The next morning at dawn, Farrow, who had the last watch, noticed something in front of the fire, which by then had been reduced to just embers. He stood. From a few yards, it seemed to be a small animal. He moved closer and bent down. It was a dead rat.
‘Jesus!’
Bolt woke and joined Farrow. He poked the rat with his knife and flipped it over. There were claw marks around its neck. Bolt counted six indentations on both sides. A bite mark was evident at the base of the skull.
‘How’d it get here?’ Farrow asked. ‘Maybe those damned natives left it as a warning.’
‘Special delivery?’ Bolt said. ‘Doubt it. Had to be a cat.’
‘A very quiet one, for sure.’
‘Why drop it here?’
‘Can’t be a food offering, I don’t think,’ Bolt said.
‘Why not?’
‘I was here on a boat a few years back. They had a rat plague of some sort. The Dutch advertised for cats to be sent to the island. The cats killed them but would not devour them.’
Dawn uncovered the beachfront. A boat had found its way into the shallows and had been pushed onto the sand. There were seven bodies lying on the sand. Bolt aroused the others.
‘We’d better see if they are friend or foe,’ he said, sheathing his knife and strapping on the belt. ‘C’mon. Safety in numbers.’
The others followed him the few hundred yards back the way they had trekked during the night. They approached the men, some of whom were waking from their slumber.
The seven were Australians. Two were dead. They had died in the night on the beach. The boat had been holed by rocks and coral.
These men had fared far worse than the swimmers, except for Farrow. They had all experienced the sickening moments when exploding torpedoes had cruelly ended their lives as sailors and sunk their ‘home’. Those in the lifeboat had been on the water for about 30 hours and had endured exploding projectiles, until they were numb. In that time about eighteen vessels were sunk, not to mention the countless numbers of rafts, lifeboats and other vessels which had been reduced, in the main, to driftwood. Sleep had been impossible. They had spent far more time on the ocean, though not in it, than the swimmers. But the latter had kept their bodies moving.
The boat people needed rest. The heat of the day would soon sap what energy they had.
After some brief, hesitant introductions and near enough to a wordless ‘discussion’, Bolt suggested they move to the shade of the palm trees up the beach, where they could sleep more comfortably. Mosquitoes were already making their presence felt, feasting on a new batch of blood-bearers. The swimmers had been roughly protected by the viscous oil on them and then by sand in the night. But the boat people had no such luxury. They gestured to their lonely-looking boat, now in danger of floating back into the shallows and the ocean. There were mosquito nets and layers of canvas stored in it.
Bolt and the other swimmers pulled the boat away from the incoming tide. They brought the nets and canvas back to shore, along with small barrels of water, one of rum, a tin of kerosene, sandwiches, a bottle of Scotch, biscuits, tins of fruit and tins of bully beef. There were also four oars.
Bolt and the swimmers sat in silence while the others slumbered, snoring heavily. They watched, mosquito nets placed over all of them, as a Japanese destroyer sailed in concentric circles, stopping here and there to observe something in the ocean; perhaps a raft, or a battling swimmer. They were distracted a few times by the not-so-distant boom of artillery. Most depressing was the sight of a seemingly endless, slow-moving line of masts and funnels beyond the horizon.
‘Bloody Jap troopships,’ Farrow observed gloomily.
‘Yeah, probably,’ Bright agreed. ‘Not ours, for sure.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ Burroughs asked.
‘Well, for a start, our entire 8th Division has been captured. That’s a quarter of our force. The other three are in bloody North Africa or the damned Middle East fighting Jerry and the Ities, thanks to fucking Churchill.’
The discussion descended into an anti-Churchill diatribe about Gallipoli in World War I. Bolt brought them back to present dangers.
‘The ships mean Java will soon be thick with Japs, if it isn’t already,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to work out plans to get out of here.’
‘They’ll disembark at Priok, mostly, I reckon,’ Farrow said.
‘That’s only, what, 20 miles as the crow flies,’ Bright added.
The thought of the enemy’s close proximity sobered them to a silence only broken by the steady whine of an amphibious plane. Later they were alerted to bombers and fighters zooming above. No one could tell if they were Allies or enemy.
Four hours later each one of the boat people began to emerge from their slumber. First to stir was Pete ‘Sparky’ Tait, a 23-year-old ship’s electrician. The thin man of medium height looked around at the swimmers with a bewildered expression, and tried to stand. Bolt helped him to his feet.
‘Welcome, sailor,’ Bolt said, shaking hands. ‘You’ve had a rough night.’
‘Drink?’ he said, his voice husky; his throat parched.
‘Water?’ Farrow asked.
‘No, rum,’ Tait said. ‘It’s in the brown-coloured barrel.’
‘We’ve salvaged it from your boat.’
‘I’ll go with that,’ a second man, gunner Ollie Grout, said, running a rough hand over his bearded face. He was no more than twenty, and unlike most of the callow complexions of his fellow sailors at that age, he already had a weather-beaten look, helped along by endless surfing on Australia’s east coast beaches.
Farrow fetched the barrel in question. Soon all the boat people were sitting up, looking around with expressions that were variously stunned, perplexed and confused. Some spoke in brief staccato bursts of horrific nightmares; others mentioned peaceful dreams of death at sea. Mostly they remained silent, trying to make sense of their experiences. They began to feel the heat as the sun moved higher. It was 10 a.m. and already 85 degrees Fahrenheit.
When Bolt judged that some were in a coherent state of mind, he broached the subject of burying the dead close to the palm trees. The others mumbled their agreement and the grisly task was undertaken.
The Japanese sailor whom Bolt had encountered was also dragged to the shallow grave they had scooped out of the deep sand.
‘You’re not putting that cunt in there with our blokes,’ a tall, beefy blond-haired able seaman, Bob Nadler, said. The 6-foot-3-inch 33-year-old had an off-centre, flattened nose that had been on the end of too many bar brawls in his native Sydney. His thick eyebrows gave him a menacing look, even if he was amused, usually by something cruel said about others.
‘Then would you like to dig another grave for him?’ Bolt asked.
‘You cheeky fuck!’ Nadler said. ‘Who do you think you are?’
‘He’s an officer from our ship,’ Bright said, ‘as if you didn’t know.’
‘He’s nobody out here, mate,’ Warwick Oscar Wallis, 35, said. He was a thuggish-looking 6-footer with thinning hair brushed back. Wallis was another with a reputation as a brawler and was said to have disabled a man in a bar fight in Perth. He had a distinct, incurable dislike for authority of any kind.
‘He’s the officer out here too,’ Bright said, and earned dark looks from Wallis and Nadler. He added defiantly: ‘What he says, goes. And it should for all of us.’
‘All officers are the same,’ Gil Haget, a chunky, 30-year-old West Australian with spectacles strapped to his head, remarked with ambiguity, ‘wherever they are.’ There may have been more disdain than respect in the comment.
He did not make eye contact with Bolt but instead touched a scar that ran from his left ear to his neck. It was inflamed from the oil, which he kept trying to wipe off. His bulbous nose also had a small scar, which he’d received from flying debris on Perth.
Burroughs diffused the potential hostility by pointing at the bodies and saying, ‘They’re all God’s children. It doesn’t matter if we bury ’em together.’
‘Who asked you, Yank?’ Nadler said, turning aggressively to the American.
‘Let’s take a vote on it,’ Bolt suggested.
He asked for a show of hands. Four were fine with the Japanese sailor going in with the Australians. Five were not.
‘That decides it,’ Bolt said, and began to use his knife to create a second grave a few yards from the first one. Burroughs fell to his knees and helped, followed by Farrow and Bright. The others wandered off inland to look for food, despite having access to the water and food from their holed lifeboat, which they disdained apart from the rum.
‘Be careful,’ Bolt said, ‘the locals have machetes. They were ready to use them last night.’
Nadler gave him the middle-finger salute and moved off.
‘Noted, sailor,’ Bolt said, ‘noted. Just meet us back here in a couple of hours.’
Nadler ignored him.
Burroughs shook his head and smiled.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ Bolt said, ‘all ships have their bully-boys. He was ours. So’s his mate, Wallis. Thick, and thick as thieves. Always in trouble at every port.’
‘You’d think, at this moment …’ Burroughs began.
‘There’d be more of an attempt at unity? Not blokes like that. We’re just unfortunate to be marooned with two or three of the worst types on Perth. We don’t have many pricks, but they’re up there.’
‘Prick?’
‘Yeah, you’d say “asshole”.’
‘Okay, gotcha,’ Burroughs said with a laugh. ‘But I never use the word. My mammy taught me not to cuss.’
‘You have better manners than me, Edgar. Wallis is more an arsehole than you know. I’m told he has “W” tattooed on each buttock. His initials are WOW. He likes to bend over and show his mates in the locker-room. Get it?’
‘Oh, I do, I do,’ Burroughs said with a mock shake of his head.
‘Nadler isn’t so smart. He has a tattoo of his girlfriend on his calf and one of his mother under it. The word ‘Mum’ is written between the two small tats. It’s hard to work out which is his mother, and which is his girlfriend. No one has been brave enough to ridicule him about it. He is very sensitive about his own stupidity.’
The four men finished the burial job and fashioned two rough crosses from tree branches and bush twine.
Burroughs said a prayer over the two graves. The four men then visited the freshwater stream and washed more of the stinking oil off their bodies.
‘Let’s see where this goes,’ Bolt said, leading the way through the scrub and down a slope towards the ocean. They found two wooden outrigger canoes tied to tree stumps. They were about 16 feet long and 4 feet wide. The men examined the boats, with their upturned bow and stern. They contained two parangs, fishing rods, two paddles, a sail that could be raised quickly, and canvas rain covers.
‘Well kept,’ Farrow observed. ‘Must be owned by local villagers.’
‘Made by them too,’ Bright said. ‘Never seen such unique designs.’ He examined a small platform extending from the stern, which held a wooden bucket.
Bolt climbed into one of the canoes. ‘One wouldn’t hold more than four of us,’ he said, sitting on one of two cross-benches, and inspecting one of two paddles.
‘Won’t make it to Australia,’ Bright said.
‘Wouldn’t get us even around the south of Java,’ Farrow opined.
‘We’d need a couple like that but a bit bigger and sturdier to take all of us,’ Bolt said.
They made their way back towards the meeting point under the palms near the graves, sobered by the thought they’d yet to find an escape vessel suitable for an attempt to make it down a chain of islands to Australia.
They were nearly at the graves when Bolt and Farrow were distracted by something in the bushes. It looked like a wild cat.
‘Do you see that?’ Farrow exclaimed. ‘A black cat.’
They moved closer.
‘It’s not black,’ Bolt said, ‘that’s oil. It’s been in the water too.’
‘He must be the one who left us the rat offering.’
The cat backed away.
‘Red Lead?’ Bolt said, with an upward inflection rather than confidence.
The cat stopped, sat and meowed.
‘Fuck me!’ Bright mumbled. ‘Is it?’
He blundered in the cat’s direction. It skipped away and was soon out of sight.
‘If it’s her,’ Bolt said, ‘she won’t go far.’
They arrived back at the graves. A plump, grey-winged bird, about half the size of a chicken, had been placed between the two crosses. It had also been killed, not eaten. The same distinctive six claw imprints were either side of its neck where it met the bird’s torso. Burroughs prodded it with a stick.
‘Neck’s broken,’ he said.
‘What do think, sir?’ Bright asked. ‘Red Lead again?’
‘It’s her specialty; I mean the broken neck. Maybe it is her. But this is a food offering. It could be cooked.’
‘How did she …’
‘Get here? She’s a terrific swimmer,’ Bolt said with a smile.
‘But not that good.’
‘No,’ Bolt chortled. ‘That skiff we saw; she probably made it on that. Wonder if Bob Collins made it too? Maybe he was with her on it.’
The four men broke open some coconuts. Burroughs, acting as the chef, roasted the bird, and volunteered to sample it first.
‘Not bad!’ Bright said. ‘You’re a good cook!’
‘That’s what starving men always say,’ Burroughs said with a bow.