Out here there was dust and heat and endless shimmering mirages broken by swirls of detritus that sprang suddenly from the red grassless plain, reached into the sky then just as quickly collapsed and died. Like hope that sometimes came with the mail, or the crackling news on the radio.
It was early 1942. News from the war was scant and bleak. I was fifteen and cared and felt little about it. I went to school. My father drove the train that went to the city every other day. A six-hundred-kilometre round trip.
We lived next to the track. A small four room weatherboard railway house painted forever brown with deep red corrugated iron roof. The smell of hot metal, cooling cinders and wooden carriages clung to the gutters like rotting leaves, and I loved it.
We were up before the sun every day. My first chore was reviving the fire in the kitchen stove and emptying the ashes. On the iciest of mornings I cradled the warm tray against my chest. Small morning gusts lofted ash around my head. My breath became manifest, a fragment of my heart that came out to see the incredible beauty of the sunrise. My bare feet crackled the frosted grass still in shadow.
I walked to the great pile of cinders where the fireman emptied the hopper when the engine had tiredly chuffed to a standstill after its eight-hour haul. It was always warm unless there had been rain, and then it had a biting smell like the slicing edge of something sharp and quick. I slowly slid our ashes from the tray and turned to face the engine resting on the turntable. Waiting for the fireman who was eating breakfast and would soon stoke the engine’s heart again to be ready to leave the station in two hours.
Not 200 metres beyond the grey and red bulk of the engine was the dappled green anabranch of the great river that ran into a swamp just before it returned to the broad and brown main stream. I had explored, played and fished around there ever since I could remember walking. I knew every tree, every fishing hole, every place to be if you did not want to be found. It always smelled fresh and new, like a lettuce or carrot just pulled from the garden.
Before school most days I ran out the back to watch the train slowly pass and wave to dad. The screen door creaked then whacked the house. I slid down the track I had carved in the bank. The rails were still lofting and falling from the weight of the train when I stood on one. After the train had turned from sight I felt the trundle and clack of its progress through my feet. Downhill. We always said it was downhill from here to the city. Downhill and away.
In the opposite direction, back past our house, lived my best friend. Jean was 14. I called her Ji and she called me Teddy. She was as tough and fast as me and we played as equals with no boundaries. With bright copper red hair and brown skin befreckled by the unforgiving sun she was my elf and was becoming my muse. We sensed the other’s pain and joy, we knew the other’s heart.
And we understood our games were changing now. Being alone together for hours each day was its own adventure. We still ran and fished and swam and lay in the sun but there was a magic tension that pulled and stretched us and sometimes cornered us in wordless silence.
As I stood on the scattered cinders and gravel in the mornings and watched the sun pierce the trees along the river Ji was part of me, seeing our world with my eyes.
But when I came to the tracks on the way back to the house she floated to the back of my mind and the bottom of my heart.
I balanced on one iron rail, the cold burning my feet. I felt the icy magnetic pull of whatever was at the end of those endless tracks surge through me. I stared at the point where the tracks met in the far distance and wondered if I could ever reach that point and how I would get beyond it.
We barely felt or noticed the war. Men were away and some women had uniforms and stood out in the shops. On the farms city girls had come to help with the herds and crops but they rarely came to town. There was just one intrusion that came to unsettle and then threaten us.
Ji and I were on the river late in the afternoon when we heard the train whistle at the crossing about three miles out of town. We rarely touched except in rough and tumble ways in our games and sports. But laying on a warm beach in a light and drowsy silence I had reached for her hand. She squeezed mine back. We lay there until the whistle reached us.
I jumped up and called her and we ran to the station just as the train reached it. We waved to my father as the engine trundled to a stop. He waved back but seemed distracted.
As the passengers we knew came from the carriages a noisy knot of men in blue uniforms with silver buttons and soft caps spilled from the last. They brushed past us and one winked at Ji. She blushed and turned to me.
A few weeks before Ji’s fifteenth birthday Catalina flying boats had begun landing on a lake ten kilometres away. They came to be serviced and repaired far from the reach of the bombers and fighters. With them came first dozens and then hundreds of men – pilots, engineers, mechanics, clerks.
It did not take them long to discover the train that would bring them to the nearest town around 5 in the evening and return them to base before 8 next morning.
And it did not take our town long to discover the many ways to extract money from the pockets of these self-assured airmen while they idled in town overnight.
Ji’s mother, Eliza, wept almost every day. Ji’s father had been gone for three years and was somewhere north, probably Borneo, and her uncle had died in a plane crash just before being sent into the Pacific.
Eliza worked in a store in town. She walked with us on our way to school each day and Ji would meet her as she walked home in the evening. After the airmen found the train there were nights she came home late. And then there were nights an airman or two would come home with her.
She began buying things for Ji, starting with clothes that made her look older and more feminine. Then there was the day I went to meet Ji and her mother for the walk to town and her mother said Ji was sick and staying home.
After school I went straight to Ji’s house and walked in as I always did. There was a mess like I had never seen before. Ji’s room was empty as was the rest of the house. An airman’s jacket was crumpled on the floor in the hall. I picked it up and a button fell off the sleeve. I put the button in my pocket.
I ran home and changed and ran straight to the river, to the crossing point we had made. On the other side I sensed anger and upset and went slowly towards one of our safe places. I heard Ji crying and when I saw her she did not need to tell me what had happened.
I held her, really held her for the first time like a man holds a woman he loves. I kissed her hair and her despair softened and ebbed for a time. I stroked her arms and back trying to draw out the knots of anguish and shame.
Inside me there was turmoil and turbulence. Seething blood and crippling pain through the heart. Muscles tensed beyond breaking, nerves like fuses of fire. My mind had enough left to tell me to be still and let this subside.
I helped her home and saw her to sleep in her own bed. The jacket was gone.
Early next morning, Saturday, I went to her house. She was awake and tormented by pain and shame. We had tea in a silence that told me her mother suspected but did not know and was afraid to ask. After her mother went to work she wanted to walk, but not to the river, never to the river again.
She refused to talk, to answer my questions. I wanted to be at the station before the train left and shout and hit and point fingers, make accusations; to kill. She walked in silence as if at a funeral. This silence was filled with sharp edged bristling tensions forcing us apart.
She was no longer my elf, could never be my muse. She was shutting herself in a dark room where there was no air or space for me.
For days and weeks I poured out love in the only ways I knew: to laugh and sing, swim and play games. I had held her like a man but confronted by a hurt so deep that it transposed her life to a space and time far away from me I became a boy again, a puppy.
We went out together every day as before but we went nowhere. We were encased in blackness too dense. I could not see a way out for her and I despaired.
One night her mother came to our house. Ji was not home. We all went to the police. It was a small station with just two constables. They had a bike and a motorbike between them. They did not have guns. No-one talked about the airmen. They said they would search in the morning.
I had the ashes emptied and fire going before the sun burned a hole in the deep blue. I left my father and mother eating porridge and toast and drinking tea. I left my shoes. I knew where she was and I had one thing to do before I took the police there.
As I ran towards the river I stopped and balanced on the cold iron rail. The pull was much stronger now. I willed it to grow and dislocate me too in space and time. My feet were slipping out from under me. I was about to fly down the rails. My world here was dying.
I found the policeman on his bike half an hour later riding on the track next to the river near the railway station. I said I’d found Ji. I was crying, my heart icily running out of me.
When we reached the place across the river and down a track where Ji and I knew no-one would find us, he waved for me to stay back. I saw him look at the blood on her head and on the rock. I saw him uncurl Ji’s hand and take out a silver button.
I never crossed the river again, never went back to the warm beach or any hiding places.
The next morning just before the train left I came from the bush near the river and climbed onto a carriage on the side away from the station. When the school bell went I was locked in a toilet in the middle carriage while the pull of the iron rails sped me towards the city.
My father never knew he had carried me away. And no-one ever knew that I had left Ji there with the button in her hand as a promise to her and myself that I would erase our pain completely. Only for me, that never worked.
I wrote once to Ji's mother, about two years after I left. I told her how much I had loved her daughter. No address, nothing about me. And I asked her not to tell anyone about that letter. I never wrote to my mother. I was too angry and ashamed. I guess she's dead now. That hurts me more than the ice in my heart.
And I never told anyone more than I told the police. The story bounces around my head every day. I can never find the way to a better ending.
Beautifully evocative.