Amongst the Dead (18 page)

He’d brought bully beef, which we wolfed down without dignity or grace, and he told us that the horse had found the Nackeroos, and that he’d followed its tracks to where it had bolted, and then followed ours to where he’d found us. This seemed a miracle to me. I couldn’t see how any tracks could survive the conditions.

‘Easy one, boss,’ was all he said.

By late afternoon, we’d rejoined Fulton, Ashe, Farrell, Pyers, and Ngulmiri. They laughed immoderately at our appearance. However, I was relieved to see that they were all still alive, and that the murderer amongst them hadn’t seen fit to further reduce their number. Yet.

Three more nights and four more days of enervating, torturous walking brought us, on Sunday, 8 November to Flick’s Waterhole — One Platoon HQ. The fact that it carried the moniker ‘headquarters’ inevitably created in my imagination the notion of something substantial and well-equipped. When Fulton told us that we were only a couple of hours shy of it, I couldn’t refrain from picturing an oasis of comfort and civilisation.

My first impression was dispiriting, to say the least. We approached it through a veil of rain and along a track glutinous with mud. It was difficult to determine the extent of the camp. There were three quite large tents — rectangular and solid, in the American way — and there was a thick, healthy growth of trees that spoke of good, permanent water. I’d had just about enough of water by this stage so, while appreciating its influence on this corner of the Northern Territory, I longed for the evaporative fury of a fierce sun. Although the ulcer on my leg was responding well to my eccentric and repellent therapy, my feet had begun to feel soft and pulpy as if they were beginning to rot, and there was a painful gripping in my intestines that threatened to erupt into diarrhoea. This battery of discomforts dulled my ability to see at a glance that Flick’s Waterhole, while not a resort, offered considerably more amenity than the section camp we’d left at West Alligator River.

We reported to a Lieutenant Linden, the platoon commander, in his commodious tent. He’d already been apprised by radio of Andrew Battell’s death, and had had ten days to absorb it, which may explain his curt expression of condolence — perhaps he was merely pragmatic about the absence of anyone who might reasonably be expected to require condolences. He did his duty by acknowledging a fallen comrade, and moved quickly to the more pressing matter of informing us that we’d be required, after only a day’s rest, to return to A Company HQ at Roper Bar, some eighty miles north of Flick’s Waterhole. Road transport was out of the question: trucks couldn’t negotiate the track without sinking up to their axles. The thought of more walking made me want to weep, but any notion that the order was a capricious one was dispelled when Lieutenant Linden said that there was every expectation that Port Moresby would fall to the Japanese, and that military strategy suggested that the Nackeroos at Roper Bar would form the frontline of troops on Australian soil. Sixteen of the twenty Nackeroos at Flick’s would be returning with us.

Glen, despite his swollen fingers, immediately suggested that we put on a performance. Lieutenant Linden thought this was a splendid idea, and said that the rough sleeping-quarters, with its tarpaulin roof, would provide an ideal space. He asked us how much time we would need. Two hours, we thought, should be enough time to scrape the mould and mud off the weary tuxedos; and Brian, of course, had to shave many days’ growth off his face. A fully bearded femme was too grotesque to contemplate.

The Nackeroos who crowded into the bush-timber structure that constituted their dormitory were a ragged lot. Their clothes hung off them in tatters, and their faces were barricaded behind beards of varying extravagance. They pushed the bush bunks to one side and surrendered to the magic of Glen Pyers, illusionist, and his beautiful assistant. At such close quarters, and with limbs disfigured by bites, scratches, and sores, Brian sensibly decided to play his part for laughs, and so successful was he that laughter rolled up and down the half-mile length of the waterhole. The Aboriginal horse-tailers, of whom there must have been at least six, would have heard this laughter from their position away from the tents. They hadn’t been invited to attend the concert.

Glen’s fingers were troubling him, because he fumbled one trick — something I’d never seen him do. But he turned it to his advantage and created a comic bit out of it.

With such a well-primed and generous audience, I was sure it was safe to risk one of the more obscure but delightful speeches from
Cymbeline
. It became apparent, not long after I’d begun, that the people before me were leaning forward, not to ensure that not a syllable was lost, but in expectation that at any moment the joke would be delivered. When none came, the energy in the room — if this clumsy shelter could be called a room — drained away, and all they could lavish on me was desultory applause, and a collective regret that packing for tomorrow’s departure forbade a second soliloquy. The thuggish Nicholas Ashe had the gall to suggest that I should do my pieces first.

‘That way,’ he said, ‘Glen and Brian would be a reward for having to listen to you, rather than you being a punishment for having enjoyed them.’

I didn’t give him the satisfaction of a reply, but firmed him up as the chief suspect in the murder of Andrew Battell. You may imagine, therefore, my confusion and disappointment when, four days later, he was found at Roper Bar, seated under a tree, the back of his head blown out, his pistol in his hand. It was assumed he’d taken his own life — men had gone troppo up there before and almost killed themselves, or someone else, before being invalided out to Brisbane or Townsville — but I knew that Nicholas Ashe hadn’t taken his own life. In death, he held his gun in his right hand, and Ashe was left-handed. It seemed unlikely to me that his final act would be a demonstration of ambidextrousness.

Chapter Seven

roper bar

THE ROPER RIVER COILS AND UNCOILS
for more than two hundred and fifty miles from where it rises to where it spills into the Limmen Bight in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The Roper Bar is not a pub. It is a point some eighty-seven miles from the sea at which it is possible to cross the river from side to side and at which it is no longer possible for substantial boats to proceed up its length. At some time a police station had been built on the southern bank of the river, and this was large enough and sufficiently well-constructed to accommodate the cookhouse and several offices. Signal and troop quarters were purpose built, and the area was dotted with tents and shaggy huts draped in paperbark. When we arrived, three days after leaving Flick’s Waterhole, Roper Bar was a busy place. The fact that Roper River was the most obvious, and most convenient, point at which the Japanese might attempt an incursion into the Australian mainland leant the camp at Roper Bar an air of something like controlled panic. Well, not panic exactly, but an expectancy and permanent alertness that made men prone to being easily startled and to have the appearance of having been deprived of sleep.

We straggled into the encampment at three o’clock on Thursday, 12 November: a date seared into my mind with the permanence of a psychic tattoo. This was not just because it was the day before Nicholas Ashe died, but because it was the day on which I lost my faith in the power of Shakespeare’s verse to make strawberry jam out of pig shit.

A Company HQ at Roper Bar was under the charge of a man named Lieutenant Jenkinson, and as he had only recently taken up the position and was facing a degree of surly hostility from men who preferred the previous OC, he was most anxious that we take their minds off their troubles poste haste. A performance was scheduled for that very afternoon.

The audience was quite large — at least sixty men — and amongst the faces were a dozen dark, Aboriginal ones. Brian decided that he could put sufficient distance between himself and the front row to create his impressive illusion of femininity. His wig was beginning to look a little tired, having suffered the rigours of this extremely wet Wet season, but he thought it would do if he hid its ragged sections under a digger’s hat. Fully made up, with the hat pulled jauntily down on one side, the effect was more than adequate. It was almost beguiling. The audience certainly thought so. With a generous blindness to his undepilated forearms, they laughed and whistled their approval, and he and Glen performed their routine smoothly and with a precision of comic timing that would have set audiences on their ears in London or New York. Glen’s dexterity was unaffected this time by his swollen joints, and the whole performance was top hole.

I thought I’d made a sensible decision in replacing obscure Shakespearean gems with crowd pleasers like Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ and Henry V’s ‘Band of brothers.’ I began with my back to the audience, and when I faced them, ready to intone Hamlet’s meditation on life and death, I’d produced a virtuosic flow of tears. Given Hamlet’s state of mind, I thought this was a not-unreasonable interpretation. The audience, so swift in embracing Brian’s and Glen’s tomfoolery, were at a loss how to respond. They obviously had failed to grasp that this was acting, and saw only a grown man in a tuxedo sobbing his way through some of the most beautiful lines in the language — lines that were largely, it seemed, incomprehensible to them. What kind of education leaves a person ignorant of ‘bare bodkins’ and ‘fardles’?

I paused at the end of the speech to collect my breath, wipe my eyes, and mop my streaming nose. I’d given them a magnificent display of a racked and tortured man. An audience with even a scintilla of sensibility would have needed a moment to compose itself as well. The only discomposure I could detect amongst them was barely controlled sniggering and the spectacle of a number of fellows whose heads were bowed in what I could only resentfully interpret as embarrassment.

I was tempted to give them a piece of dire doggerel, which no doubt they would have lapped up with the gusto of a dog eating its own vomit, but I felt an obligation to expose them to the great rallying call of Harry Hotspur. Here, surely, they would find some resemblance between their own situation and the outnumbered English. In a practical demonstration of courage in the face of overwhelming odds, I decided to move amongst them as I spoke. The verse tumbled from me, the movement to the crescendo of ‘For England, Harry and Saint George,’ unstoppable and electrifying. For a few moments I
was
Henry V.

To this day, I’m not sure who it was who hit me. At some point in the speech I placed my hand upon a Nackeroo’s shoulder — a little touch of Harry — and squeezed it in what any normal person would have felt as a fraternal gesture of solidarity and comfort. In a blur of movement, whoever it was leapt to his feet and slammed his fist into my face. I reeled back and fell awkwardly into a soldier who wasn’t pleased to receive my weight. He pushed me away with unseemly roughness, so that I fell forward into the chest of a brute who steadied me by grabbing the front of my tuxedo before placing his greasy plate of a hand over my face and shoving me with such force that I felt something tear in the muscles of my neck. I crashed onto the ground on my back. I lay winded and in a state of mild shock. Around me there was an unhurried dispersal of the audience, as if the assault they’d just witnessed was of so little moment that, as soon as it was done, their attention was directed elsewhere. My well-being, and the savage injustice of the attack, were of no interest to them whatsoever. One or two men even stepped over me on their way to whatever duty they were due to recommence. It was Nicholas Ashe who helped me to my feet.

‘You need to learn how to do something useful, mate. Can you juggle?’

‘No,’ I said calmly. ‘I do not juggle. I don’t ride a unicycle, I don’t swallow swords, and I don’t balance crockery on a stick. I’m an actor, not a member of a travelling freak show.’

I said this more to soothe my own feelings than to educate Ashe. He greeted my words with a derisive little snort and walked away, but not before tossing the word ‘fairy’ in my direction. I took a step after him, and became aware that the slightest movement of my head to the left or right caused an excruciating bolt of pain to run through my body. I stood, rigid, and gingerly experimented, now oblivious to the movement of soldiers about me. My neck couldn’t possibly be broken. I was fairly certain that a broken neck would be rather more discommoding than whatever damage I’d sustained.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said someone behind me. I would have turned my head to acknowledge the speaker’s words, but I was obliged to slowly turn my whole body. To my astonishment, the speaker, his hands on his hips, and a broad smile on his face, was Archie Warmington.