Fireshadow (3 page)

THREE

Vinnie

He woke to a few silent seconds of confused orientation. The morning was cold, and as he shrugged out of the warm cocoon of his sleeping bag, Vinnie shivered. Mist had settled across the clearing, cloaking the trees on the far side. The gurgle of the creek reminded him of the pressure in his bladder and a nearby tree provided relief, his stream steaming slightly in the chill air. A couple of metres away the brush trembled with the passage of some creature startled from its morning feed. Magpies cried in the treetops, the timelessness of their song calling the sun through the fog.

Lighting the fire was easier this time. The flames, stripped of their dancing shadows by pale, growing daylight, were clear and innocuous. Soon a billy of creek water bubbled on its way to boiling. Watching, Vinnie thought of home. By this time his father could be up, boiling the kettle for his mother's first cup of tea. His parents. Had they worried?

The letter should have explained everything. The hours he'd spent on it, trying to put down in writing feelings and ideas he couldn't convey any other way. Rationalising his decision into stark black letters on white paper. He'd left it by the kettle, where his father would discover it first thing.

The letter had been the hardest part. The rest was simple.

Leaving through the back door, retrieving pack, food and tent from the shed, stopping to scratch a silent goodbye behind his dog's ear, the creature dozy at this hour of the night – some guard! Then creeping around the side and out, through the gate into the lane. Sleep hung on the world. Houses, their windows sightless eyes, slumbered either side of him as he walked the few blocks to the all-night deli. There a taxi to the central bus depot. The driver barely looked at him, other than the expected double glance at his scars. Paid for taxi, waited fifteen minutes, sitting on his pack. A little down the platform a couple of drunks slumped, singing unintelligible words at the occasional passing car. Across the road a shopping complex crouched empty amidst its car parks. A security car cruised by, spotlights on the roof, passing both him and the drunks without pause. Bus arrived, driver yawning, drinking coffee from a flask for five minutes before pulling out again into the deserted streets. Ride to outer suburbs, then a forty-five minute hike to the truck stop, the first outside the city limits. A couple of cars rushed past without stopping, lights on high beam, drivers comfortably ensconced in heated cabins, hurrying into the darkness. Nothing for twenty minutes, then the logging truck.

The neon of the roadhouse receded in the mirrors and, after the first bend, he and the driver were left alone in the glow of the moonlight and the faint illumination of the dashboard. The driver, a balding man in his fifties, cast a sideways glance.

‘Where you headed?'

‘Wherever you can drop me, if that's okay?'

‘I'm headed out to a logging stand the other side of Dwellingup. I can let you off there if you want.'

‘Yeah, thanks. That'd be great.'

No further questions. No further conversation. They had driven through the early morning in companionable silence, and Vinnie had been grateful for that.

Dwellingup at sunrise, breakfast in the park, reading until the tourist information place opened at nine. Bought a map of the area, not certain what he was looking for. A little square in the middle of the bush caught his eye.
Marrinup
.
Prisoner of
War Camp – Heritage Area
. The idea seemed incongruous – so totally alien. There was a camping symbol next to it, and a hiking path from the town. It would do. A quick walk through the museum, finding out about the timber town, the fire that destroyed it, then into the bush, to here . . .

Vinnie sipped his steaming coffee and let the morning wash over him, bathing in its quiet warmth. With the growing sun the fog was lifting, shifting, dissolving into blueness. The sounds of night animals surrendered to the more boisterous screeches of those who dwelled in daylight and the diurnal cycle of the forest started again, either unaware of, or ignoring, his presence there. Vinnie found himself filled with a sudden and overwhelming sense of being just another part of something – of somewhere. It was a sensation he'd long missed at home in the city. Hadn't felt since before Katia, and hadn't been alert to even then. As the fire spluttered and hissed, he whistled for the first time in many months.

The day stretched ahead, empty. He had books and his journal but for the moment Vinnie was content to just sit and be.

A few hundred metres away, up at the far end of the clearing, a wooden sign caught his attention. It stood at the mouth of a pathway that disappeared into the shadowy hollows of the forest. A different trail from the one he'd followed yesterday, and with nothing better to do, Vinnie meandered slowly up the terraces, clambering over small piles of rock and crossing the dirt road that ran through the clearing. The words, cut into the timber of the sign and daubed with white paint, stood clear against the greeny brown background:

POW Camp Trail. 4 kilometres, 1.5 hours return.

Black cockatoos chortled overhead. Vinnie cast a glance back across the deserted clearing, stepped onto the pathway and into the enclosing, living dimness of the jarrah forest.

Vinnie examined his reflection in the trembling mirror of a small rock pool. The creek intersecting the path gurgled beneath a rough timber footbridge and Vinnie considered his scarred visage. The dull sheen of the water lessoned the impact of the scar, its vivid brightness muted by the mossy rocks below the drifting water. With a little imagination, the old Vinnie could almost be seen there, lurking somewhere in the background, another layer beneath the echo of his face. But the old Vinnie was gone, dead. Burned away at the same time as his sister.

The old Vinnie would have made the walk without stopping to look at a rock pool. The old Vinnie wouldn't have been here in the first place. More likely down at the Galleria, hanging with his mates, eyeing girls and making a lot of noise – drawing attention to himself. He'd be making plans for the weekend with Marie or one of the others. Dancing until the small hours, late night coffee with the gang on the way home . . .

A water insect swerved its erratic way across the pool, landing here and there on the quicksilver of the water itself, its miniscule weight changing the surface tension just enough to make his reflected face swell and stretch. The old Vinnie didn't have that red welt of shame running from his neck, below his chin, up the right side of his face and nose, under his eye and back to where his ear was a twist of skin and cartilage. The old Vinnie was dead.

This new Vinnie, who stared back from the greeny-grey surface of the water, this was a different person. No, perhaps not person, not even certain of that yet. A different creature. This was something new, something without a place, without friends. A creature whose very image was a reminder of all that the old Vinnie had despised – fear, cowardice, shame. This was a being who could embrace isolation, who chased silence.

A rock eased into his searching hand, and the hated image shattered into a thousand rippling shards. Vinnie turned back to the path.

Here on the other side of the creek the forest seemed to draw in and the path narrowed to a thin trail not much wider than his shoulders, running between a swamp-like clump of ti-trees. The trail was straight, raised slightly off the marshy ground on a causeway of piled earth and lined with decaying railway sleepers. It was firm and easy to walk on.

The end of the trail was only a couple of hundred metres up a slight hill, an arrangement of gates and fences marking the entrance to the old prisoner-of-war camp.

June 1943

‘Erich, would you mind passing the antiseptic?'

The query, like all the doctor's requests, was uttered quietly and Erich took the large brown bottle down from its shelf in the dispensary cupboard and passed it without comment.

‘Thank you.'

The infirmary fell again into silence, broken only by the soft crackle of the pot-belly stove. Outside, the rain fell in sheets, as it had for three days now, turning the parade ground to mud and soaking anyone caught out in it for more than a couple of seconds. Already the camp hospital was busy with cases of colds and mild influenza.

‘Steady now.' The doctor's voice was reassuring. The patient, a burly private who had sliced his leg open with an axe, swore in German as the sharp sting of the reddish-brown liquid bit into the wound.

‘He doesn't speak English,
Herr Doctor
.'

‘I know, Erich, but sometimes the actual words aren't important, it's the way that you say them.'

Erich didn't reply, just as he didn't respond to most of Doctor Alexander's musings. Instead, he checked the fire, finding it low and the hopper out of logs.

‘I will need to get some more wood.'

‘That's fine, Erich.'

Stepping out, Erich shivered as the cold slammed through his thin uniform. Despite the rain and dropping temperature he still refused, even after a week, to wear any of the crimson Australian issue uniform. At first the doctor had tried to persuade him.

‘At least wear the coat, Erich, or you'll end up in here as a patient, and I can't afford that.'

But Erich knew that his silent resistance sent a message to everyone, Australian and German alike, that despite his age he wasn't the sort who would bow to pressure in the face of the enemy. Never. Unlike some others, he wasn't about to surrender simply because he'd been captured.

During his first couple of days the other men had passed remarks, commenting on his youth and pride, but on each occasion he'd simply fixed them with a cold stare and refused to be drawn by their stirring. The novelty had rapidly worn off and he'd soon been left alone.

The wood pile was under a tarpaulin behind the mess hall. Erich ran through the sleeting rain, enjoying the opportunity to stretch his legs after the claustrophobic fogginess of the hospital. Water sluiced in icy streams down the back of his uniform and shocked him with its touch, but he revelled in the intensity of it, in the living power of the storm. In many ways the orderly position was a good one. The hospital was one of the few camp buildings that was heated and insulated against the invasive cold, and the doctor seemed a reasonable character, if a little staid.

Lightning flickered somewhere a few miles distant and the overcast was lit briefly. It was the middle of the day but so gloomy with thick, low clouds that the perimeter lights had been switched on, and through the rain no-man's-land bathed in the ethereal glow usually reserved for darkness.

At the timber pile he pulled back the tarpaulin and retrieved a couple of large logs, shoving them into the front of his jacket to keep them as dry as possible during the short sprint back.

‘You there!'

The day grew suddenly brighter and Erich found himself caught in the sharp glare of one of the tower spotlights. Through the rain a voice floated, tinny and amplified.

‘Stay right there.'

The light stayed unwaveringly upon him, and a green figure in an Australian uniform detached itself from the gloom near the compound gate and hurried through the mud, rifle held ready.

‘Whatcha think you're doing?'

Erich recognised the guard as the young one who called the names through the megaphone at morning roll. He didn't answer, waiting until the guard was standing right before him.

‘You speak English?'

‘
Ja
.'

‘Right. So what are you doing here? Stealing wood?'

‘Not stealing. For the stove in the hospital. The doctor sent me.'

The guard snorted. A few tufts of red hair sprouted from under the brim of his slouch hat. Erich could see a smattering of pimples dotting his chin.

‘Not likely, mate. He always sends Domenico for this sort of thing.'

‘I am his new orderly. Domenico is back in the forest chopping wood, and has been for a week.'

The guard's eyes narrowed.

‘You better watch how you speak to me, Fritz.'

The insult drew no response and the two stood eyeing one another in the rain, Erich acutely aware of the Australian fingering the trigger-guard of his rifle. He drew upon all of his self-control. No fear. Not in the face of the enemy.

‘Come on.' The guard waved his rifle at the hospital. ‘Let's check your story out, and you better not try anything. Understand?'

Erich trudged back through the mud, up the steps, and into the infirmary. The guard, rifle levelled at the middle of his back, followed.

If the doctor was at all surprised to have an armed guard follow Erich into the room, he didn't show it.

‘Thomas. To what do we owe the pleasure?'

‘This bloke was nicking wood from the pile.'

‘Not at all, Thomas. This is Erich, my new orderly.'

The boy threw a sullen look at the far end of the room, where Erich had dumped the timber into the hopper and was busying himself re-stoking the fire.

‘Wasn't informed about no new orderly.'

‘I'm sure the paperwork has been held up somewhere in administration, Thomas. You know how things are around here. You can take my word for it, though. Erich is simply doing as I asked.'

‘If you say.' Thomas seemed reluctant to let it go.

‘I do say.'

The boy turned to leave, but the doctor stopped him. ‘And Thomas . . .'

‘What?'

‘I'd consider it a personal favour if you wouldn't bring a loaded rifle into the hospital in future.'

‘Can't leave it outside. Regulations.'

‘Then I imagine that next time you'll simply have to stay outside with it. Have a nice day, Thomas.'

The door slammed and the guard was gone.

‘I'm terribly sorry about that, Erich. Thomas is only young, and at times can tend to be a little . . . enthusiastic. He's really not a bad boy, for all that.'