Poor old Lizard Brancussi, Sheephead Morton said. And that story was too sad for anyone to repeat. He had carried the pencil sketch of his wife through the camps, on the hellship to Japan, held on to it when the Mitsubishi shipworks in Nagasaki, where he was slave labouring, vanished in the A-bomb and he somehow survived. He made it to safety in the hills, walking past the dead who filled the river like floating firewood, and the living fleeing with skin falling away in long ribbons like seaweed; he’d stumbled on past carbon sculptures of human beings walking, cycling, or running; past all those Japanese in agony in that roiling hell of blue fire and black rain, who, like the POWs he remembered, called for their mother as they were dying. And all the time he tried to see Maisie as Rabbit Hendricks had sketched her that morning in a Syrian village that smelt of human beings in trouble.
He tried to imagine her as the one thing in the world that was not this, and as long as she was there, he would not die or go mad, that as long as she was there, the world was good. On his way to Manila on a US aircraft carrier he had shown the postcard to the American sailors, who agreed he was a very lucky man. He finally got to Fremantle on a ship that was going through to Melbourne, and there he had telephoned home.
Dave and Maisie’s phone, a man’s voice answered. Dave speaking.
Lizard Brancussi had hung up. When his ship steamed out of Fremantle he was spotted slipping over the side on the first night and was never found.
Suddenly the beer was like fuel for a fire. They drank to make themselves feel as they should feel when they didn’t drink, that way they had felt when they hadn’t drunk before the war. For that night they felt ferocious and whole and not yet undone, and they would laugh at all that had happened. And when they laughed the war was nothing, and everybody dead was alive in them, and everything that had happened to them was just this vibrating jumping thing beating inside them so hard they needed another drink quickly to slow the feeling.
And that night Lizard Brancussi was alive in them, and little Wat Cooney was alive in them, and Yabby Burrows and Jack Rainbow and Tiny Middleton were alive in them, all the many dead, and Sheephead Morton said he even sometimes remembered fondly that dirty miserable bastard Rooster MacNeice who should have been dead. And Gallipoli von Kessler—who had turned up in an old pair of worsted trousers so frayed around the cuffs they looked as if he had bought them from a scarecrow—mentioned Darky Gardiner, and then Jimmy Bigelow started singing—
Every day in every way it’s getting a little bit better.
They were standing around the pub fire at the Hope and Anchor that night, until the backs of their trousers got so hot they pushed them forward into another beer. It was forty-eight or maybe forty-seven. Whenever it was, it wasn’t much of a night, and it felt good to be inside, warm. They hadn’t all got together since being demobbed. Jimmy Bigelow wasn’t saying much. The marriage he had come back to wasn’t the marriage he had left. Or he had come back different.
I’m doing the best I can, he said at one point.
There were kids. He had four of them in the end and was called a family man. He wasn’t. He was a man who had four kids. No one said anything much more about Darky Gardiner, except for Gallipoli von Kessler who said, Nikitaris’s.
Yeah, said Sheephead Morton. Bloody Nikitaris’s fish shop. Never shut up about it, did he?
5
JIMMY BIGELOW SAID nothing. He was trying, that was the point, surely? But he didn’t speak. His hopes of becoming a musician, somebody, something, hadn’t worked out. He worked at the zinc works as a storeman. The big-band music he loved was no longer in fashion. The new music, the bebop and modern jazz, wasn’t music to him. It was choppy noise pretending to make music out of traffic jams. You couldn’t dance or fall in love with it, thought Jimmy. It wasn’t Al Bowlly. It wasn’t Benny Goodman or the Duke. It was the end of music. And the end of hope for someone like Jimmy Bigelow. The big bands were all folding, if not gone.
The things he believed in were heading out to sea, vanishing, lost forever. The things he thought he was coming home to. The things that he had hoped to become and make his life. It turned out that they weren’t worth a brass razoo. He didn’t fit with his own life anymore, his own life was breaking down, and all that did fit—his job, his family—seemed to be coming apart. He wanted to set things right with Dulcie, with his life, with bebop and swing, but it was over. He’d like to set things right, he thought, but it wasn’t possible.
But that wasn’t why they left the pub and headed up Elizabeth Street towards Nikitaris’s fish shop. To make all the wrong right. They left because it was near midnight, way past closing, and they were drunk and thrown out and they had nothing better to do.
It was one of those Hobart spring nights, cold as charity, snow coming down hard on the mountain, the harbour a lather, sleet slapping and scratching at windows and tin roofs like a wild drunk who’s been locked out.
They tramped up Elizabeth Street to Nikitaris’s fish shop, following the frayed trousers of Gallipoli von Kessler as he strode out the front. You could have fired a mortar down the street and hit no one. The fish shop wasn’t how they had imagined it in the camps, with people everywhere and steam and the smell of frying food and Darky’s girlfriend sitting up there waiting for them to walk in and do what they had to do. No, it was nothing like that.