Black Diamonds (28 page)

Drummond looks me up and down now. I know I'm covered in paint of every colour, and he can wonder if I'm barking. I hope he thinks I am. I hope he's wondering what I'm going to do. I certainly don't feel much like a pacifist right now and that's what's called irony, isn't it. And I'm an expert at irony today. I should belt him just for speaking to me like this in front of my wife; I should belt him for speaking like this in front of my wife who is very clearly upset, who is still holding a telegram from my mother that tells us my brother-in-law is dead. I won't test my left on him, though. I'm just sane enough to be mindful of the conflicts of interest here.

Instead I say: ‘Well. Why don't you fuck off and pay them, you mean cunt.'

The horror on his face is only matched by the flame on France's. Drummond's horrified not at the sentiment but at my language. I crack it at this point. It's all right to murder millions and make money out of it, but we don't say fuck off cunt, do we. We're civilised here. Not me.

I say: ‘Are you deaf?'

He's just standing there; France says to him, with her perfect manners: ‘I think you had better go, Mr Drummond.'

He does, and he stalks off round the side of the house, but he'll do as he's told on this: no choice. Danny's wandered out to the verandah, and he starts to cry. His father is not a very pleasant chap. I can't look at him, not now, and I turn to go back inside my cage.

France says at my back: ‘It's all right.' And she means it. And I know exactly how she means it. She's saying: get on with it, get rid of it. Luck takes on a new meaning for me. I'll go back inside and finish this mess, and I'll do it for her. Just her.

After all that, it's only three pictures: my Holy Trinity. One big one, of the Albert-Bapaume Road heading towards Pozieres, and two smaller ones: there's Madonna hanging over the road, and there's Fritz-Johan bringing Strath out of the hole as he turns to look back at me:
Das muss dir echt weh tun. Echt schlimm, ja?
Not any more. Not now. I know that I'm finished because I've just woken up from ten hours' straight sleep, and though I'm aching everywhere, I'm looking at the big one, which hurt the most, and I see: it's only a picture. There it is. Permanently there, and no more or less than all of the other pictures in my mind: sea, pyramids, Dunc cleaning his toes, corkscrews, my stupid legs. Don't have to get them out unless I particularly want to look at them. Won't get a ticket to any art school for them either, and I don't give a shit. I'm in control of myself, the whole machine, for the first time since … for the first time ever probably.

When I go back inside the house I wander around for a bit, looking at the things we have, so much rubbish; they're all just pictures too. I catch sight of myself in the mirror above the sideboard. Beard does not suit me; I look like a crook Frog. France is round at Mum's debriefing and sorting out how they're going to sell the house and Roy's business and move Mim and the kids back to Lithgow. She'll be a while yet, so I'll spend the rest of the day making myself respectable.

I don't want to draw or paint or carve another thing for ten years. I will, I know, but I've got other matters to attend to for a good long while. Wife, son, mother, sister, nieces and nephews, and even a brother somewhere — forgotten I had one of them. Life. The thought of touching Francine now, right now … like you wouldn't believe. Look out.

After I've shaved it all off and cut my hair a bit, I have another good look at myself. I look like me again. I look twenty-three. No wonder Dunc thought me special.

It's finished. Please.

 

FRANCINE

I stop when I hear it, as Danny and I are walking home through the gully. It's hot, and I'm tired and sad, scoured out, but Danny's not — to think I so desperately wanted him to walk once. Novelty's worn off, for me at least. Now that's all he wants to do; no: run. I am gripping him by the wrist to stop him from falling down the steep bank just before I can see the house. I can't take him out in the Cadillac any more: he won't sit still, wants to jump out of it, while it's moving. And he's worse in the trap; wants to ride Hayseed. He's been naughty all afternoon: I'm sure children pick up everything that we don't want them to understand and express their opinions in stubbornness, wriggling and the word ‘no'. I'd smack him if he weren't so lovely otherwise. Or maybe it's simply because he's an Ackerman. They are all wicked. And adorable: even when they are called McKinnons, and especially when they are small and sane and live inside a house and don't look like a bushranger. My tether is stretched just a little too tight, and now, finally, it snaps.

Even Danny stops, looks up at me.

I say: ‘That's Daddy. Playing the piano. Race you home.'

Didn't know if he could still play it. Must be able to, obviously. Does everything else with that arm that looks like it needs a good squirt of oil. I've still got hold of Danny, and his feet are fairly off the ground as I drag him along; but he doesn't mind. He's giggling at me as a tune I've not heard before floats across the valley.

Daniel's singing, in the fashion he does, when we clatter inside:

If you were the only girl in the world

And I were the only boy

Nothing else would matter in the world today

We could go on loving in the same old way

A garden of Eden just made for two

With nothing to mar our joy

I'd say such wonderful things to you

There'd be such wonderful things to do

If you were the only girl in the world

And I were the only boy …

‘What's
that
song?' I ask him when he's finished. ‘It's too sweet.'

He doesn't turn around; he's looking at the keys. ‘Something I picked up in London.' He's laughing inside his voice. ‘Could have been worse.'

There's no sheet music on the stand, must have memorised it; I say: ‘Play something else.'

But he plays ‘
Funkel, funkel kleiner Stern
', double time, full chords, turns around and looks at me. Small smile. Good God.

He says: ‘Did you sort things out for Mim?'

‘Think so. And when Mim's ready to move, the boys will come and stay with us, and all the girls at your mum's.' Harry and Charlie are in the middle of the mix: nine and nearly seven. They need a man, and a firm hand, and I had thought they might bring Daniel out of himself a bit, or they'd be too terrified by him to misbehave. Seems there's no need to worry on that score now: he's back in the nick of time.

‘Good,' he says, and the glint makes it plain that they will now all misbehave. I could not be more pleased or relieved. Timing is appalling for us as ever as we move Danny's cot into the spare room. I'm pulsing all over already and he hasn't even kissed me yet. Oh my goodness.

Speechless. Knew I would be, but if I imagined anything at all, it wasn't this. They are grotesque and sinister and transfixing, on the floor, where he painted them. Eviscerating might describe the large canvas, if I were searching for a euphemism for four square feet of … bodies and pieces of bodies of men and horses, mangled and torn and charred, coming into and out of grey mud, disaster stretching out forever under a red-purple sky. The perspective is shaped as though looking through a magnifying glass, the horizon rounded, distorting slightly at the edges. It's the world, somehow rolling forward. I've never seen anything like it, and I've never seen a painting like it, on the floor or otherwise. The colours are electrically vivid and the sphere of destruction deceptive: more explicit and intricate the closer I look down into it, a fingernail leaching its pink with lost life, a cracked hoof, more explicit than language, than reality maybe. Expression loud and clear.
He's very clever with it.
I know I'm biased, but … That book I read a lifetime ago, about those
Continental Expressionists
, those squabbling French and German pretenders, rings a faint bell somewhere.
Art or Arrogance?
Something about the invalidity of the emotional view, obfuscating truth. I don't know what this is that Daniel's done, other than intensely disturbing:
painting.
And he must have had to somehow stand right over it to reach the middle, since his arm doesn't stretch out as it should. I'd say that's doing things the hard way, if I were looking for a euphemism for the completeness of my incredulity.

The other two smaller paintings are not as immediately confronting, but maybe more so for what they seem to say. Our Lady leans over a broken road from a ruined cathedral, holding Baby Jesus down towards what looks like a fissure, but is in fact an open wound, revealing the shattering of bone. I'd like to think that's just my Catholic-afflicted imagination; know it's not. Neither is the intent in the other one: a smooth-faced, fair-haired, frightened boy, inside a grey Hun tunic, red piping like a vein down his charcoal trouser leg, a body hung over his shoulder, khaki clad and rent open from rib to thigh. The boy is looking out, directly, through the night, as he clutches the enemy's legs to his chest, pleading for something impossible; a National propaganda poster gone very awry.

What can I say? Have to say something; but avoid the unspeakable, and tears stoppered with awe … I look up at him, standing beside me, and blurt: ‘You could get locked up for this.' A joke, but a weak one, considering the War Precautions Act has now allowed for censorship of anything remotely resembling war protest. For images that should be sent straight to Melbourne marked
Urgent: Commonwealth Parliament House
, and hung above their heads.

He laughs, softly. ‘Yep. So that's the end of it. I'll stick them under the house and we can forget about them.'

‘No you will not,' I say, and wince: bite my tongue; I've no business telling him what to do.

But he says: ‘All right.' Picks them up one by one and stacks them against the windowless wall, so that now all that can be seen is the precision with which he's pulled and fixed canvas over wooden frames. ‘I'll leave them here then. But you don't have to look at anything like this again, and neither do I.'

And I think I'm more stunned by the apology in his voice than anything else.

We're sitting out on the front steps, in the shade of the house, looking over the valley; Danny's having an afternoon nap for once. It's the middle of December and it's so scorching you feel you can't take a full breath; cicadas deafening, flies appalling. I'm only wearing a shift, no undergarments: we can see and hear anyone who comes around the corner in enough time for me to run in and get decent, not that we're expecting anyone. Daniel's not wearing a shirt, just those old trousers, and he doesn't run anywhere for anyone; not because he can't, he just doesn't. He's not quite the same Achilles that I first saw, but he'll do, very well. It's hard not to feel that very sharp bolt of gratitude every time I see the scars: the backward S, the silvery dent; the neat slash along the underside of his forearm, the slight wasting of the muscles above knobbly hinge. Things could have been very different. For all my prayers and promises, I don't know if I would have coped, and I'm not sure that he would have either. He's quite vain, in a way, and I don't think he could have stood needing help all the time. We would not have been a Stan and Lilly duet; perhaps more Louise and Paul. Thank God, the stars, the angels, the saints and whoever else had a hand in making sure we'd never find out; thank the moon if it was you. He's not contemplating anything as pedestrian as that at the moment: he's looking at my breasts through the almost sheer fabric of my shift.

‘No,' I tell him. ‘It's too hot.' That's all we've done for the best part of the last month: no exaggeration and twice already this morning, the second time he sat me on the sideboard, as he often likes to, while Danny was corralled in the spare room. I love that; I am in a constant swoon for him, but it really is too hot right now. Haven't fired the stove for the last few days for fear that the house, or the entire valley, will combust; fires in the mountains have even brought somnolent koalas down here, swinging from branches to get the air going.

‘This is not hot,' he says. ‘Egypt got
hot.
'

I'm surprised he's said that; he's not really mentioned much about it yet. But I say, having a bet each way: ‘I've never been to Egypt.'

‘You were there, though. Every stinking day. You didn't mind torturing me then either.'

‘Ha. I think you'll find that worked both ways, and I didn't start it.'

‘Yes, you did. Minute you stepped into town. Don't know how I'll ever forgive you, Francine Connolly. The things you've put me through.'

Sublime. But I'm not relenting. ‘Apart from vaporising me
later
, when it's cooler, what are you going to do with yourself …?' Daring the question, because he hasn't been out to his
room
, or off the bounds of our property for the last month either; when he's not having me, he's playing with Danny in the orchard, or playing the piano, or teaching Danny to bash it, or picking grubs off the tomatoes and green beans I planted in spring. Once upon a time I might have thought nothing unreasonable in perpetual leisure, and Evan's said to me that Daniel's the happiest he's ever seen him, and he is happy, and Doctor Nichols has said to me that
rest is best
, and he is resting, but still …

‘Knock some sense into Charlie and Harry when they get here,' he says. Sarah's in Bathurst right now, and will bundle them all onto a train tomorrow; but he hasn't answered my question. ‘I'm going to have a go at being a gentleman who is good to his wife and family,' he adds, and that's not an answer either.

‘While I keep drudging?' I play along with a dig.

‘I'll never be that much of a gentleman, dear. You can suit yourself.'

Love is not the word, nowhere near close. I'll drudge till the end of a trillion times forever on principle, but I say: ‘There is only one thing I'd like, to make my life complete, and that is an indoor bathroom.' True, especially today: I want to sit in a cold bath. Arms and legs hanging over tin tub in the kitchen is not quite on the money.

‘Done,' he says, wink and a nod: ‘So long as you're paying. I know too much about the importance of good plumbing these days, so I'll do it myself. Special scheme, special price, just for you.'

‘What do you know about plumbing?' I laugh, without thinking; I haven't pried into the knot of what's passed, and I realise too late that that's what I've just done.

But it seems that's exactly what I should have done at this precise moment in time, since a good deal comes tumbling out now. Right here, hip to hip, on the front steps of our house.

It's not funny, it's so very,
very
not funny, but he has me laughing as he tells me about all these men together in this Great Act of Stupidity. Trying to avoid flooding dugouts with sewage, the contentedness of rats and lice, first blooded by a fellow called Foley who accidentally hit him with a roll of barbed wire, moonlight jaunting with a drunk called Stratho, Captain Duncan and his little words and little feet always popping up and promoting him and nearly having him killed playing rugby against the BEF. But it's the unofficial version of what he calls his Most Distinguished Conduct that pinches off my laughter: he tells me how he tried to retrieve Stratho's body and ended up falling down a hole and that's how he broke his arm; spent his final big night of the Pozieres offensive in that hole with a dead man and a German boy who wanted to give himself up. Stifle the shudder and try to smile: because, somehow, Daniel thinks it is funny. I suspected the AIF were stretching the truth about the valorous act
under bombardment
business; I also suspect that Daniel's spinning a yarn. Longest tale he's ever told. A special version for me, for today. Compensation for the paintings perhaps. Naive as I am of matters military, I am fairly certain that you don't get a medal for falling in a hole; don't think that's what Stan Henderson meant about loose screws and asking what's for dinner.

Even more certain now: he's talking about wandering up the road towards Madonna, he's so mad that when he hears the shell whistling towards him he thinks he's slept in because it's already dawn. He says: ‘But Duncan …' and then he stops. He puts his head on his knees.

Little Danny has woken up; he's talking to himself, singing, ‘Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, baaaaaaah!' and rattling the side of his cot, which he is far too big for now. He can climb up and over, and he'll appear any moment now to see his father crying. He can hear him anyway. There it is. It's the worst sound. I put my hand on the middle of Daniel's back, it's such a big back and such a small hand, and he collapses against me as Danny toddles out. Danny pats Daddy on the shoulder; Daddy's very sad. I'm very fierce.