment of the state of play by several sharp and painful kicks to my back, buttocks, ribs, and legs. I knew from experience that bruising would be extensive. I hoped that Brian had protected himself against a similar battering. A heavily bruised femme would create the unfortunate impression of an unhappy domestic situation.

I don’t think I fell unconscious at any time, but at some point I was lying amid a forest of trousered legs, and at another I was sprawled in the dirt with no one around me, and with flies reclaiming their temporarily abandoned demesne. There was a great deal of shouting, with the M.P.s bringing their soldiers under control largely through screaming abuse at them. The other Australians had sensibly melted away as soon as it was safe to do so. They were actors, after all, and were unaccustomed to fisticuffs, unless they were carefully choreographed. The Americans would have pummelled them into the dust. I understood this but, nevertheless, it would have been nice if someone, Brian or Glen perhaps, had remained long enough to help me to my feet.