Amongst the Dead (14 page)

I waited for a minute, and, when I was sure I was alone, took off the cumbersome hat with its netting, and the gloves. I’d been strongly advised, however, to keep all my clothes on, however stifling it became; given that the cheesecloth excluded even vigorous breezes, I thought I might die of heat exhaustion or smoke inhalation.

When my head touched the bedroll it became apparent that it was wet. The cheesecloth wasn’t waterproof. My clothes were wet, too, as they soaked up the bed’s moisture. I was suddenly so tired that I didn’t care. I couldn’t, however, ignore the insistent whining that began close to my ear. By now the smoke had seeped out from a tiny breach in my defences, and at least one mosquito had found the hole and gained entry. And then another; and another. I slapped at them, put my hat and gloves back on, and wondered why I’d ever thought this operation was a good idea. Ngulmiri, who was on horse-tailing duty, began calling out his name and some other words in his language. He did this several times. I was glad we’d been warned about it because I found it alarming and spooky. I fell asleep thinking that a few short weeks before I’d been luxuriating in an unpatriotically deep, hot bath. Still, I thought ruefully, that had turned out rather badly. Perhaps, starting from such a low base, this experience might improve, rather than decline. As if.

It rained heavily during the night, so heavily that water and mud flowed freely under and around my bed. I awoke so thoroughly saturated in rain and sweat that it was as if I’d spent the night submerged in a pond. It was just daylight, and when I raised the corner of the cheesecloth I saw that no one else was yet stirring. Through the filmy gauze of the hat netting I noticed the cheesecloth around Andrew Battell’s bed bulge as a body pressed up against it. He must be getting up, I thought. A figure, dressed as I still was, and unrecognisable, emerged and stood up. His hands were briefly exposed and, as he looked down at the low, elongated tent-like covering, he slowly put his gloves on. To my astonishment, he then lifted the edge of his netting veil and spat. Why would Andrew Battell spit on his own bed? He was feverish, it was true, and the cloth’s inability to secure a decent night’s sleep might well provoke an irrational attack against it.

I lay back down, put my hands behind my head, and waited until the Nackeroos decided the time was right to get up. Having accepted that there was nothing I could do about the water, I even managed to doze, and it was a deep, reviving doze, which I was shaken out of by Brian.

‘We’re leaving,’ he said.

There was bustle in the camp. Rufus was busy preparing ersatz scrambled eggs, using powders of various kinds, and Isaiah and Fulton were loading the FS6 onto horses — it took four horses to accommodate its bits and pieces and, from the strain apparent on Fulton’s face as the accumulators were loaded, it was clear that they were very, very heavy. The horses couldn’t possibly be expected to carry these for more than a couple of hours without relief. This explained, I suppose, the extraordinary number of remounts required to service only four Nackeroos. The tarpaulin had been taken down, and crates and boxes gathered into the centre of the camp, prior to loading or discarding.

I packed up my things quickly and, following the lead of the Nackeroos, I wore long sleeves and trousers. This wasn’t going to be a day for wandering about naked in Eden.

At some point it was noticed that Andrew Battell’s little tent hadn’t been packed away.

‘Get up, you lazy bastard,’ Nicholas Ashe called, but without rancour. Battell’s dengue fever gave him some leeway, temporarily, in the pulling of his weight. All the others had either been in his position already or knew that they would inevitably be so at some stage. There was no reply from Battell’s tent.

‘Maybe he’s off having a shit,’ Rufus said.

We ate, and final preparations for departure were made.

‘Why are we leaving?’ I asked Fulton as I forced the barely edible egg-matter down.

‘Last night, Platoon HQ recalled us. Fair enough, too. We’ve been on patrol for weeks now. It’s going to take us a couple of weeks, maybe, to get back to Flick’s Waterhole.’

He pulled out a Fighter Guide map, with hand-drawn additions, and showed me what lay ahead. It was a maze of water courses and swamp.

‘It doesn’t seem logical to me,’ I said. ‘Flick’s Waterhole is south of Company HQ. Why don’t we go straight there, to Roper Bar?’

‘We’re not just going home, Will. We’re mapping all the way. We mapped a route on the way up here, so we know where there’s grass and water for the horses, and where the going is impossible. With the Wet settling in now, things will have changed, so we’ll go back pretty much the same way and see what’s what. It’s going to be bloody hard work, and without the blackfellas we couldn’t do it.’

‘Maybe Nicholas Ashe needs to appreciate that a bit more.’

‘Nick’s all right, Will.’

He said this in a way that precluded further discussion, so I let it go, supposing that camaraderie forged in difficult conditions had dulled my brother’s decency. Brian’s words about our having separate fathers echoed suddenly in my mind, and I looked at Fulton’s profile with some concentration. Family resemblance isn’t a reliable marker of paternity or maternity; but, even so, I thought I detected, in the general shape of his head and in the way he held it, a decided difference from either Brian or me — and it wasn’t just that he was younger. He wouldn’t grow to look like us. No. He’d grow to look like someone else entirely.

Nicholas Ashe appeared and declared that, as we were ready to leave, it might be a good idea for someone to wake Andrew Battell. This time he sounded irritated, as if he’d been prepared to make allowances up to a point, but that point had now been reached and passed.

‘All right,’ Fulton said, ‘I’ll wake him and help him with his kit.’

He began by standing outside Battell’s cheesecloth tent and calling his name. There was no reply, so he pulled the material back to reveal Battell apparently asleep, although not wearing his mosquito hat. Fulton was about to shake him when he drew back and said, ‘He’s dead.’

We hurried over and stared down at Battell’s face. His eyes were open and lifeless but, appallingly, maggots had already been deposited in their corners and in his mouth, and they crawled and wriggled as they sought purchase to feed.

‘How did the flies get in?’ Brian asked, and at that moment it seemed like a more important question than how Battell had died.

‘Maybe he went to the dunny and left a gap,’ Glen said.

‘Yes, he did,’ I said. ‘Just after dawn. I saw him leave his tent.’

As soon as I’d said it, I realised I’d made a terrible mistake because, as if to prove my skills as a detective hadn’t deserted me, I was struck at that moment by the knowledge that the person leaving Battell’s tent at dawn wouldn’t have been Battell, but his killer. I’d just alerted this man to the fact that he’d been seen, and this put my life at considerable risk, especially in a landscape where there were a million ways to die — and all of them could look like an accident.

‘What do we do?’ Rufus asked reasonably.

‘The first thing to do is to radio someone and tell them,’ I said, ‘and then we should try to figure out how he died.’

‘We know how he died,’ Fulton said sharply. ‘Dengue. And I know it sounds hard, but we’re not unloading and reloading the radio. We can do that tonight. It’s not going to make any difference.’

‘Well, I think we should check to see if there might be any other cause of death,’ I said quietly, but firmly. Brian caught the determination in my voice, and realised that I might have reason to believe that Battell’s death was suspicious.

‘We have to do that,’ he said. ‘For the family.’

‘You’re going to do an autopsy here, are you?’ The small, unexpected sneer in Fulton’s voice was unfamiliar, in the true sense of that word.

‘No,’ Brian said calmly, ‘but we can check for things like snakebite.’

‘Or stab wounds,’ I said sharply, unable to resist the small shock such frankness might provoke in the murderer, and signalling at the same time that he needn’t think I was going to be as easy to dispose of as the feverish Andrew Battell.

Fulton shook his head and looked puzzled. ‘Fine. Do whatever you like, but I don’t want any part of it. Nick and I will dig a grave. Charlie Humphries can bring some people around to collect the body later.’

Glen, Brian, and I dismantled Andrew Battell’s bedding arrangements and exposed his body to the open air. This was going to be unpleasant. Only his face was visible, but the blowflies were already crowding on it, above it, and around it. Without speaking, we set about removing his clothes. Brian took off his boots and socks, and I undid the buttons on the two shirts he’d worn to bed. In only a few minutes the corpse lay naked in the dirt.While Glen waved a branch about to shoo away the flies, Brian and I looked closely at the body. Corporal Battell had several nasty sores on his legs, and his chest was pocked with impetigo. There were dozens of mosquito and sandfly bites — some of them merely welts, others angry, inflamed mounds — and many open sites of infection. If a snake or scorpion had bitten him, none of us was sufficiently experienced to confidently identify the puncture marks. I knew that Corporal Battell hadn’t suffered the misadventure of venom.

I forced myself to look at his head. Glen was ostentatiously looking away, and I didn’t blame him. There was no sense of the living Corporal Battell in this pale, rigid, fly-struck face. I reached out and gingerly moved the head slightly by pushing against the chin. A few dislodged maggots fell onto my hand, but the gorge rising in my throat subsided when I saw the raw burn of a ligature mark around his throat. Unmistakably, he’d been strangled, swiftly and brutally, and by a pair of hands that were experienced and strong.

‘Have you found anything?’ Glen asked, still resolutely avoiding looking at the body. I caught Brian’s eye and nodded in the direction of Corporal Battell’s throat while saying, ‘No. Fulton was right, I think. Dengue fever.’

Brian and I wrestled Corporal Battell into one of his shirts, and raised the collar to disguise the scar. Then we put one pair of his trousers back on and squeezed his feet into his shoes. I covered his face with his spare shirt, and reassured Glen that it was now safe to look.

‘I just can’t stand maggots,’ he said. ‘It’s like a phobia. It’s not the body.’

‘You finished?’ Fulton said, and his tone implied that he thought we’d done something unnecessary and inappropriate. Brian stepped forward and said quietly, ‘We had to check, Fulton.’

Fulton shrugged, but Brian’s words had mollified him. I knew that if I’d spoken the same words, the effect would have been different. I was reminded that I was an outsider in my family, condemned by my putative resemblance to my father — a man to whom I was never close and whom I never really knew, or liked particularly. It seemed unreasonable and unfair that I should inherit familial disdain simply because my father’s death put him beyond personally expressed disapproval. It’s strange that the mind permits such ruminations even at times when one might expect the attendant drama to drive them out. Even then, as I was helping carry Andrew Battell’s murdered body to the prepared grave, I couldn’t prevent the intrusion of irrelevant domestic tensions.

The grave was shallow and water had pooled at its bottom, but we had no choice other than burial. We couldn’t sling the corpse over the back of a horse and take it with us to Flick’s Waterhole, and the only other option was to place the body on a platform above ground, as was the tradition amongst some Aborigines, or so Rufus said. I’d already lost sight of the man who was Corporal Andrew Battell, so I felt no guilty pang when I started to think that a dead body is an inconvenience at the best of times, let alone in a situation like this.

We put him in the earth and covered him over. Fulton hammered in a rough bush-timber cross, and we observed a minute’s silence. No eulogy was delivered. As Fulton noted, the details of Battell’s life were unknown to them. The most that could be said was that he did his job, that he was a bit dour, and that he was sick for much of the time. He wasn’t known to have said anything really amusing, and he’d never mentioned a girlfriend or family. It was acknowledged that his natural reticence might have been increased by the debilitating effects of dengue fever.

‘We should go now,’ Fulton said, ‘and get some distance in before it gets too hot.’

He seemed to have assumed authority, and no one resented it. And so we began what would become the longest two weeks of my life.

Chapter Six

good medicine