Next morning Steve left on his first routine flight, his first general visit to the people who were at all times his possible patients. Covici held monthly clinics at certain stations and settlements, and people with minor ailments and those with problems they did not want to discuss over the air came in to these clinics to see him. Jack Tristram went with Steve and Billy, but Charlie Pinjarra stayed behind – “I get a little bit sick in aeroplanes, Steve. Don’t help me none just because there’s a doctor along.” He smiled, like a child. “I get little bit sick on camels, too. Bloody weak stomach, Doc Covici said me trouble was.”
The plane landed at several stations and while the station stockboys unloaded the mail and supplies, Steve met the owner or manager and his family. They all gave him a friendly welcome, but he could not get over the feeling that they were all reserving judgment on him. It was as if at each station where they landed, the shadow of Keating got out of the plane with him. In the past few weeks his life had become crowded with ghosts and shadows: he wondered what Charlie Pinjarra, who could smell the death-wind, could make of a world peopled by spirits and shadows.
They landed at Nymagee Station and met Ron Fogarty and his wife, who turned out to be the pregnant woman Steve had heard on the radio “galah session.” She was a massive woman: you would have had to look twice to notice her pregnancy. “I’ve had six already, Doctor, but it’s nice to know you’ll be on hand.” She stood with her arm round the shoulders of her husband, a man who resembled a rake: long and thin and with a gap-toothed smile. “My hubby delivered the first one – and spent the next three days in bed. I hadda get up and nurse him.” And she gave her husband a hug that almost snapped him in two.
The plane had just left Nymagee when Sid Price called from Winnemincka: there were two emergency calls. A Japanese pearl diver had been landed at Crocodile River Mission suffering from diver’s paralysis, and the son of the manager of Mount William Station was ill with suspected appendicitis.
Steve leaned forward in the cockpit, trying to catch the voice against the crackle of static. This was something he had been hoping would not confront him: diagnosis from a distance and a decision to be made without seeing the patient.
Both voices that spoke to him were calm: Mother Maria at Crocodile River and Mrs. Nevin at Mount William had faced this sort of situation before: Steve envied them their calmness and their experience. When they had finished he said, “I’ll come to Crocodile River first. The boy’s symptoms don’t sound too urgent just yet. I’ll call in at Mount William on my way back. Over and out.”
He sat back and Tristram bellowed in his ear, “You ever treated anyone for the bends?”
Steve shook his head. “Who’d get the bends down in Sydney?”
Tristram grinned, almost losing his teeth, and slapped him on the back. “Just what your old man would of said!”
Half an hour later Billy put the plane down at Crocodile River Mission. The river ran into the sea between high red cliffs; the mission station stood on a small beach at its very mouth. The air strip was two miles up the coast, and the plane was met by a small utility truck driven by a young nun.
“I hate coming here,” said Billy. “I’m always afraid I’m going to say something a bit off-colour.”
“You do,” said Tristram, “and I’ll knock you—block off. And now that’s the last swear word till we leave here.”
The young nun drove them into the mission, laughing and joking, handling the truck on its rough track with all the skill of a hill-climb expert. “Oh, damn I” she said on one occasion, stalling the truck as they crossed a small stream, and at once apologised to the three men.
“It’s all right, Sister,” said Tristram, looking like Buster Keaton. “It’s a word I sometimes use myself.”
“I’ll bet,” said the young nun, equally straight-faced; and Billy almost fell out of the truck laughing.
The mission was tucked in beneath the high red cliffs. Steve’s first impression was of a blaze of colour: the bright red cliffs, the green pandanus palms along the river bank, the white sand and the white rammed-earth buildings, and the large cross in the centre of the compound which glittered and flashed as if it were faced with precious stones.
“Our blacks built it,” said the young nun. “It’s just broken pieces of bottle.” She blushed. “Most of it beer bottles from Winnemincka. My goodness, you must drink a lot down there!”
“Never touch it,” said Tristram, face set like a mask.
The truck pulled up and the men got down to be met by the Mother Superior, Mother Maria. She was an elderly woman, but Steve would not guess at her age: nuns, to him, somehow seemed ageless after they had lost the early bloom of youth. But when she said she had been here at Crocodile River for forty years, he knew she must be in her sixties. She was German, and her accent was still thick: she met no more English-speaking people here than she would have met in Heidelberg forty years before.
She led the way across to a small hut, its walls of whitewashed rammed-earth and its roof of thatched paper-bark. The inside of the hut was simplicity itself: a crushed shingle floor, a bed, a chair, and a crucifix hung on one wall: Steve later learned that this was home, the one retreat into privacy for the young nun who had brought them in in the truck.
A young muscular Japanese, stripped to the waist and covered by a blanket, lay on the bed. Beside him was an old Japanese, burnt the colour of bark, a nimbus of grey hair across the top of his wrinkled skull.
“Where’s the rest of the lugger’s crew?” Steve asked.
“I had to ask their captain to take the lugger out,” said Mother Maria. “His men were making a nuisance of themselves with my girls. We have fifty young black girls here.”
Steve said nothing. The girls’ virtue meant as much to this nun as did the life of this young Japanese’ on the bed. He turned to the old Japanese, but the latter shrugged hopelessly and intimated that he did not speak English. Tristram and Billy had come into the hut and Tristram was looking at the man on the bed.
“He looks bad to me, Steve. I don’t reckon they’ve even staged him. Just left him here to die.”
“I had to send them away.” Mother Maria’s hands moved nervously in the folds of her habit; the faded blue eyes clouded with worry. “I had to think of the girls—”
“It’s all right, Mother,” Steve said, but he knew the nun would recognise his comfort as a lie. He looked down again at the young Japanese, at the muscles in the upper torso contracted in paralysis, the darkened face and the eyes that bulged sightlessly. The pulse rate was low, and he had the feeling that once again he had arrived too late. He turned to Tristram. “Do you know anything about staging?”
Tristram shook his head. “Only what I’ve heard ’em talk about. You gotta take him down and let the pressure do its job. I seen a coupla diving helmets outside—” He hesitated. “I’d go down with him, Steve, only I can’t swim. But that’s what he needs all right, to be staged. Otherwise he ain’t gunna last.”
“I’ll take him down,” Billy said.
But Steve shook his head. “I’ll go down with him. Evidently his mate can’t swim, otherwise he would have taken him down.”
“The captain left two diving-suits and some equipment,” Mother Maria said. “He said something about bad luck – his English was bad, also. He said the old man should go down with this poor fellow. But he hasn’t moved since the lugger went out, just sat there. Praying, perhaps,” she said, and looked down at the old Japanese as if wondering what sort of prayers he might know different from her own.
Steve went out of the hut and the old nun followed him. “You are worried, Doctor?”
“Yes.” He looked at her, and recognised a woman who had received many confidences and had taken advantage of none of them. “And afraid, too.”
Mother Maria shrugged, a gesture almost lost in the loose folds of her habit. Against the stiff whiteness of her coif, her sun-browned face had the angularity of a wooden mask: only the pale blue eyes, faded, as Tristram’s were, by too many years of too-bright sun, were alive. “I cannot help you, Doctor. I, too, am afraid—” She looked back at the hut; a brown hand, gnarled and calloused as an old labourer’s, fingered the beads at her waist. Her voice was now more Germanic, guttural with concern. “Afraid that I should not have sent the other men away.”
He tried to console her: the irony of it struck him even then: he, the sinner and afraid, comforting the woman whose life was dedicated to the consolation of others. “They couldn’t have needed much persuasion, Mother. Decent men wouldn’t have deserted this man so readily – they must have wanted to go—”
“That does not excuse me.” She looked about the mission station, as if seeking some excuse in her surroundings, but finding none. After forty years here she could still look with a stranger’s eye on what she saw: often the pandanus palms would turn into the dark pines of home. At the end of the beach a group of aboriginal children sat round a young nun: a garble of words floated on the quiet air, a phrase occasionally shooting clear and high, to linger in a sudden momentary silence, as if the children had stopped in amazement to listen to what their primitive tongues had said: forgive us our trespasses … “One can be too long in a place such as this. The security lulls one – everything is taken so much for granted—”
The security: living in austerity on the edge of the wilderness, death always only a prayer’s-length away. Steve turned away, shamed by the old nun’s humility. He considered his own security, and for the first time saw clearly that all its terms were materialistic. He was honest enough not to beat his breast in false shame; an over-emotional man might have condemned himself on the spot. He knew that, logically, life, as he knew it and lived it, could not avoid certain terms of materialism, the old nun had escaped, as much as turned her back on, the demands of a society based on materialistic factors. Keeping up with the Joneses meant nothing here: the Joneses hadn’t come to live in the wilderness; keeping up appearances was exposed out here for the sham façade that it was: the silk shirt and the new suit added nothing to the character of the man. But sham or otherwise, such factors conditioned a man’s life in the city if he was to conform. And, Steve realised now with something of a shock, he had always been a conformist, even if he had liked to think of himself as an individualist. He turned back to the old nun, hurt by the worry in the faded old eyes. “It’s a common human fault, Mother – almost a disease. Taking things for granted, I mean. I’ve been guilty of it all my life.” He stared at her, smiling wryly, tasting the salt of his own sudden humility. “And I haven’t your security.”
She saw the wryness of his smile: she was not blind to irony. She smiled, too, the wooden mask crumbling into the soft wrinkled countenance that is the map of an old Woman’s life: she had not forgotten that humour, as well as prayer, is a help.
Then Tristram came to the door of the hut. “What do we do, Steve?”
“We’ll take him out to the lugger,” Steve said, pointing off shore; then he looked back at Mother Maria. He felt a strength he had not suspected: it was as if he had absorbed some of the indomitable will of the old woman: he had tasted of forty years’ endurance of the wilderness. “We’ll save him, if it’s at all possible.”
The mission had a small boat that was used for fishing and had once been used for pearling. This coast was littered with these sort of boats; fifty years ago fleets of pearlers had patrolled these shores. Billy supervised several of the mission’s young blacks as they carried the helmets, diving-suits and the three-cylinder pump out to the boat; Steve,Tristram and the old Japanese put the young man on a rough stretcher and took him out by dinghy to the boat. Mother Maria and her five nuns, backed by the blacks belonging to the mission, stood on the beach as the dinghy went out through the gentle surf.
“We shall pray for you, Doctor,” Mother Maria said. “We shall stay here on the beach till you come in.” She looked down at the young Japanese. “Perhaps I should not have sent them away. One never knows – I prayed to God for guidance—”
“Just pray for help this time,” Steve said, not unkindly, and pushed the dinghy out into the water. Tristram sat in the prow, his teeth out now and his mouth clamped tight: he was to tell Steve later that this was his working order. The old Japanese, showing surprising strength, took the oars and sculled them out to the boat. Steve sat in the stern, a knot of fear tangling inside him as he thought of what he had taken on.
The old Japanese knew his trade. Still silent but working now with quick purpose, he dressed the paralysed young man in one of the diving-suits, meanwhile indicating that Steve should dress in the same way. The lugger captain, whoever he was and wherever he was now, had at least provided everything he could; but Steve was puzzled why, with the shortage of divers, this boy should have been left to die by his mates.
Steve drew on the thick woollen undersuit, wound the flannel strip round his waist, and pulled on the thick socks. He saw the old Japanese slick soap over the hands and wrists of the young man; and he did the same to his own. Tristram helped him into the canvas suit; then stepped into the twenty-pound boots and Tristram buckled their straps. The heavy metal corselet was fitted over his shoulders, the broad leather belt buckled on and the lifeline rope tied round his middle. He pulled on the woollen diver’s cap, and checked the knife in its round brass sheath at his waist. Then he stood up and plodded heavily across to the side of the boat.
The men had worked in silence. The water lapped gently against the sides of the boat, and an occasional gull came in close with a soft swish-swish of its wings. The sea was calm and the light, perpendicular now, struck its surface in a blinding glare. Steve stood at the side of the boat, his eyes narrowed against the glare, and looked back at the beach. He could see the white habits of the nuns and behind them the darker figures of the blacks. In the bright glare all the figures seemed somehow foreshortened; then he realised with a shock that the whole mission was kneeling in prayer. He did something he had not done in years, crossed his forehead with the ball of his thumb, then swung over the side and went down the ladder.
He paused when his chest was level with the gunwale, and Tristram tied the forty-pound weights on the corselet. Then the old Japanese brought the helmet, fitted it over Steve’s head and screwed it on. Then in pantomime he showed Steve how to work the valve on the air-hose. He demonstrated that three quick jerks on the lifeline rope meant danger and that he would be hauled to the surface as quick as he and the young Japanese could be brought up. Steve nodded his understanding, not trusting himself to speak. He was now more scared than he had ever been in his life before, more scared even than when the shark had attacked him as a boy.
The young Japanese, now looking dead, was lowered over the side on another ladder, his helmet screwed on, the face-glass screwed in and his air turned on. The pump at the back of the boat began to thump, and Steve felt the air, rubber-smelling and warm, coming into his own helmet. The old Japanese fitted the face-glass and prepared to tighten its screws. He looked at Steve, then across at the young Japanese, held on the ladder by Tristram and two of the blacks. Then he said the only English word he had uttered since Steve and the others had met him half an hour before.
“Son,” he said, and when he looked back at Steve there were tears in the black, cataract-dimmed eyes.
He screwed in the face-glass and Steve had a sudden moment of panic. He raised a hand to smash at the glass, to yell that he was afraid and couldn’t go through with it; but he was too late. Tristram waved to him, then he and the two blacks pushed the young Japanese off the ladder. Steve felt the sharp ring of the old Japanese’s fist against his helmet; then he had gone backwards off the ladder and was going down.
He saw the boat diminishing in size and solidity above him. He looked directly up into the sun, saw it turn from gold to green-gold to green; then a cloud of fish went across it and it was gone. He felt the pressure in his ears, felt the suit grip him, and again the panic fled through him. Then his feet struck something that gave a little, he sank to his knees, and he found he was on the bottom. He fumbled at the valve, seeking more air, then straightened up, trying to still his nerves. He looked about, saw the young Japanese standing stiffly like some grotesque dead knight in his armour, and moved towards him. He gave a single jerk on the lifeline to let those above know he was all right. He found the valve on the other man’s air-hose, adjusted it, and settled down for the long wait.
He knew that it was going to be a long wait and that the whole task would be one of simple trial and error. He had to find the right undersea pressure at which the paralysed diver would begin to find relief, and he would know that only when the patient’s face began to show relief through the dim face-glass. He searched his memory for some experience that might help him now, but all he could remember, and that only dimly, was an article in a medical journal he had read four or five years before.
He looked about him, getting his bearings should they have to move. They stood on the edge of a deep shelf that dropped abruptly away to their right. Behind him was a small clump of sea-trees, moving gently with the tide, as if bowing like land-trees to the sway of the breeze. He was amazed at the colour he saw about him. He had read that the undersea world had its colour, but he had never imagined it to be as brilliant as this. A garden of coral grew among some rocks; a parrot-fish moved amongst the red, lemon and blue coral, like a brightly-plumed bird seeking insects amongst flowers. A huge clam lay at the edge of the shelf, bleeding green flesh; beyond it a sea-slug, a bright red concertina, inched its way across the sea-floor. There was no sound but that of the air pumping into his helmet, almost like a magnified beat of his own heart. He was aware that his heart was still beating rapidly, but it appeared to be slowing gradually. He was still scared, but he was getting his nerves under control.
A school of bright blue fish streamed past him, pursued by a larger fish; the blue fish swung back and went between him and the young Japanese, passing across his face-glass like a blue scarf whipped by a strong wind. He opened the spitcock on his helmet and blew a mouthful of water over his face-glass, which had begun to mist up from his breath. Then he looked again at the black dead face showing through the other glass only inches from his own. The Japanese was not responding to the pressure at this depth.
Slowly, clumsily and yet with hardly any sense of weight, he dragged the paralysed diver towards the edge of the shelf. He jerked on the lifeline rope, hoping the men above would understand what he was about to do; then, holding the Japanese by the arm, as if going out for a morning walk with a corpse, he stepped off the edge of the shelf. The two men went down, falling slowly through the water and a school of black-and-white Moorish Idols, like slow-motion paratroopers falling through a bright barrage of flak. Steve felt coral crunch beneath his boots and he braced himself, bringing the Japanese gently to rest beside him. The pressure had increased and he opened his own and the Japanese’s valve a little more. He swallowed hard, easing the pressure in his ears, then the increased air began to bring relief.
The shelf towered above them, a small cliff faced with coral: pink-tipped staghorn coral, a heliotrope fan of coral, brain coral that looked like the mass waste of an anatomy class. They stood in a field of bright-green sea-grass; a coral snake, poisonous as any on land, slid away from beneath the Japanese’s heavy boot. A boulder, half-buried in the sand, split open and turned into a huge clam; Steve felt the sweat break out on his face as he realised he could have stepped into the great mouth and been trapped. Again he had a rush of panic and again he tried to steady himself.
He turned to the paralysed man beside him. The two figures stood there in the green shadow of the steep shelf, their helmets only inches from each other, like bloated comical knights each waiting for the other to make the first move. Steve, keeping his glass clear with occasional spits of water, stared into the glass immediately before him, at the stranger’s face with its bulging sightless eyes and its almost black complexion. Then while he stared he saw the complexion slowly begin to lighten; turning grey, then grey-yellow, then the yellow turning to brown. The eyes began to lose their goitre-like bulge; the lids blinked once and tears formed in the corners. Carefully Steve manipulated the valve: pain flashed across the man’s face, and he turned the valve back.
There was no way of knowing how long they had been down. This was the real timeless land: the tides were the slow tick of eternity. There was no loneliness like this, no silence like this: it was a tomb in which only the mind, with its dancing devil of fear, was alive. Somewhere down here was the beginning of everything.
The face in the other glass suddenly twitched and the black eyes focused for an instant. Steve kept his fingers on the other’s valve; it was almost as if he were breathing for the paralysed man. The black lips opened slightly, the eyes closed and then opened abruptly. They stared straight into Steve’s, bewildered and frightened; they were scummed with another stab of pain. Steve turned the valve, opened it too far and turned it back. The look of pain eased on the Japanese’s face.
Steve felt cold and he wondered just how long a man could stay down below. He knew that some Japanese and Malay divers could stay down for hours; he also knew that white men did not have their endurance. He had no feeling of cramp, but at times the suit seemed too small for him: he knew it was a feeling of claustrophobia rather than a building-up of pressure from outside, and he tried not to think about it. He tried to think of many things, of Rona, Kate, his father; but the water was in his brain and all he could think of was death.
The paralysed diver slowly improved. The darkness went out of his face and the pain from his eyes. Once he smiled at Steve, lifting a hand to take Steve’s: they shook hands at the bottom of the sea, like strangers in a green desert. At last Steve motioned upwards and the Japanese nodded within his helmet. Steve jerked on the two lines and slowly they were hauled up. When they were level with the top of the shelf he jerked on the lines again, and they settled slowly once more on the ledge.
Steve adjusted both valves, watching closely for the look of relief that would cross the Japanese’s face. The man’s face was tight, then slowly it eased; the pressure was right, and Steve took his fingers from the valve. He turned round, sensing rather than seeing the shadow that had passed over them, and saw the shark coming back.
He stood without moving, for the first time aware of the weight of the boots he wore, as paralysed as the man beside him had been He felt something twitch in his thigh, almost as if the scar there were splitting open; he felt the teeth of long ago scrape against him again, and he cried out in terror. Then he saw the man beside him lift both hands, one clutching at the other wrist; a slow explosion of bubbles flew out from the wrist of the Japanese’s suit, and the shark swung away as if it had run into a bursting grenade. It went by over Steve’s shoulder, a huge grey shape that scraped against his helmet, and on up into the sun-misted water above them. Steve let out a great breath of air: his glass fogged up from it and the steam of the thick sweat on his face. He opened the spitcock, took in a mouthful of water and cleared the glass. The Japanese, his glass only an inch from Steve’s, was smiling encouragement to him.
The shark did not come back, but once a giant groper swam dangerously close. The sea above grew greener as the sun dropped lower; the coral garden lost its colour as the darkness crept down. Slowly, agonisingly slowly, the two men floated up through the sea: pressure was altered, was grown accustomed to, another stage was attempted and completed. The water grew increasingly lighter: a school of small fish blew over them like a gust of silver leaves: a gull came down, big as an eagle against the light. Then they had come through the surface, were staring directly into the sun, and hands were reaching down to help. Tristram swung open the face-glass of Steve’s helmet, and the blessed sounds of the world rushed in: the lap of the water, the screech of a gull, the creak of the boat, the stuttering click of Tristram’s teeth.
“Oh, you bloody beaut, Steve! Stone the bloody crows, you bloody beaut! Your old man would of been bloody proud of you! Oh, you bloody beaut!”
The young Japanese had been put on a stretcher and loaded into the back of the truck along with the diving-suits and the pump. The young nun was waiting to drive Steve and the others back to the air-strip. Mother Maria and the old Japanese followed the men down to the truck.
In the slanting light of the sun the big cross blazed with colour: the breweries made their involuntary offering to the Lord. From the vegetable garden behind the beach there came a snatch of song: a hymn greeted each sweet potato as it was dug from the earth. The roof of the mission chapel, tiles made of kerosene tins beaten flat, blazed like silver in the low sun. The file of nuns, their shadows long on the sand, went into the chapel, and Mother Maria said in her heavy German: “We shall say a novena for you, Doctor. May God protect you.”
She stood there in her white habit, the bottom of it dark with dust and her black boots showing below it also dusty. The light struck slantwise across her face, and Steve could see now that she was older than he had thought: seventy, at least. She had come here to the end of the world forty years ago and she would die here; and she was going to say a novena for him. He had no words to answer her: he just raised his hand and climbed into the truck behind the others. They drove slowly down the beach, and even Tristram was silent. Steve, looking back, saw the gaunt white figure of the old nun, carved by the light as if out of white wood. Then the white figure merged into the white buildings of the mission behind it; then that, too, was gone and there was nothing but the brilliant flat light. The truck turned right and went into a screen of pandanus palms.
They put the two Japanese aboard the plane, said good-bye to the young nun, and took off for Mount William. Billy radioed in to Winnemincka that they were on their way, but got no distinct answer. The reception was bad, and no matter how Billy tried all he could get was the frustrating crackle of static.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Even if they didn’t get us clearly, they’d know we’re on our way somewhere. We’ll pick up the Nevin kid and we’ll be home just on dark. I could go a beer. How about you, Jack? Or are you still not drinking?”
“Never told so many lies in me life,” Tristram said. “Maybe the nuns don’t know it, but they encourage you to sin. Who could ever look a nun like that young one in the face and tell her you’ve been blind drunk for a week on end?” Then he looked at Steve. “How do you feel now, mate?”
Mate: it was the first time he had called Steve that. “Still a bit shaky. I think I’ll have some of Covici’s Scotch when we get back. My nerves need more than beer.”
Tristram nodded back at the Japanese father and son in the rear of the plane, and they both smiled at him. “I wonder if they only drink sake?”
“We’ll try ’em on beer,” said Billy. “To-night calls for some sort of celebration.”
Then they were coming in over the flat-topped mountains and swinging down over a long brown-green savannah. The strip was ahead of them, dust blowing thinly down it, its wind-sock swinging like a white sausage at the top of its crude pole, and the Landrover waiting with the small figure of the man beside it. Billy put the plane down without a bump, brought it back along the strip and switched off the engines. Steve opened the door and jumped down as the man, dressed in faded blue stockman’s rig, his face shadowed beneath a wide-brimmed hat, came forward.
“Mr. Nevin? I’m Dr. McCabe. How’s your boy?”
“Didn’t you get the message on the wireless?” the man said. “Colin died an hour ago.”
“I used to think I was good,” Steve said. “When I left the university I was top boy – a brilliant prospect, they called me. But everything has been made easy for me – now I come to think of it, even the patients seemed to be obliging! At any rate they always took ill conveniently close to a hospital!” He took a long drink of Covici’s Scotch: it was good Scotch, but he had got past appreciating it. “But out here – out here I fumble around like a bloody fourth-year student!”
“You’ll have to work it out yourself, son,” Tristram said. “This kid didn’t die because you’re a poor doctor. You said yourself they gave you no urgent symptoms over the wireless. Pete Nevin himself agrees on that – he’s not blaming you, see what I mean. Oh, his missus went off her head a bit, but any woman would – it’s their only kid. She will simmer down.” He sipped his beer, and opened another button on his shirt: the thick hair on his chest was black with sweat: he looked as if he carried an animal within his shirt, a wet platypus. “It’s just like you said, son – you always had it too easy. You haven’t got used to the idea that now and again a man must fail.”
They had landed back at Winnemincka an hour before. The young Japanese had been put into hospital, and a bed found for his father on the hospital veranda. A radio call had gone out for the pearling lugger and it was expected in the day after tomorrow to pick up the men. The whole town knew of the arrival of the Japanese; it also knew of the death of Colin Nevin. In the old days when pearling had been booming, Japanese and other Asiatics had formed more than half the population of the town; then during the war the Japanese had bombed the town, coming out of a peaceful bright morning and flying low up and down the wide street, strafing the townspeople as they fled in panic; and now this old man and his son were the first Japanese to come into the town since that day of horror. The town this evening was ominously quiet, and Steve could not tell if it was a judgment of the two Japanese or of himself.
Charlie Pinjarra, drinking lemonade, said, “I bin talking to the old bloke. He don’t speak English, but he talks a little bit pidgin. That young feller, he’s bad luck. That’s bin why the other fellers put him ashore and left him. Two, three times he sailed with that lugger, two, three times something happen to him. Those Japs, they’re just like us blacks. When you got bad luck, get rid of it.”
“How do you do that?” Steve said, and got up and began to move about the room. “I’m loaded with bad luck. Whom do I get rid of – myself?”
A beetle crashed against the light and fell to the table stunned. Tristram casually brushed it to the floor. Beyond the windows, out at sea, lightning swept across the sky: out there it was raining, but the Wet would not be here for another month. Then the beetles and the other insects would invade the houses in droves. The books and all the leather in the house would become mildewed, and the mosquitoes, thick enough already, would come in in black clouds from the mangrove swamps off shore. Tristram and Charlie would be inland on a cattle station, another doctor would be here in Winnemincka, and Steve himself would be back in Sydney, his only bad luck no worse than the monthly visit of Mrs. Crepello.
“I’m wiring Covici tomorrow,” Steve said, and put down his empty glass. He reached for the bottle of Scotch, then changed his mind: this was how men went downhill in the tropics in the old Maugham books. Times had changed, he had read; in the tropics now it was the natives, newly independent, who had taken to drink. “Tell him to get a man up here as soon as he can. This week, preferably.”
Then the screen-door on the veranda banged and Kate was standing in the doorway, a big cardboard box under her arm and her face flushed with excitement. “The mail came in this afternoon. There was this box for me – Oh, Jack, you shouldn’t have!” She was opening the box, scattering tissue paper about the room. She was like a child who had just received her first birthday present: she stood on the threshold of a new world. She held up the dress, deep blue, almost purple in the shoddy light: a jewelled claw winked on one shoulder. “But how did you guess the right size?”
“Had the time of me life.” Tristram was on his feet, his teeth clicking: he was glad Kate had come, as much for the happiness on her face as for the interruption she had provided. “Had every girl in the store paraded past me – just like being at the bloodstock sales – and I picked out the one most like you. They asked me embarrassing questions, said didn’t I know your exact measurements, but I told ’em I had a good eye—”
“Oh, you have! I tried it on – it fits perfectly!” She held the dress up against her, looking at all three of them for approval. My God, Steve thought, this must be the first evening dress she has ever owned; and he remembered the entire closet given over to Rona’s evening dresss, the Dior, Balmain, Connolly gowns she took for granted, as if they were no more than the Mother Hubbards he had seen on the mission girls this afternoon. Almost as if she had read his thoughts Kate said, “This is the first evening dress I’ve ever had. I suppose a girl down south would have something wrong with her if she hadn’t had an evening dress by the time she was my age?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he lied. “I’ve never taken much interest in women’s dresses.” And saw what looked to be disappointment cloud her face: “But I like that. You should look beautiful in it.”
“Oh, I will!” She twirled round, spinning the dress out from her. “It’s a real Dior! I’ll be the belle of the ball!”
“Who’s taking you?” Tristram said.
“Why, you are! Who else?”
Tristram shook his head. “Not me, Kate. I can’t dance, and besides I was thinking I might get on the beer that night. Ah no, you want a younger bloke, you know what I mean. I wouldn’t do credit to that dress—” He trailed off, his eyes straying to Steve and back to Kate.
She didn’t miss the hint, nor was she embarrassed by it. “Has anyone asked you yet, Steve?”
He was startled by her directness. “Do you mean the women up here ask the men?”
“They do, if they’re choosy.” There was a suggestion of a smile at the corners of her mouth, but she was earnest about the matter. “I know Grace Hudson and Scotty have got their eyes on you. Would you like to take me?” Then her confidence went: she was the young girl again: “I–I’ll pay for the tickets.”
“Would you honour me as my partner to the Race Ball?” said Steve in his most formal manner; he was a little drunk, but he did his best not to let it show. “I’ll pay for the tickets.”
“Oh, yes, I’ll go, of course!” She laughed, then was abruptly sober; he marvelled that anyone could change their moods so quickly. “You want to go, don’t you? I mean, you’re not doing me a favour—”
“I’d knock his block off if he went about it that way,” said Tristram.
“I’ll go out and get the tribe,” said Charlie, grinning. “You might need a little bit help, Jack.”
“I’m not doing you a favour,” Steve said quietly. “You’ll be doing me the favour if you go with me.”
“Me? But why—?” She looked puzzled: she knew there was more behind his words than mere flattery.
It was Tristram who explained things bluntly: “Kate, how does the town feel about Steve? I mean, about the Japs being brought in here. And young Colin Nevin dying like he did.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Jack!” Steve turned away in embarrassment and anger. He was not used to having his problems aired this way: in the past he had carried them with him, concealed like obscene postcards: Goodyear, nor even Rona, had never known of the overdraft at the bank, the girl he had gone with in his third year at medical school who had thought she was pregnant.
“Take it easy, son,” Tristram said. “We’re only trying to help you.”
“I haven’t talked to anyone,” Kate said. “Except Sid Price. He said the men down at the pubs were more concerned about the Japs than they were about young Colin.”
“Are they getting nasty?” Steve stood with his hands jammed into his trouser-pockets: a hand closed tightly on the aboriginal charm, and its sharp beak cut into his flesh.
“I don’t know.” Kate stood with the dress held against her middle, forgotten. She slapped at a mosquito on her bare arm, but without taking her eyes from Steve’s face. “It’s not just the townspeople. There are shearers and meatworkers – they’ve got nothing to do at night except talk and get drunk—”
“Which pub is the main one?”
“The Coach and Horses,” said Tristram. “Why?”
“I’m going down there,” Steve said, and rolled down his sleeves. That’s how cock-eyed everything is up here, he thought: I’m going out, maybe to fight, and I’m rolling down my sleeves. He killed a mosquito on his wrist and buttoned up his sleeve. “I’ve got to go down there, Jack. I can’t sit around, go to bed tonight and lie awake all night, waiting for people to make up their minds about me. I’ve got to know!”
“You’re shoving your neck out, son.”
He knew that, but he was just drunk enough not to care. Or perhaps he did care: cared enough to risk even injury, being beaten up, just to know whether Winnemincka thought he was a good doctor or not. “I’ll be all right,” he said, without conviction.
“We’ll come with you, just in case,” said Tristram, and reached for his hat. “I feel like a breath of fresh air.” He paused by Kate and ran a rough hand over the smooth material of the dress. “I’m glad you liked it, girl. It won’t do you justice, though.”
Kate said, “Be careful. All of you.”
“We’re just going down for a beer, that’s all,” said Tristram.
It was a long walk down the street from the hospital to the Coach and Horses. The night was oppressive, thick with humidity: sweat ran on a man at the slightest exertion. Mosquitoes hung like a web in the air: Steve held up his hand and it was black with them: he clapped the other hand over them and when he took it away it was streaked with blood. Out at sea the lightning flickered again, baleful as a giant’s grin; out in the pindan one could see the small red grins of the fires at the blacks’ camp. Some half-caste children played beneath the huge boab in the middle of the street: they rushed screaming from its black shadows as if pursued by the devils of their black mother. They passed the Music Hall and a drunk stood up in the empty shell of it and sang “Mother Machree”: the lachrymose words ended in something that could have been a sob or a hiccup. Then they were outside the bar of the Coach and Horses.
“You got any chip on your shoulder?” Tristram said.
“No,” said Steve, surprised: he had come here looking for friends, not enemies: the chip rested on the shoulders inside the bar.
“Don’t go shouting for everybody in the bar. Let ’em buy their own drinks. They suspect the glad-handers up here.”
“Any more advice?” Steve knew that Tristram was only trying to help him, but the Scotch burned his tongue: he contained an anger that whirled within him looking for a direction.
“No,” said Tristram slowly, and took out his teeth and put them carefully in his pocket. “Just don’t mix your own drinks, that’s all. Drink lemonade with Charlie for a while.”
The bar was a big one, lit by the chandelier that had once graced the Music Hall: half its bulbs did not work and most of the light was directed up to the ceiling: directly beneath it you stood in a pool of deep shadow. A stuffed crocodile, six to eight feet long, rested on a shelf high above the back of the bar: it snarled down with sightless eyes at the drunks below, more horrifying than any pink elephants. The shelves behind the bar were lined with glittering bottles, but they were all empty: beer was the main, almost the only drink up here. Once a ship bringing beer to the town had been wrecked farther down the coast, and a local drinker had volunteered to go down and pick up the beer in his truck. He had made the 1500-mile trip over a bush track in six days, driving through a monsoonal storm on the 750-mile return trip and covering it in seventy-two hours. His name was carved on a rough wooden plaque hung below the stuffed crocodile: he had achieved immortality. As Kate had said, there was nothing for the men to do here after dark but talk and drink.
There was plenty of both going on when Steve, Tristram and Charlie walked in the open door. The talking stopped almost immediately; a few men drained their glasses before they turned to look at the newcomers. Steve had occasionally been into some of the hotels around Sydney’s waterfront, but there had been few men there who had had the look of toughness that nearly all the men here had. They were mostly shearers and meat-workers, and there was no place for soft men in those professions. Eight hours of back-breaking wrestling a sheep, stooped almost all the time, and the same time stint of heaving bullock carcasses about on a slippery blood-rink, had eliminated physical weaknesses from these men.
Some of the men spoke to Tristram and Charlie, but none even nodded to Steve. There was not the open hostility he had expected; they were just waiting for him to prove himself. But how? he wondered. He had brought two Japanese into the town; they wanted him to justify his doing that. They opened up their ranks, like a crowd in a courtroom, and he stepped up to the bar.
“A beer,” he said, and remembered Tristram’s advice: “And two lemonades.”
The barmaid was all bosom and smiles and massive arms: beneath the bar you knew her legs and thighs would also be massive: she had come to Winnemincka fifty years too late, she was meant to have been a chorus girl at the Music Hall in its hey-day. Late in the night she would sing old songs with the drunks who had no home to go to: “If You Were The Only Girl In The World” was her anthem, her wish. She smiled now, her mouth full of gold, and said, “You ain’t a drinker, Doctor? You must feel outa place up here.”
Steve looked along the bar. On one side of him stood a man two or three inches taller than himself, dark and evil-looking as a Moor: he smelled of blood and it was ingrained in the cracks in his hands. Beyond him other faces hung in the air above the bar as their owners craned forward: it was like looking at a row of grotesque door-knobs, iron-like and insentient. A voice said, “Get off my—foot,” and the barmaid smiled twice as brightly, as if the owner of the voice had complimented her.
“No,” said Steve, and nodded at Charlie. “My friend here doesn’t drink, either.”
The barmaid looked at Charlie: it was as if the men in the bar had appointed her their spokesman. “But Charlie’s black,” she said, smiling at Charlie, telling him she wasn’t insulting him. “He knows he’s not allowed to drink grog.”
“I’ll have a lemonade, too,” said Tristram. “If it kills me.”
One or two of the men laughed, but the others were not ready yet for jokes. Then the big Moor-like man beside Steve said. “You brought a coupla Japs in here tonight, Doc.”
“That’s right;” said Steve, and took the lukewarm lemonade the barmaid had poured for him. He drank the gassy stuff and instantly wanted to burp. He swallowed the burp, not knowing whether the man beside him would laugh or take it as an insult. “The young fellow needed hospital treatment.”
“I fought against the Japs.” Mosquitoes nested on the big man’s arms but he seemed unaware of them. “They had me in the bag for three and a half years. In Changi. I lost bloody near seven stone.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Steve. “But I don’t see what that has to do with the two men I brought in tonight.”
“All Japs are the same,” said the big man, and the barmaid nodded her hennaed head vigorously. Steve looked at her and saw that there was more hatred of the Japanese in her than in the big man beside him. It was often like that, the female of the species hating with a bitterness the male could never equal: he had seen it down in Sydney, heard his women patients talk with violent antagonism of the Japs, the Huns, the New Australians: all foreigners, ex-enemy or ex-allies, were the same, you could trust no one but an Australian.
“I once knew a good Jap,” Tristram said, drinking his lemonade and burping loudly: no one laughed and the big man wasn’t insulted. “He lived right here in Winnemincka. His name was Sam Nagochi.” There was a murmur from one or two of the older men. “He lived here for thirty years or more and he did more good for people in this town than he ever did harm to them.”
“Yeah, Sam was all right,” said a voice from the back of the crowd.
“What happened to him?” said the big man: there was beer froth round his mouth, he looked ugly and dangerous.
“The night after Pearl Harbour some mugs got drunk in this pub and went up to Sam’s place and shot him full of holes. Molly was working here then, she served them all with their grog, she heard them talking about what they were gunna do.” He finished his lemonade, burped again and looked at the barmaid. “I think I’ll have beer this time, Molly.”
Her face was the colour of her hair. “You watch what you’re saying! I’m worth any half a dozen bloody Japs—” She looked along the bar for support, but the men said nothing: they had left: their talking to her and now they had found she had betrayed them: they still had no love for the Japs, but each man told himself he would never have shot a good Jap, no matter how drunk he was. The barmaid realised she was on her own, and for a moment she looked as if she might burst into tears. But the pouched eyes could not squeeze out the tears: she had no pity left, not even for herself. “Ah, who cares? I don’t like Japs, good ’uns or bad ’uns, and I don’t care who knows it!”
The big man wiped the froth from his mouth. “Doc, if you had to choose between a white man and Jap, say they was both hurt, like, who would you look after first? Answer me that.”
“He give us the answer to that this afternoon.” Steve turned to look at the man who spoke. He stood in the shadow beneath the chandelier: he was just a voice, accusing. “He went out to see this Jap, instead of going to see the Nevin youngster.”
Steve was aware of Tristram and Charlie watching him as keenly as were the others in the bar. Tristram was not going to step in now to defend him: only he could answer now. “I went to the Jap because I thought his case was more urgent. Given the same set of circumstances and the same information as I was given this afternoon over the air, I’d do the same again. It’s what any doctor would do.”
“Doc Covici wouldn’t of,” said the shadowed man.
“How do you know?” Steve said angrily; he felt the gas of the lemonade rise in him and he made no attempt to stop the burp. “How do you know how a doctor thinks, how he makes his decisions? What are you?”
“I’m a slaughterman.”
“So all you do is kill. Cut throats, knock them on the head with a hammer, whatever it is you do to kill bullocks. That takes a bloody lot of deciding. Don’t make me laugh! The last man to judge a doctor should be a slaughterman. We’re often bracketed together, didn’t you know?” He hadn’t meant it to be a joke, but some of the men laughed. He was angry, almost burning for a fight; but some of the anger drained out of him when the men laughed. He burped again, and then he knew it was useless: he wouldn’t be able to fight at all if someone challenged him. He looked at the man standing in the deep shadow of the chandelier and though: God, he may knock me out, may even kill me, and I shan’t even know what he looked like.
“I wouldn’t get too funny, Doc,” said the man, and moved out into the light. Steve almost laughed, it came out as another burp: the man was cross-eyed and had hair the same colour as the barmaid’s: Steve had never laughed at another’s affliction, but this suddenly was too funny. He struggled with another laugh held behind his clenched teeth, and was saved by the big man beside him.
“Doc, this young Jap this afternoon. Did you think of him as a Jap while you was treating him?”
Steve thought of this afternoon: the huge anonymous figure of the diving-suit, the dark pain-filled face behind the glass: the Japanese this afternoon could not have had less nationality. “He was just a dying man I was trying to save. And if you expect more of a doctor than that, you’re expecting too bloody much!”
He straightened up, tensing for the blow from the big man’s fist; behind him he felt Tristram and Charlie also straighten up. The big man looked at Tristram and Charlie, then back at Steve. The room was silent: a beetle crashed into the chandelier, fell into it with a dying succession of tinkling bumps. The barmaid stood with one hand on a pump-handle, as if waiting to pull the switch of an explosion. Outside in the street there was a scream from the children, then a woman’s voice calling them home.
“Doc,” said the big man, “I got respect for you blokes. I seen what some of ’em did in Changi. If you say you hadda save that Jap this afternoon, that’s all right with me. At least, you was honest about it,” he said, and looked back at the barmaid, white-faced under her brilliant hair, standing there like a huge comical doll into which children from now on would drive pins. “I always got respect for an honest man. Or woman.”
The barmaid pulled down the pump-handle with an involuntary movement, almost like a nervous reflex: the beer gushed into the glass she held, and instantly the men along the bar began to talk. Steve felt the room relax around him, felt the momentary strength of anger and despair run out of him: he leaned against the bar for support and asked the barmaid for a Scotch and soda.
Tristram nudged him in the small of the back and Charlie winked at him. “I’ll buy you your drink, Doc,” said the big man. “The name is Packy Quilpie.”
Tristram took his false teeth out of his pocket, held them under the soda siphon on the bar and squirted them clean of the fluff and tobacco they had picked up. He ordered a beer and Charlie another lemonade. The barmaid, sullen and white-faced, served them: as she named the price, the gold glinted again in her mouth, cold as the eye of a serpent. She went away down the bar and Quilpie said, “She’s a mean fat bitch. I think I’d rather a Jap any day than her.”
Steve said, “Here’s your health.”
“Yours, too, Doc,” said Quilpie. “I hope you have a nice long stay up here.”