David Malouf - Fly Away Peter

Others were involved. Many thousands. And they were ordinary enough fellows like himself. They came from places back home with comfortable names like Samford and Bundaberg and Lismore over the border, and had obviously known similar lives since they spoke the same way he did and liked the same jokes and tunes. They were called Nobby Clarke, Blue Cotton, Jock McLaren, Cec Cope, Clem Battersby, and one of them was a stocky, curly-headed fellow called Clancy Parkett, who was always in trouble. He had first got into trouble on the induction course at Enoggera, then on the boat coming over, and had been in trouble ever since — he had slipped out with another bloke, on one of their first nights in France, and come back with two strangled chooks still flapping under his tunic. He knew some of the best stories Jim had ever heard, ran a poker school, and could down ten pints at a single session. Clancy teased Jim because Jim wanted, in his cautious way, to put every step down firmly and in the right place. Clancy was just the opposite. In real life, in Australia, he was an electrician.

Coming over on the Borda , and at Larkhill on Salisbury Plain while they were being trained and held back, there had been time enough to get to know one another and for every sort of hostility and friendship to develop. Jim made no close friends in the platoon, nobody special that is; but he thought of Clancy as someone he wouldn’t want to be without. He might have been there always.

A lot of the men had wives and children and Jim had, over the months, seen their photographs and learned their names. Clancy had a List: addresses as well as names, which he flashed but never let you read. He also had stories about each of the women on his List — for a while he had done project jobs all over the southern part of the state — and Jim heard a good deal about a fisherman’s wife up at the Passage, called Muriel, and others, a Pearl, a Maureen, at places like Warwick and Esk. It was the names of the places, as much as Clancy’s ribald accounts of peace time philandering, that Jim liked to hear. It did him good, it kept the old life real; and he had no stories of his own to relate.

It was the same later when he and Bobby Cleese, after a trench raid, had spent a whole day and night together in a shell-hole in front of the lines, so close to the enemy out there that they could hear the striking of matches in the trenches up ahead and one man endlessly snuffling with a headcold. It was early February and the weather was freezing.

Bobby had talked of the Bay, in a low voiceless whisper that itself created mystery and made the familiar seem strange, as if dangerous or forbidden. He talked about fishing off Peel Island where the lepers were.

‘Whiting now. that’s a nice fish. Sweet. You can eat pounds of it if it’s softly boiled with a white sauce and a bit of onion an’ parsley in it. Bony, but. I saw a bloke choke once. It was horrible. The best place for whiting is over towards Redcliffe or round the point in Deception Bay. You ever been to Redcliffe, Jim? It’s got a pier’.

Bobby’s voice, white-breathed in the cold, evoked the whole blaze of the bay, faintly steaming (it would be summer there) in the heat before dawn, and Jim could see it, almost feel the warmth in his own bones, smell the dirty bilgewater in the bottom of the dinghy and feel fishscales drying and sticking to his feet. It was there, the Bay. It was daylight there. Even as they talked now, far out in no-man’s land under the dangerous moon, it was dazzling with sunlight, or maybe building up to a storm that would only break in the late afternoon. Men would be out exercising greyhounds, and a milkcart with three metal cans might be starting on its rounds. Whiting, thousands of them, were swarming under the blue surface of Bob Cleese’s eyes.

Jim would have liked then to speak of the swamp and the big seas that would be running at this time of year, king tides they were called, all along the beaches, threatening to wash them away.

‘Golly but I’m cold!’ is what he muttered instead. The mud round the edge of the hole they were in was frozen solid. It had a razor-edge of dirty grey where the moon touched it. Ice. They were in mud to their knees and crouching.

‘Tell us again, Bobby. About that bloke ’n the fishbone. Deception.’

But more reassuring than all this — the places, the stories of a life that was continuous elsewhere — a kind of private reassurance for himself alone, was the presence of the birds, that allowed Jim to make a map in his head of how the parts of his life were connected, there and here, and to find his way back at times to a natural cycle of things that the birds still followed undisturbed.

Out on Salisbury Plain in the late summer and autumn there had been thousands of birds. And earlier in the year, when they first crossed the Channel, at le Havre, after the long train-trip from Marseilles, he had seen from the side of the ship a whole flock of sandpipers with their odd down-turned wings flying low over the greasy water, and among them, clearly distinguishable because so much bigger, knots, that would have been down from the arctic, their bodies reddish in that season — the same grey-crowned knots he might have seen along the coastal sandflats at home, arriving in spring and departing at the commencement of autumn, just as they did here. It was comforting to see the familiar creatures, who might come and go all that way across the globe in the natural course of their lives, and to see that they were barely touched by the activity around them: the ferries pouring out smoke, the big ironclads unloading, the cries, the blowing of whistles, the men marching down the gangplanks and forming up on the quay, the revving of lorries, panicky horses being winched down, rearing and neighing, the skirl of Highland bagpipes. He noted the cry of these local sandpipers: kitty wiper, kitty wiper , which was new, and below them the cry of the knot, so familiar that he felt his heart turn over and might have been back in the warm dunes, barefoot, and in sight of a long fold of surf. Thu thu it went, a soft whistling. Then, more quietly, wut. Very low, though his ears caught it.

Still eager in those first days, he jotted all this down to be described later to Miss Harcourt. ‘I have seen the dunlin’ he was able to tell her. He had had no notion, from their single specimen, what they would look like in numbers. ‘A great flock,’ he wrote, ‘twisting this way and that, all at once, very precise, with all the undersides flashing white on the turn.’

Back again at le Havre — it was winter now and they were camped on a greasy plain outside the port — Jim had been ‘picked’ by a big fellow from another company whose name was Wizzer Green.

He had never seen the man before. He didn’t know what he had done, maybe he had done nothing at all, but something in him offended Wizzer, and while they were still wrought up after the crossing and tired after being marched up, there had been a bit of a fracas in which Wizzer tripped Jim and then accused him of deliberately getting in the way. In a moment they were eye to eye and preparing to fight.

There were no heated words. Wizzer’s contemptuous challenge hadn’t been heard by anyone else. But he and Jim had, at first sight almost, got to the bottom of one another. It could happen, it seemed. Jim had found himself defending whatever it was in him that Wizzer rejected, and discovered that he needed this sudden, unexpected confrontation to see who he was and what he had to defend. Enemies, like friends, told you who you were. They faced one another with murder in their eyes and Jim was surprised by the black anger he was possessed by and the dull savagery he sensed in the other man, whose square clenched brows and fiercely grinding jaw reminded Jim of his father — reminded him because he came closer to his father’s nature at that moment than he had ever thought possible.