The Best Australian Stories (2 page)

All that night, the following day and the next they travelled slowly, with frequent stops, up the centre of Australia. They were heading towards the fighting. The further north they went the more they stopped in daylight, waiting for hours on end. On the third day the train remained motionless all afternoon, creaking in the heat, and they saw nothing through the windows but low grey bush, a few worn hills in the distance.

A young soldier spoke for the first time. ‘As far as I'm concerned the Japs can have it.'

The horizon remained. Nothing moved. And the low horizon may have spread the melancholy among them. Banerjee tried to picture his street, his front fence and house, the appearance of his wife. Their daughter was growing up while he waited in the train. The other men had fallen silent, some nodding off.

*

The train stopped. It creaked forward, stopped again. In the dark a sergeant came through, shouting his head off.

It was Banerjee's group which was told to fall in outside.

The cold and unevenness of the ground alongside the train had them stumbling and swearing. They herded together, hands in greatcoats, and waited.

‘Put out that cigarette!' – meaning the light receding.

Banerjee didn't even smile. After it could no longer be seen the train could still be heard; but what remained was soon enough replaced by the immense silence. To clear a throat out there would be deafening, worse than a concert hall.

Banerjee was probably the first to pick up the sound, a smaller engine. Another ten minutes must have passed before the truck stopped before them, tall and vibrating. It took some trouble climbing into the back. They sat facing each other under a tarpaulin roof; and the truck turned, climbing over bushes, and made its way back along the same track, over low bush and rocks, and what appeared to be creek beds, pale stones there, while the dust funnelled out behind them, obliterating the stars.

After two hours of this – bumping about, grabbing at arms, crashing of gears – the truck slowed, the path became smoother.

Someone nudged, ‘Stick your head out and see where we are.'

To no one in particular Banerjee said, ‘I've never been in this part of the world before.'

Leaning forward he saw a large silver shed and other buildings in the moonlight.

They were shown into a long hut. Banerjee lay down in his uniform and slept.

At first light the desolate composition of the aerodrome was revealed. A runway had been cut into the mulga by a team of crack Americans. Here then were the nation's forward defences. And not a cloud in the sky. Already it was warm. Everything spanking new in the morning light. There were two large hangars, sheds and a long water tank. Down the far end were smaller buildings and men moving about.

A man wearing an officer's cap and khaki shorts stood before them. Eric could have sworn he used to see him at the recitals at the Town Hall, although there he wore a beard.

Clearing his throat he spoke casually, but firmly. He didn't expect much in the way of formality, he said. He did however expect their full attention. ‘It would make our job a darned sight easier.' The enemy, he explained, was not far away and coming closer ‘as we speak'. The aerodrome was one of a number along the top of the Northern Territory. Their task was to paint – every inch of the place. ‘At the moment it is a sitting duck,' was how he put it. The slightest patch of bare metal, he explained, could flash a signal to the enemy in the sky. To demonstrate he fished around in a pocket and held up a threepence – ‘like so'.

The camouflage officer then squinted at the new roofs shining in the sun. ‘The art in all this is deception,' he said thoughtfully, as if the whole thing was a game. He spoke of the ‘science of appearances', of fooling the oriental eye. It was a matter of applying the right colours in certain combinations and patterns.

Banerjee was handed a bucket of ochre paint, a wide brush, and assigned the roof of the main hangar. It took a while to get used to the height. And the roof itself was slippery. Close up it didn't seem possible that his hand, which produced a strip of rapidly drying colour, would make any difference to the larger situation, the advance of mechanised armies across islands and continents. Further along other men were slapping on industrial grey.

As the day progressed the huge expanse of corrugated iron warmed up, almost too hot to touch, and glittered more, straining the eyes.

The others had taken off their shirts and the signwriter nearby knotted his handkerchief at the corners and put it on his head. Now and then the officer in shorts appeared below and studied their progress through the reverse end of binoculars. Pointing with a long stick he shouted up to Banerjee to give more curve there to the red ochre. He made a parallel flowing movement with his hands. ‘Like a woman's hips. Think of her hips!' Which allowed Banerjee in unpromising surroundings to wander over the softness of his wife's body – at that moment probably bent over their daughter. ‘That's good, a little more to the left. Good man,' the voice continued.

At the morning tea-break Banerjee sat in the shade and closed his eyes.

The Americans were recognisable by their sunglasses. When he returned their greetings Banerjee thought everybody could do with sunglasses up on the roof.

And this thought made him realise he was doing his best, and he felt satisfied.

*

Piano-tuning hadn't been his first choice of profession. When Eric was about ten the
News
ran a photo of him seated at the Town Hall's Steinway, his feet barely touching the pedals, reeling off a mazurka by Chopin he had sighted only minutes before. That tabloid which always had a reputation in Adelaide for fearlessness came out and announced ‘our latest prodigy'. A career in the concert hall beckoned. Accordingly his normal schooling was adjusted and his parents made the necessary sacrifices, going without small luxuries, such as extra clothes or holidays. The teacher appointed was considered one of the best available: Viennese, arthritic, cameo brooch.

Banerjee became accustomed to applause. His combed hair, jug ears. He hardly ever missed a note. As he went on playing here and there, as it all flowed more like water out of his hands, years passed, and he began to wonder, as did others, whether his playing was progressing. Flaws in his technique began to show. These were probably flaws in temperament; he didn't seem conscious of them. He was taller and heavier than most pianists.

By his mid-twenties Eric Banerjee had given very few recitals, at least not in the main venues. However hard he worked the world around him remained just out of reach. It was as if a steady invisible force held him in the one spot, and now began pushing him back slightly and to one side. Almost without noticing he was playing more and more at less demanding venues, weddings, church gatherings, schools and the like, and didn't seem to mind. He felt comfortable there. Both parents died. He hardly ever attended a concert. In the space of a few more years he retreated still further until, after taking in a few pupils, which is how he met his wife, he came to rest, it would appear, piano-tuning, which may be some distance from bowing in tails on the concert platform, but is in the general vicinity, and supplied a small, regular income.

For all this, Banerjee had escaped the bitterness endemic among piano-tuners. He was pale and had a small valley in his chin. One advantage of his profession was that it left his head permanently inclined to one side, which gave the impression he was a good listener.

Banerjee was close to forty. Looking back he wondered where it had all gone. What happened in all those years? Most people didn't know or care if a piano was out of tune; only a few could tell the difference. And yet there he would surely be, continuing into the sunset, crossing from one manganese brick house to the next, one suburb to another, adjusting the progressions of sound plucked out of the air, as it were. If anyone could understand it would be the officer who spoke of ‘deception'. On the street between the dusty box hedges time itself seemed to have slowed to a crawl. Any sign of life was at mid-distance; and all so quiet it was as if he was going deaf.

Not that he wanted disturbance, disruption, surprise and so on. A certain order was necessary in his line of work. These thoughts he kept to himself. Yet increasingly he felt a dissatisfaction, as though he had all along been avoiding something which was actually closer to the true surface of life.

*

By early afternoon the officer had taken pity on them. The academic had lost his glasses. Further along another man was silently vomiting; Banerjee too felt dizzy – headache behind the eyes. There was paint on his fingers, elbows and wrists. Perspiration had also mixed with reddish dust and muck. The golden rule in his profession: clean fingernails. Now look at them. The one remaining sign of his previous life was the vibration in one leg, and he tried shifting his weight, for of course it reminded him of the final tremor of a tuning fork.

As they made their way down, Banerjee lost control of the bucket and paint ran all over his pattern.

‘Leave it till morning,' the officer said. ‘If the Japs come over we're done for anyway.'

‘These blisters, I couldn't grip.'

‘I take it you don't, as a rule, work with your hands.'

Banerjee was examining his palm. ‘Piano.' He looked up. ‘I mean piano-tuner, that's what I do.'

All he wanted just then was to drink a gallon of water, and shut his eyes to the light, which he did with the help of an elbow, only to see the roof in all its glittering endlessness. He didn't feel like eating.

But it only took a few days for his body to grow into the work. His hands soon enough hardened. With his shirt off and sun on his back he became absorbed in the task. The undulating pattern of red-grey was interesting in itself; the idea behind it made them merry.

A rivalry began with the men on the other roof to see who could finish first. These men Banerjee knew from the dormitory. In ordinary life some were successful painters of hills and trees – Horace, Arthur, Russell were names Banerjee heard. The picture-framer was apparently known to them. He suggested the artists sign each sheet of iron when they finished. The man with prematurely white eyebrows nodded. ‘That's the only way you'll make a killing.'

Banerjee enjoyed this sort of banter, even if he was on the fringe. There was not much of it in the day of a piano-tuner; and it would never occur to him to banter with his wife, Lina, who had anyway become curiously solemn after having their child.

Early one afternoon planes were spotted – three of them, high. Leaning back they shielded their eyes to watch. The officer on the ground had to clap and yell to get them down – ‘For Christ sake!' – off the roof.

Later that same day they had a grandstand view of the first two planes to land.

And just when the dust had settled, and they were admiring the practised efficiency of the Americans parking the planes, they ran out of paint. There was nothing to do but come down on ladders and sit around in the shade, where it was still hot.

Without effort, Banerjee was a man who kept his thoughts to himself; preferred to stay back than join in. Yet there he was more or less part of the group mumbling and wisecracking. Often they were joined by the camouflage officer. After all, he had nothing much to do either. Close up Banerjee noticed his face was infested with small lines.

The officer looked up from scratching the ground with his stick. ‘I don't know what's happened to our paint.' To Banerjee he added, ‘In war there's more waiting than shooting. Always was.' When the talk turned to music Banerjee could have said something, and with real authority; instead he listened while letting his thoughts wander among other things.

On the third or fourth day one of the pilots squatted beside him. After talking about his hometown (St Louis) and his parents, he held out a hand and introduced himself.

*

Banerjee married late. Lina was barely twenty-one. He had taken her away from everybody else; that was how it later felt. All her privacies she transferred to him. The way their habits became one she accepted with busy contentment; while Banerjee composed his face, unable to find his natural state.

He was strong all right, in the sense that he practised a certain distance, the same way he had played the piano. But Lina, she knew more; she always had. It was part of her flow, along with blood.

Whenever he paused and considered his wife he first saw her name, then found he knew very little, virtually nothing, about her; what went on in her mind, the way she came to decisions – no idea. He could not get a firm outline; and he knew only a little more about himself. More than anything else he was aware of her needs, and how he reacted to them. She had a slightly clipped voice.

She had gone to him for piano lessons. When he appeared he said he was no longer taking pupils. But that didn't stop her. Marriage was a continuation. Later, she explained how she'd heard him playing in the next room, and then his voice, though unable to catch his words. Without seeing him she had turned to her mother, ‘That man is for me. He will do.'

‘Even though you didn't hear a word I said? I was probably talking nothing but rot.'

But then Lina's faith in situations invariably impressed him. She could be very solemn, sometimes. She was a woman who couldn't leave things alone; constantly rearranging things on tables, plates, sideboards. She also had a way of peeling an orange with one hand, which for some reason irritated him. Banerjee knew he should be thinking more about her, his wife; and their own daughter. She complained, as she once put it, he was ‘somewhere else'. Very fond of her pale shape. Her spreading generosity.

*

One afternoon Banerjee and the picture-framer were invited by the pilot and another American for a drive to the nearest town, Katherine, about an hour away. The jeep had a white star on the bonnet; and, unusual for a pilot, he drove one-hand, crashing into bushes and rocks instead of driving around. ‘Know any songs?' he called out over his shoulder. Both Americans began singing boogie-woogie, banging on the dashboard.