Black Diamonds Read online

  ‘It didn’t happen like that.’

  ‘So?’

  No answer.

  Stratho says: ‘How’re you getting along with Dunc? He put the hard word on you yet? Ten quid says he’s in love with you.’

  ‘Fuck off.’ He cracks me.

  ‘How’s that missus of yours? She had the baby yet?’

  ‘Maybe. Don’t know. Probably.’ I want to steal one of those frigging bomb-shitting aeroplanes and fly home to her, if you really want to know. And he does know: he’s not married but he’s got a sweetheart in Sydney, poor girl.

  He says: ‘One more reason to push on, ay? Come on.’

  Yep.

  FRANCINE

  ‘He’s very clever with it,’ Sarah says, almost dismissively. I opened Daniel’s package just before she arrived: another carving. It’s a kitten with its paw raised as if it’s waving hello: pretty toy. The note says: The Sphinx says g’day. That’s about as interesting as it gets. x Daniel. He must have sent this from Egypt, and it’s taken months to get here. Kitten is very much more than clever and I want to say that to her but all my words are stuck: I’m preoccupied with the conflicting endeavours of trying not to dissolve and trying to convince myself that the arrival of the letter and the package on the exact same day must be a good omen. She adds, as if she’s telling Kitten: ‘Pity it’s only him who doesn’t seem to notice.’

  I can agree with her there, but still I can’t open my mouth. Beneath that wryness of hers she’s unspeakably upset: blink and you’ll miss it, there’s that look. Perhaps now is not the time to give her the news of his whereabouts.

  She returns Kitten to the side table and sits down next to me. Then she takes my hand. That’s it for me: immediate blubbering. So much for willing him back with the magical force of my love.

  ‘Oh Francine,’ she says softly. ‘Of course it hurts. Otherwise how would you truly know?’

  ‘Know what?’ Sniff, sniff.

  ‘That you love. But you can’t cry every time it hurts. If I did, that’s all I’d do some days.’

  That’s fairly much all I do seem to have done some days, and she knows that very well, but she’s not criticising me.

  ‘You must think me very hard-hearted,’ she says.

  Sometimes. ‘No,’ I tell her. ‘Just wiser.’

  She laughs. ‘I might have more experience but I’m not sure that makes me any wiser. I’ve learned to not want to know. Not very admirable, but necessary, for me.’

  ‘Why?’ I dare. How can you possibly not want to know?

  ‘I’ve lost a son, and a husband, and —’ She lets go of my hand.

  ‘You haven’t lost a son,’ I say, desperately: please don’t talk about him as if he’s already dead.

  She sighs. ‘He hasn’t told you.’

  ‘Told me what?’

  So she tells me. About her first Daniel. I hold my belly, my precious bump, as she speaks plainly about that loss. ‘Just thirteen, so excited to start work, to be a man; then — bang — gone. On the seventh of September 1894.’ I knew her pain was greater than mine, but I can’t imagine this vastness, and how deep it goes, so deep that my Daniel hasn’t ever told me he had this brother. She says, just as plainly: ‘But I was pregnant at the time, very pregnant, and when he was born, I called him Daniel, and I remember promising myself that … I don’t know, that I would do a better job with him, love him more, I suppose. That was all I thought about, for a very long time. Even when Peter followed his father in, even when the whole mine exploded.’

  Peter was a miner too? And whole mines can explode?

  She nods. ‘Especially then. Ninety-six died that day, thirty-first of July, 1902. And they called that an accident too — all the fault of coal gas. Such accidental coal gas that the owners and their politicians could not be held responsible for all their lies about it, or forced to provide safety lamps to avoid another unfortunate calamity. And there was the implication, as there is always the implication, that the miners might have taken better care themselves, as if the joke is law: Every miner is an owner — of his own risk. We moved here after that.’ She pauses again and I’m thinking they didn’t mention anything like this in Bituminous Coal in the Western and Illawarra Fields or I’d have stayed awake, when she adds: ‘I spent the next six years trying to make Daniel be good at school. I mean understand the point of it.’ She raises an eyebrow: ‘And you can see how successful I was there.’

  But there’s that flash of grief again, so much sharper for this, jabbing at me, and I want to refute the implication she’s making against herself and tell her what a stupid, obstinate, abandoning son she has. Abandoning husband I have. I want to hold her, and I want her to hold me. She’s got more wisdom to impart, though.

  ‘Responsibility is a hazardous thing to contemplate. You can call something an accident, an unavoidable thing, you can say What else could I have done? and there’s no truth to see your loss against anyway. This war is the same. Except there’s more dignity, and more public excitement, in dying in battle, than dying at work. It’s all the same to the dead, though, isn’t it. And for me, it’s better to try not to think about it at all.’

  She takes my hand again and squeezes. ‘I know you can’t help thinking about it, Francine. I know you love my son and I am very glad of it, more than I could ever tell you. Something else experience has taught me is that true life, true love comes from the completeness of your union with your husband. No matter what a fool he is. Mine was just as bad, if not worse. I don’t regret a moment of loving him; I still do. That’s not something to admire either: it’s a privilege, and a burden, of existence.’

  Yes. Maybe that’s all I need to know too. But I ask her, just to ask one of the thousands of questions I have about her, and how such a woman came to be … here: ‘What made you choose your husband?’

  She smiles, slowly, and laughs lightly. ‘Heinrich. Ah. Well, I was sixteen and he, you know, looked just like Daniel, except he was blond and not quite so tall. I thought he must be a god. He was a conscript in the Saxon Guard, and that uniform only made him more of a heart-stopper. He hated it, he was eighteen, and impatient. We eloped — broke enough laws to have him hanged ten times. Very exciting then, to be such young fugitives, heads filled with more romance than sense.’

  Good God: how many more questions does that make me want to ask. But, bizarrely, all I can think of in the wash is that this likely means that warrants for criminal rebelliousness remain outstanding on both sides of my baby’s family. I try to blab out another question, but only manage: ‘Wh …?’

  ‘What’s the truth?’ In her skewed smile she is so delicate and so robust she is sixteen and something more than ancient. ‘You’d laugh if you could really know it. Dresden is a very old city, a beautiful place, but one that can put big ideas into your head only to frown at you for thinking them. Heinrich was thinking about Sozialismus, not the revolutionary kind but the natural variety that was supposed to be springing up in the furthest corner of the earth. In Australia, so-called the Workingman’s Paradise. He wanted to be something different, new, but he didn’t know how to get there. So he shunned his compulsory military training instead, every boy over seventeen had do that training, but Heinrich didn’t want to play soldiers in the woods, and so he earned himself a sentence of three years’ active service. And if Bismarck didn’t kill him, my father would have. Couldn’t have my expensive education wasted on cannon fodder, and besides, I was already …’ She caresses my bump with a knuckle. ‘He was born in Hamburg, just before we left, and I thought I was the cleverest thing; Heinrich joked that we were Joseph and Mary hiding from King Herod; I joked that I didn’t think a good Jewish girl like Mary would have stolen money from her father to do it. When we arrived in Sydney I saw the name Woolloomooloo on a sign and I thought it was the funniest thing. Almost as funny as the realisation that Kembla, where we were told to go by the port official since we had no contacts anywhere, had no natural socialism, no job for Harry but coalmining, and n
o house for us other than a sack-walled shack — I cooked on a fire outside with my baby on my back. I cried for the whole first year, I think. Harry didn’t. Loved the place at first sight, all of it. Well, he was a natural bloke before anything else, so he was always going to love it here. Natural liebling, my baby, too: he’d take me out into bush, to try to cheer me up, and he’d say to me: But look at the sun on the hills, Sarah — look at the colours on the water. Look. You can’t get that in Deutschland, you can’t get that anywhere but here.’

  Suddenly she frowns; I don’t remember ever having seen her really frown before.

  She says: ‘And Daniel has run back in the opposite direction, a fugitive from himself. It hurts to think of how responsible I might be for that, but it’s pointless to wonder about it. You can’t tell Daniel what to do; you can’t make him do anything. You know that already. He is his father’s son, this land’s son, except perhaps in one way: he’s not nearly so tough. Couldn’t shoot a sick pony. If he comes back from this European disgrace, I don’t want to think about what will have been robbed from him.’

  That falls like a stone into the room. I can’t allow the thoughts of if he does come back and what will be robbed: Daniel will come home, and when he does, he will stop being Neanderthal Boy.

  I ignore the threat and ask her instead: ‘Did you teach him to draw too?’

  ‘Draw? No. I didn’t know he could.’

  I get the drawings from my room and show her; she says: ‘It doesn’t surprise me. But look at that handwriting — terrible.’

  She gets up then and leaves the room for a while. I don’t follow her. I think I can guess what she’s doing. Meanwhile, I sit and contemplate how complete my union is. I don’t care if it’s a maternal derangement; I focus on him, and he will come home.

  And I keep focusing when the pains start. Unsurprisingly, given my track record, I don’t do a good line in stoicism when it comes to labouring in childbirth: I scream for Armageddon. I scream for Daniel. I scream until he comes. And he does come. God knows how he does. It’s a boy.

  He is born in my bed, our bed, there is blood everywhere, I am shaking all over as I take him in my arms, hold his little lamb cries against my chest till he quietens. He is so very perfect I feel I’m never going to stop shaking and crying. Even Mrs Moran has a tear when she says, ‘Well done,’ and cuts the cord. Sarah touches his squashy pink face softly with the back of her fingers and kisses me on the head as she says: ‘Let’s clean him up. You too.’ She takes him from me, and I really start up again then. No one needs to ask why I’m fairly wailing. Louise is holding me and she keeps a good hold of me till I get myself under control.

  Calm again, all clean and soft and bruised and lovely and disbelieving of the miracle and believing that they must surely grow on trees, and here in my arms again. I call him Daniel. Just Daniel. Like his father. He has the hair to prove it. Sarah knew I would.

  It’s the fifth of July. Sisyphus wants a push across the River Somme and Achilles is most definitely there lending a hand. Little Danny is guzzling contentedly on me — couldn’t give two hoots for any of it, least of all my wonder at the simple fact of his feeding — and I close my eyes, the better to feel the magic flow out through me, see it fly across the world to him. And when I open them again, it’s snowing outside my window.

  Second week of August and there are apples everywhere. Better get to bagging them before they spoil. Must do something after what I’ve just read: there’s an estimate that twenty thousand Australians have been killed in France in the last month. Twenty thousand? For once I hope the journalist is lying. If he’s not, must be some kind of a record, given the size of the force. That’s possibly around a one in four or five chance, just of being killed. How many other casualties? No wonder it’s referred to as a cauldron. I’m waiting for my missive from the AIF now, not from Daniel. I don’t think magic can fight those sorts of odds.

  Little Danny screws up his face at me as if to say, ‘Nah, Mum, it’ll be all right.’

  Let’s believe Baby Daniel is a prophet for the rest of the day, shall we.

  More reasonable than putting any stock in reportage: that it’ll all be all right because Fritz is copping it worse, because Our Boys, with odds against them, are rather formidable: noble savages. Anger jabs: I’m sure Fritz can cope — he has millions to sacrifice. Bite your tongue, Francine.

  I can’t really comprehend it. I feel as if I am drifting away from it. This can’t be happening.

  DANIEL

  My identity tags slip across my chest as we settle in to camp and they’ve never felt more like cold meat tickets. I’d say I’m expanding my understanding of disgusting again, except I don’t think it is possible to understand the scale of this. It’s the most horrific shift changeover imaginable as thousands and thousands of Tommies head back from the front. It hasn’t been going too well, obviously. They are ripped ragged, covered in mud and blood; a nod, a smile, a wave, got a smoke, tell a joke, dead eyes. The lot of them. There’s that many walking wounded they must be turning anyone who’s not at least half dead away from the casualty stations. One bloke who stops for a chat says: ‘Me and Johnny here, we’re the only ones left in our battalion.’ And he laughs. Out of his mind. I don’t see a single Tommy officer above a sergeant anywhere among these leftovers. Either they’ve all been killed or they’re off having a port somewhere else after a bad day. Something makes me think it might be the latter. Duncan might be strange, but he wouldn’t make himself scarce if we looked like that. And that’s the difference between us and them I suppose.

  So, now we’ll go in with our own infantry, loaded up with enough wire to build a city, to advance on a tiny village. We’ve been drilled so hard that we’re prepared for anything and everything. I can make and throw a jam-tin bomb these days as good as look at you, or any one and any number of the new beaut grenades, and find my rifle under any circumstance, pull it out sideways through a roll of wire if I have to. Of course us engineers are not expected to join in the fun, just set up for the get-together; but it is expected that a bit of that might be inevitable, just to make sure that I don’t leave here without doing every last thing I didn’t want to. A bit of something worse by the looks of it too. Just when I think I couldn’t be more excited than I am right now, Duncan pulls me up wanting a word; very hard one.

  ‘Watkins is to shift to Transport,’ he says, meaning Watkins has had enough of the front; he’s not been looking too hardy these past few weeks and Dunc is culling a non-coper. ‘So I want you to take over as sergeant, see how you go.’

  If I was a gambler I’d have put money on this.

  ‘No,’ I tell him. I don’t want the responsibility of having to account for so many. Don’t want to see how I’ll go, after my last effort.

  ‘No is not an answer, Ackerman. That’s what you’re doing until I tell you otherwise.’ And off he goes again.

  First day in my new beaut position of authority is the day we set out for the front. I’m at the head of the mob with Duncan, though, once I’ve given orders to the parties that’ll go out doing this and that and everyone’s had a good crack. I tell the bastards they can call me sir from now on, just to get another one, while Stratho salutes me with a limp wrist for his.

  After orders, there’s not a huge amount of difference between a sergeant and a private in the field; it’s all the same rubbish. If I thought it appropriate I could shovel slightly less shit, but the main part of the job is giving orders as passed down the line from the brass. And, of course, to keep on with Dunc’s favourite: how are we all today, and pull out anyone who’s sick or tired or not bearing up, or all three; and I can do that now without even asking for his opinion, just as I can read a map that’s no doubt going to be fucking wrong anyway and tell others where to go. Up until a few days ago I was fairly impressed at the difference between the AIF and the BEF that means our lower-order officers are more often than not drawn from the rank and file on the basis of merit, rather than where they
went to school or how long they’ve been around, but the fact of it for me now is not exactly comfortable. The brass is the brass and I don’t want to have anything to do with them. I don’t want to take responsibility for their actions. It’s too hard to take responsibility for my own: I can feel France whacking me, but with the plain knowledge now that I could not have made a worse mistake, and that it’s far too late for that sort of clarity.

  A very big shell explodes a mile or so ahead up the road, beyond Albert, or what’s left of the town. I feel the shudder under my feet. I look up at the ruined cathedral we’re passing and there’s a statue of the Madonna and Child on top of it hanging right over the street, tipping just below horizontal. She’s had enough, obviously. She’s holding her baby down to us as if to say: Please, take him away from here. She’s famous, on both sides: whoever knocks her down will win the war. How sad is that? Others say the opposite; that’s even sadder. There are craters everywhere, in the road, across the town, beyond the town and all the way to where we’re going. Closer in, well within shelling range and under the buzz of dozens of aeroplanes, the bodies start; those that will stay here because there are too many to retrieve; everyone’s a little busy with other things right now. I wish I had a camera so that these men could be seen by everyone everywhere: to stop this. I would want it to be in colour, though, so that you can see their bones against their pink-grey flesh, the colours of their dead eyes that stare every which way. See the trenches, collapsed, sinking back into the earth, taking these men with them. The shapes of the men, some just asleep, some stunned, some still in the moment of screaming. Some don’t look like men at all; only charred shapes. And just as many horses; stinking meat everywhere, as far as you can see. I don’t think my photograph would make it into the papers somehow. And even if it did, I’m not sure it would make a difference. How could anyone make sense of it? I’m looking right at it and I can’t.