This Red Earth Read online

  ‘Get some fresh air at Moresby, Brockie,’ Johno suggests, but I don’t want fresh air when we land there to pick up fuel and drop off the mail. I will see Port Moresby another time too. I just want to sleep, and fortunately I do, like a dead man, just about the whole trip, until I hear Johno at my shoulder: ‘Wake up, kiddo, we’re home.’

  Home? I sit up and look out the window of the plane.

  He says: ‘There, that’s Rabaul.’

  Rabaul. I can’t see the town from here, only the harbour opening out as we approach from the south. A harbour that is a volcano, a flooded caldera. I can see the peaks of its vents rising up out of the water.

  ‘That’s Vulcan,’ Johno points at the mountain we’re banking around to the west, descending, ‘and there’s the new island.’ He points down into the bay and I stand up to see it: a stretch of fresh pumice below us. He told me about it somewhere in the craze of last night. Vulcan is the vent that erupted, prompting Errol’s heroism, creating a new island six hundred feet high, from spewing up a mass of coral reef a mile wide, raising the bottom of the bay with a tremendous undersea pyroclastic surge. I wake up fully with the realisation now: I’m seeing a live volcano for the first time. This is a place where the earth really does speak.

  I go across to look out the other side of the plane. There’s a streak of steam coming out of another vent ahead. ‘That one’s Matupi,’ Johno says, and I look at him: he’s seen a volcanic eruption. How amazing is that?

  He’s gone back to looking out the portside window now as the town appears, a small town, with the mountains behind it, hardly there at all. ‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ he says quietly, in some sort of awe.

  ‘She is,’ I can only agree.

  The setting sun is lighting up the clouds above the peaks bright pink. The water of the bay is purple and the palm trees are blue. Beautiful, like nothing I’ve ever seen. By the time the pilot brings us down with a kiss of the hull, I might be a bit in awe of this New Britain too.

  BERNIE

  Yoohoo frowns at the bump below my waistband, which I’m patting by way of explaining why there’s no chance I will be able to step in and do this turquoise slipper-satin gown she’s just draped over my desk, for her autumn evening-wear show. It’s gorgeous, but it’s also an unforgiving Molyneux, moulded hip line not designed for breathing, much less this thing.

  She asks it, ever the optimist: ‘But it might be over by Saturday?’ Shaking my head, no, it’s not that sort of bloat; I make a bulging gesture over the bump to say it’s only going to get worse. ‘Oh.’ She frowns again, slowly, peering hard at it as she takes in what I mean, and then she says: ‘Yes. Well. That would explain a few things, wouldn’t it. Have you been to the doctor?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Don’t think I need a doctor to tell me what any dill might find out after a visit to the public library, the big one under the Queen Vic, asking the librarian with just the right amount of awkwardness for something on preparing for marriage, so that one might be directed to a well-thumbed copy of For The Young Wife. It’s simply expressed there: yes, not getting your curse means you’re either sick, defective or – I don’t want to hear it out aloud. As if not hearing it might somehow make it go away. Stop the pleats of my blouse bowing out of whack with my blossoming bustline. Stop me returning every other day to the library during my lunch hour to see if the book might say something different, as if the dates might say I’m not about four months along, and as if I might stop wanting to buy another pound of plums from the barrow outside while I’m there. I can’t stop eating those plums.

  ‘Don’t look so glum,’ Yoohoo chirps. ‘So, you’ll have to bring the wedding forward. You won’t be the first to do that.’

  ‘I know.’ My own parents managed it themselves, history repeating like – don’t even mention pork chops to me. It’s not the embarrassment I’m worried about, not the moral issue or what the gossips will think. It’s – it’s that I don’t want to have a baby. Not now. And then five minutes later, when I think of how happy everyone will be, I go all fluttery inside and I do want a baby, our baby – I want half-a-dozen, delirious at that picture. And then I don’t want one at all again. It’s too soon. Too soon for what, for Pete’s sake? I don’t want it to interfere with my shopping in Singapore? The cut of my figure on Waikiki? I need Yoohoo to slap me.

  But she says, gone all sparkly with happiness for me now: ‘Have you told him yet?’

  ‘No!’ I just about yell it. I can’t tell Rock. Not now. Even if I wanted to. He’s incommunicado for the next several weeks as they’ve gone into the jungle to do whatever it is they do to look for oil. In several weeks I won’t be able to hide this bump under the peplum of my jacket. We won’t be able to marry in time to keep this secret. Keep it decent. I suppose I’ll have to go over there, to him, arrange a very small wedding indeed, in Rabaul. Mum will be so disappointed to call off St Brigid’s, and she will be embarrassed. Forget horrified: she’ll be humiliated. It’ll look like a shotgun with me waddling up to some registry, and Dad won’t be able to attend to laugh us through it. And I was going to ask Yoohoo to be my bridesmaid, too; I was going to ask her to do the decorations for the reception, at the Bay, a surprise for Mum. Something to stick in the beaks. I’ve ruined everything, for everyone, especially myself. The one flimsy thread of purpose I had and I’ve ruined it. Purpose? I’m going to be a mother. That’s a purpose all right. And the book says nothing about the screaming, hair-curling terror that takes me at the thought.

  ‘Oh, but he’ll be thrilled, won’t he?’ Yoohoo gives me a squeeze.

  I nod. He will. I can see him, a picture of pure thrill. He’ll throw his hat in the air, and that thought swings me screaming back the other way. Into his smile, one that tastes of caramel as I melt into him. He won’t care about the circumstances. He’s already got his eye on a house for us, a white weatherboard up in the hills above the town, with a cool breeze, a view of the volcanoes, and a yard where fruit just falls off the trees and into your hands. The people who are renting it are moving back to Brisbane next Christmas. Perfect for us. He told me all about it in his last call, three Saturdays ago. He’s booked a telephone call every Saturday since he left, ten shillings a minute it costs, and he doesn’t care. He’s so thrilled doing what he’s doing there, in his element, being essential and getting paid a small fortune to go hiking, and otherwise playing bad tennis at the club where he says the inmates are a bit wild, but geez they’re a grouse mob. You’re going to love it, Bernie. Bathers are compulsory on the court – it’s been raining that much, you just about have to swim everywhere anyway. With our baby. In the jungles of New Guinea.

  ‘Bernie,’ Yoohoo says, because she’s as sharp as she is lovely, ‘if it’s worth doing, it’s going to be daunting, isn’t it?’

  I nod again. Of course it’s daunting. What else would it be? And what else did I expect? It’s not so very long ago that I thought kissing a boy made babies. I might not understand the science of this business much better now, but I knew what I was up for when I kissed him, didn’t I. I’ll get used to the idea of this consequence. I pat my bump again: we’ll work things out, won’t we. Baby. Good grief.

  Yoohoo slaps me gently: ‘And you’ll never know how envious I am.’ A prod to work things out promptly. Edie Peterson is sharp and lovely and twenty-seven, just hasn’t found the right fish in the sea, yet. I have the right fish. The very best of them. There is no doubt about that in my mind, not one shred of doubt at all. It’s time to put my skates on, catch up with my blessings, and start being blooping well grate–

  ‘Miss Cooper.’ Count Heany sneaks up behind me with a whispery creek of his door. A wrong fish if ever there was one. And there’s only one reason I’m still here working for him: to distract me from my woes. Yoohoo scoops the gown up from my desk and disappears in a swish of slipper satin as I turn and smile at him with my secret: I’m having a baby, yes, say the word – P.R.E.G.N.A.N.T. – and one of the great benefits of it is that soon, very soon, Mas
ter, I will never see you again. But I remove the smile: he looks a bit grimmer than usual. Something bad has happened, the printer no doubt has made some dreadful mistake that’s all my fault. He says: ‘Please, come into my office.’

  Please? Strange note; the Count is not one for common courtesies. But now he’s ushering me in with, ‘Please, Miss Cooper, sit down,’ and I know something is very out of the ordinary here. Sit down? He only ever tells me to sit, and it’s never an invitation.

  I sit down and some reflex sends my hand protectively to my bump as he begins over steepled fingers: ‘Some difficult decisions have had to be made in these most difficult of times, and I regret to inform you that there is no longer a need for a full-time advertising assistant at Chalmers. The directors have decided to limit stock to British-made lines for the duration of the war, concentrating more on the luxury lines, and in much reduced quantities, having now turned over so much warehousing to the Department of Army for munitions storage. As you are aware, many of the British lines, particularly in luxury apparel, come with their own exclusive advertising material and so therefore …’

  I’ve got the sack. He keeps droning on about it, but I’m not interested in any rationale other than my own. I can’t wear a Molyneux frock and now I can’t write two words about one either? I was only ever good for flogging cheap and nasty Jap underwear anyway? How dare you! Despite hating this job, despite spending the past at least six months fantasising about my departure, I now want to hit him with a brick for depriving me of the luxury of resigning.

  I stand up, cut him off: ‘Thank you.’

  Mr Heany stands too. ‘Miss Cooper, of course I shall provide you with a suitable letter of reference. You have been–’

  ‘Please don’t bother about it,’ I cut him off again. ‘I’m getting married.’

  Gone.

  I pick up my handbag, and walk out of the office, down the fire stairs. It’s only four o’clock. Let this be my resignation, my one hour’s worth of dignity.

  No. Make that five minutes. In my present distraction of useless, if righteous, rage, I’m charging across Liverpool Street at the corner of Castlereagh, full steam with the not-fairs, when I get my left heel caught in the tram tracks, to be sure that my dignity thumps abruptly to the asphalt.

  Smack on my backside.

  Ow. Ow. Ow.

  Right outside the steps of Foy’s, audience of hundreds, attending their April Super Savings sale – pure merino dressing gowns in there down to 30/-, put one on lay-by for Dad last Friday, in taupe. It gets chilly out at Ingleburn.

  Ow. Ow. Ow.

  ‘Oh miss, my word, are you all right?’ A cab driver scoops me up before I’m flattened by the oncoming Railway Square.

  ‘I’m all right, yes,’ I think. ‘Thank you.’

  Just a well-accomplished dill.

  In a considerable distraction of pain by the time I get home. Must have jarred the small of my back in the fall: breathtaking.

  ‘Those high heels – they’ll finish you one day!’ Mum squawks, then she clucks: ‘Get into the bath and then into bed, Missy,’ and I do as I’m told. ‘Lie flat, close your eyes, while I get you some tea, see if it doesn’t settle.’

  It doesn’t settle. It gets worse. Turning into what feels like curse cramps stabbing through to my spine and making me call out: ‘Mum!’

  ‘What, love?’ Mum runs back in to me, turning on the overhead light as I throw back my bedclothes, trying to get up, get away from this pain, and as I do I see the blood. My bed is covered with blood. It takes a moment to understand that it’s mine.

  ‘Oh no, oh no.’ Mum is bundling up my sheets, and telling me: ‘Look away, love.’

  Look away? I want to curl up on the floor. My legs are shaking with the pain but I look away. I look up above the bed, at the little rosewood cross there, our tiny ivory Lord suffering there forever in the middle of my forget-me-not wallpaper, and then I suddenly understand what the blood must be. The pain. The baby.

  ‘No!’ I wail it. ‘No!’

  ‘Shush, love,’ Mum says gently, even though she’s busy cleaning up my mess. Cleaning up me. Bundling me back into fresh sheets and holding me as I cry, as I’ve never cried. ‘Shush, love, it’s all right. It wasn’t meant to be.’

  ‘What?’ What did Mum just say? Wasn’t meant to be? ‘You knew?’

  ‘Yes, love, I had my suspicions,’ she says, soft as the warm kitchen smell of her, stroking my forehead. ‘I know what goes on in my laundry. You haven’t had your things for a while.’

  Things, what Mum calls the curse, and I see what she means: although I wash my own bits and pieces, it’s her laundry and she knows what goes on it. Where I’ve been, or haven’t. That makes me cry again: she’s been waiting for me to come to her, keeping her disappointment to herself.

  ‘It might be for the best anyway, Bernie love,’ she tries to soothe me. ‘You’ll have another. Next year, when you’re properly married. You’ll see. Maybe you’ve been spared worse. Sometimes I do wonder if our Lord punished me for, well, you know, jumping the gun, as they say.’

  Dreaming me up before Father O’Brien said Amen, as Dad always teases her, but: ‘What do you mean punished?’

  ‘Oh,’ she sighs, ‘I had a lot of trouble afterwards.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ I try to joke, not funny, the pain coming back for me again, with interest.

  ‘Not you, silly,’ Mum clucks, mystified by me as much as I am by her, and then she tells me: ‘I lost four babies after you. And the last one got a bit dangerous, so I had to go into St Margaret’s and have the doctor make it so I couldn’t have another. Your father made me go in. I didn’t want to.’

  Mum. There’s no euphemism for what’s in her eyes now: this pain. It still hurts her after all these years.

  ‘But it was for the best, Bernie. As this is for you. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.’ She looks up at the cross. ‘Maybe you’ll be spared my troubles.’

  She’s asking Hughie for that to be so, praying for it. And I want to wail again: Hughie doesn’t care, Mum. He doesn’t care about us. Dad told me that himself, years ago, a Saturday afternoon, he was a bit pie-eyed and full of some worry about the garage, and I asked him why he called God ‘Hughie’, and he told me, Hughie is the rain, never around when you need him, he’s drought and then a flood followed by a bushfire; and calling him Hughie is better than calling him what he ought to be called.

  A baby stealer.

  I’ve lost my baby. Our baby. I’m so sorry, Gordon. Sorry and grateful only that you’ll never know about it.

  I roll away and curl around my pain. Mine. And rage returns. Sorry. There’s not going to be any wedding now, is there. I’m not going through this again. I’m going to cry for a hundred years. I have nothing now: no job, no marriage, no baby. No baby? All my horrible, sinful, selfish whingeing about not wanting my baby smashes into my spine. I don’t deserve to be a mother. I don’t deserve Rock. I don’t deserve anything less than this punishment. I’m a disaster. The whole world is a disaster, waiting to unfold, and the unfolding begins here, right here: in me. It’s all my fault.

  ‘It was a girl,’ Mum says.

  A girl. Of course it was a girl. My baby girl. I’m going to wail forever.

  I make a good attempt at disappearing into the mattress, at least until Thursday morning when I hear the front gate squeak, boots clomping up the path.

  ‘Peggy!’

  It’s Dad. Come home a day early. Surprise. And you’ve never seen a girl pull herself together faster: he can’t know about any of my nonsense. He’s got more important things to worry about, such as the next one hundred and twenty recruits he’s preparing for Hughie’s boy-stealing machine.

  ‘Dad!’ I’m in the hall and in his arms in a heartbeat, in desperate need of his bear hug.

  ‘Bernie? What are you doing home, and in your nightie?’ he says, and as I let him make his way in, I give him a brief but embellished account of my fall on Tuesday night, about Mum being a
pest making me stay in bed, lying like there’s no tomorrow, apart from how sore my back still is. Not too sore compared to how tired Dad looks, though. He chuckles at my tale of calamity, ‘Just as well the cabbie stopped or we’d still be picking you out of the tracks, eh?’ But there’s something on his mind. Distracted: he’s come home to speak to Mum about something. Something serious.

  ‘Hello, Bill,’ she says with a lack of surprise: she knows what goes on in her kitchen as well as anywhere else. A look passes between them, as if Dad’s done something to earn her disapproval, got some explaining to do. A long silence before Mum asks him: ‘ So where are they sending you?’ She’s holding the rolling pin as though she might hit him with it, or turn back to the shortcrust, depending on the answer.

  ‘Peg,’ he says, apologising. ‘Beyond Palestine, I don’t know, not really.’

  No, I didn’t hear that. This is not happening. Not now. I’m still asleep. I want to be still asleep, wrapped around my warm ball of pain.

  ‘Hmm,’ Mum sniffs: ‘Of course you don’t know where you’re going – the army don’t tell you anything, do they.’ Turns back to the pastry.

  Dad opens a bottle of beer; it’s only ten o’clock. ‘We flipped a coin, the other captain, Pat Sullivan, and me, to see which one of us would go. I won.’

  ‘You won?’ Mum doesn’t stop rolling.

  ‘He’s got littlies, Peg. Two little girls, too small to be without a father for so long.’

  My heart screams: What about me? I’m too small to be without my father. I want to hurl myself around his ankles to stop him from leaving me. For Palestine. I know most of Dad’s division is already there, in the desert. The Sixth Div. I’ve heard Dad complain that it’s the same story as the last war – Hanging about getting skinny, waiting for the Somme. Shaking his head: Or are they busy planning Gallipoli II for us? Only Hughie would know. No. Dad’s not going there. Not going anywhere. He can’t go.