is just a man who’s a little more sunburned than the rest of us. But you would never be able to see it that way. You have to be a man, Caulfield, to know how to treat men properly. And you never knew how to treat us. If the boongs disliked you as much as we did, then I shouldn’t go back to New Guinea if I were you. Not now, when they could blame your death on the Japs.”
Caulfield’s face got redder, the freckles turning almost black, but before he had a chance to speak the men had turned back to the bar; and there was that little island of silence again in that sea of noise. Vern stood there waiting for the burst of temper that they all knew of old.
But Caulfield just muttered, “You’ll be sorry for this,” and when Vern looked back over his shoulder he had gone.
“I’ve been waiting to say that for two bloody years,” said Jack. “In the circumstances I thought I was remarkably restrained.”
“Too bloody restrained,” said Mick Kennedy. “I’d of jobbed him if I’d been closer to him.”
“I wanted to job him,” said Bluey. “Trouble is, my days of jobbing people are over. Even with that bung hand of his, he’d have knocked me arse-over-Bluey.” He looked wistfully into his glass. “You miss a lot when you get past forty.”
“‘I’m another bloke,’ he said.” Joe Brennan almost spat into his beer. “‘Let’s make a new start.’ Christ, what does he think we are, lovers?”
“Now in the tribe,” said Charlie Fogarty, and sipped his shandy, “we would’ve pointed the bone at him, and he’d of been dead in a week. You blokes are too civilised.”
Vern had been thinking of all they had had to put up with in the time Caulfield had been with them. The sarcastic arrogant way he had of talking to the men; the looking after his own comfort and ignoring that of those under him; the trivial rules instituted just to show his authority. The company after a while had called itself Caulfield’s Boongs, and had put up with him with good-humoured resignation. Then the good humour had begun to run dry and threats were muttered against him. On the trip to the Middle East he had headed the shark-bait list; but somehow he had landed safely in Palestine and had survived the months spent there and at Mersa Matruh. Then the battalion had gone into the Syrian campaign and he had had his hand mangled by a shell splinter, and he had been invalided home to the accompaniment of loud cheers from the men. Vern had never seen anyone hated so much, and now here was the man daring to come back and ask that the past be forgotten. Was he so thick-skinned or just blind or did he have more guts than the men, though reluctantly, had conceded him? And what had he meant by his remark that they would be sorry?
JACK WATCHED Vern Radcliffe board the tram, waved at him, then turned away with the feeling of being lost that had kept recurring ever since they had first landed back at Adelaide. Vern had asked him home for dinner, and he had almost accepted. But then he had recognised the invitation for what it was, sincere but a spur-of-the-moment thought; he had thought of Dinah sharing the moments with her husband after two long years, and so he had told Vern he had a date.
Well, he’d better see if he did have a date. He crossed the road to St. James station, lined up outside the phone box and ten minutes later was dialling a number, conscious of the thick stuffy smell of the box and the belligerently impatient queue outside.
“Rita? This is Jack here.”
“Jack? Jack who?” Her voice sounded the same, light and empty as her head.
“Jack Savanna. How many Jacks do you know? They had once lived together for three months, but now she had forgotten him. He grinned to himself and patted his bruised ego.
“Jack Savanna! Well, Ah declare! How you been, huh?” Her voice had changed, after all: it had crossed the Pacific. “Long time no see, Jack, honey.”
Why did I ring her? he thought; and thought what a trap was the telephone. In the old days, when one had to write a letter there was always time for a second thought. But now: two pennies in the slot, a spin of the dial, and bingo! Why had he called her? Rita, with the blank pretty face, the pretty blank mind and the beautiful body—yes, that was why he had called her. “I’ve missed you, too, Rita, honey. How about dinner to-night, and afterwards we can talk about old times, huh?”
“Ah gee, Jack honey, if I’d only known! But I already gotta go out—I’m gonna see”—he could hear her two-stroke brain changing gears—“my aunt.”
“Your ant? Are you interested in entomology now?”
She laughed, light and meaningless as a child’s bell. “Still the same old Jack! Still making with the big words.”
Serves me right, he thought, for having designs on her body. He hadn’t taken her mind into account, and he was beaten before he had started. Suddenly the box seemed more stinking and stuffy than ever. Abruptly he said good-bye, hung up and pushed open the door.
“You been long enough, dig,” said a sailor. “Who you been ringing, MacArthur?”
Jack hunched his shoulders. “Want to make something of it, matelot?”
“I gotta ring me sheila,” said the sailor, and skipped nimbly into the box. He grinned through the glass, then turned to the phone, a red-headed, broken-nosed, freckle-faced Romeo who was sure of his girl.
Jack walked past the other people waiting to use the phone and out into Elizabeth Street again. It was a mild night with light still in the sky behind the buildings on the west side of the street. Right above him a few stars, poignant as tears, looked down at the city. A plane appeared from behind the towers of St. Mary’s Basilica, a metal angel with winking red and green light, heading north; it passed over the harbour, suddenly an angel no longer but a small black fly caught in the tangled skein of the searchlights. I should be on that, he thought, getting out of this bloody unfriendly city. And then was angry at himself for being sorry for himself.
He looked about him, aware now of a change in the atmosphere of the city he had loved so well. There was that air of electric nervousness that came upon all cities at this time of day during the war. In London and Cairo and Berlin, and in all cities within reach of the bombers, there would be fear behind the nervousness; here in Sydney and in Melbourne, probably New York too and San Francisco, there was just the hope of a good time. Girls stood waiting for their men, looking at other men, wondering if they were better prospects than their date for to-night: modesty had become a wartime casualty and had been replaced by the roving eye and the calculating mind. Couples walked arm-in-arm out of the great green bed of Hyde Park, flushed with love-making and stained with grass juice. An American sailor, his arm about a brazenly successful girl, stood on the kerb waiting confidently for the cab that would come to him past all the hailing Australian arms. The city had changed all right.
He began to walk along Elizabeth Street, aimless and lost in the city that was his home, big Jack Savanna who was always so definite and self-possessed and impregnable. Then he heard the music coming across the park and suddenly he remembered the Anzac Buffet. There would be girls there, plenty of them, all dedicated to the enjoyment of the boys on leave. He turned and began to hurry across the park, almost as if he had to get there before the supply of girls ran out. He wasn’t drunk, he’d had only four beers with the boys in the Marble Bar, but he suddenly had the pleasant lightness of feeling, that warmth that makes the world a good place that must be enjoyed to the full, and his low mood of the last quarter-hour had suddenly gone like the last light of day behind the buildings across the street. He was determined to enjoy to-night.
He saw the girl as soon as he entered the large hall where the band was bouncing out Chattanooga Choo-Choo. She was sitting in a deep chair, turned away from him, and all he could see was the smooth blonde hair, almost silvery and suggesting metal in its polished sleekness. He stood for several minutes watching the blonde head, waiting for it to turn and let him see the face that went with it. He had seen plenty of girls who looked like Miss Australia from the back and