Where the Line Breaks Read online

  He ran through the names of the men who’d left with Nugget: Brennan and Stokes were standing a few feet away, Morrow was sobbing on the ground, wincing with each breath. Icy-cold fingers reached out and gripped his heart.

  Trooper Richardson. Richie. Twenty-two-year-old from Perth proper.

  ‘Where’s Richie?’

  Nugget stared straight through him, back the way they’d come.

  ‘What happened to Richie?’

  ‘No, I think it’s my eardrum. Damn near took my head off.’ Someone was blowing cool air on the back of his neck, the hairs on his arms rising, the muscles in his shoulders tensed. Hard granite. ‘Morrow needs help, Al.’

  They’d crucify him, court-martial him, have his guts for garters. He couldn’t swallow properly, his throat was too dry. His tongue was too big for his mouth, choking him. Nugget registered the object in his hand, the long tail trailing behind tracking his descent down the dune. Nugget reached for it, but Alan snatched it back. He’d keep the boot and return it himself. Nugget’s eyes dodged his gaze, and then he dropped his head.

  ‘Richie’s gone.’

  ‘Where’s he gone, Nug?’ He didn’t understand. ‘He won’t get very far without a bloody boot.’

  Nugget laid a hot, heavy hand on his shoulder.

  The pit yawned wider. Alan shrugged off the meaty grip.

  ‘Richie’s gone.’ Nugget was yelling now, couldn’t hear how stupid he sounded, the words rising and scattering somewhere over the dune. Alan glanced about, looking for a body. For blood. For limbs, or parts, or a sign, somewhere, of Richie’s phantom presence. Everywhere was sand. He stumbled, past Nugget, peering around the stunned men. He dropped to the ground and combed his fingers through the shingle. Hot on the surface, jagged rocks in the cold depths.

  He scrambled forward, crawling in the dirt around Morrow and his dead-eyed gaze, and then, finding nothing, turned and thrust his arms under Morrow’s body and picked him up. He’d flipped the injured man over, thrown him, like Richie might be waiting to jump out from underneath with a wild grin, the whole gag an elaborate prank. Morrow screamed – shrill, unforgiving.

  ‘Where!?’

  The men looked at Alan with wide eyes, like they couldn’t hear him, like he’d spoken a language they didn’t understand.

  Nugget’s hand was on his shoulder once more. A lead weight.

  Richie was gone, into the hot air around them. Into the grains of sand finding their way into every crack and crevice. Into the sun beating down hotter with each passing minute. Into the sweat soaking their backs. Into the scorching desert landscape, the harsh empty furnace that cooked, courageous and willing, the tender young flesh of them and their mates.

  A single left boot.

  A single boot.

  Left.

  12 E.L. Sanders, The Great Australian Poets, 2nd ed., Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2000, p. 213. Paterson et al. still have their place, but the Unknown Digger has pushed them down the rankings.

  13 Johanissen, ‘On the Spirit of the West’, p. 155.

  14 ‘Books of the Decade’, Australian Book Review, 12th January 2010, available at australianbookreview.com.au/decade. And for further evidence, see my own life. When I first moved to London, I rented a room in a little terraced house in Shepherd’s Bush, owned by a tiny Jamaican grandma who must have lived there for the past five hundred years. It wasn’t terrible, but once Em came along, it felt too small to hold all of our potential.

  15 From The Sydney Courier, 28th April 1997, under the headline ‘This Poem Might Change the World’. I read all the Unknown Digger poems and letters in a voice like those old recordings of Don Bradman, high-pitched and slightly quicker than normal, like he’s thinking things at twice the rate I’m able. Alan and Australia go together like meat pies and footy, like swearing and hot pavement, like Scott and Charlene. You can’t have one without the other. Like Em and I. Em came over to my Shepherd’s Bush house one night and we tried to cook ratatouille, while my landlord hovered in the corridor outside.

  We should get our own place, I’d said, stirring the zucchini (‘courgette’, they call it over here), don’t you think? Somewhere we could be alone?

  I can’t leave my place, Em said, head in the fridge looking for the capsicums (‘peppers’, old boy, wot wot).

  Never?

  Not now. I’ve spent so long making it into a home. I’m finally comfortable in it.

  She’s painted the lounge room herself, and her paper cut-out butterflies fly their way across the kitchen, and the chip in the wall by the front door is from her umbrella and no-one else’s.

  16 See Ian Gill and Neville Browning, Gallipoli to Tripoli: History of the 10th Light Horse Regiment AIF 1914–1919 (Hesperian Press, Carlisle, 2012) for an in-depth and step-by-step account of the regiment and their movements throughout the war.

  Maybe I could move in with you, then? I said quietly. Hey, does this need salt?

  She picked up the spoon and slurped off some of the sauce, like they do in movies when they’re whipping up a five-star meal. No more salt. Do you have any herbs? (I didn’t) And I don’t think that would be fair on Dan. He only just moved out.

  But he’s out?

  Basically. Mostly. A few more boxes. She took my hand and kissed me. She tasted like restaurant-grade pasta sauce. Hey, when we’re ready, ok?

  My landlord walked in and loudly opened the fridge. Em let go of my hand with a quick squeeze, and tried to make conversation. The ratatouille was incredible. I realised I had to move.

  17 Still in use by the 10th to this day, though the regiment is no longer mounted on horses but is a fully mechanised ‘light cavalry’. I struck swiftly, finding this place. It’s a studio on the top floor of an old place in Turnpike Lane, which is in North London. Smaller than my old room, but if you’re sitting on the toilet and you reach forward and open the bathroom door you get a perfect view of the whole space stretching out before you, from the bed to the kitchenette, and it seems a lot bigger. Plus, no live-in landlord. I skyped my parents and walked them through my favourite part – the hallway from the front door to the main room. Makes it feel like a home. Been here about a year now, and I’ve promised myself I’m going to buy a painting one of these days.

  Best thing is I can catch the 221 or the N91 from down the road and be up at Em’s place in Bounds Green within minutes – anytime, day or night. Some nights she’ll message late and ask if I’m busy, and if I’m only writing or watching a documentary or doing research, I can gather my stuff and we can be in bed within fifteen minutes. Em says it’s a South African thing, feeling safer in her own home – she needs her own space. Her place is bigger, so I visit her more than she visits me. She’s never stayed at mine, but she came with me to the viewing, and I don’t think I could have done it without her.

  Just think, she’d said, a couple of pillows on the futon when it’s in couch mode. A throw rug. She stood on tiptoe and we kissed. Maybe an accent colour on this wall? She smiled at me, then up at the wall. How do we feel about yellow?

  Obviously the toilet will be working by the time you move in, said the guy from the real estate agency. He looked like a schoolboy, his suit three sizes too big, one of those ties with the elastic round his neck.

  And so close to me, Em said, running her hand along the wall where she said I need to hang a painting. Is anyone else interested? she said to the schoolboy, who blushed and stammered a reply.

  You should take it, she said to me.

  I don’t know. It is a lot of money, but Em has this way of calming the nerves, making you braver. She makes you feel invincible – like you’re running up the beach at Gallipoli, dodging Turkish bullets, or steaming down the pitch at the MCG with the new ball.

  Unstoppable.

  18 See Terry Kinloch, Devils on Horses: In the Words of the Anzacs in the Middle East 1916–19, Exisle Publishing, Auckland, 2007. I moved by myself one weekend while Em was dealing with the Dan fallout – I booked a taxi and took my three suitcases
and six boxes of books across London, and thought of Alan entering the holy city as I lugged each box up three flights of stairs. How proud he must have felt leading his men into the glory of that ancient city, how fearless and indestructible. When I finally sat down on the floor and ordered pizza and opened a warm can of Foster’s I’d bought from the offie down the road, I felt a little bit of that fearlessness myself – and it turns out my new place is actually older than the Australian Federation, far older than Alan Lewis. I’m living in history.

  19 Frank Burnside, ANZAC: Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Times. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1988, p. 288. Alan Lewis was born 250 kilometres away from where I was born. He studied at the same university I studied at, played cricket at the same club I watched every Saturday during term time, probably swam in the same water I swam in after long, dusty history lectures. Fell in love with the same sunsets. I hope if I had been alive back then, I would have signed up too and maybe fought alongside him at The Nek. Maybe this thesis is me paying him back. No worries, mate.

  20 See Burnside, ANZAC: Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Times, pp. 63–67, which examines the immense popularity and attraction of signing up, and reports on the staggering numbers of young men who signed up within the first few days, even hours, of the war. Scariest thing I’ve done was get on that plane to come here. Best thing I’ve done, too. Leaving that world for the dream of something more. I figured, if Alan could do it, why couldn’t I? And then I bought my ticket – one way.

  21 See The Regimental Scrapbook of the 10th Light Horse Regiment, Western Australia held at the National Anzac Centre, Albany, Western Australia and available upon request. The Mashobra sailed from Fremantle on 7th February 1915. I drove to Perth International Airport on a cloudy June evening. I knew I wanted to continue my studies, so I applied for the postgraduate research position in the English department at University College London. My honours professor back home knew someone who worked there, and got me an interview. For the first year, alongside doing all the Prof’s dirty research work, I also worked a part-time job at the library, restacking books, organising student theses, and a million other odd jobs I can do with my eyes closed. That’s where I met Em. Nowadays, I help the Prof out with his units four days a week, and do my own research the rest of the time. He puts the good word in for me with the journals and publishers he knows. He’s one of those eccentric English professors who seems like they were raised in a university: he wears pink socks and still plays cricket with the uni team and makes jokes about the postmodernists hating postmodernism, which is pretty postmodern, he says, with one of those Englishmen laughs. He ‘headhunted’ Em, she says, to offer her a position as his receptionist/secretary/man Friday, which makes her proud, because everyone wants to work for him, all the undergrads want to be in his classes, and everyone loves him.

  He’s a good boss, Em says. We work hard, but we play hard, too.

  22 Plus, the Prof fully supports what I’m trying to do: one day he called me when I was in the library, and said something like, Matt, do we have a copy of the Siegfried Sassoon biography?

  Which one? I said.

  It’s by one of those fellows with two first names.

  Richard Simon. Sassoon: His Life, Times and Poems.

  That sounds like the badger.

  Not worth the read. Try Moorcroft Wilson, I’ll send it up.

  He liked that I knew my stuff, and when I came up to the office he asked me more about my thesis, and Alan Lewis, and what I was hoping to achieve.

  You can prove Lewis wrote the poems?

  He had his feet up on the desk, brown leather brogues and yellow socks with dark blue ivy climbing up his calf.

  He’s the ultimate Australian hero, I said. I’m convinced he’s the Unknown Digger.

  He looked me up and down and said, So what are you waiting for? Prove it.

  Like it’s that easy.

  23 Second Lieutenant Hugo Throssell has been the subject of many respected works of historical study, not least the worthy The Price of Valour by John Hamilton (Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2012), which I encourage you to seek out and read.

  24 For an in-depth history of Lewis’s life and times, try Nicholas Curtin-Kneeling, From Busso to the Holy Land: Alan Lewis and the 10th Light Horse (Fremantle Press, Fremantle, 2010). I had the pleasure of meeting Curtin-Kneeling at the biennial First World War Writing Analysis Conference (FWWWAC) when it was held in London a few years back, where we were the sole Australian representatives. I believed it was our duty to stick up for our fellow countrymen, to uphold the digger values by pushing Australian contributions to the historical and analytical landscape over all others, and arguing aggressively against all other viewpoints. Childish? Sure, but if we didn’t, the Poms would’ve walked all over us, and if I’ve learnt anything from studying the Anzacs, it’s that the true Spirit of Anzac wasn’t about defeating the Turks or the Huns or the ‘bad guys’, it was showing the Mother Country we weren’t a country to be fucked around with – you still see it in the cricket and the Olympics and any time we meet in competition – like every Australian signs a pact when they’re born to make England regret giving away all their best citizens hundreds of years ago just because they stole a few loaves of bread or murdered someone or whatever. (I tease the Prof endlessly about the Ashes, and if the Poms were to miraculously win, he’d tease me back.) It’s an odd sort of national pride, but it’s strong in us.

  25 Burnside, ANZAC: Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Times, p. 201. Of the three hundred men actively fighting for the 10th, 138 lighthorsemen were casualties, of which eighty died. Almost one in three. I always wonder how I’d handle the gunfire, the bombings, the dysentery. It’s easy when you’re reading about it in a poem or watching Mel Gibson ham it up on the big screen, but nothing slams it home quite like the numbers of the dead and injured – three hundred people is the Prof’s entire lecture hall. And 138 injured is almost every tutorial I’ve run this year. Eighty dead is seventy-six more people than I’ve had ex-girlfriends.

  The official Turkish death toll was twelve.

  26 From the personal letters of Rose Porter, in Curtin-Kneeling, From Busso to the Holy Land, p. 134 and again in Arthur Pyke, The Annotated Letters of Alan Lewis VC, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1975.

  27 Kinloch, Devils on Horses: In the Words of the Anzacs in the Middle East 1916–19, p. 55.

  28 The first failed attack at Gaza took place in March 1917, followed by a second, equally disastrous attempt in April. For more, see Curtin-Kneeling, From Busso to the Holy Land, pp. 183–202. Curtin-Kneeling gave an extremely interesting speech at FWWWAC about the various reasons for these failures, although I can’t remember much of what he said. I do distinctly remember passing, rugby-style, a reproduction First World War kitbag stuffed with jumpers, over the heads of several team members, and watching as Curtin-Kneeling barrelled through a prize-winning British author, sending his spectacles flying, to complete the match-winning try for the ‘Antipodean Savages’ team.

  29 Curtin-Kneeling, From Busso to the Holy Land, p. 215. Some first trip away from home. Nowadays the whole thing’s become a rite of passage for rich kids from the Golden Triangle of Perth’s western suburbs: finish school, travel Europe, come back home and buy a house/marry/pop out a sprog. Unfortunately, Australian pilgrims bring with them an unwanted reputation.

  Full disclosure: I had my own Eurotrip, but I avoided the tour buses and the party hostels – I visited Ypres and Polygon Wood and was lucky enough to do Anzac Day in Gallipoli, where drunk Aussies sang football chants long into the night, and left lolly wrappers on the ground the next morning. It was the most embarrassed I’ve ever been of my countrymen.

  Alan and the Anzacs would have been turning in their Commonwealth war graves.

  30 Taken from The Regimental Scrapbook of the 10th Light Horse Regiment. I lie in bed listening to the trucks passing by and wonder if I’d’ve had the guts to go in once, let alone twice, let alone three times. I don’t think I have it in me, b
ut then, we can’t all be Alan Lewises.

  31 See L.L. Hereford, They Walk Amongst Us (Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne, 1933) for a dramatic contextual account of Lewis’s actions. Reading it will make you feel simultaneously proud and like you haven’t accomplished enough in your own life. Seriously, you’ll feel inadequate in every single way. And then you’ll start seeing similarities to your own life. Like this weekend past – my own personal Lone Pine, which I say with all due respect to the brave men who lost their lives there. We’re sitting on the couch, post-Sunday-brunch, recovering, and Em starts looking around at the walls, eyeing up the length and height, looking shifty. I can tell there’s a plan brewing in her head because she’s absent-mindedly playing with the buttons on my shorts and I’m worried she’s going to pop one of them off.

  Let’s wallpaper the bedroom, she says.

  You wallpapered a room before?

  No.

  Wallpapered anything before?

  No. She turns to look at the wall, and the dye in her hair shines vivid purple in the sunlight, so that even me, who wears purple jeans because I can’t tell what colour they are (Bold colour choice, Matt! From the Prof when I walk into work), even I can tell she’s got great Lost Cities of Lavender sunk deep in the tangle of blonde, and I’ll do whatever it takes, anything, to be able to pull her close and lose myself in her. She turns back to me with her face all innocent. But how hard can it be?

  And now we have a wallpapered wall, because once Em sets her mind on something, she gets it done. And sure, in the moment, it might’ve been indescribably hard, and one of us might have come close to killing the other (Em), and one of us might have cried (not Em), and I might have had to pay for the trip to Homebase for supplies, and yes, if you want to be a critic, there are air bubbles the size of large pizzas at some of the higher points, and, technically, the first piece is hanging at an odd angle, because we weren’t sure what we were doing when we hung it, but, BUT – now we have a wallpapered wall. Finished. Wallpapered. Where there was nothing this morning. That’s what Em does. Em makes things happen.