Black Diamonds Read online

  ‘Pity I don’t drink,’ I tell him for the third time since I’ve met him. And the reason I don’t is plain: it tastes disgusting and makes me chuck. Not that I go to the trouble of telling Stratho that — let him wonder if I’m a wowser or not; got to have some amusement round here.

  ‘Oh, come off it — I don’t drink very often either, but this is an occasion,’ says Anderson.

  ‘I don’t fucking drink — you two go and have one for me.’

  ‘You’re an odd cunt, Ackerman,’ says Stratho, getting up.

  ‘Yep,’ I tell him: ‘you’ve picked me in one. Must be all those deep thoughts of mine.’

  Only one thought going on right now: Francine’s going to have a baby, and I’m going to sit here quietly and plough through my bread and oranges loving every mouthful. Can’t take the smile off my face.

  Smile’s still there on the ship to Marseilles, every time I think about her. The Mediterranean is kinder to me, but maybe I’ve just relaxed a bit. It’s all going to be on from here for old and new hands, but it’s a relief to get going somewhere. Not me gutchucking this time; plenty of it going on, though: the amount of grog downed on this ship would make Fritz think we’re giving him an advantage; but he’d be wrong I think. A large majority of the Gallipoli blokes are raring and roaring, not keen to get back in but keen to even the score, and it’s contagious. I don’t rattle easily, but there’s barely contained savagery in them that’s something to give a wide berth to; we pass a destroyer on the lookout for submarines and I think: just let this lot in the water. They’ve all been warned, though: soon as we’re off this ship there’ll be order. Apparently the top brass is nervous that lack of discipline will become a problem; can’t see it myself: I wouldn’t take any of them on.

  And when they’re not busy drinking they’re busy trying to learn a bit of French; don’t know which is more hilarious or frightening. Not that I’d do better, but I do have a clue as to what it’s supposed to sound like. Which makes me think I should probably write to Mum at some stage, for what it’d be worth. But decide against it again; she won’t want to know and France can tell her I’m still around. And that I’m a bit more than an idiot. Totaler Idiot.

  When we dock I scribble a few lines for France, my France, about having taken the long way round the block to reach her this time; it’s pissing down and freezing and I breathe in the cold wet air like I’ve been holding my breath all these months. There’s young women everywhere in the Marseilles welcoming committee and I see why the blokes were so eager to learn the language. Things must be grim here, though: they’re all so bloody happy to see us. But there’s no time for anyone to exploit the goodwill among the mademoiselles, because we’re straight on the train again heading north.

  I get lost in the green outside the windows, trying to imagine I’m home for a bit, but the colours are sharper, darker here, although the sky’s dull, washed out whether there’s clouds or not. The train steams on forever, and it’d be good if it would really, but eventually we pile out at a village with the name of Ebblinghem, as if the person who named it knew that one day we’d be passing through and wanted to be sure we’d feel at home with an easy pronunciation. And we’re dossing in an empty brewery of all places. Someone’s got a sense of humour.

  I’m outside having a piss in the dark when Duncan stalks up behind me for another private moment. He’s left me alone for weeks now but I knew he’d be back sometime.

  He says: ‘Ackerman, we’ve almost got to where we’re going, and things might start to fray from here. Time to forget your buttons and start looking at the men.’

  What the fuck does that mean? I don’t know why I choose this moment, maybe I’m jumpy and tired, maybe it’s because I’m sure he’s queer, but at this point I completely forget myself with him and I crack silly as.

  When I’ve worn myself out and put myself away he says: ‘Now that you’ve got that out of your system, let me tell you how I’d like to exploit you from now on.’ Chuckle: ‘And it’s not for your soldiering or your shovelling technique. I want you to keep an eye on the men generally and let me know who you think’s not bearing up.’

  ‘How would I know that?’ There are more experienced men here than me, and I’m bottom rank.

  ‘Because you’re a miner, really, aren’t you.’ Smart-arse, slinging my words back at me. ‘Somewhat conditioned to difficult circumstances and the suppression of fear. Panic: I think you’ll be able to spot it quickly in others, don’t you? You are also perversely honest and aloof and won’t give a second thought to telling me who needs a rest, or taking a bit of charge if necessary.’

  ‘What makes you think I won’t panic — I’ve never done this before.’

  ‘I don’t believe you will.’

  I have to ask him: ‘You’ve got so much faith in my abilities, what was all the round the clock “sir” bullshit back home about then? Especially since I don’t know my arse from my elbow.’

  Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle, and all he says is: ‘You have to understand the way authority works in order to circumvent it; at least appear to play along. It’s called diplomatic insubordination. Grossly undervalued skill. Should be part of military training, for Australians. Tommy simply copes better when he hears “yes sir”. Besides, I enjoyed seeing how far I could stretch your selfcontrol. Outstanding nerve, you have.’

  Is that right? Good thing you’re so sure. Prick.

  He adds: ‘And I’ve seen the way you look at that photograph. You won’t give in in a hurry.’

  That’s probably true, but it’s a bit unsettling that he’s been looking close enough to have an opinion on that too. Maybe he’s not queer. I ask him: ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Divorced.’ And he makes it clear that that’s the end of that enquiry; not surprised: I’ve never met anyone who’s divorced.

  But I have to ask him while we’re being chatty: ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Same reason you are.’ And that’s the end of that enquiry too.

  I want to ask him why field engineering is the worst job in the army, apart from the obvious of being walking targets weighted down with all our gear along the front, or being buried underground tunnelling, but I don’t think it would be a help to hear it tonight. It’ll come soon enough. And he’s already walked off anyway. Not all that sure what he’s just asked me to do, either, but I suppose that’ll come too. It occurs to me that he’s never seen any action before, so what would he know, but he talks as if he has — but then he’s a commissioned officer: he’d know more by the company he keeps when he’s not with us.

  Everyone knows it’s not going to be a picnic. Still, we’ve all got helmets and gasmasks now. More protection than I ever had at the Wattle, or that they had at Gallipoli. Maybe they’ve got it better planned this time. Whatever, I do know it will be like nothing I’ve ever seen. And I’ll be sticking with rule number one: I will be scared. I am scared. And Duncan doesn’t need to tell me I’ll be doing my best not to panic, like you wouldn’t be trying very, very hard not to. It’d be the same reflex that’d make you shoot: you just don’t let it get you. But what would I know? I’m not going to think any more about it till it happens.

  It’s pitch-black inside the brewery with no beer so I rootle around in my kitbag for a piece of paper and pencil and take it back outside, but it’s clouded over again and it’s just as dark out here, as if I could have seen anyway. I want to tell France that I love her. I know she knows, but I’ve never said it outright. Half the blokes inside write up their diaries and spend ages writing letters home, to their families, their wives, their sweethearts, the fucking postman, as we’ve all been encouraged to. What do they write about? Buggered if I know. What could I tell France apart from that I love her, that I want to see her belly growing, with us, but tough luck that I can’t. Luck? The way I closed her out and then just left, left her alone, makes me feel, as they say in dinkum Gallipolese, like a fucked-up cunt. I’ve done this to myself, to us both, and my language has deteriorat
ed further; France would be appalled and look at me and blink.

  I focus on that as I draw in the dark anyway, then I find my way back in, and lie down and do it quietly so I pass out. There are plenty that do it louder than me tonight.

  FRANCINE

  First word from Daniel is a card with camels on the front and it says: France, if they are ships, then I am a sailor, I reckon. Don’t wish you were here — very unattractive, me and the camels. Still, I do, every moment. And the rest, x Daniel. And there’s a tiny sketch beneath showing a soldier leaning over the rails of a ship. So few lines, but somehow I can feel the queasy sway in it. How does he do that? When his handwriting is so outrageously untidy. I’ve never really noticed that contradiction before, and now here it is, another wonder.

  Our notes must have crossed. I want to know what he thinks of my tardily fruitful womb, whether he laughed at my jokes, as if he’s just gone off on a lengthy jaunt somewhere, as if he does that regularly. I look at his photograph now, sometimes take it to bed; I’ve even taken to wearing his old clothes to bed too. Must be a maternal derangement. Good thing I live alone. But then again, I’m a serviceman’s wife, aren’t I: it’s my duty to perform ritual longing, so long as I’m keeping this little home fire burning. I want to know if he’s still in Egypt, even though he must be. The news is, Britannia doesn’t want to let the AIF be its own big army in charge of itself, but wants it to stay broken up into smaller corps or something, under British Expeditionary Force direction. Seems Australia is not quite grown up enough to go into bat on its own behalf, but there’s been a crisis in finding enough British officers to lead these separate corps, so it’s all stalled in the desert for Our Boys while they sort it out. I still want to be told that they’ve become fed up with the mess and called it a draw. But they haven’t: Achilles is going to team up with Sisyphus on the Western Front, inevitably. If only it were truly myth, Sister Carmel, and my interpretation designed only to give the Good Lord cause to regret wasting a mind on me: Sisyphus isn’t rolling a boulder up a hill and watching it fall back down again in this tale: he’s trying to cross a line, five hundred miles of it, across France and Belgium, and he needs rather a lot of help just to take a step.

  I cry myself to sleep just about every night, diligent home-fire burner that I am. Sarah tells me when she sees my bleary eyes that it’s not good for the baby to cry so much, and for the first time I want to shake her and scream at her: Tell me if you think I can help it. She’s made of stone; no she’s not, she’s just wiser. I pull away from the hysteria: I remember her face when I told her my first suspicion of pregnancy: thrilled would be putting it mildly. We raced up to Mrs Moran in the Cadillac and I went too fast and nearly hit a dog, and I was Sarah’s daughter as she said, ‘Oh Francine, you need something more than spectacles,’ then more so as she held my hand while Mrs Moran was extremely efficient about my body and while I laughed as I was embarrassed at her questions, and Sarah softly touched my face with the back of her fingers and laughed too as Mrs Moran proclaimed, ‘Well, if you’re not pregnant, you’ll make me a liar.’ But I went home, alone, because I wanted to be. I wanted to pretend that night that I was waiting for him to come home from the Wattle and I told him, over and over again, in the kitchen, at the door, at the table, in our bed. And Sarah probably knew that too; that she knows so much is not a help: for all my wanting to ask her questions, now I don’t want to know. She’s not my mother, she’s Daniel’s mother, and her pain must be larger than mine. I don’t even really know what a mother is, and my eyes are raw with all that long-held and withheld wanting too, and the gnaw of barely thought questions: why did you call this house Josie’s Place, Father? To keep close to my heart someone I can never ever possibly have? To place me inside a box of loss?

  Mr Beckett appears to distract me from myself, however. He’s the only person in town who’s more insane. I’ve only known him and his wife Louise for two weeks, and have taken them twice to the large hospital in Bathurst, where Mr Beckett, her Paul, is a curiosity casualty. He knows exactly who I am, and he asks after Danny, and thinks he’s going to the mine, where he used to work as wheeler with the ponies. The very quick verdict from the doctor is that nothing can be done for him. Louise tells me that he loves riding in the motor car, that it’s the calmest he is ever, and we agree to make a weekly date, just to drive and pretend we’re going to the mine to get Danny, for Louise really. I want to ask her what the army is going to do for her and Paul, but that would not help; the army is rather over-busy, and Louise, I think, would just like to drive and have a calm Paul, whatever that means. I find out when we run out of petrol on our first proper outing, thought we’d wend the very long way twenty miles round through to Hartley and back so we never get there, and Paul dives under the car when I say blast it and pull up the brake. Halfway round nowhere, not a house or a track in sight.

  He won’t come out. Louise says: ‘Paul, we have to get you to work, you’ll be late.’ She’s beside herself but you wouldn’t know it unless you’d seen the look on her face when he scrambled out and under, unless you look at her fingernails, which are bitten down to the quick. We look at each other, as you do when you’re absolutely bereft. I hear Father Hurley’s endorsement of best-intention fibs and I kneel down and stick my head under and say: ‘Beckett, Paul Beckett, you have to help me. Danny wants you to take me to Mrs Moran. I’m having a baby. Now!’

  Paul’s out in a hurry and he says: ‘Danny? Where is he?’

  ‘He’s in-pit,’ Louise says. ‘It’ll take him too long to get up, you have to help Francine. Now. We have to go to the hospital.’

  ‘Well, let’s get on then,’ says Paul like we’re holding up events; I tell him to get in the back and wait, for I need to catch my breath. Truly. But Paul just stands where he is, and watches intently as I flap about for the spare tin can, then spill half its contents on the road. ‘Come on, Paul!’ Louise yells as I turn the switch key and fumble for the clutch. He looks at the vehicle and smiles at us both, and gets in the back seat as if nothing had happened. Naturally, the motor then back fires as I accelerate up the hill, but Paul doesn’t jump out again: instead he curls up on the floor behind us.

  I say to Louise after my heart has stopped charging: ‘You can’t live like this.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘But there’s no other way, is there?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The army doctor in Sydney said that Paul’s condition might not have been brought about by, you know, said that it was probably just triggered by it, and would have happened at some time anyway. Said his nerves weren’t strong enough, but the army can’t be responsible for things they don’t know about when the men sign up. Still, I’m hoping we’ll get a little bit of pension for his service, from the government. That’s something.’

  Hoping? And I can’t imagine a government pension will compensate for this something. I’d stop the motor now and tell her exactly that, but it won’t help. I say, because it is the right and only thing to say: ‘If you need anything, anything at all, come to me.’ My ancient legal angels will slip it through the large loophole in Father’s instructions called Incapacitating Injuries and I don’t care if I run down the fund; I’ll just raise the percentage again.

  She answers: ‘What I do need is to get Paul into a sanatorium or an asylum, but no one will take him, even if I could afford it, because he’s either not mad enough or not normal enough, according to them, and I’ve taken him everywhere, in Sydney and the mountains. I’ve been told that since he shaves and dresses himself and generally does what he’s told, he’ll come good eventually. I don’t believe that and I don’t think you can help me there. No one wants to know us — Paul is just too much of a handful. People don’t know what to say, even family, his family.’

  ‘I want to know you,’ I say.

  She doesn’t answer and we don’t speak for the rest of the drive, but I am her friend. There is no charity in this: she has my admiration for life.

  As we head back
down the sweep into Lithgow, inequities slap harder than scars. How is it that Mr Andrew Fisher, our prime minister, could have resigned from office a few months ago, for reasons of ill health, exhausted by the war and his long and illustrious political career? Too tired to go on. Poor lamb. And, wouldn’t you know it, he was a coalminer once too. Where’s his bottle gone? Now Billy Hughes, the former attorney-general, has taken his place and is pushing for conscription. Conscription? He used to be some sort of a union man, didn’t he? Cream rising to the top? Or curds? I can see his photograph: he looks like a wizened little troll and, call me flighty, but I doubt that he’ll be asking the AIF to be careful to vet those with possible dodgy nerves. What does the war mean to him? Maybe it’s just a matter of being the prime minister; of showing Blighty that we’re made of even stronger stuff than the last prime minister showed. Of being too busy with all that to see the likes of Paul Beckett. I can see Paul Beckett, though, when I look behind me, and as he was standing just now by the car; I can even see a memory of him running round the paddock kicking a football around with Daniel and the others: he’s ordinary, not short, not tall, not fair, not dark, nobody, except Louise’s Paul.

  Nationalists sing ‘Advance Australia Fair’ but who’s making things fair for those who can’t advance? Those who can’t have wealth for toil? How can it be left up to those who need help to help themselves when they’re helpless and alone? And why should they be alone, when they did exactly what was asked of them: served their country? That’s not a tangle: it’s a fairly straightforward betrayal. Australian sons exchange young and free for nothing. I remember reading something recently about a returned serviceman’s league being set up in Brisbane, to provide help for those who’ve come home to governmental abandonment. There’s a circle: leave one union to go to war, then come home and have to start up another to try to help you find what you once had: a job. That’s only if you’re well enough to work, though. Even if there was a league like that here, what could they do for Paul Beckett?