1915 (23 page)

“Why ain't Nugget here?”

“He's coming.”

“For Christ's sake, he's down at the beach!”

“Aw, Frank.”

As they negotiated the turn into safety and shade Frank's moans intensified. He let go and bellowed, “They've butchered me!” Between blubbering intakes of breath and intervening gusts of loud surprise he said, “Fucking shit, fucking shit, fucking shit.”

Walter thought: I know it must hurt, but why doesn't he shut his teeth on it? He's letting himself down. Frank … Our father aged thirty-two who wields a silent spindle. It's not like this is it? For you are brave, Frank, your soul is a flame of silence and you will snuff it by bawling.

Charlie Bushel, white-faced, knelt eye to eye with Walter and issued an order: “Back to your post.”

“I can't, he won't let me.”

“Frank?” said Charlie. “It's me, Charles. Let him go. I'm sorry you're hurt.”

“Get me a priest.”

The grip tightened.

“How do you feel now?” They all waited for an answer to Charlie's stupid question.

“Help!” Frank tugged Walter's arm like a bellrope.

“There's no priest up here,” said Charlie. Then
cruelly he repeated it, shouting. “
There's — no — priest!
”

Along the communication trench Frank's voice cleared. “I had a good horse,” he intoned, “and I sold it.” With every lurch of the stretcher he repeated himself. “I had a good horse, had a good horse, and I sold it.”

They carried him through places turning darker and darker until it seemed the nursery rhyme intonation would stop and with a cry, enveloped in a red egg of nothing-but-pain, he would shrink to a baby and die.

But in the support trench that served as a casualty clearing station he came to himself. The bearers found a ledge and bandaged him as best they could.

“I'm sorry for letting go. It's like I was kicked in the guts by a bullock. It's like there's cods in there that won't stop hurting.” With horror Walter saw a silk-sheened tube of intestine shining through.

“We can't take him any further like this,” said the leading bearer. Charlie drew him aside.

“A priest or a doctor?”

“Flip a coin. There's a doctor around, but only the angel Gabriel could rouse him now.”

“Well fetch a priest. And hurry.” He justified his concern: “We're from the same town.”

“Any bastard'll do, won't he? Any religion?” The orderly picked dry snot from a black toothbrush of nose-hair, ignoring the extrusion of fingernail dirt (blood?) that travelled up a nostril, wiggled crankily, and emerged for examination. Then he gave Frank a morphine injection and entered the dose in his pay book.

“He's a Mick. Take care you fetch the right brand.”

Officers came and went before the orderly
eventually departed. Captain Naylor sent Charlie off on a job (he went willingly) but asked Walter to stay.

“I can't do anything.”

“Aren't you his mate?”

“Yes. But Nugget Arthur's his closest mate.”

“Arthur's with the other mob, and look, son, it'll make no difference. The truth is he's not going to live. He won't even come round again.” Together they checked Frank's face for signs of life in case he made a liar out of him, a face so pale that dark shades flickered underneath as if a smoky dusk had come at the end of a cloudless day.

 

The dying man said: “Is that you?”

“It's Walter Gilchrist.” So ravenous is self-pity that he wanted Frank to see his tears. “Nugget's around,” he added despairingly.

“Nug, remember Wally at the Cri?”

“This
is
Wally.” But he drew back when Frank's eyes opened. What if the intact brain in its torn container condemned him for his shameless self-regard? So in order to appear honest he was required to lie, and play along at being Nugget. He stared at the wall where someone had glued a newspaper clipping, all ribbed and still wet — an advocacy of the six golden rules of outdoor hygiene. Frank said, “Let's have a last drink, a rum, after the girls go. What do you say?”

“All right.”

“The only trouble is, I can't remember why we came to town. Was it the horses?”

“The war.”

Because of the diminished firing, noises from the
farther distance thundered long and dramatically. An exchange of artillery on the lower slopes boomed with the sound of two trains noisily approaching each other on a railway bridge. The wash of their impact came later, less importantly. All vigour and threat was contained in their passage across the lower sky, a journey that commenced over and over. Frank's eyes alertly traced the source of the sound. Though fate was writing a conclusion and signing it personally his, he seemed unconcerned. Or felt no fear. Or was a sick man who a minute before had been hale, who understood only that pain was drawing him aside from his old self, but nonetheless fought that belief. With eyes closed he said:

“You never did like Marge, did you.”

“That's not true. She's — lovely,” Walter breathed. He took a draught of breath and spun Frank's life out. “She's a lovely girl, Frank, with such a serene face. As soon as I clapped eyes on her I knew she was happy. Not many girls are calm like she is. I liked that button on her dress. She's got a nice laugh.”

“She's not to know how I copped it.”

“Come on, Frank, you're just knocked around a bit.”

“Tell Mossy, though. Write to her uncle.”

“Whatever you want.”

“Tell Marge I died fighting.”

“Sure”.

“There's a gate … a gate …” Frank's eyes opened greasily as he peered at Walter and tried to speak more forcefully. For a second it seemed as if he was trying to sit up, to look at something. A gate? The gate of heaven? Was this how death crept over a man, one world fading out while the next showed up ahead? This time Walter really did lean close, close enough for
Frank's sour milk breath and blood-filmed spittle to reach him, close enough for a stubbled cheek audibly to scrape Walter's sleeve, and for the inert lizard skin of the nine parts dead to state its condition with cold factuality. “There's a gape … a gaping hole in me, ain't there?”

“They're fetching a doctor. The ambulance chap went. I've been in a hospital, Frank. They can do wonders.”

“I met my brother in Perth,” said Frank. “He's got no kids. Do you know how to mend a watch? He's a grocer.”

Then Frank began to wheeze as prelude to another bout of pain, but before the agony gathered force he passed out. Was he dead? Perhaps it was just the morphine taking effect. Walter had to know. He scuttled to one end of the chamber, then the other. Someone had been here a minute ago when Frank was issuing his instructions. All right, I'll find out myself … but Frank's pulse was smeared with blood. His eyes — Walter raised a lid and a blind but living pupil met his. The lid settled back slowly like finger-printed tar on a hot day.

 

It was no longer true that everything seemed speeded up. Things were the other way round, sick and slow at the world's tired end, a million years AD, when Walter smoked a pipe at the bedside of the last generation but one. Was it true that Frank had suddenly struck a wall as Hurst had fancied, falling back while Walter glided through? In Frank's dying was visible a microscopic progress, as if clusters of
memory were sliding clear of nutritive experience and gathering somewhere grey and cold for the final starvation.

Still nobody came, and Walter allowed this disagreeable thought to age in smoke until his pipe reduced to an acrid dottle. For the living there would be no more surprises. All tended down into the same vortex, with consolation nothing but word-play. So when Frank spoke yet again, Walter regarded him as already dead, and responded monotonously. Frank asked:

“Father?”

“Can you hear me, Frank? It's only Wally.”

“Yes, Father.”

Oh, Christ. What now? The Catholic dead needed oil and Latin hocus pocus.

“Is it done?”

“Yes.” Walter gabbled a conclusion: “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.” It fooled Frank (he decided) but Christ was dead a million years past.

“Frank, may the Lord Jesus Christ give you — a decent place in heaven, Frank Barton.”

And a voice behind him said, “Amen.” A voice from the past.

Potty Fox!

“You're too late,” (the world had ended).

“I'm not a Catholic priest, but —”

Walter reached out a hand to the khaki-clad minister, who (stupid man) failed to recognize him. A tired conventional smile played around thin lips. His handshake for Walter came straight from the chaplains' rule-book: sincere but inhuman, meant for the agony of the multitude, ill attuned to the throes of one. But his eyes were remarkable. No longer the intense marble of
home, they had softened. Yet it was a discomforting change. For the alteration appeared to have come about by the constant release of an inner heat, so that hot and restless the eyes begged for sponging in cold water.

“What have we here? Oh, how terribly sad.”

But who did he think he was, just glancing at the nearly-dead and then applying all this false charity to someone he took for a perfect stranger. No, the hand grasped by Potty was not meant for shaking —

Oh no.

It was meant for striking the minister down. Hit him! this incarnation of bullshit.

But no blow came. Instead, a suppressed whimper, a string of sobs, for dizzy at relief in any form, the next few minutes for Walter passed in a kind of faint.

Somehow Potty guided him to a ledge away from Frank leaving the dying man faintly gurgling like a waterpipe, and from a creased paper bag took a glassy heap of barley sugar from which he levered a sticky lozenge and placed it on Walter's tongue.

“I'm Chaplain Fox.” Still oblivious.

Slumped with curved spine beside the minister, staring with the dazed air of an apprehended miscreant, Walter cracked the lolly and heard it crunch with a dozen fractures. The sound flung him in imagination through a landscape of breaking nerves: grass made of iron pickets, a stubble of nails, vines of barbed wire, flowers of bursting steel, the shocking sunlight of signal lights and their successive waves of ghastly moonlight.

Here was the breaking point. Not one, but many, an endless run with no bucolic gasping on the far side of a wall. A maze, rather, beyond human capacity to solve, because it required the human for its building blocks.

Helplessly Walter accepted a pat on the back as
Potty (how futile) strove to raise him up with practical comforts and cheering phrases. But what about Frank? Did he no longer matter because he was just bones now and a bag of blood, and a heartbeat (perhaps) performing its last weird somersaults? Walter found himself condemning the minister for taking the same view of the nearly-dead Frank that he had a minute before taken himself: that he was beyond comfort, already gone.

“How about him?”

“He's quiet,” said Potty after taking a look. “Shall we pray?”

Walter shrugged, and stared at the floor to avoid the man's poached egg eyes. “Our Father …”

 

There was something collusive about the way Potty administered his treatment for the pangs of war. It was equally military in purpose to the sounding of the retreat at sunset, those moments when the bugle offered with its melodious
Come Home! Come Home! Come Home!
an illusion of wholeness at the end, when all along the motive was to restore and fling lives back into the fray.

“I'll go to him,” said Mr Fox when Frank gave a sudden cry. He placed a restraining hand on Walter's knee, and smiled, quizzical this time on the brink of recognition. Then it struck Walter that the oddness in the minister's eyes was nothing more than the bewildered and nervous look of a man who had mislaid his glasses. Could it be that simple? Walter cursed what he saw as a limitation that prevented him from adhering to the surface of things, which had him
bounding always from the cosmic to the underground. He cursed this as unsteadiness, but an overactive imagination has its rewards. Watching the minister at work Walter developed a sense of being a spectator at the play of his own fate. This was horrible, but also absorbing. It was as if his life had become a three dimensional performance wherein feeling as well as action were available to himself-as-onlooker: the carved, flesh-coloured figures part of a fascinating, enigmatic drama of the world that illumined, inevitably, the enigmas of the self.

Thus curiosity calmed him, and with its callous power, healed.

Mr Fox unrolled a stained white surplice and knelt at Frank's side. Like an ineptly slaughtered animal Frank refused to die, but gasped and tensed.

“Our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath left power to His church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in Him, of His great mercy forgive thee thine offences,” — Frank's moans had earned him this sermon — “and by the authority committed unto me, I absolve thee from all thy sins in the name of the father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost amen.”

A conversation ensued, declining sounds and searching fingertips on one side, words on the other. Frank was being attended to by the real article now and he must have realized, for Potty signalled Walter to come closer.

“He wants you to give a message to someone called Nugget.”

“Wally?” The name dribbled from Frank's lips. Inch by inch he once again forced out the instructions relating to Marge and Mossie.

“I'll tell him.”

At least there, at the bitter end, Mr Fox's role appeared substantial. Not just a military appendage, but a manifestation of love. “Lo, I am with you always,” he murmured, “even unto the end of the world.”

Wide-eyed now, Frank faced the two of them and groped (it seemed) through the loneliness of pain and shock for sympathy and confidence. Frank the lover … If only this straining in the gloom led to a hotel rooftop, and the hand in yours, Frank, belonged to the girl with the impassive face and lustrous eyes. “The eternal arms of God's love are about you,” said Mr Fox, and repeated the assurance many times as if performing an act of mesmerism. “Don't you feel the grip of Christ's pierced hands? The Christ who has been through it all Himself.” He leaned forward and blocked Walter's view. When he shifted back Frank's eyes were still. Mr. Fox hestitantly made the sign of the cross, then recited loudly and firmly: “Unto God's gracious mercy and protection we commit you. The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you, and give you His peace, now and for evermore.”