Amongst the Dead (9 page)

‘Not quite the truth?’ I asked.

‘The truth is that that first raid was devastating. God knows how many hundreds of people were killed in the town and in the harbour — especially the harbour. The RAAF base was more or less destroyed. I’ve heard stories that there were so many casualties that bodies had to buried wherever a convenient place could be found for them, and that crocodiles kept digging them up and taking chunks out of them.’

‘That certainly didn’t make it into
The Age
or
The Argus
,’ I said.

‘You’ll see tomorrow that Darwin doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s just a whole lot of soldiers wandering around in rubble.’

‘Civilians?’

‘A handful. The blacks and the whites were evacuated. There are some nurses. A few others. Something else you won’t read about in the papers? After the RAAF base was carpet-bombed, the airmen there were spooked, and just up and left. Headed south to Adelaide River, that’s what I’m told. The Adelaide River Stakes, they called it. They couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Officers, too. Some blokes I’ve spoken to reckon they were told to go bush. I don’t know if they were scared, or just confused and poorly led. Most of them came back eventually. Thank God for the Yanks. I’ll tell you something: you won’t hear a bad word said about the Yanks up here. They’re bloody marvellous.’

Glen, who’d said very little, suddenly spoke up. ‘The bloody Japs are going to do it, aren’t they? They’re really going to land here. They’re actually going to invade.’

There wasn’t the slightest trace of fear in his voice. I imagine his experiences in Milne Bay had steeled him against panic — but neither was there any excitement. He was simply expressing a reasonable assumption. Luther nodded.

‘That seems to be the general view. If Port Moresby falls to the Japs, we’re next. Like I said, thank God for the Yanks.’

Brian, whose nerves were doubtless as shaken as mine by the air raid, cut across the conversation and asked rather sharply, ‘So what are we doing here? I mean here, in the Sergeants’ Mess? Why the privilege?’

I couldn’t see that sitting in an ugly room full of stolen furnishings was a privilege, but I took his point. We ought to have been banished to barracks that housed soldiers without rank; unless, of course, James Fowler had been wrong, and Army Intelligence had alerted a few people up here to who we were and what our mission was. When I thought about this mission I realised that I hadn’t allowed myself to ponder its magnitude, except in the beginning when it had seemed as safe and uncomplicated as a parlour game, where simple deduction would solve the puzzle. Who is killing the Nackeroos? No worries. William Power will find out for you. I think it was the shrapnel that made me wonder if I hadn’t over-reached myself on this occasion.

‘The army,’ said Luther, ‘despite all appearances to the contrary, is an efficient bureaucracy. I asked the Amenities people to do me a favour and lend me some entertainers from one of the concert parties, just for one day for a specialised job. You were volunteered.’

‘By whom?’ Glen asked.

‘I just do the paperwork. I put in the request, and it came back in the affirmative.’

‘All this sounds a bit irregular,’ Brian said, although he couldn’t possibly know what was or wasn’t regular in the army.

‘Well, it’s the nature of the exercise,’ Luther said. ‘I take it you haven’t been briefed at all about this?’

We shook our heads in unison, like fairground clowns waiting for someone to push ping-pong balls down our throats.

‘It’s straightforward, really. We just want you to pop across for a few hours to a place called Channel Island. It’s close by, out in the harbour a bit. A quick boat trip. The people there have had a rough trot and could do with a bit of light entertainment.’

‘I suppose they were badly hit by the bombings,’ I said, now knowing how much havoc had been wrought in the harbour.

‘No,’ Luther said, ‘they weren’t hit at all. It’s like the Japs deliberately avoided hitting Channel Island.’

Brian drew his eyebrows together, a facial expression he’d used since childhood to signal dubiousness about what he was hearing.

‘What,’ he asked, ‘is the missing piece of information here?’

Luther coughed.

‘Channel Island is a leprosarium.’

He looked at each of us in turn.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘My ears are still ringing from the bombs, but just for a moment I thought you said “leprosarium”.’

‘You’ll be relieved to know that there’s nothing wrong with your hearing. Channel Island is indeed a leprosarium.’

‘What,’ asked Glen, ‘is a leprothingo?’

In the calm voice of a patient teacher explaining something to a dull child, Brian said, ‘A leprosarium, Glen, is a place where lepers are sent for treatment.’

‘Lepers? You want us to entertain lepers?’ Glen asked, and the disgust in his voice was unmistakeable.

I said nothing for a moment, and was busy taking internal umbrage at the thought that someone, somewhere, had assessed my talents as being suited to a leper colony.

‘There are seventy of the poor bastards out there on Channel Island. Men, women, and children.’

‘No way am I going to catch leprosy,’ Glen said. ‘Khaki dermatitis was bad enough. I’m a magician. I need all my fingers for my work.’

‘You can’t catch leprosy from a single visit,’ Luther said. ‘You have to be exposed to it for a very long time, and even then you have to be unlucky. Besides, you’re being asked to sing and dance
for
them, not sing and dance
with
them.’

‘It’s all very Father Damian of Molokai,’ I said. ‘Do we have a choice?’

‘Of course, but I didn’t think …’

‘Good,’ Glen said. ‘I’m not going. I don’t mind being shot at, but this is germ warfare, and that’s against the Geneva Convention.’

There was something so fierce and ugly in Glen’s tone that I felt a compulsion to distance myself from him.

‘These people aren’t our enemies, Glen.’

‘You don’t even know who they are, you stupid bastard, and I don’t care who they are. They’re lepers, and I’m sticking with tradition and having nothing to do with them.’

‘All right,’ Brian said. ‘Will and I will go.’

If he was expecting Glen to change his mind, he was disappointed. He stuck to his guns with a sullen stubbornness that made me see in him the revolting child he must have been.

After little more than two hours’ sleep we woke to a slate-grey morning. The colour of such a morning in Melbourne would suggest a chilly day ahead. Here in Darwin the air didn’t seem to need the sun to heat it. The sky was crowded with dense and ominous clouds, and by the time we walked out of Larrakeyah Barracks, with Luther as our guide, and without Glen, I was sweating profusely. Brian and I were both wearing shorts, our pale legs betraying us as new arrivals. We were to catch a small boat and make the short crossing to Channel Island; but first, Luther wanted to give us a brief tour of Darwin’s shattered streets.

It wasn’t a long walk from the barracks to what had once been the commercial centre of town. Houses along the way stood or had fallen according to a random pattern of destruction. Here, a lush and flowering garden sat unscathed, its house empty but intact; there, a garden had great gaps blown in it, the yard pocked by bomb craters, and its house a tangle of blasted, scorched timbers. At the gate of one property, Luther drew our attention to a now-faded notice dated April 1942 and bearing the mayor’s signature, exhorting troops to forego looting abandoned properties and reminding them, as if they needed it, that the abandonment had not been voluntary but the result of enemy action.

It was difficult to determine what the streets might have looked like, so extensive was the damage. The Bank of New South Wales, which must have been a rather grand building, was now a crumbling shell, and its neighbours sat roofless, or boarded up, or with great, jagged holes in their walls. There were plenty of men about clearing the roads of rubble, or doing the best they could to repair what was repairable, or tear down and make safe what wasn’t. Almost to a man they were dressed only in shorts, and most of them were hatless.

‘A lot of these blokes are Civil Construction Corps volunteers,’ Luther said. ‘Not army. Without them, practically nothing in this place would work.’

‘Where are they from?’

‘All over. Some of them have been directed into the corps by Manpower. How’d you be? One day you’re in Melbourne doing some job Manpower thinks is useless, and the next you’re on your way here. You’d be pissed off.’

I couldn’t disagree with him and, after looking around, refrained from suggesting that perhaps the nation hadn’t lost too many significant buildings. By this stage we were approaching the enclave at the end of what had been Cavenagh Street. This, Luther said, was where the notorious, open-sewered Chinatown had been. It had been looted bare, and more or less dismantled.

‘No great loss,’ he said. ‘It was a squalid and immoral place, apparently.’

The way he said this reinforced for me the suspicion I’d been harbouring that Luther Martin’s attitude was rooted in a thoughtless Christian revulsion for anything that might offend his God. I immediately distrusted him, and told him that Brian and I needed some time before catching the boat to work out what we were going to do to entertain the lepers.

Luther left us at the harbour, where the skeletons of many ships protruded from the water, and where men were busy repairing the wharf. We had half an hour to sort out what we’d do. We’d already decided the night before, after finding a recording of a Glenn Miller swing tune in the Mess (and having been assured that there was a gramophone on Channel Island), that we’d attempt a demonstration of the jitterbug. We agreed that it would be pointless of Brian to slip into his Jean Harlow sheath.

‘We need to run through this dance,’ I said.

‘What, here?’

‘We rehearse where we can, Brian. Our stage is wherever we happen to be.’

Where we happened to be was on the partly repaired timbers of the long wharf, surrounded by Civil Construction Corps workmen and others, all hammering and carrying and swearing. I have no doubt that, for those who looked up from their work and saw us, the sight of two men moving woodenly through the steps of the jitterbug was very strange. Woodenly at first, that is. Having established the general shape of the dance, and who was to do what, I counted us in and began to hum ‘In the Mood’. Brian is an excellent dancer, and he moved easily and fluidly to the syncopation he was hearing in his head. We began apart, both gyrating independently, and then came together in a graceful and energetic rendition of the dance. I threw Brian over my hip and between my legs, and we span and twirled and stomped — and didn’t believe Fred and Ginger could have done better under the circumstances. When we’d finished we were suddenly aware that work on the wharf had stopped, and men were staring at us, some with hammers poised in mid-air. If this had been a movie they would have applauded; we were rewarded instead with a few disbelieving sniggers, and the workers returned to their labours.

We were both breathing heavily; I, for one, had underestimated how much energy the jitterbug required.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘That’s good, but it’s only a few minutes. I’m sure they’re expecting a bit more.’

‘Maybe we could teach them a few of the steps.’

‘They’ve got leprosy, Brian. If they start throwing each other around, bits will fall off.’

The teacher in Brian, always lurking just beneath the surface, couldn’t resist correcting my apparently poor understanding of the condition.

‘All right. All right. I was only joking, Brian. For heaven’s sake.’

‘I’m glad you can see the funny side of leprosy, Will, because frankly it doesn’t strike me as one of nature’s wittiest diseases.’

‘Well, I guess we all have our favourites. Now if I could just drag you down from your pulpit for a moment, do you have any ideas of a non-earnest variety for our programme?’

Brian sighed with familiar, exaggerated resignation and said, ‘I thought I might recite “The Geebung Polo Club” — I know it off by heart — and maybe “Bellbirds”, and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.’

I wasn’t sure how the lepers would react to Brian’s English curriculum, but I had to acknowledge that recitation was the go. My only difficulty was in deciding which speeches from which plays would be best calculated to make a leper forget his hideous condition for a few, precious minutes. Something from
Cymbeline
perhaps, and definitely a piece from
Titus Andronicus
, my performance of which had been thwarted a few months earlier by events beyond my control. In one of those flashes of inspiration that come whenever my attention is focussed on Shakespeare, I decided that I would sing a couple of the songs from
Twelfth Night
. I’d have to forgo the lute, of course, and do it unaccompanied, but I thought that the ostentatious plucking of a stringed instrument with healthy fingers might anyway be seen as rubbing their noses in it rather.

The boat, which was little more than a canoe, arrived, and in a few minutes we stepped ashore on Channel Island. It was a desolate place — almost without trees of any kind, as if the landscape itself had contracted leprosy. We were met by a nurse in a uniform that had once been white, but which had been poorly dyed a khaki colour. (She told us later that the white uniforms stood out dangerously in the shadows of slit trenches.) There were people moving about near a group of buildings which I supposed constituted the lazaret.