The Narrow Road to the Deep North (39 page)

Something in Ryoko’s manner and Kota’s strange refusal to answer his door began to disturb Taro Ootomo, and he said as much while drinking with his old schoolfriend and now police lieutenant Takeshi Hashimoto one night.

Hashimoto smelled a rat. With some difficulty, he managed to check welfare records and noticed that Ryoko had power of attorney over her father’s affairs. Two months earlier, two million yen had been withdrawn from Kota’s account. Hashimoto obtained permission for a search of Kota’s apartment. It was in a formerly favoured part of the city, but the block of units, once fashionable, had in recent years fallen into disrepair. There were roughly assembled wire cages bolted on the exterior walls above the first floor to catch falling render. As the lift doors refused to open, Hashimoto and his three men had to climb the stairs to the seventh floor.

In an apartment lined with bookshelves of poetry, Hashimoto found the mummified body of an ancient man lying in bed. There was no smell. He had been dead for years, perhaps, thought Hashimoto, decades. Reaching down with his left hand, Takeshi Hashimoto very slowly lifted the flowery bedspread. The fluids of the slowly decomposing body had left a thick, dark stain on the sheets. At the centre of this halo, skin stretched like parchment over his bones, lay Shiro Kota.

On the bedside table by the living Buddha, now dead, was an old copy of Basho’s great travel journal
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
. Hashimoto opened it to a page marked with a dry blade of grass.

Days and months are travellers of eternity, he read. So too the years that pass by.

AS HIS COMMANDING
officer, it ought to have been John Menadue’s job, but John Menadue had no heart for it; he had never had a heart for anything, not up on the Line, not back in Australia. Dorrigo Evans had received a letter from Bonox Baker telling him that he had heard no one had been to see Jack Rainbow’s widow, that John Menadue had his medals to give her but just never seemed to get round to it. And so, some months after he had returned from his honeymoon and as it became clear to him that his marriage was what it was, and that what it was wasn’t anything worth wanting, Dorrigo Evans took an ANA flight to Hobart. He found John Menadue in a pub two doors down from Nikitaris’s fish shop.

Up in the jungle John Menadue had found he was no leader at all. Some people, like the Big Fella, it came to, thought John Menadue. But not him, which was strange—because John Menadue had been told by his father that he was a leader, and that leadership had nothing to do with anything other than character. At the Hutchins School he was told that he was a leader because only leaders were admitted into the Hutchins School. Leadership, he was told, was his natural destiny because it was the natural destiny of all people born leaders, who were all the boys at Hutchins. And so the world went on telling him, and so John Menadue—because of his schooling and his connections, because of his undeniable character and his irrevocable destiny—went straight into officer school. John Menadue had believed it all to be true and self-evident and himself a leader until he had arrived on the Line. Then he came to see that his primary interest was not in helping others but in saving his own life, and that his father had been right about character but wrong about his son.

John Menadue understood authority. And that day as he sat in the pub two doors down from Nikitaris’s fish shop with a pound of couta fillets and his good looks intact, his life intact, John Menadue knew he had none. He wondered what it was that allowed it to exist in such a man as Dorrigo Evans—a despicable womaniser close to ugly, a loner who hid in crowds, a man oblivious to any sort of authority except that which he commanded by some insulting grace of God—who made the favour he was doing John Menadue look like a trivial act of no great consequence.

I’m sorry, John Menadue said to Dorrigo Evans. I went to see Mrs Les Whittle. I couldn’t do it again after that. Do you remember Les?

I do. He was a rather marvellous Robert Taylor in
Waterloo Bridge
. It was opposite Jack Rainbow, of all people, wasn’t it?

I don’t remember. You heard about his death?

No.

He ended up in a camp in Japan. Slave labourer in a coal mine under the Inland Sea for the Japs. They were starving. When the war ended the Yanks parachuted supplies into the POW camps there. US Liberators dropping forty-four-gallon steel drums chockers with food. They’re fluttering down—gentle as dandelions in summer, one bloke said. Blokes everywhere, excited. Then the forty-fours start landing, crashing through roofs, smashing up whatever they fell on. And a forty-four full of Hershey bars landed on Les. Crushed him to death.

He passed over a shoebox to Dorrigo Evans in which a few ribbons and medals rolled around. On the lid was sticky-taped the name and address of Mrs Jack Rainbow.

What sort of death is that? John Menadue said, his gaze fixed on the shoebox. A starving man killed by food? By our side? By Hershey bars. For God’s sake, Dorrigo, bloody Hershey bars. What do you say?

What did you say?

The right things. Lies. She was a very dignified woman. Small, chunky thing. But dignified. And she listened to me lie. And for a long time she didn’t say anything. Then she said, I never really knew him, you know. That’s the sadness of it. I would have liked to have known him.

Mrs Jack Rainbow lived near Neika, a few miles beyond the small village that sat in forest halfway up the mountain above Hobart. Overhearing Dorrigo Evans asking for directions, the barman introduced him to a small man who drove the Cascade brewery truck and was heading that way with a delivery. He could drop Dorrigo off and pick him up on his return home, two hours later.

A little out of Hobart, it began to snow. The truck had one shuddering windscreen wiper that cleared a small cone into a winter world where eucalypts and great man ferns heavy with fresh fallen snow leant over the road. The rest disappeared into white, and Dorrigo Evans found his thoughts following. He held a hand out and pushed his fingers into the air, trying to see if there was some other way he had not known of stopping that femoral artery emptying. His fingers pushed and shoved emptiness, coldness, whiteness, nothing.

Nippy, eh? said the brewery driver, noticing him moving his fingers. That’s why I have these, he said, lifting a wool-gloved hand from the steering wheel. Bloody well die of frigging frostbite otherwise. Scott of the bloody Antarctic, that’s me, mate.

They made their way up the mountain, through Fern Tree and past Neika. As they came down on the range’s far side, the brewery driver dropped Dorrigo Evans off at a farm entrance composed of two green lichen-bearded posts and a broken gate, which lay on the side of a snow-covered path. The farm looked dilapidated, and the whiteness and the intense hush that went with the snow made the place feel abandoned. Fences and hop frames were leaning, and in places fallen down. The sheds seemed weary; a little vertical-board oast house sagged.

He found her in a small concrete dairy shed, churning butter. She wore a cotton skirt decorated with swirling red hibiscuses and an old home-knitted woollen jumper that was unravelling at one elbow. Her bare legs were unshaved and bruised. Her face seemed to him only to hold broken hope, the line of her mouth a wobble that fell away at each end into thin lines.

He gave his name and his regiment number, and before he could say anything more she took him through her kitchen, which was warm from a fuel range crackling at its centre, into her parlour, which was cold and dark. She called him
sir
. When he said that wasn’t at all necessary, she called him Mr Evans. He sat in an overstuffed armchair that felt damp.

Across the hall and through an open doorway he could see beaded wainscoting painted bright cream enamel rising to the ceiling, and in front an iron bed. He hoped she had known some happiness in it with Jack. He imagined them together on such a winter night as would come in a few short hours, and them together warm, perhaps watching a bedroom fire dying into embers, Jack puffing on his Pall Malls.

WE HAVE FIVE
children, she said. Two boys, three girls. Little Gwennie, she’s the dead spit of her father. The youngest, Terry, was born after Jack left and has never seen his dad.

There was a long silence. Dorrigo Evans had learnt in his surgery to wait for people to say what they really wished to say.

I couldn’t bear to be alone, she said finally. I have a terrible fear of being lonely. When he was away at the war I slept with all the kids. She smiled at the memory. Bloody six of us in the bed. Ridiculous, eh?

A kettle whistled and she disappeared to the kitchen. He regretted letting her take his army greatcoat. She returned with tea in a chipped green enamel pot and the remnants of a large cream cake.

It’s very quiet, she said, on account of the snow falling. Like a great big blanket. That’s why I like the kids round. But the little ones are at Jack’s sister’s today and the big kids are at school. She paused. Jack loves the snow but, Lord, I feel it sometimes.

She offered him some cake and he declined. She put the cake plate down on a side table, swept the crumbs at its edge inwards with her index finger for a few moments, then, without looking up, said—

Do you believe in love, Mr Evans?

It was an unexpected question. He understood he did not need to answer.

Because I think you make it. You don’t get it given to you. You make it.

She halted, waiting perhaps for a comment or judgement, but when Dorrigo Evans made neither she seemed emboldened and went on.

That’s what I think, Mr Evans.

Dorrigo. Please.

Dorrigo. That really is what I think, Dorrigo. And I thought Jack and me, we were going to make it.

She sat down and asked if he minded if she lit up. She never did when Jack was about and puffing like a steam train, she said, but now, well, it was sort of him and it sort of helped—him not being here and that.

Pall Malls, eh? she said, taking a cigarette out of the bright-red pack. Not Woodbines for Jack. Something a little posh to make up for all that cursing. He always was quarterflash, Jack. Quarterflash and half-cut with a fulsome woman, he used to say, what fool isn’t happy?

She took a puff, put the cigarette in the ashtray and stared at it. Without looking up, she said, But do you believe in love, Mr Evans?

She rolled the cigarette end around in the ashtray.

Do you?

Outside, he thought, beyond this mountain and its snow, there was a world of countless millions of people. He could see them in their cities, in the heat and the light. And he could see this house, so remote and isolated, so far away, and he had a feeling that it once must have seemed to her and Jack, if only for a short time, like the universe with the two of them at its centre. And for a moment he was at the King of Cornwall with Amy in the room they thought of as theirs—with the sea and the sun and the shadows, with the white paint flaking off the French doors and with their rusty lock, with the breezes late of an afternoon and of a night the sound of the waves breaking—and he remembered how that too had once seemed the centre of the universe.

I don’t, she said. No, I don’t. It’s too small a word, don’t you think, Mr Evans? I have a friend in Fern Tree who teaches piano. Very musical, she is. I’m tone-deaf myself. But one day she was telling me how every room has a note. You just have to find it. She started warbling away, up and down. And suddenly one note came back to us, just bounced back off the walls and rose from the floor and filled the place with this perfect hum. This beautiful sound. Like you’ve thrown a plum and an orchard comes back at you. You wouldn’t believe it, Mr Evans. These two completely different things, a note and a room, finding each other. It sounded . . .
right
. Am I being ridiculous? Do you think that’s what we mean by love, Mr Evans? The note that comes back to you? That finds you even when you don’t want to be found? That one day you find someone, and everything they are comes back to you in a strange way that hums? That fits. That’s beautiful. I’m not explaining myself at all well, am I? she said. I’m not very good with words. But that’s what we were. Jack and me. We didn’t really know each other. I’m not sure if I liked everything about him. I suppose some things about me annoyed him. But I was that room and he was that note and now he’s gone. And everything is silent.

I was with Jack, he began. At the end. He was keen for a Pall Mall.

THE MATTRESS WAS
lumpy and had a small crater at its centre unsatisfactorily padded out with an old North Hobart football jumper. He turned onto his side, manoeuvred his body around its contours, its wadis and plains, its inclines and depressions and ravines. Having formed himself into the shape of the mattress, he leant into her, pushing his knees up under her knees, his thighs under her thighs, and, resting an elbow on her hip, brought his hand around her, and in this way he held her. There seemed to be a deep relief to speak of so many things that troubled both of them without confusing any of them with words. She couldn’t bear to be alone. Perhaps they lay together for warmth. Perhaps they held each other against the silence. Hoping for that sound to come back. Both knowing the person lying next to them understood it never would. He could hear sleet beginning to brush the tin roof. It was enough to be warm with her. Perhaps that’s all there was. He felt an immense age. He would be thirty-four come July. They held each other without words until he heard the horn of the brewery truck at the top of the drive.

After he left she tipped the medals into the range fire. A few days later she raked out the ash, and for a moment was unsure what the melted slag in her hearth pan was as she threw it into the chook yard. Nineteen years later the great fire of ’67 swept through, taking all before it. The hop farm, now run by her son, her timber home and his newer brick home, the photos of her and Jack, all went in the flames. And over half-buried slag that had once been medals in what had once been a chicken pen a new layer of ash deposited itself. After more years passed, there grew out of it water ferns and dogwood and myrtles, until what had been the dream of Jack’s life was a forest and the forest dropped leaves and bark and branches, and over more time the ash disappeared under more layers of rot and peat and new life.