In a pocket of the ceiling in Betty’s quarters, below a beam across the tin roof, waited a fat, black spider, and its awkward, long-limbed patience reminded her of Shorty, but she was too tired to think about Shorty, so she took off her uniform and fell asleep on the bunk, the mosquito net a veil for her nakedness.
As she slept, the spider stepped carefully down the net to the floor, where it lifted the hem of Betty’s veil and gazed upon her body with four pairs of arachnoid eyes, and resolved to crawl inside her and have its fun. Throughout the night, it swallowed her happiness, until it had consumed it all. It grew so fat it became lodged in her guts, the pads on its front feet ticking at her heart, its back legs kicking like a foetus against her navel.
Oh God, like a foetus, though Betty, and she ran to the toilet and vomited.
The wave of food and bile that washed over its body did nothing to dislodge the spider, and Betty knew it would be inside her forever.
She would have to make love to Shorty that evening because, if she were pregnant, he must believe it was his child.
The spider turned inside her and she thought, Oh, this is the worst thing that has ever happened or could ever happen.
There was no reason for Betty to believe she was pregnant because it wasn’t even her fertile time of the month, and she hardly bled anyway in Vietnam, so she wasn’t to worry if the bleeding didn’t come, and how many girls got pregnant their first time?
Chief among the things she must not do was think about what she had done, as that would make it real. If she closed her mind to her actions, they might never have happened. After all, she had woken up in her own bed and it could have been all just a dream and, Why the hell did I do that? Why the hell hell hell hell?
She had to work. She was a nurse. She had to go to the hospital. She was in Vietnam. There was a war. She worked with an orderly named Anderson. Why the hell hell hell hell?
At least she was alive. She wished she wasn’t. She had two arms. She wished they hadn’t held him. They’d more than held him, they’d drawn him to her.
Everything in life was hell hell hell hell.
She washed but couldn’t clean herself, dressed but couldn’t cover herself, and walked over to the hospital. She didn’t eat because she couldn’t eat, because there was a spider that had swollen to fill the space in her stomach, and what if it were like a pregnancy and it crawled out of her vagina?
The first person she saw on the ward was Anderson, who saluted her and said, ‘Ma’am,’ without mockery, but he had low, dark, hairy testicles like a spider.
He smiled at her and his smile was kind, and she smiled back and her smile was madness, and then he looked away as if the shame was his and the triumph was hers.
Dr Clarke came onto the ward and he could see exactly what had happened and where and how and when: everything but the spider.
Adams was sitting up in bed, without his arms. He wasn’t joking, or smoking a pipe. How could he light a pipe?
The doctor had him filled with morphine, an amniotic fluid to float him in the world. He spoke sometimes, but slowly, and his lips flopped about.
It could be worse, thought Betty, I could be him.
Dr Clarke looked at Adams and saw prosthetic limbs attached. He could imagine how the man could live a life, or eighty per cent of a life.
But in his heart, after all this time, Dr Clarke was finally disgusted and saddened, at explosives and mines, and soldiers, guerrillas and wars, and army doctors and young men and governments and science, and Dr Clarke knew he was going to drink more now, until he died, and leave the world on a gentle river of whiskey, withdrawing slowly, one glass at a time.
A man with no arms.
‘I hope they’re happy about this,’ said Dr Clarke. He believed he was thinking, but he was speaking out loud.
Betty thought he was talking about her and Anderson.
‘I hope the VC are pleased with themselves,’ said Dr Clarke. ‘They’ve made a man without arms.’
‘It’s okay, doc,’ said Adams. ‘I am free.’
Morphine talking, talking morphine.
His parents would receive a telegram saying he had been seriously wounded, but there would be no details beyond the word ‘seriously’, and they would think, What does that mean, ‘seriously’? They would talk about it all night, turn it around on their tongues, flip it upside down to look beneath it and try to read the message written on the underside. Did it mean they would never see grandchildren? What would they make of ‘seriously’, two country people from – where? Dr Clarke looked at Adams’ record – Toowoomba, Queensland.
‘My dad was in the army,’ explained Adams, ‘and I am a dolphin.’
Dr Clarke understood. Adams had no arms, only fins.
‘They’re wings,’ said Adams, ‘and I can fly.’
Morphine is worth giving up your life for, thought Dr Clarke. Better than women, better than whiskey.
He could give Adams some more now. He could give him too much.
‘No,’ said Adams. ‘I must stay a while.’
Betty checked his catheter, and his intravenous drip.
‘Your fiancé,’ said Adams.
‘No,’ said Betty.
She thought he meant Anderson.
‘He bought me a whore, so I took his shift,’ said Adams.
All Betty heard was the morphine, and the blood rushing to her ears whenever she looked at Anderson.
‘I’ll march with my dad to the war memorial,’ said Adams, ‘but I won’t swing my arms.’
‘We’ll get you arms,’ said Dr Clarke.
‘Not hooks,’ said Adams. He looked at Betty. ‘Do you like hooks?’ he asked. ‘How would you feel when your fiancé scratched your back?’
Betty started to cry.
Anderson came over and lifted his hands hesitantly.
‘The fatty wants to put his arm around you,’ said Adams. ‘What would Shorty think about that? Shorty had a warning: God asked him for a sacrifice. That’s why the priest was waiting. But Shorty got his punishment, didn’t he? Looks like his girl has fucked a fatman.
‘Ha ha,’ said Adams, and he fell asleep.
Shorty came into the ward, and Anderson withdrew.
When Shorty saw Adams, his chest shrank around his lungs. He sat beside the eightypercentman, and knew there should be twenty per cent less of Shorty.
Adams’ eyes jumped open. ‘There’s so much of you,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t miss it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Shorty.
‘About me?’ asked Adams. ‘Or the fatso fatty arbuckle?’
Shorty assumed he was delirious.
‘I love you, Shorty,’ said Adams.
He was trying to imitate Betty’s voice, brittle and insincere, but Shorty leaned across his chest and kissed him on the forehead.
Dr Clarke asked Shorty to leave. He could come back the next day, and the next.
Betty said she would see him later in the evening. She needed a drink. Shorty had never heard her say those words before.
‘Come to my quarters,’ she said.
‘What about the guard?’ asked Shorty.
‘You can cut his throat,’ whispered Betty.
With joy in his heart, Anderson watched Shorty close the doors. Now he was alone with Betty again. He knew she was in love with him, the way she had dragged him towards her.
Shorty walked back through the camp, writhing inside. If he hadn’t been drunk in a brothel with Adams, he would never have asked him to swap shifts. If he hadn’t been talking with the whores, Shorty would have been sitting in the back of the Land Rover, carrying the M60, and he wouldn’t have turned around at whatever had caught Adams’ attention, and the mine they had crossed the road to trigger would have popped off harmlessly behind them.
Shorty couldn’t see what he could ever do to redeem himself. He couldn’t give Adams back his arms. He hugged himself, as if he were cold, but he just wanted to feel his elbows with his hands. Other men walked by, shirtless, watching him. Shorty had two friends in Vung Tau, Nashville and Adams, and they had both been ruined. Why hadn’t he been there with Nashville at Le Boudin?
Shorty hadn’t come to Vietnam to drag good men down. He remembered believing he could help, but how exactly could he have helped? He supposed he had thought everyone should pull together to haul the world out of this war. But there was no war in Vung Tau, just drunks and whores and idiots like Shorty, and nogs who only wanted you for your money, if you were lucky. At least Betty was saving lives, so men could go back to Australia with no arms. Shorty didn’t deserve her.
In the ward, Betty changed the dressings on Adams’ shoulder. He bucked at her touch.
‘It should’ve been Shorty in the Land Rover,’ said Adams. ‘It should’ve been me rooting you.’
They must be able to smell it on me, thought Betty. Men know that smell: it’s them.
She felt Anderson had dried inside her.
Betty and Anderson worked the ward as if they were joined by a pole, never fewer than three beds apart. Betty couldn’t bear to look at him. She wished he’d wander into a minefield and blow off his face. And his penis. That was the only way she would ever touch him again: if he were paralysed and maimed, with nothing for a woman.
Why him? she thought. Oh God, why him?
Inside her belly, the spider laughed.
Shorty watched the guard on the nurses’ quarters, and saw he only worked to collect smiles. None of the sentries inside ALSG were alert. There was too much noise and too few threats. The bigger men and fools would have preferred to be out in the bush, chasing VC, than standing around like this, watching nothing change. Others counted every day as a reprieve. The guard waited for a corporal to come by and inspect him. They spoke a few words. A centipede marched over Shorty’s boot.
Once the corporal had checked the piquet, the guard went for a piss. Shorty slipped though the gap.
He had never been in Betty’s quarters, and was surprised she had floral curtains. She must have brought them from home. A jar of dried flowers sat on the bedside table, and the air smelled of potpourri and something else. It was the sort of hut that should have a name.
Betty kissed him, although she didn’t want him. When they brushed lips, she thought of Dr Clarke. Betty’s breath tasted of mint toothpaste. Her skin smelled of soap. Her hair was thickened by lilac shampoo and heavy conditioner. She had cleaned every part of her, and disguised her scent with sweet-smelling herbs. Shorty had grown used to the damp tang of her sweat in the tropics, which made her seem less separate from a man. He held his fiancée and imagined a soldier.
Shorty’s hands climbed up Betty’s leg.
Like a spider, she thought. Oh God, like the spider.
Shorty took off his pants. He was awkward, inevitably – it was how she’d known it would be – but he gazed at her with great tenderness. She hoped her eyes wore the same disguise.
She gave him her blouse. He looked for a place to hang it.
She took his hand and placed it inside her bra. He found her nipple and cupped it, tweaked it, tugged it – what on earth did he plan to do with it? He pressed it, as if it were an alarm button, then dropped to his knees and suckled like a child, her child. He was a foetus and already he had grown.
It’s too quick, thought Betty, too soon after the last one.
She could pretend it hadn’t happened, replace the memory of the night before with now. It had been Shorty in the medicine tent, Shorty she’d led inside her. Of course it had been. Who else could it have been? It was always going to be Shorty.
Shorty was ready, nervous, dutiful, excited.
She looked into his trusting eyes. And then she couldn’t do it.
I shouldn’t have looked, she thought. Because now she couldn’t do it.
‘Stop,’ she said, holding out her hand as if she were directing traffic. ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’