Evie Wyld - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

‘You got much of a family back home?’ asked Rod.

‘Not much of one. But somewhere around I got some parents.’ Funny to say that. But Rod wasn’t really listening. He was drawing with a stick in the dirt. ‘What they think of you coming out here?’

‘Dunno. Guess they’re not that happy about it.’

‘But you knew you wanted to go, right, and you knew it was important?’

‘I was conscripted.’

‘Oh.’ He looked crestfallen.

‘You signed up?’

‘Yeah — but you’ve got to get permission — you’ve got to get your parents to sign something. Like going on a fucking school trip.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Nineteen. Soon.’

‘Crikey.’

‘They didn’t want to sign. There were all kinds of tears about it. They didn’t come and say goodbye. Dad was too upset.’ The dirt drawing took on an egg shape and he drilled round and round it with his stick.

‘That’s hard.’

‘Yup. But he signed up, he was in Greece. I’d have thought he’d understand, y’know? All’s I’m asking for is a bit of support.’

Leon nodded. But it seemed like a lot to ask for.

Uk-hew, went the fuck-you bird.

By the end of the week Rod was feeling better, though still liable to vomit without much warning. As the chopper set down to take them to their new patrol, a man came running out of the cookhouse, a brown lizard hacked through with a shovel swinging from his hands. ‘I found the bastard! Found the fuck-you bird! An’ he’s a lizard!’ The man threw the lizard down in the dust in front of the men’s feet, proudly, like he’d made it himself. It still moved slowly, but there wasn’t much left in it. ‘Bastard bit me!’ he said, looking pleased all the same. They watched the lizard become still.

The helicopter made him feel too light, like he might get sucked out of the open door at any minute. Rod was sick into his hand and tried to throw it out, but it caught in the wind and flew back at him. He looked dismayed. The other men just shook their heads, their faces dark and tired. It was hard to tell where the camouflage ended and their eyes began. Rod stared at the floor, and Leon did the same, deciding not to look too closely at the other men.

In the jungle you couldn’t tell if the air was getting to your lungs, like a wet sock had been stuffed down there. The other men in his unit wore the same expression as the men in the helicopter.

Pete was in charge and he seemed like an all right kind of a bloke, although when he saw it was just Rod and Leon getting off to join them, he threw his hat on the floor and shouted ‘Bastard shit!’ before he asked to see their papers and got a bit more friendly. ‘Sorry, fellas, we’re a bit short. Was expecting at least another three. Anyways.’ He turned to four men who looked tired and as if they might carry lice. ‘Here, we’ve got not one, but two men to come and give us a hand. Leon here’s a good shooter, and Rodney here.’

‘Rod,’ said Rod.

‘Rod here is good on the nav. And by the look of you, Rod, you’d fit down a rabbit hole okay too.’

Rod tried to smile.

Pete pointed to the four men. ‘Daniel, Cray, Flood and Clive.’ They all nodded. ‘Cray’s forward scout, Flood gunner, then there’s the rest of us behind.’

Cray nodded again, Flood did not. Instead he said, not quietly, to Daniel who was standing next to him, ‘Perfect, a dago and a grommet.’

Daniel looked uncomfortable and turned away.

‘Fuck off, Flood,’ Clive and Cray said in unison, and everyone laughed, including Leon and Rod, although Leon was sure Rod was laughing the same as him, out of a need not to throw up.

Days passed and it was just walking with the sweat pouring through his eyebrows, which mixed with the cammo and stung his eyes. Sometimes there was the sound of far-off fighting and they’d all stop and listen. It was important not to think about breath, to breathe automatically and not panic; let the time pass without comment. When he could, he got out his camera and took pictures of fat leaves and brightly coloured spiders, of the section at rest, and Rod posing with his gun, giving the thumbs up. Looking through the lens you saw it more clearly than usual. Each of them was a rusty brown outside the jungle, but inside their skin glowed white like they’d been rolled in caster sugar, and even colouring in their faces with the thick cammo didn’t help much. The whites of their eyes were luminous. He wondered at Cray at the front, how he stood it, glowing like that, his face a target. Leon pulled his hat down low over his face, but then the back of his neck was exposed. Perhaps in that other jungle his father had had the same problem. He thought of his mother’s hair tight in its bun, the smell of the shop after one of her long hot baths. His knuckles looked like claws on his gun.

They took little steps, staring hard at the ground, in the trees, looking for something that might not be normal, but everything was extraordinary. The beep of a bird was enough to send rifles swinging in all directions, the echo of a tree shedding its bark made the section stop and hold its breath for twenty minutes. Behind Cray, Flood carried the machine gun and twitched like crazy every time Cray’s pace slowed. Leon carried the ammunition for Flood, and he felt the strings of bullets pressing against his chest, each one a finger, tap-tapping, making that scritch-scratching against his shirt. Rod counted their steps with a clicker and Leon counted his own, just to see how they tallied up. There were so many things to step across and around, and to fall over, things to disrupt the accuracy of counting footsteps. If they hit dense bamboo, there was nothing for it but to walk round it, even though the map said straight, even though the map said three hundred steps and they took well over a thousand.

They stopped for a meal break and his skin felt like it might start to peel from the heat and the damp. He found that he’d gone almost twice as many steps as Rod and decided not to count any more. He wondered at Rod, carefully moving stones from one pocket to another, counting under his breath in case the clicker got reset, as if their lives depended on it, which they did.

They opened up their packets of food and there was a low level of talk, some smokes. Flood held up his tin. ‘What kind of an army marches on lima beans?’ When no one responded, he answered himself: ‘A pretty crook one, that’s what kind.’

The beans were like soft stones on Leon’s tongue. The heat glazed him, if anything happened he might just sit there and watch it all come. Now and then he thought he could smell eucalyptus in among the rubber trees, where birds drilled and carried on like there was nothing the matter. Cray ate his meal a little distance from the others, always watching.

Leon’s feet were swollen in his boots; he could feel a hot liquid between his toes. The back of Flood’s neck was livid orange and muddled with mosquito bites, and he could feel them at him too, piercing through his hat and collar, drinking through the repellant, different from the ones back home, something deeper in their whine. Some of the men shook out their clothes, unbuttoned their shirts looking for leeches. One man bit his lips into a thin line and tried to look only annoyed by the thick slug that had blown up bloodily on his chest. He poked at it with a lit cigarette and the thing fell off, a pat in the dust. They must be on me too, thought Leon. He checked down the cuffs of his sleeves, rolled up both trouser legs, but couldn’t find any. He decided not to look too much closer; the man, having stripped to his underwear, was now looking palely into his pants.

‘This is the fucking life, eh?’ said Cray, catching Leon’s eye.

‘My oath,’ said Leon and they both laughed, and it felt good.