Love in the Years of Lunacy (24 page)

23

M
ist crowned the summit of the mountain. It was hard to see where the earth stopped rising and the clouds began. From inside the plane, with her one good eye, Pearl could see dozens of streams cascading through gorges, towards the plateaus and valleys below. The peaked roofs of native huts sat further down, on an uneven terrace, against the green and straw-coloured rows of a garden. She was wedged next to Wanipe in the back of the Stinson, between him and several boxes. She held Pup close to her, against her chest, where she could feel the dog's warm breath against her skin. Pearl's ears hurt so much that they felt as if they were filled with water and would burst at any moment.

Pearl's altercation with Rudolph less than an hour before hadn't ended well: he'd remained angry, affronted, shocked. But perhaps the hardest thing for him, she knew, was the humiliation he would face if her true identity were ever revealed; the consequences for him as both a soldier and a man would be devastating, which was why he'd finally relented and allowed her to board the plane.

There was an airstrip on the east side of the mountain but, due to the heavy cover of mist, the pilot was unable to locate it. Instead, he flew beyond what they could see of the cloudy summit, circling around the jagged spurs and precipices. As the aircraft scooped and dipped and shuddered, Pup cowered closer to her mistress.

Suddenly a straight brown gash appeared in the west side of the mountain. At first it looked like an abandoned garden, but as the plane dropped towards it Pearl could see a landing strip carved between stunted trees. The Stinson shook as the nose edged downwards. Pearl's breath seized inside her, her muscles tensed. One ear popped, and then the other. The pilot cut the engine and the plane swooped down. When she felt the thud of the wheels against the ground she let out a loud whoop and the dog answered back with three short, happy barks.

A group of American soldiers unloaded the plane quickly; the pilot was nervous about the cloud cover and mist and wanted to return to base as soon as possible. As they stacked boxes of food to one side of the strip, the Americans explained that, in defending the airstrip over the past few weeks, they'd already lost nine men. After the job was done the pilot climbed back into the cockpit, started the engine and taxied the plane in a circle. Within moments he was lifting off the mountainside, and the plane disappeared behind a rocky, Z-shaped ridge.

The temperature was much cooler up on the mountain, with wind singing through the lichen-covered trees. The thin air made Pearl feel giddy and slightly intoxicated. Pup trotted about the surrounding area, nosing at flowers and dew-covered ferns. Mould grew between tufts of snow grass and clusters of blue and violet blossoms. Mist crawled down from the peak of the mountain and circled them like ghosts. Pearl was glad she was wearing the new uniform—she would have been frozen in the old one. Wanipe had prepared for the journey by dressing in a uniform too, though he refused to wear boots. The Americans were already hoeing into the tinned food, not even bothering to heat it up.

Pearl was still sore and bruised; her right eye continued to throb. It seemed impossible that Charlie had been killed only two days ago. She kept expecting him to sneak up behind her and pinch her on the bum, or call out, ‘Hey, Willis, what's for tea?' And the longer she watched the Americans eating and trading jokes, the more keenly she felt his absence and its awful permanence.

When the missing unit had last radioed, they'd reported that they were three miles east of the landing strip, further up towards the summit. When they'd lost contact with their CO several days before, the men had been holding the crest of a ridge against a small band of Japanese. Pearl and Wanipe had been told there were twelve Australians in the unit, though their numbers may have dropped; no one could be certain that they hadn't all been killed.

That night, they camped with the Americans close to the landing strip, beneath a lean-to of bracken and ferns. At dawn, after they woke, one of the GIs loaned her a walkie-talkie so she and Wanipe could keep in touch with them. It was so heavy that Wanipe had to carry it strapped to his back. They set off into the sunrise and, a couple of hours later, located the ridge the soldiers had fought to hold. They searched the surrounding area for Allies—dead or alive—but found only the smoked corpse of a local man, who sat strapped to a chair on a bamboo platform.

Nearby, however, Pup found the ashes of what looked like a recent fire and she nosed around in the soot until the metal button of a uniform glinted in the sunlight. Pearl picked it up and rubbed it against her trousers, noticing it was exactly the same as the button on her own jacket.

The days passed in spirals of mist and foot tracks that seemed to lead nowhere. They followed sparse trails of rusty tin cans, the occasional blunt razor blade, two broken bootlaces, and several charred matches. Sometimes, they happened upon isolated gardens, bordered by pigpens and beds of sweet potato. The villagers were shocked by the sight of Pearl, whom they thought was some ghost or otherwordly god, as had the villagers back in the Bismarck Range.

She kept in touch with the Americans at the airstrip via the walkie-talkie, and they in turn communicated with the mobile medical base and with Rudolph, who was now back in Lae. But the higher she and Wanipe walked towards the summit, the thinner the air became, and with it she felt her resolve diminishing. Several days after discovering the button in the ashes of fire, the thin, unpromising trail of bootlaces and matches ran out. She developed a bad cold; her throat grew dry and raw from coughing. As they were climbing a steep ridge, she lost her footing and her rifle slipped from her shoulder and dropped into a chasm so deep she heard only a distant echo when it hit the ground. Pup was whining and irritable until Pearl discovered a tick in her hind leg and dug it out with a razor blade. Wanipe cut his foot on a rock as they crossed a stream and within two days it had become infected, ballooning into an angry purple lump. Every time Pearl urinated, she caught the flow in her cupped hand and rubbed it into the wounds on Pup's leg and Wanipe's foot, as it was the only disinfectant to be had for forty miles.

During their thirteenth day on Mount Hagen they encountered a family who were not shocked to see a white ghost. The father, a small man with a broad, flat nose pierced with a hook-shaped bone, smiled and greeted Pearl and Wanipe as if they were neighbours. He and his seven children ushered them into a wide hut, one wall of which opened onto a deck overlooking a waterfall and ravine. There, they sat on straw mats and, while the children chased and played with Pup, the father offered Pearl and Wanipe gold-lipped pearl shells rimmed with red clay and iridescent feathers from a bird of paradise. At the same time, he produced two razor blades and a box with only five matches inside, holding them up and pointing to Pearl, and then to himself, repeating the gesture several times. He wished to barter for additional blades, she realised with a rising sense of excitement; the unit of soldiers she and Wanipe had been tracking must have traded the matches only days before.

She handed over all but one of the blades she had, and two of the three boxes of matches in her pack. She also added some dried biscuits and a shard of a mirror that she used when she applied make-up for the show. The father was overjoyed and the mirror was passed between the excited children as if it were some rare form of magic.

Then came the hard part: attempting to communicate with him to find out which way the unit had gone. Wanipe tried a few words from the different dialects he'd picked up during his trading days, but the father just looked quizzical and answered back in his own tongue. Pearl picked up the blades and matchbox he'd shown them originally and with her hands shaped the outline of a man. She then shrugged and pointed in various directions from the deck of the hut. She repeated the gestures several times until the father smiled, strode across the deck, and pointed to a rocky crest of limestone to the west.

They gave the man back his shells and feathers and instead took ten sweet potatoes and two pig's feet. The children were sad to see them go and followed them across the heath of alpine grass and snow daisies for almost a mile, skipping along with Pup and throwing sticks for her to fetch. After a while, they grew bored and began struggling back home.

It was sunset by the time Pearl, Wanipe and Pup reached the limestone crest, which was a long plateau of rock overlooking what seemed to be a gorge. They were unable to gauge the depth of the drop, nor what lay beyond it, for great rolls of mist were purling towards them. The plateau was wet and mottled with moss; there were ridges and indentations against the rock wall behind them. They followed the embankment until Wanipe found a cave for them to shelter in for the night. The pig's feet were a welcome change from the monotony of bully beef and biscuits that had been their staple diet for so many months. Pearl hugged Pup close to her, but she didn't rest well on the hard floor of the cave and the evening was fractured by nightmares during which she was forced to solo with a band playing at an impossible tempo. She blew and blew into her mouthpiece, moving her fingers briskly against the keys, but the instrument made no sound, no matter how hard she tried.

Morning dawned with the plaintive song of a bird, a relentless pitch of longing. While Wanipe slept, Pearl crawled out of the cave and stretched. Patches of frost clung to the limestone, glistening silver against the moss. Pup nosed around the plateau, chasing a beetle. As the sun rose, the fog in the gorge began to lift in places and slowly pockets of a deep valley emerged, as if out of a dream. It was clustered with pale green bushes and withered trees that grew against the terraces sloping downwards, like a staircase made for giants. She could see the silver wings of a small crashed plane further down in the valley. The bird that had awakened her kept twittering and she followed the sound to a nest about fifteen feet away, built into a recess of the limestone, a wreath of twigs and leaves out of which grew an arbour of sticks, feathers, the veined translucent wings of an insect, and what looked like strands of blond human hair glinting in the sunlight. The tiny bowerbird stood beneath the arch, pale blue feathers ruffled, chirping urgently at the rising sun.

She was just returning to the mouth of the cave when, out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed something moving on one of the lower terraces, about half a mile away. She edged to the lip of the precipice and, squinting, saw two, then three figures walking east towards the early light. They were too far away for her to tell if they were natives, Allies or Japanese, and she scrambled back to the cave to grab her binoculars. As she rummaged in her bag, she called to Wanipe, alerting him to the presence of strangers. He sat up, startled, registered what she was saying, and together they crept out onto the shelf of rock, lying on their stomachs to conceal themselves.

It was a minute or so before she spotted them again through the magnification of the lenses, and when she did it felt as if her heart began to spin in wild revolutions. She spotted three, then four men in jungle-green uniforms and black berets, their faces covered with camouflage netting, but the real shock came when, a few lengths ahead of them, she saw a dark-skinned man dressed in the same clothes, shouldering a rifle and bayonet.

‘It's them!' she cried. ‘It's the unit!' She leaped to her feet, passing the binoculars to Wanipe. For a few crazy moments she fancied the dark-skinned man was James—for who else could it be, with skin the colour of milky coffee, wearing Australian army fatigues? She felt so much blood and adrenaline course through her body she thought she would levitate. But then it occurred to her that the man in question was probably a local guide, and all the air abruptly left her body. Wanipe himself dressed in a similar uniform to hers and there were bound to be other guides who did the same.

Wanipe gave a low cry and waved her back to the ground. She put down Pup and dropped to her stomach. He passed her the binoculars and pointed to a nearby terrace, about three hundred yards away, also ringed with mist. At first she glimpsed only a line of gnarled trees, tufts of pale flowers and the cabin of the crashed plane. Then the lenses caught the image of a Japanese man in a worn khaki uniform; his head was bowed and he was looking at the ground, as if he were tracing the path of a small animal. The lenses then caught another man behind, then another, and another, until it became obvious that there were about twenty Japanese stealing across the upper part of the valley, all armed with rifles. They were short and emaciated, shoulders hunched, but they were heading east, in the same direction as the Australians, and it was clear that they outnumbered the latter by at least three to one. The only things that separated the two groups were three terraces, and about six hundred yards.

Perhaps the Japanese were tracking the Australian unit, or maybe it was sheer coincidence that they were in such close proximity to their enemy. Either way, it was only a matter of time before the Aussies would be taken unawares, for the Japanese, like Pearl and Wanipe, had the advantage of being higher up in the valley and having better sight lines. Her heart drummed in her chest and an uncontrollable trembling overtook her body. She could no longer hold the binoculars steady and the image of the Japanese unit began to shudder, like a film being run through a faulty projector. She passed them back to Wanipe and made for the cave to grab the walkie-talkie, at the same time attempting to calculate their location, which she figured was roughly four miles east and six miles north from the airstrip where they'd landed. Or was it six miles east and four miles north? They were much closer to the summit, she was certain of that. She called the Americans back at the airstrip, but there was a lot of interference, like the sound of breaking waves. She yelled that the lost unit had been located, that there was a band of Japs tailing the Aussies and they'd need reinforcements as soon as possible. The tidal sound of the interference rose and crashed in her ear.