The Turning Tide (3 page)

I take a mouthful of wine and think of young, confident Lena – pregnancy sidestepped with a pill, reputation based on character, not sex life. You’re getting maudlin, I tell myself; even now, in the early eighties, it’s not easy for women. But it’s better. At least it’s better than it was for Kitty. Isn’t it?

In that odd way thinking of someone seems to make them appear, the next day I’m flipping through something in the Union bookshop and Lena’s there across a stack of texts. Our eyes meet at the same time and she’s delighted. I’m feeling unsociable but she insists we have a cup of coffee next door.

‘I was hoping I’d run into you, Mike,’ she says, spooning sugar into her cup. ‘I’m having such a great time, second semester’s amazing! We’re doing electromagnetism –’

‘You didn’t do it last year?’

‘Not in this detail. We had to really concentrate. Equation after equation on the blackboard, but it all went together so incredibly. Then at the end, like magic –’

‘I know … E equals MC squared?’

‘How did you know?’

‘It happened to me too, a long time ago. Amazing moment.’

‘Did your class applaud too?’

‘Lena, it was just after the war. We all knew nuclear bombs had been dropped on living people. I think we sat there stunned that something so … beautiful … could do that. No, we didn’t applaud.’

I can see I’ve hurt her a little. She says coolly, finding a flaw in my story, ‘Nana said you were at university before the war, not after.’

Oh, Nana said, did she?

‘I started before but didn’t finish till afterwards. A serviceman’s grant – the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme,’ I say with bureaucratic precision.

She looks at me and I notice for the first time she has the same little brown dot in her left iris as Helen. I tell her so.

She’s silent for a moment. ‘A boy at school used to tease me about it.’

‘But it’s lovely. I remember –’ I stop. ‘It’s good to have something special like that.’

She smiles a little. A thought hits me.

‘My God, we’ve been talking about you and your grandmother. But what about your dad? Johnny’s son, what’s his name? Is he in Foster too?’ I suddenly recall she’d said she lived with her mother and pray I haven’t screwed up again.

‘He’s called Ian. He lives in Hong Kong.’ She looks up and sees the surprise on my face. ‘He and Mum divorced when I was ten. But now she lives with Mitch. He’s really nice.’ She sighs. ‘Dad was in the navy in Vietnam and when he came home he was different. Horrible. That happened to my friend at school’s dad too.’

I can’t speak for shock and nausea. Johnny dead in the Pacific War and they send his son to fight in that disgusting, evil, arselick of a war? All the way with those shits who learnt nothing,
nothing
, from what we went through?

I take a breath. ‘Lena, I’m sorry about your dad. That’s … Jesus, I’m so sorry.’

‘He visits every year,’ she says lightly. ‘And always brings me nice things. He’s happier nowadays, he doesn’t get so angry. Or sad. He’s captain of a boat. I think he likes that.’

Ian. Ian Erikssen. Oh Johnny, how did we let them get away with it again? I feel an agony of responsibility. We tried to stop them, Johnny. Argued, joined anti-war groups, marched in demos. Dear God, your son – Helen’s baby – in Vietnam.

‘Mike, it’s all right,’ says Lena hesitantly. She can’t know why my face twists with pain, but it doesn’t scare her. She’s a kind girl.

‘We honestly thought war wouldn’t happen again,’ I try to explain. ‘But it did and it steamrolled right over you and your family,
again
. It’s … wrong. Wrong.’

She looks at me, her head slightly to one side. ‘What about your family, Mike?’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Well, my wife Marion died about three years ago now. I’ve got a daughter who’s a vet and a son,
a teacher. They’re my stepchildren really, but I’ve raised them since they were small.’

After a moment she says, ‘Why don’t you come down in the September holidays and see Nana? She said she’d like that.’

No, Lena, I don’t think she would. And I’m absolutely certain I wouldn’t.

‘I’m afraid I’ve got another commitment,’ I say, trying to think of something plausible.

Lena looks at me sceptically. ‘Uh-huh. What about the Christmas break, then? Three months of it?’

I open my mouth but can’t think of anything, so shut it again.

She smiles. ‘I told you Nana remarried, yeah?’

‘Yes.’ My expression is under control.

‘They divorced, ages ago. She’s by herself, Mike. She’d really like to see an old friend.’

‘That’s very thoughtful of you, Lena. I’ll certainly try to get away for a visit,’ I lie.

Chapter 3

In April 1940 the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway. In May, they walked into Holland, Belgium and France. In September, Japan signed a treaty with Germany and Italy and officially joined the Axis.

Dad sent me a letter, as strict as he ever got, insisting I finish my education. An engineer would always be more useful than a foot soldier, he said. In the Great War he’d been captain of a steel sailing ship that was torpedoed by a submarine. As a child it sounded like a marvellous adventure, but when I grew older I noticed he rarely mentioned it, and if he did I could see the memory distressed him.

So I stayed at uni. In any case, for much of second year I was still bedazzled by Kitty and sex, but not so much I suffered too deeply when our affair ended. My exams went well.

At the end of 1940 I went home to Broome for the first time in two years. It was a journey of a few weeks in those days: steamer from Melbourne to Perth, then another ship for the twelve hundred miles from Perth to Broome. We stopped at all the small ports going north, the air hotter and dustier every day. Approaching Broome I remember the orange bluffs, the luminous bay, the shimmering heat pouring from the sky.

I look up at a small painting on the wall and smile to myself. Dashes of turquoise water and rust-red sand and ruffled green mangroves, the familiar sweet lines of a lugger winging off into the distance. One of my brother Liam’s painting. Well, half-brother really, but the distinction was pointless. He was ten when I was born, and always my protector and best friend.

Liam and I had a sister too, Anna. She was only a year older than me so we were rivals in childhood, but almost friends by the time I went away to university. She was in Perth at secretarial college. Anna was happy, her scribbled letters told me, caught up in the thrill of war and the glamour of young warriors.

My parents had a small lugger-building business in Broome. Luggers were sailing boats especially designed for pearl-shell fishing. But the industry was hit hard by the Depression so we didn’t have much money when I was young, at least not until my parents received a legacy that made life a lot easier. It came from my English godfather, but I don’t remember him.

I do remember his wife though, my godmother Min-lu, because she came back to live in Perth after he died and we’d go to visit her every year when the summer got too
hot in Broome. She was small and fine-featured, with kind eyes and beautiful cheekbones, and silver hair pulled up on her head with golden combs that fascinated me as a child.

She’d lived in this country for many years before going to England, and I remember her saying in her precise, beautiful voice, ‘Oh, I’m so happy to be home at last and to forget that appalling weather.’ She’d gained her Australian residency before Federation in 1901, which was a good thing, as otherwise she’d have been barred from the country.

You see, my godmother was Chinese. Her son Sam had been a sailor with my father and a close friend of my parents – they gave me the middle name of Samuel. When Mum’s own mother died when she was only fifteen it was Min-lu who’d taken care of her.

Brought up in Broome, I didn’t realise having Japanese friends or a Chinese godmother was odd, at least not until I went to boarding school in Perth. Then boys would pull up the corners of their eyes and chant imbecilities that were nothing at all like the gentle murmurings I’d known since I was a child. But I learnt a lot at boarding school; when to lie low and when to attack, and after a while I had to do neither. I was stronger and more savage than anyone had realised, and wisely they left me alone.

As I said, Broome was a very different place from the rest of the country.

Mum and Dad met me off the steamer and with the other passengers we took the little tram along the jetty to shore. Dad put my bags in the boot of his new car parked under a tree, saying, to my delight, he’d give me driving lessons.

As we passed along the foreshore I looked out at the lugger camps. It was the lay-up season but there were fewer boats drawn onto the beach than I had ever seen.

‘Are some of them still working outside?’ I asked.

‘No, love,’ said Mum. ‘That’s all that’s left. There’s only about sixty luggers in Broome now.’

‘Sixty!’

‘There’s maybe another fifteen or so at Onslow and Cape Leveque,’ said Dad, ‘and Captain Gregory’s taken ten or twelve to Darwin over the last few years. But that’d be all.’ ‘There used to be hundreds,’ I said, astonished. It was the first time I’d realised what I’d assumed from childhood to be unchanging was nothing of the kind.

Thankfully the house was much as I remembered, with its shady latticed verandahs and white paths of crushed pearl shell winding around the garden, but even then I noticed the trees had grown and there was new furniture in the lounge. Still, the usual ritual of tea and cake on the verandah was comforting, followed by the familiar afternoon doze: in midsummer Broome, a siesta was a necessity.

That evening a storm in the distance blew cool breezes as we ate at the table on the verandah and gossiped about friends and family. I heard my sister Anna had a new boyfriend, an RAAF pilot. ‘She got sick of last month’s sailor then?’ I said.

Mum said, ‘She should concentrate on her studies.’ Dad touched her hand and she smiled wryly and a look passed between them. They’d always been intensely close, playing fiddle music together, seeming to understand each other’s thoughts, laughing at the same time without a word. As a child I hated being excluded that way, but Mum would
say they’d been together for so long they could read each other’s minds. I didn’t understand, then, how rare their bond was.

‘And Liam’s having his first big exhibition in Perth next month,’ said Mum. She adored my brother Liam, even though he was actually my dad’s son from before they got married. A boy at school said Liam was a bastard so I beat him up, but not too much because it was true.

‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to hear about the Egawas now?’ said Dad in his soft Irish accent, carving the roast for the main course.

‘How are they?’

‘Old man Egawa’s still at the boat repairs, though he must be over seventy. And Yoshi and Mary had their twenty-fifth anniversary a few weeks ago. And a very good party it was too.’

‘Dad.’

He chuckled. ‘Oh, you mean the youngsters?’

‘
Dad
.’

‘They’re both around.’ His smile faded and I saw concern in his eyes. ‘But not for long. They’re going to Japan in a few weeks. Ken wants to join the army. Betty’s going because Yoshi thinks she’ll be safer there.’

‘Safer?’

Dad sighed. ‘Ah, son, the odds of war with Japan are getting greater every day. If it came to that, what do you suppose would happen to the Egawas?’

‘Nothing! Mary and the kids are Australian, not Japanese. You don’t think anyone would hurt them?’

‘Not in Broome. But governments usually lock up enemy citizens in time of war. That’s what Yoshi’s afraid of.’

I was silent with shock.

Mum leant towards me. ‘Sweetheart, Betty hasn’t changed. But Ken … he fell in with some nationalists and now his head’s full of rubbish. He wants to fight the Koreans, the Chinese, anyone, everyone, for the glory of that awful emperor.’

I looked at her, amazed. Even before I’d gone away to university I’d heard of the horrors the Japanese army had inflicted on China. My old friend Ken wanted to be part of something like that?

I’m sitting in the Union cafe, avoiding colleagues and trying to catch up on a research paper I should have read a week ago. I look around and think how it would have shocked my grandparents’ generation: young people from every country under the sun together, queuing, eating, laughing. A group of animated Asian kids are at the table next to me. I notice a ray of light refracting into tiny spectra on one girl’s glossy black hair.

I used to see that iridescence in Betty’s hair too, though I didn’t have the words then to understand it: it was just some magical thing that happened in the sunlight. I remember her sitting beside me on a seat near Town Beach, facing onto quiet Roebuck Bay. We were waiting for Ken, who was splashing in the water with friends.

‘I don’t want to go to Japan, Mike,’ she said, looking down – that’s when I noticed those little rainbows. ‘But my father is determined I should experience some Japanese civilisation, he calls it, with his family. At least until the threat of war has passed.’

‘That could be a long time, Betty,’ I said, unable to keep the dismay out of my voice.

After my affair with Kitty I saw Betty with new eyes. Still the gentle, amusing friend she’d always been, but different too; she’d grown up while I was away. She looked at me. Gleams of light turned the brown of her eyes into velvet and her lashes and eyebrows were like charcoal feather strokes against her skin.

‘You’ve been away a long time, Mike. Everything has changed. Ken became friends last year with a new diver who used to be in the Japanese army. Now all the time he talks about empires and conquests and subservient races – it’s terrible.’

Betty had always been stoic. I’d never seen her cry, not when she scraped her knees in childhood games, not even the time she broke her arm in a fall. I was shaken to see tears in her eyes now. I held her slim hand and we sat quietly side by side for a time. She blinked and sniffed and took a breath.

‘I’m so afraid, Mike. What if war does come? I’ll be stuck in Japan, away from my friends. And Ken is determined to join the Japanese army. He could get killed, it would destroy my family. I can’t see any way out of a terrible future.’