Prologue
My mother had more stories than a famine has mice. She stitched them to our clothes, stirred them into our rice and tucked them into our beds with us at night. She told stories to comfort, to feed and to teach us about the corners of a world that might otherwise remain mysterious to a child. She could weave words into bandages, my mother. She could speak the coolness of dark green shade and the crumble of cinnamon-coloured loam between your toes.
Words were sweet between my mother’s lips – the names of our ancestors, songs for planting and for harvest, lullabies. She could find the meaning in bird-calls and cloud shadows. She knew the names of all the animals and plants in the forest. She knew which leaves to stew into a tea for fevers and which ones would help a dying man pass swiftly and without fear to the next world.
When I was a child, death was only an occasional visitor to our village. After someone in the village died an elder would decide on the exact location of the grave by throwing an egg into the air and digging where it fell. My mother would throw her eggs with particular care – not too close to the well but near enough to the sweeping fruit trees so that the blind tangle of their roots could feast on the body beneath.
She had a story for every season, my mother, but my favourite was one that she told to each of her children while we were still at her breast and the entire world was contained within that small sphere of warm skin and sky.
“A long, long time ago,” my mother would say, “when the earth was still warm and soft like just-risen dough, our country was ruled by giant reptiles. They had the thin-membraned wings of bats, these creatures, and their skin was scaled and cold. Those were troubled times and the reptiles were quarrelsome masters. Their dragon claws tore at the surface of the newborn earth and their harsh cries split the sky like lightning.” As she spoke my mother would draw her hands through the air, her fingers sharp.
“One day,” my mother would say in a low voice, “the king of the snakes rose from his home in the sea to make war with the serpent queen of the mountains. They circled one another with venomous fangs bared, looking for the other’s weakness. Their angry voices shook all but the sturdiest trees down and tore the fledgling rivers from their beds. The world held its breath in anticipation of the terrible battle to come. But something strange happened. As they reared into the air preparing to strike, they looked into each other’s eyes, peering through the glassy blackness to the core of one another.”
My mother smiled and stroked my face with gentle hands. “In that instant they fell in love and nothing would ever be the same again. In their cold, reptilian hearts they found the truth denied to many. That love is love. Beyond that nothing matters.”
Excerpt from Chapter Seven
Frank often spoke about his grandfather on our drives from village to village or on rest days in the town. Each story was like a picture or a window to a time that had passed. Unlike my mother’s stories, Frank’s did not wrap themselves around a meaning like a python, but painted pictures that were themselves the centre. He would string together images from his past that seemed unrelated and it was only afterwards that I could piece it all together and discover the reason for their telling. Sometimes he told his stories over, talking to pass the time and the distance, and then I would tell him mine. His stories soon became part of my own memories, woven tight together, and dense with detail.
Frank’s father, like mine, had died when he was young and I think now that our friendship grew from this common fault-line, this similarity. My mother would say – hens with hens and sparrows with sparrows. We grow to manhood less visibly when fatherless. I have watched my own son tread the path to adulthood, millimetre by painstaking millimetre, as if through a magnifying glass. But to the rest of the world boys appear to shake off their childhoods and emerge as adult men, in the way that awkward, down-flecked fledglings depart the nest with their feathers smooth and ready for flight.
Frank’s grandparents took him in the day they buried his father. Years later his grandfather would also give a home to his dead son’s wife, though by then she was little more than an invalid. Frank’s grandparents grew a small crop and sent a few dozen of their rangy cows, wild eyed, to market every year. Theirs was not a big farm or a luxurious life but Frank said it was mostly happy. Frank told me that Granddad had fought in the Australian war against the Turks and still lived his life as though men went to war on horses; as though honour and courage still counted for something.
Frank’s grandmother died while he was still at school. We had been in the country for two years before I tried to find his grandfather but by then it was too late – he died in 1975, just before we came to Australia. I visited the farm once, drove a borrowed car out along the Great Northern Highway, rocking in the wake of roadtrains passing, trying not to look at the lumped-up carcasses of kangaroos on the side of the road. The wind off the hills blew the trees into angles and the brown grass in the paddocks was flat and sketchy. Later, standing at the base of some low gravelly hills, I looked out at the paddocks and tried to imagine how it would have felt to grow up surrounded by the scent of eucalypts, gravel dust drying on your hands. But all I felt was a painful emptiness as though I was being eaten from the inside.
Frank told me that his grandfather came home from the war with a limp and a love of horses that he would never lose. As he got older his joints stiffened, his legs would neither bend nor straighten and he was unable to ride. But he would still walk amongst the small herd of horses in the paddock, feeling the heat of their dusty sides, running his crooked hands along their backs and breathing in the grassy, sweet smell of their bodies as they bumped against each other and nudged at his pockets with their soft, blunt muzzles. In the slow, amber evenings he would watch them at the water trough jostling like fretful siblings, stamping the dry ground and lifting clouds of dust that caught the lowering rays of the sun and tipped the edges of their bodies with gold.
Frank said that Granddad never forgave himself for ageing. That he was happiest with the reins in his hands, the smell of horse sweat seeping through woollen saddle blankets and the rhythm of shod hooves crunching gravel. Over time he grew less able to care for them and he let the little herd dwindle as they grew old and died. And they did, one by one, slowly and peacefully in the place that they had played out their whole lives. He folded their long-legged bodies into holes dug out of the hard clay and mounded the red soil above them. From the house he could see them, seven miniature hills fringed with weeds and the long, stiff stalks of wild oats. Each one he buried took a little more of him into the ground with them and the bridles in the shed became unrecognisable under their mantle of cobwebs.
The last of them, a grey-coated pony called Dusty, died just before I started working for Frank. I know it pained him to think of his grandfather on his own, working to add the last small hill to the row, but he had been away for so long that the old man must have been used to the solitude. Frank knew that his mother would have been small comfort, as by then she did little else but write long letters that were never sent and sit staring out the window of her bedroom at the hills and the rocky scrub that covered them. She kept a bottle of brandy in the top drawer of her dresser beneath her underwear. Granddad told Frank he made sure it was always a third full for, although it was the drink that had ruined her, it was her one source of pleasure and her greatest joy.
Frank told me that all he had ever wanted to do was join the army, see the world and return home to the farm. I would come to realise that some men are born to till the soil, raise livestock or haggle over prices and others take a gun into their arms for the first time and it settles into the bend of their elbow and the hollow of their collarbones like it has always been missing from them. Stillness comes to these men naturally and an instinct for wind, scent and the cover of darkness. I understood his longing for the farm but I also came to understand that he was not a farmer. Like a night insect he was drawn to the flame, the burn inevitable.
Excerpt from Chapter Nine
“When we were in Malaya we said that when a man first kills another, he’s ‘seen the elephant’. I’ve never seen a wild elephant in the bush. Never turned the corner on a path and come face-to-face with an animal so large it could crush me under its foot without breaking stride. But I can imagine.
“They kill a lot of people, wild elephants. The sheer weight of an animal that big. And its size. If you saw one and you survived it, you would never forget.
“The first time you kill a man knowingly, well that’s something you’ll never forget either. You look down the sights at him. And you know that if you don’t kill him he’ll kill you or one of your mates.
“You steady your breathing. Not holding your breath but taking one in and letting it out, just a little bit till you come to a place where your whole body stills for half a second. You can hear your own heartbeat in the pulse of blood behind your ears. You stare through the sights till they seem a part of you and level the rifle at the top of his breastbone. Not the head, not the heart, but that place on your chest that rings hollow when you tap it with a stiff finger. And you aim there because in training that’s what they’ve screamed at you, over and over. A head shot is too easy to miss and if you aim for the heart and shoot low all you’ve got is a belly wound. But this, this is the place – too high you get the head, too low you get the gut.
“Your trigger finger feels light and you’ve shot that weapon so many times by now you know exactly how much pressure it will take to send the bullet that’s up the spout spinning out at eight hundred and fifty yards a second.
“There’s a pause while you take up the slack in the trigger.
Every nerve in your body is centred in your finger. You listen for the space between heartbeats. And then the air splits and the gun takes your shoulder backwards, smooth like dancing. You can’t hear anything over the ringing in your ears. Next time you look there’s no man in the sights, just a bloody pile of clothes that used to be someone.
“And after that adrenaline pumps your heart against your ribs like a dog at a fence and sends jolts of electricity down your arms into your fingers till they burn. And your breath is sour and sharp in your throat and you’re panting like you’ll never get enough of it into your lungs because this time – this time it was him and not you.
“And later, back at base some blokes vomit, some blokes cry and some sit on the bare, hard ground and roll one smoke after another, smoking till their fingers look like tanned hide and their skin folds like cardboard into creases. Because you know, without a doubt, that the world will never, ever be the same place again. You’ve seen the elephant and it’s big, so big it can block out the sun forever.”
My mother had more stories than a famine has mice. She stitched them to our clothes, stirred them into our rice and tucked them into our beds with us at night. She told stories to comfort, to feed and to teach us about the corners of a world that might otherwise remain mysterious to a child. She could weave words into bandages, my mother. She could speak the coolness of dark green shade and the crumble of cinnamon-coloured loam between your toes.
Words were sweet between my mother’s lips – the names of our ancestors, songs for planting and for harvest, lullabies. She could find the meaning in bird-calls and cloud shadows. She knew the names of all the animals and plants in the forest. She knew which leaves to stew into a tea for fevers and which ones would help a dying man pass swiftly and without fear to the next world.
When I was a child, death was only an occasional visitor to our village. After someone in the village died an elder would decide on the exact location of the grave by throwing an egg into the air and digging where it fell. My mother would throw her eggs with particular care – not too close to the well but near enough to the sweeping fruit trees so that the blind tangle of their roots could feast on the body beneath.
She had a story for every season, my mother, but my favourite was one that she told to each of her children while we were still at her breast and the entire world was contained within that small sphere of warm skin and sky.
“A long, long time ago,” my mother would say, “when the earth was still warm and soft like just-risen dough, our country was ruled by giant reptiles. They had the thin-membraned wings of bats, these creatures, and their skin was scaled and cold. Those were troubled times and the reptiles were quarrelsome masters. Their dragon claws tore at the surface of the newborn earth and their harsh cries split the sky like lightning.” As she spoke my mother would draw her hands through the air, her fingers sharp.
“One day,” my mother would say in a low voice, “the king of the snakes rose from his home in the sea to make war with the serpent queen of the mountains. They circled one another with venomous fangs bared, looking for the other’s weakness. Their angry voices shook all but the sturdiest trees down and tore the fledgling rivers from their beds. The world held its breath in anticipation of the terrible battle to come. But something strange happened. As they reared into the air preparing to strike, they looked into each other’s eyes, peering through the glassy blackness to the core of one another.”
My mother smiled and stroked my face with gentle hands. “In that instant they fell in love and nothing would ever be the same again. In their cold, reptilian hearts they found the truth denied to many. That love is love. Beyond that nothing matters.”
Excerpt from Chapter Seven
Frank often spoke about his grandfather on our drives from village to village or on rest days in the town. Each story was like a picture or a window to a time that had passed. Unlike my mother’s stories, Frank’s did not wrap themselves around a meaning like a python, but painted pictures that were themselves the centre. He would string together images from his past that seemed unrelated and it was only afterwards that I could piece it all together and discover the reason for their telling. Sometimes he told his stories over, talking to pass the time and the distance, and then I would tell him mine. His stories soon became part of my own memories, woven tight together, and dense with detail.
Frank’s father, like mine, had died when he was young and I think now that our friendship grew from this common fault-line, this similarity. My mother would say – hens with hens and sparrows with sparrows. We grow to manhood less visibly when fatherless. I have watched my own son tread the path to adulthood, millimetre by painstaking millimetre, as if through a magnifying glass. But to the rest of the world boys appear to shake off their childhoods and emerge as adult men, in the way that awkward, down-flecked fledglings depart the nest with their feathers smooth and ready for flight.
Frank’s grandparents took him in the day they buried his father. Years later his grandfather would also give a home to his dead son’s wife, though by then she was little more than an invalid. Frank’s grandparents grew a small crop and sent a few dozen of their rangy cows, wild eyed, to market every year. Theirs was not a big farm or a luxurious life but Frank said it was mostly happy. Frank told me that Granddad had fought in the Australian war against the Turks and still lived his life as though men went to war on horses; as though honour and courage still counted for something.
Frank’s grandmother died while he was still at school. We had been in the country for two years before I tried to find his grandfather but by then it was too late – he died in 1975, just before we came to Australia. I visited the farm once, drove a borrowed car out along the Great Northern Highway, rocking in the wake of roadtrains passing, trying not to look at the lumped-up carcasses of kangaroos on the side of the road. The wind off the hills blew the trees into angles and the brown grass in the paddocks was flat and sketchy. Later, standing at the base of some low gravelly hills, I looked out at the paddocks and tried to imagine how it would have felt to grow up surrounded by the scent of eucalypts, gravel dust drying on your hands. But all I felt was a painful emptiness as though I was being eaten from the inside.
Frank told me that his grandfather came home from the war with a limp and a love of horses that he would never lose. As he got older his joints stiffened, his legs would neither bend nor straighten and he was unable to ride. But he would still walk amongst the small herd of horses in the paddock, feeling the heat of their dusty sides, running his crooked hands along their backs and breathing in the grassy, sweet smell of their bodies as they bumped against each other and nudged at his pockets with their soft, blunt muzzles. In the slow, amber evenings he would watch them at the water trough jostling like fretful siblings, stamping the dry ground and lifting clouds of dust that caught the lowering rays of the sun and tipped the edges of their bodies with gold.
Frank said that Granddad never forgave himself for ageing. That he was happiest with the reins in his hands, the smell of horse sweat seeping through woollen saddle blankets and the rhythm of shod hooves crunching gravel. Over time he grew less able to care for them and he let the little herd dwindle as they grew old and died. And they did, one by one, slowly and peacefully in the place that they had played out their whole lives. He folded their long-legged bodies into holes dug out of the hard clay and mounded the red soil above them. From the house he could see them, seven miniature hills fringed with weeds and the long, stiff stalks of wild oats. Each one he buried took a little more of him into the ground with them and the bridles in the shed became unrecognisable under their mantle of cobwebs.
The last of them, a grey-coated pony called Dusty, died just before I started working for Frank. I know it pained him to think of his grandfather on his own, working to add the last small hill to the row, but he had been away for so long that the old man must have been used to the solitude. Frank knew that his mother would have been small comfort, as by then she did little else but write long letters that were never sent and sit staring out the window of her bedroom at the hills and the rocky scrub that covered them. She kept a bottle of brandy in the top drawer of her dresser beneath her underwear. Granddad told Frank he made sure it was always a third full for, although it was the drink that had ruined her, it was her one source of pleasure and her greatest joy.
Frank told me that all he had ever wanted to do was join the army, see the world and return home to the farm. I would come to realise that some men are born to till the soil, raise livestock or haggle over prices and others take a gun into their arms for the first time and it settles into the bend of their elbow and the hollow of their collarbones like it has always been missing from them. Stillness comes to these men naturally and an instinct for wind, scent and the cover of darkness. I understood his longing for the farm but I also came to understand that he was not a farmer. Like a night insect he was drawn to the flame, the burn inevitable.
Excerpt from Chapter Nine
“When we were in Malaya we said that when a man first kills another, he’s ‘seen the elephant’. I’ve never seen a wild elephant in the bush. Never turned the corner on a path and come face-to-face with an animal so large it could crush me under its foot without breaking stride. But I can imagine.
“They kill a lot of people, wild elephants. The sheer weight of an animal that big. And its size. If you saw one and you survived it, you would never forget.
“The first time you kill a man knowingly, well that’s something you’ll never forget either. You look down the sights at him. And you know that if you don’t kill him he’ll kill you or one of your mates.
“You steady your breathing. Not holding your breath but taking one in and letting it out, just a little bit till you come to a place where your whole body stills for half a second. You can hear your own heartbeat in the pulse of blood behind your ears. You stare through the sights till they seem a part of you and level the rifle at the top of his breastbone. Not the head, not the heart, but that place on your chest that rings hollow when you tap it with a stiff finger. And you aim there because in training that’s what they’ve screamed at you, over and over. A head shot is too easy to miss and if you aim for the heart and shoot low all you’ve got is a belly wound. But this, this is the place – too high you get the head, too low you get the gut.
“Your trigger finger feels light and you’ve shot that weapon so many times by now you know exactly how much pressure it will take to send the bullet that’s up the spout spinning out at eight hundred and fifty yards a second.
“There’s a pause while you take up the slack in the trigger.
Every nerve in your body is centred in your finger. You listen for the space between heartbeats. And then the air splits and the gun takes your shoulder backwards, smooth like dancing. You can’t hear anything over the ringing in your ears. Next time you look there’s no man in the sights, just a bloody pile of clothes that used to be someone.
“And after that adrenaline pumps your heart against your ribs like a dog at a fence and sends jolts of electricity down your arms into your fingers till they burn. And your breath is sour and sharp in your throat and you’re panting like you’ll never get enough of it into your lungs because this time – this time it was him and not you.
“And later, back at base some blokes vomit, some blokes cry and some sit on the bare, hard ground and roll one smoke after another, smoking till their fingers look like tanned hide and their skin folds like cardboard into creases. Because you know, without a doubt, that the world will never, ever be the same place again. You’ve seen the elephant and it’s big, so big it can block out the sun forever.”