This Red Earth Read online

  I put my foot down on the accelerator. From here the drive to Rabaul is only twenty minutes, but I think I’ll probably do it in ten, I am that keen to see civilisation again. As soon as I’m through Tunnel Hill and on the bitumen, catching sight of the whitewashed town and tramlines of Malaguna Road, all I want to do is have a bath. After I’ve called Bernie. It’s the twentieth of May today. I haven’t seen her face for nineteen weeks. Please don’t let the wireless be out. Don’t let the line be booked out either.

  As I drive through town, I look out across Simpson Harbour at Blanche Bay, at the shape of the volcano. Mother Mountain and her North Daughter and South Daughter are asleep behind Mount Matupi – the one that’s always steaming and groaning, always threatening to show how alive a rock can be. I want to go up there, as close as I can to the lava, when I have the time. It’s only three miles away, but I can’t even say when I’ll be back in Rabaul again, let alone organise a hike. How am I going to tell Bernie that? That I’m not keen on her living in this town while I’m away, that we will probably only get three months together out of every year I’m here, at an optimum. I’m concerned she’ll get cold feet about the whole thing. Maybe I shouldn’t say anything yet, wait until after the wedding. I can’t do that, though. Can I?

  I turn into Casuarina Avenue, past the Pacific Hotel, the rum palace that’s always full of sailors and dockers, and some very interesting people that probably had to disappear from normal society not exactly by choice. There’s a brothel behind it up the top of Chinatown, where you can get heroin and Christ knows what else. But then the she oaks of this wide avenue open out into a flower garden, and I can see Bernie here, picking orchids on her way to buying some pork roasted in sweet red sauce from Ah Ching’s on Solomon Street. I can see her with a frangipani behind her ear bargaining for fish and pineapples with the marys, the native women, at their market called the Bung. I can see her picking passionfruit off the vines that grow up the stilts of the Commonwealth Bank here, an old Queensland bungalow that looks more like a holiday resort. And I want her here, I do, in this town that’s not much bigger than Nyngan, but it’s an amazing place. What if she just came up when I’m in town? In the rainy season. January and February it rains so hard you may as well really wear your bathers everywhere. Two or three months of amazement a year would be better than whole years of ordinariness, wouldn’t it?

  But first things first. I have to stop into the Southern Star office to report that I haven’t buggered things up with the rig: we are drilling in the right place. The office is over the other side of the flower garden in Court Street, a smaller version of the Commonwealth resort. Mr Taylor, the chief of exploration, and the chief geo, Mr Roycox, are already having a gin sling on the verandah as I pull into the drive. It’s a tough life for some. I’m sure they do more important things than changing their shirts three times a day. I just don’t know what, apart from sometimes having a gin with Mr Komazaki, the Jap who owns the shipyards, ready to strike a deal as soon as we strike the black gold. In any case, town hours are unreal, especially for public servants, they work from nine till twelve, and then, after a nap, from two till four, yawning.

  ‘Hello, young Brock.’ Mr Taylor stands and waves me over as I get out of the jeep: ‘I do hope you bring good news for us?’

  His wireless voice is turned on full. This is not his first gin. I tell him, ‘I do,’ holding up my core-sample logbook. As I take the stairs and hand it over, I notice the houseboy cutting the lawn round the side, with shears: they work twenty-four hours a day. The inequity knocks me a bit sideways for a second, probably from being out of town for a while. But it’s the way the world works, and not my concern today. I reel off my facts for my bosses, that the composition of the pyroclastic overlayer so far matches the Anglo-Eastern data, and the bagged-up samples are to follow for their analysis. ‘Hm, hm,’ they nod, as Mr Taylor hands the log to Mr Roycox, who puts it on the card table behind him. They look a bit like Laurel and Hardy, only it’s skinny Mr Taylor with the toothbrush moustache and they both wear panamas rather than bowlers. I add, for what it’s worth, what I think might be one small discrepancy: ‘There’s some dacite apparent in the last few cores that I didn’t expect at this–’

  ‘Never mind that,’ Mr Roycox says with a clap of his fat hands. ‘Carry on down for the oil, lad.’ There’s my permission from my scientific senior. Chief geo: I don’t think he even has a degree. He’s certainly not interested in geology. It’s Mr Taylor who got my name from Professor Richardson, not Mr Roycox, some old boys’ connection from the Kings School. And the dacite doesn’t really matter, I don’t suppose – it’s just another type of igneous rock very probably splattered over the entire island at many and various times.

  Mr Taylor puts his hand on my shoulder. ‘Will you join us at the club for dinner?’

  No. I recognise that this offer is an acknowledgement of my efforts to make these men and their cohorts rich, but I don’t want to go their club. The Rabaul Club. It’s where plantation owners go to count their coconuts with the senior public nappers, in the traditional airconditioned atmosphere, so I’m told, of native boys waving palm fronds. As my father’s son I couldn’t accept an invitation to dine with bank managers. As plainly myself I can’t either, because I’m going to the New Guinea Club, two steps round the corner from here, where my trunk is, and where I’m going to have that very long bath after I’ve made my call to Bernie. The service to Sydney opens at four; it’s a quarter to now. I put them off with an appeal to their greed: ‘Thank you but no. It will have to be an early start for me in the morning. The sooner I’m back at the rig, the sooner we recommence the drilling.’

  ‘Good show,’ says Mr Taylor. ‘I knew you were our man the moment I met you.’

  I’m not your man, I think, but as I say cheerio to them, I can’t say to myself whose man I am. My own? Not for the next three years anyway.

  The afternoon sun just about quilts me as I pull into the drive of the New Guinea. There’s music already coming from the lounge, laughter coming up off the tennis courts at the rear, but I’m going straight round to the Weekender, where the accommodation is.

  ‘A room with a bath, young Mr Brock?’ the manager’s wife, Mrs Chittaway, smiles from the reception desk when she sees me. I must smell bad, too. But when she says, ‘A call to Sydney this afternoon?’ she’s frowning. ‘I’m sorry, pet, the afternoon service is cancelled today, terrific storms over the mainland. But the morning service is expected to resume as normal at eleven am tomorrow. Will that suit instead?’

  No. That’s too late. I have to leave at dawn. You can’t do this to me. But Mrs Chittaway adds: ‘Ah, but I do have a letter for you, came a few weeks ago now.’

  She fishes around under the desk, and I’m expecting it to be from His Majesty, catching up with me, for overdue national service. But it’s not. As soon as I smell Bernie’s White Lilac, my heart rate doubles. I don’t know why, but I’m suddenly convinced she’s calling it off, that it’s a Dear Gordon letter. Halfwit. It’s the first letter from Bernie. My first letter ever from my girl. I’m going to be excited, aren’t I. Open it here in reception. My hands are shaking as I read:

  My wonderful darling Rock

  I have absolutely nothing to tell you but I had to write to let you know that I love you, with every atom in me. I love you come what may. I love you always.

  Bernie

  She loves me. My mind goes into a spin, looping round every word, lost in the R of her Rock. I’ve never seen her name for me written out before. And she’s never said she loves me before.

  She loves me.

  BERNIE

  It looks like a budgie, not an aeroplane, spluttering out of the De Havilland hangar here at Mascot Aerodrome. It doesn’t look like a plane at all, not compared to the huge thing that Rock went up in. But this – this Tiger Moth – is a training plane. For the Royal Australian Air Force.

  ‘Ladies!’ the supervisor bellows above the engine as it begins its hurtle up th
e runway. ‘This is your machine! The pride of our war effort! The pride of the Commonwealth!’

  A fleet of budgies is all I can see as another one splutters out behind it. These are the aircraft we’re making, and this demonstration is to inspire our fingers to faster work. Two planes a day, seven hundred a year, is the schedule. I want to call the pilots back as they take off and up: you can’t go up in the air in that thing. It’s made of matchsticks and Irish linen, and I had a hand in it. You’ll fall out of the sky.

  I look at the faces of the girls around me: all beaming, bursting with the pride of their contribution, as the budgies whizz and swoop above us. There are eight of us wing girls, who cut and sew the linen coverings for the wings, other teams doing the fuselage, propellers and tail, and I’m the oldest of us, getting £1/5/6 per week, slave-labour wages – less than half of what I got at Chalmers. The youngest of us wing girls, Gladdy, is sixteen; she just about works for free, and is thrilled about it, jumping up and down and shouting: ‘Woweeeee!’ Maybe I’m too old for this. I don’t want any pilots to train for war. I don’t want to be a part of this aeroplane sewing machine.

  We file back into the workshops at the rear of the hangar and I dread even more a return to the task itself. I got the job on the strength of my record of gainful employment and that dress-making course I didn’t finish almost three years ago, but I really got it because the manager of production, Mr Dobbs, has known Dad for years from the Mechanics’ Institute, and because Mrs Dobbs told Mum via the Catholic Daily natter up at the grocers that he was looking for good girls to sew the wings on budgies. I’m a fraud. I’m a good seamstress, no doubt about it, and there’s no one more desiring of doing her bit, but I am –

  ‘Oh come on, Miss Cooper, you are not a surgeon,’ the supervisor, Mrs Curruthers, is already picking on me for being so slow, as she does a dozen times a day. She is the Methodist equivalent of Sister Columba: horribility incarnate. She also picks on me each morning on arrival for not wearing overalls like the other girls. Well, I’m not wearing overalls. I’m just not. There are some sacrifices my country can do without me making and one of them is overalls.

  ‘You’re the neatest,’ Lena, my partner, whispers beside me when Mrs Curruthers is gone; she holds the strip of fabric taut and straight over the wooden frame as I sew. ‘Not one tiniest bit of air could get through your stitching,’ she says, and it’s important to her at least: Lena’s fiancé as well as her brother are among the trainee pilots, about to head off to Canada to learn how to be bombers. It’s important to her that my stitching is more perfect than fast, so that the budgie-yellow cellulose paint will go over it smoothly, no bumps or cracks. So that the planes won’t fall out of the sky.

  I can’t do this job. My nerves are racked rotten. But I’ve only been at it a fortnight, I tell myself, trying to inspire these nerves to settle down – as I shove the needle into my left thumb. Baaa! Ignore it. Think of Dad. And see a fleet of budgies falling out of the sky, raining down over his whole battalion.

  ‘Miss Cooper?’ Mr Dobbs is behind me now as the bell for morning tea goes. ‘A word, if I may?’ Lena skedaddles off outside with the others as I stand up straight, preparing to take it like a man. ‘You’re not quite happy at this sort of factory work, are you?’

  I consider lying, but instead I say: ‘Ahummm?’

  He sighs, impatient but nice about it. Hard, shrewd eyes, won’t suffer fools, not even Bill Cooper’s daughter. ‘Office work might be your sort of thing after all, no shame in that. I could make inquiries for you, if you like, with the Department of Army.’

  No, please don’t, is my first thought. I don’t want to work for the machine at all.

  ‘Thank you,’ I tell him, ‘but it’s all right. I’ll find something myself.’

  I pick up my handbag and he says: ‘You’re very good, you know, just a little bit … slow.’

  Yes, I do know that, and I don’t walk too slowly out the side door, into the winter sun, where one of the young airmen having a cigarette by the engine workshop whistles at me.

  I glare at him. ‘Shut up.’

  So that the whole half-dozen of them go: ‘Ooooooh. Cranky.’

  Blockheads, think they’re above the law in a uniform. There must be something useful I can do that’s not associated with the killing of them, though. But what? I wonder as I walk up to the tram. Go to Lithgow, wherever that is, and make bullets? Girls getting paid double, shifts round the clock, hundreds more needed, to fill the arsenal of the antipodes. No chance I’d be in that, but that’s about all the war work there is for a girl. With no talents. I’ve been scouring the papers every day since Dad left for Palestine and there’s nothing – even if I did have some skill. Women’s auxiliary forces are under consideration now, or might be once Big Chief Pig Face overcomes his horror of women wearing slacks – about the only point on which the Prime Minister and I agree. Other than that, there’s nothing but nursing; loads of vacancies there. But that’s a vocation, not a job; it’s also too close to the nasty end of this business, for me.

  Not something you can do for six months, either. While you’re waiting to get married. Trying to convince myself that I can go through with it, that just because Mum had four miscarriages and a hysterectomy doesn’t mean I will. History can’t be that predictable. Could be worse in store for me: I could die in childbirth. Like Gordon’s poor Mum. Blooping heck. So I keep putting off making any decisions about it – can’t manage to call Yoohoo to ask her about doing the reception, or being my bridesmaid, can’t choose a typeface for the invitations – stalling, stalling, stalling, and disappointing Mum who wants to get on with the business of distracting herself from her worries by the only means available: my wedding. Why don’t you pop into town on your way home Friday night, love, and choose your fabric so I can make a start on the dress? Because I can’t. I am trapped, trapped the way you feel when you’ve got both hands full on a hot day and can’t get your cardi off till after you’ve reached the top of the hill. What can I do? Not much, it seems, but change trams at Central.

  When I finally get home, Mum’s out the back in the veggie patch scraping the caterpillar eggs off her cauliflowers, again. Lost to it, unaware that I’m watching her from the kitchen window, watching her missing Dad. Mashing my heart. How can I possibly not marry Gordon? How could I do that to Mum, never mind Gordon? And yet that note I sent him, true as it is, was a warning for him too: I love you always, even if I call it off.

  You can’t call it off, Bernie. That is not on the menu. Just simply no, not.

  Where’s my bravery got to now?

  I look away from Mum and down into the newspaper she’s laid out by the sink ready to receive her potato peels, and see the bold type heading, DROUGHT! and a few columns over NEW AIF INFANTRY DIVISION TO BE RAISED. I read this whole page yesterday, including the three paragraphs on the Country Women’s Association continued lobbying for a women’s land army, and their being told no, again: Australian properties are too vast and the work too hard for girls. Is it too hard, though? What sort of work would it be? Work that’s important no doubt, in the drought, with diminishing resources of men, but not part of the machine. Maybe. I don’t get as far as imagining what I might look like in an Akubra, one like Rock’s with the brim turned down at the front, trusty girl rouse about in the mythical land of Nyngan, looking for a bad storyline, when the doorbell goes.

  ‘Bernadetta?’ It’s Mrs Zoc, already coming down the hall, biscuit tin in hand. She’s made more of her almond shortbread for Mum, as if they can cure a sore heart. Maybe they can; they are at least criminally moreish. She presses the tin into my hands and apologises: ‘I make too much biscotti again. I am old, I forget I have no one to feed but myself.’

  ‘Oh no, not again,’ I say. She’s mad. And maybe a bit magic. The day after Dad left, she told me to sleep with my jasper B under my pillow as it would help heal my sore back, and so I did, because I am obviously mad too, and the next day, hey presto, not sore any more. I’
ve been sleeping with it under my pillow ever since, as if it might heal everything else that’s wrong with me. I tell her: ‘Mum’s out the back.’

  ‘I see your mamma later,’ she grins, conspiratorial. ‘I bring something for you today, Bernadetta.’ She reaches into her apron pocket, black linen on her black crepe frock, perennial widow all in black except for her white hair pulled into a bun, perennially elegant. But when she looks up at me again, there’s a glint of fire in her dark eyes, hot-blooded as a Sicilian volcano, a glimpse of the young woman who must have made the boys of Palermo fall to their knees in the presence of Venus. ‘I find this for you this morning …’

  She places a tiny clipping on top of the biscuit tin under my nose. I see what I think are the words: WORKERS WANTED. It’s a job advertisement.

  How could she know I lost my job this morning? The Catholic Daily couldn’t have broadcast it that fast, surely. Couldn’t be much more than an hour ago. Of course, it’s just a coincidence. Isn’t it. Read it again, properly:

  WRITERS WANTED

  New, innovative publishing house requires storytellers of fiction. Romance, Mystery and Adventure for serialisation and paperback publication. Send brief résumé and sample of writing no more than 20 pages in length to: Wonder Publications Pty Ltd, Level 3, 83 Goulburn Street, Sydney.

  For the moment, I can’t imagine how this might apply to me. I look at Mrs Zoc, who nods, smug: ‘I see it in the Woman’s Mirror.’

  ‘Woman’s Mirror?’ As if I’m astonished Mrs Zoc can read English, never mind that it’s a halfway decent magazine, but with boring serials – ones that go along the lines of Mr and Mrs Sophistication throw a cocktail party, where Mrs Sophistication meets an alluring stranger across the crowded room but ultimately decides not to jeopardise her dull but sturdy marriage and returns to reading the far more absorbing article on balancing the household budget.