The Narrow Road to the Deep North (35 page)

Though the pressure was on from the engineers to get the railroad built, there was a pleasure and interest too in watching how the more he bashed them the less of men they became, how little they now whistled or sang, and how much more of a man he knew he was. For as long as he kept kicking and punching and beating, he was liberated. He had heard the stories of the IJA eating Australians and Americans in New Guinea, and he understood it was about something more than just starvation. And he knew none of this was a defence, and none of it would mean anything to the Australians, to their scalpel-eyed lawyers or candle-dripping judges. For when he was a guard, he lived like an animal, he behaved as an animal, he understood as an animal, he thought as an animal. And he understood that such an animal was the only human thing he had ever been allowed to be.

He was not ashamed at his discovery of his humanity in being an animal, only perplexed as to where it had led him. When his sentence of death by hanging was translated for him, he bore it like an animal, without understanding but with a dull awareness that he had had his freedom and now his end had come.

The judge’s candle-wick eyes had looked down at him with flickering flames, and he had looked up with eyes he knew were dead already; and he had shaken his head back and forth and he had felt something large and terrible come down on him. He had wanted to ask about his fifty yen, but said nothing, and now he once more found himself pacing his cell, looking for a way he might escape. But there was none, and there never had been.

THEY DIED OFF
quickly, strangely, in car smashes and suicides and creeping diseases. Too many of their children seemed born with problems and troubles, handicapped or backward or plain odd. Too many of their marriages faltered and staggered, and if they lasted it was sometimes more due to the codes and customs of the day than to their own capacity to make right all that was wrong; and what was wrong was too large for some of them. They went bush by themselves; they stayed in town with others and drank too much; they went a bit crazy like Bull Herbert, who lost his licence drunk and took to riding a horse into town when he wanted a drink, and he wanted a drink a lot after he made a suicide pact with his wife, shared poison with her and woke up to her dead and himself alive. They went silent or they talked too much, like Rooster MacNeice, run to fat and showing off his appendix scar and carrying on about the Japs bayoneting him. Like fuck they did, Rooster, said Gallipoli von Kessler, walking in on the performance one day in the Broadmeadows RSL.

Don’t worry, Rooster MacNeice said. That’s just Kes. He always was a commie but he’s okay. It was a guard they called the Mountain Lion; I testified about the bastard after the war.

They drank though. They drank and they drank, and they couldn’t get drunk no matter how much they drank. When they were demobbed the army quacks told them and their families not to talk about it, that talk was no good. It was hardly a hero’s tale in the first place. It wasn’t Kokoda or a Lancaster over the Ruhr Valley. It wasn’t the
Tirpitz
or Colditz or Tobruk. What was it, then? It was being the slave of the yellow man. That’s what Chum Fahey said when they met up at the Hope and Anchor.

Isn’t exactly something to boast about, Sheephead Morton said.

Blokes were funny. Some disappeared. Ronnie Owen married an Italian woman, and she told Sheephead Morton’s missus, Sally, that it was two years before she even knew he’d been a soldier. It was like that.

Bonox Baker said nothing for years, then one night took a shotgun to his oven, Jimmy Bigelow said. Shot the shit out of it. Looked like the back of a bloody cheese grater. Then he went quiet again. It was like that too.

Poor old Lizard Brancussi, Sheephead Morton said. And that story was too sad for anyone to repeat. He had carried the pencil sketch of his wife through the camps, on the hellship to Japan, held on to it when the Mitsubishi shipworks in Nagasaki, where he was slave labouring, vanished in the A-bomb and he somehow survived. He made it to safety in the hills, walking past the dead who filled the river like floating firewood, and the living fleeing with skin falling away in long ribbons like seaweed; he’d stumbled on past carbon sculptures of human beings walking, cycling, or running; past all those Japanese in agony in that roiling hell of blue fire and black rain, who, like the POWs he remembered, called for their mother as they were dying. And all the time he tried to see Maisie as Rabbit Hendricks had sketched her that morning in a Syrian village that smelt of human beings in trouble.

He tried to imagine her as the one thing in the world that was not this, and as long as she was there, he would not die or go mad, that as long as she was there, the world was good. On his way to Manila on a US aircraft carrier he had shown the postcard to the American sailors, who agreed he was a very lucky man. He finally got to Fremantle on a ship that was going through to Melbourne, and there he had telephoned home.

Dave and Maisie’s phone, a man’s voice answered. Dave speaking.

Lizard Brancussi had hung up. When his ship steamed out of Fremantle he was spotted slipping over the side on the first night and was never found.

Suddenly the beer was like fuel for a fire. They drank to make themselves feel as they should feel when they didn’t drink, that way they had felt when they hadn’t drunk before the war. For that night they felt ferocious and whole and not yet undone, and they would laugh at all that had happened. And when they laughed the war was nothing, and everybody dead was alive in them, and everything that had happened to them was just this vibrating jumping thing beating inside them so hard they needed another drink quickly to slow the feeling.

And that night Lizard Brancussi was alive in them, and little Wat Cooney was alive in them, and Yabby Burrows and Jack Rainbow and Tiny Middleton were alive in them, all the many dead, and Sheephead Morton said he even sometimes remembered fondly that dirty miserable bastard Rooster MacNeice who should have been dead. And Gallipoli von Kessler—who had turned up in an old pair of worsted trousers so frayed around the cuffs they looked as if he had bought them from a scarecrow—mentioned Darky Gardiner, and then Jimmy Bigelow started singing—

Every day in every way it’s getting a little bit better.

They were standing around the pub fire at the Hope and Anchor that night, until the backs of their trousers got so hot they pushed them forward into another beer. It was forty-eight or maybe forty-seven. Whenever it was, it wasn’t much of a night, and it felt good to be inside, warm. They hadn’t all got together since being demobbed. Jimmy Bigelow wasn’t saying much. The marriage he had come back to wasn’t the marriage he had left. Or he had come back different.

I’m doing the best I can, he said at one point.

There were kids. He had four of them in the end and was called a family man. He wasn’t. He was a man who had four kids. No one said anything much more about Darky Gardiner, except for Gallipoli von Kessler who said, Nikitaris’s.

Yeah, said Sheephead Morton. Bloody Nikitaris’s fish shop. Never shut up about it, did he?

JIMMY BIGELOW SAID
nothing. He was trying, that was the point, surely? But he didn’t speak. His hopes of becoming a musician, somebody, something, hadn’t worked out. He worked at the zinc works as a storeman. The big-band music he loved was no longer in fashion. The new music, the bebop and modern jazz, wasn’t music to him. It was choppy noise pretending to make music out of traffic jams. You couldn’t dance or fall in love with it, thought Jimmy. It wasn’t Al Bowlly. It wasn’t Benny Goodman or the Duke. It was the end of music. And the end of hope for someone like Jimmy Bigelow. The big bands were all folding, if not gone.

The things he believed in were heading out to sea, vanishing, lost forever. The things he thought he was coming home to. The things that he had hoped to become and make his life. It turned out that they weren’t worth a brass razoo. He didn’t fit with his own life anymore, his own life was breaking down, and all that did fit—his job, his family—seemed to be coming apart. He wanted to set things right with Dulcie, with his life, with bebop and swing, but it was over. He’d like to set things right, he thought, but it wasn’t possible.

But that wasn’t why they left the pub and headed up Elizabeth Street towards Nikitaris’s fish shop. To make all the wrong right. They left because it was near midnight, way past closing, and they were drunk and thrown out and they had nothing better to do.

It was one of those Hobart spring nights, cold as charity, snow coming down hard on the mountain, the harbour a lather, sleet slapping and scratching at windows and tin roofs like a wild drunk who’s been locked out.

They tramped up Elizabeth Street to Nikitaris’s fish shop, following the frayed trousers of Gallipoli von Kessler as he strode out the front. You could have fired a mortar down the street and hit no one. The fish shop wasn’t how they had imagined it in the camps, with people everywhere and steam and the smell of frying food and Darky’s girlfriend sitting up there waiting for them to walk in and do what they had to do. No, it was nothing like that.

As closed as a nun’s proverbial, Sheephead Morton said when they arrived.

Nikitaris’s was shut—the doors were locked, the shop interior lifeless, the lights all off save for those that illuminated the long fish tank at the front of the shop. The fish swam round and round in the window. A couple of flatheads, a trumpeter, two silver trevally and a leatherjacket. Other than them staring in at an aquarium, the night-slicked street was empty.

Well, Sheephead Morton said. You can’t say they look
exactly
unhappy.

Maybe in the camps we didn’t either at any given moment, Jimmy Bigelow said.

They stood around, hands in pockets, shrugging shoulders for warmth, hopping leg to leg, as if waiting for a midnight train to arrive. Or leave.

Nothing as clueless as a mob of drunks, Gallipoli von Kessler said. Even chooks do something.

Jimmy Bigelow felt himself all appearance with nothing inside. He had trouble feeling. He wished to feel, but it was not something one could have by wishing for it. He picked up a rock and rolled it around in his palm. He looked up at the shop window. It was a big plate glass number, all beautifully painted with NIKITARIS’S FISH SHOP on it, very flash and fancy. He brought his hand back past his shoulder and, without warning, threw the rock as hard as he could at the window.

They heard the glass crack. Not all at once. But, like time, a long fracture slowly opened with a sigh. Jimmy Bigelow was smiling as if someone had sliced his mouth at the corners.

Then they were all throwing rocks, the window broke apart and fell away, and they were in. Gallipoli von Kessler, with an orchardist’s gift for improvisation, grabbed a chip fryer and used it to scoop the fish out. After a few mishaps they had all the fish in two mop buckets, and they walked back down to the docks, trying not to slop the water away.

There were some cray and couta boats rocking in the long swell that penetrated even this far into the harbour, and a cruel wind beyond the cove. Standing at the edge of Constitution Dock, Sheephead Morton put his head into a bucket and yelled:

You’re fucking free!

And tipped the bucket.

The fish fell into the sound of water.

AT THE HOPE
and Anchor the next night, the story was told with gusto, albeit beset by a growing shame. Finally, Jimmy Bigelow said they had to go and see Nikitaris and fix him up for the window. It was still early and the shop lights were on. The window had already been replaced, though it was not yet painted.

Inside there were some old women working the fryers and a boy in the fishmonger’s part of the shop, scrubbing the display stand. Sheephead Morton asked if Mr Nikitaris might be about. The strap disappeared and returned from out the back with a small, old man, whose wizened body preserved intact the quiet resolution of the stonemason he had been as a young man. His hair was silver and his skin had the colour of a stain someone had tried to bleach out and failed. There was about his dark eyes a damp emptiness. He smelt of tobacco and aniseed.

Mr Nikitaris, said Jimmy Bigelow.

What you boys up to? the old man said. His accent was heavy. He sounded weary and annoyed. I’ve had a shocking day. What do you want?

Mr Nikitaris, said Jimmy Bigelow, we—

Just place your order with the lady over there.

We—

Mrs Pafitis there, he said, pointing with a knobbly finger. She’ll fix you up.

We’ve come to say sorry, said Jimmy Bigelow.

We had a mate, began Sheephead Morton. And this time the old Greek said nothing. He was so stooped it was hard to see his eyes, which roamed the black and white tiled floor as Sheephead Morton told him their tale.

When it was done, Jimmy Bigelow said that they wished to pay old man Nikitaris for the broken window, for the fish and any other damage.

The old Greek was a time in replying. His eyes looked up and around, and as his head roamed, taking in each man in turn, it nodded slightly.

He was your cobber?

Like all immigrants, he seemed to have an unerring instinct for the oldest, truest words in his new language. The way he said the word, it felt free of the treacherous weight of
mate.

He was, said Sheephead Morton.
Our
cobber.

Sheephead Morton took out his wallet. How much do we owe you, Mr Nikitaris?

My name is Markos, he said. But call me Marco.

Mr Nikitaris. It was your window and we broke it.

He put out a shuddery old hand and shook it.

No, he said, put it away.

He asked if they were hungry and without waiting for an answer said they must eat as his guests.

Sit down and eat, said the old Greek. It’s good to eat, boys.

The men looked at each other, uncertain about what to do.

You are my guests, he said, pulling out a seat and putting a hand on Jimmy Bigelow’s shoulder. Please, he said. Sit down. You must eat.