David Malouf - Fly Away Peter

Jim accepted the uniform, but felt too heavy for flight, as if he belonged to an earlier version of the species that would never make the crossing. Conscious of the weight of his boots, his hands, the bones in his pelvis, he climbed in behind Bert, terribly cramped in the narrow seat and already sweating. The breeze was singing in the wires, and it seemed to him for a moment that they were about to make their ascent in some sort of harp that they were taking up, for Ashley’s amusement, to be played by the wind. I know what fascinates Ashley , he thought. It’s all this piano wire !

‘Good luck!’ Ashley shouted, flapping his arms as if he might be about to take off under his own steam.

‘Just relax,’ Bert shouted. ‘The machine does the flying. All we have to do is sit still. You’re safe as houses in a crate like this.’

One of the boys from the sheds, who had been coming out to do this all year, gave the propellor a hard spin, the engine turned over, and they began to wobble forward over the coarse grass, gathered speed, ran the length of the paddock, and lifted gently at the last moment over a slip-rail fence, just failing, further on, to touch the top of a windbreak of ragged pines. They were up.

They made a great circuit of the local country, at one point crossing the border. They flew close up to the slopes of the Great Divide, saw a scatter of bright lakes to the south and big rivers down there, high to the point of flooding, rolling brown between cane fields, then turned, and there was the coast: white sand with an edge of lacy surf, then whitecaps in lines behind it, then limitless blue. Bert pointed out a racetrack, and at Southport there was the ferry-crossing and the pier, beyond it the Broadwater dotted with sails and the rip below Stradbroke Island. On the way back, flying lower, Jim had a clear view of what he had already seen in imagination: the swamp and its fringe of tea-tree forest; the paddocks, first green with underlying water then dry and scrubby, that sloped towards the jagged hills, and on the other side the dunes; the two forested hummocks that were Big and Little Burleigh; and a creek entering the sea over a sandbar, through channels of every depth of blue. It was all familiar. He had covered every inch of this country at ground level and had in his mind’s eye a kind of map that was not very different from what now presented itself to the physical one. It was, if anything, confirmation; that what he had in his head was a true picture and that he need never go up again.

Once he realized this, and had passed his own test, he could relax and enjoy the sensation of just being there. It was exciting. Especially the rush of air.

But what came to him most clearly was how the map in his own head, which he had tested and found accurate, might be related to the one the birds carried in theirs, which allowed them to find their way — by landmarks, was it? — halfway across the world. It was the wonder of that, rather than the achievement of men in learning how to precipitate themselves into the air at sixty miles an hour, that he brought away from the occasion. And the heads so small!

So it did give him a new view after all.

‘I believe you been up in one a’ them machines,’ his father taunted. ‘I don’t s’pose you seen any white feathers flyin’ about up there. If you did I’d ask you where you reckon they might’v come from. An’ I wasn’t thinkin’ v’ angels. Nor Mrs ‘Arvey’s chooks neither.’

It was a time immediately after news had come of the landings at Gallipoli and the slaughter of the following weeks. People’s attitude to the war was changing. Even his father, who hadn’t been concerned at first, was suddenly fiercely patriotic and keen for battle. A new seriousness had entered their lives, which was measured by the numbers of the dead they suddenly knew, the fact that history was being made and that the names it threw up this time were their own. Neighbours had lost sons. Some of them were fellows Jim had been at school with. And his father felt, Jim thought, that his son ought to be lost as well. His father was bitter. Jim was depriving him of his chance to reach out and touch a unique thing, to feel that he too had dug into the new century and would not be repulsed.

‘I’d go meself,’ he insisted, ‘if I wasn’t so long in the tooth. To be with them lads ! I’d give me right arm t’ go!’ And he punched hard at his open fist.

Only he wouldn’t, Jim thought. He wouldn’t be able to lift his left arm quick enough to keep up with his thirst.

Jim felt the ground tilting, as he had felt it that first day in Brisbane, to the place where the war was, and felt the drag upon him of all those deaths. The time would come when he wouldn’t be able any longer to resist. He would slide with the rest. Down into the pit.

Later he was to think of that view from Bert’s plane as his last vision of the world he knew, and of their momentarily losing sight of it when they turned to come down as the moment when he knew, quite certainly, that he would go. He didn’t discuss it with anyone. But two weeks later, after having a few drinks in the pub and playing a slow game of pool, he rode up to Brisbane on the back of a fellow’s motorbike — he didn’t know the man, they had met only an hour before — and they both joined up.

If he didn’t go, he had decided, he would never understand, when it was over, why his life and everything he had known were so changed, and nobody would be able to tell him. He would spend his whole life wondering what had happened to him and looking into the eyes of others to find out.

He strolled up to the house next morning and told Ashley Crowther. He didn’t bother to tell his father.

Ashley nodded. They were sitting on their heels at the edge of the verandah, Jim chewing a match and Ashley, his eyes narrowed, gazing out over the paddocks, which glittered in the early morning chill. Now that the lower paddock had been ploughed and replanted, the Monuments could be seen, standing like ruined columns among the new shoots.

They didn’t speak about Jim’s work. It was left unstated that the job would be there for him when he got back. The birds could wait. The timespan for them was more or less infinite.

Miss Harcourt was not so easy. She seemed angry, but cheered up a little after they’d had tea.

‘I’ll hold the fort,’ she said, making it sound the more heroic option.

He went the next day, and it was Miss Harcourt who rode up to the siding with him and waited to see him aboard. He stood looking at her out of the grimy window, her square grey figure among the coarse grass, with the smuts flying back in a cloud towards her as she swiftly receded. She was holding her bonnet on against the wind and clutching at it whenever she tried to raise her hand to wave.

Jim closed the window, already almost a soldier, and watched the beaten land go flat.

His father had got sentimental at the last. He had given Jim five quid and tried, as if he were still a child, to put his hand on the back of his neck, which was newly raw from the barber. It had made Jim, for a moment, see things differently, as if a line had been drawn between the past and what was to come, the two parts of his life, and he could look at all that other side clearly now that he was about to leave it. He still felt the weight of the old man’s hand, its dry warmth, there on his neck and saw that his father would be alone now, maybe for good, and knew it. ‘Agh!’ he had said fiercely, ‘you’re the lucky one. To be goin’!’

Three months later, when his son was safely born, Ashley Crowther went as well, but as an officer, and in another division.

THE WORLD JIM found himself in was unlike anything he had ever known or imagined. It was as if he had taken a wrong turning in his sleep, arrived at the dark side of his head, and got stuck there.