When Sal returned an hour later, she had her own trowel and, without a word to Frank or even a glance in his direction, she knelt down and began to dig out his newly planted marrow seedlings. He trotted over, his hands flapping girlishly. ‘Mate, I just planted those.’ It came out louder than he’d meant and he saw the back of her neck tense. A sweat started on his face and he tried to pull his voice back, make it lighter, friendly. ‘Maybe we could have a chat about what needs doing here — you want to feed the chooks?’
She sat back, heels supporting her bottom, and regarded him with a blank stare. ‘Marrows won’t grow in this soil.’
So — a smart-arse. ‘Well, how do you know they won’t grow unless you try them out, mate?’
She blinked at him.
There was a silence and then Sal started to laugh.
8
The latest postcard had a cartoon pelican on it, wearing a straw hat and cat-eye sunglasses. It peered over the glasses, showing off its long lashes, and gave the kind of wink that made you wonder if it was American. Behind her was another beach, this one filled with small brown bodies and striped umbrellas. Leon turned it over.
Sometimes I don’t know what we do here. We have bought this little place, it was not expensive, this little wooden house in the forest. There’s a young man I see sometimes who delivers groceries for us so that we don’t have to go into town (your father cannot bear to see the people there). This man is a native — I never met one before — fancy that. We talk sometimes. I tell him about you, how grown up you are, your beautiful cakes.
Your poor father still wakes sometimes and sometimes there are things he does that he does not remember in the morning.
‘Love, Mum’ was crushed into the corner of the card and there were two kisses, barely visible. The postal stamp was Mulaburry. Leon bit his cheek. He held the camera at arm’s length, looked into the lens and clicked the shutter open. He wouldn’t have time to develop this one before he went north for training, but at least he knew it was there. He wondered if Don Shannon remembered in the morning.
On the day he left the shop, closed up and with a notice on the door that had taken him three goes to figure out — Closed for the Time Being — Mrs Shannon stroked his arm and squeezed it. She didn’t say much more than ‘You’ll be right, kiddo’, but it was strangely draining and he was glad to hand over the keys to her and hop on to his bus. He wondered if Amy was done with being finished yet and where she might be. He would have liked to have sent a message to her but the Blackwells had shut up and moved away not long after she left, and there was nowhere to write to.
At the training compound up in Taroom, a bum-numbing twenty-two hours on a silver bus, they were asked if anyone had any useful experience. Construction workers were needed to renovate the R and R camp in Saigon, cooks and bakers would be especially useful there too. He didn’t know why he didn’t put his name forward and his palms sweated.
The uniform was good, it was a sound thing to see everyone dressed the same. You had a space that you had to keep clean and neat, and a gun that you were taught how to take apart, how to feel for the pieces of it that slotted into each other. It weighed the same as the paddle he used to get bread out of the ovens. A kid called Rod, who looked younger than he said he was, bunked above him. He’d hang his head over his bunk and watch Leon clean his gun, telling him all about his family back home, his sisters and how his father was a big deal in the city. Leon smiled and nodded back, tried on occasion to return a story, which he made up somewhat. It was strange to be so close to other people, all the time. The early mornings and the exercise meant that at night he slept like a stone, and when he woke it was good to see all those neat men with their neat boots and neat hair. After a few weeks, the flesh of his stomach shrank back and he could feel his muscles reaching out underneath his skin. His uniform didn’t feel tight around the middle. He hadn’t realised until he lost it that he’d had a paunch.
When they trained on the automatics the sergeant slapped Leon on the back and said, ‘That’s the kinda shoot we want, Collard. Good one,’ and he felt his chest expand and looked around to see who else had heard.
He borrowed some paper off Rod, who wrote to his parents twice a week, letting them know about all the swell stuff they were up to, how he was bunking with this real character of a guy, how he’d been singled out specifically for his navigational skills.
He leant the paper on his knees and felt oddly formal as he wrote ‘Dear Mother and Father’. He couldn’t remember suddenly if he’d called them something else — Mum and Dad? Had he ever talked to them like this? He might just have said, ‘Hey, you,’ or not spoken to them at all. He felt bad about the next line, ‘I hope this finds you both well’ — was it terrible to ignore that neither one of them sounded well in his mother’s postcards? ‘I have been called to service in Vietnam and am at my training now.’ He would not give the address of the training centre. He wouldn’t like another one of those cards with the cartoon character all Smiley-Dan on the front and a looney message on the back, where anyone could read it. ‘I leave for Saigon in three weeks.’ There was an odd rush when he wrote that. Just writing the word Saigon was like speaking a different language. ‘Mrs Shannon has the keys to the shop and I will of course reopen it on my return.’ He felt carried away with the formality of his voice, but he liked it. ‘Your loving son’, and here he realised he was angry at them both and didn’t sign his name. They’d work it out.
He addressed it to the Mulaburry post office, wherever that was, and sealed the envelope.
When the last three weeks were up, he took a photograph of himself in the toilet mirror, feeling like a wind-up toy. The shape of his face was different, he looked reedy and older. His uniform was crisp against his skin and he held his hat in his hand, squeezed the shape out of it. On the hot bitumen with the planes huge against the sky, he had his photograph taken with Rod.
‘It’s time,’ Rod said then, and they climbed the tin-sounding steps to the Qantas.
The lead-weight feeling of flying was not what he’d expected. He’d imagined a lightness, a small leap in the pit of his stomach, then the feeling a trapeze artist might get. But it was like being underwater, something pushed at his ears, tried to get to his brain. He couldn’t concentrate on any one thing. There was the view out of the window, the upside of the clouds, which he hadn’t considered before. They rolled and moved like live things, they reflected a white light into his eyes.
They levelled above the clouds, and the air and the boom of the engine leant in on his ears, and the freshly shaved skin underneath his nose dried out. He took a photograph out of the cabin window.
There was a fug about the place that was how the air felt around Christmas when you had to make bread and you couldn’t open a window and let in the flies. The first deep breath, coming off the plane in Saigon, he thought he’d swallowed a mouthful of heated air from the engine, but all the air was like that and you had to plough through it. In the back of the truck on the way to the base, they’d passed through all those Vietnamese getting on with their stuff, carrying baskets and cycling, just like you saw in the cartoons about China. They even wore those sun hats, the ones you couldn’t fit through a doorway in. So many people squatted by the road in a way he couldn’t imagine his own ankles allowing, and the smell of fumes was unholy and it tickled the back of his nose like no smell he’d known existed. They stopped in traffic by a roadside vendor where old men perched on their haunches, eating something that looked meaty and sticky.