Where the Line Breaks Read online

  He staggers to his feet and looks around. Bushfire creeping over the hill. A divine glow, summer sunburn behind his eyes. Splinters of burning ash float down from the sky, little pinpricks of heat on his sweating forehead, mixing with the snow, cooling and burning, fire and ice.

  His first thought is for Rose, but she’s safe at home.

  Then Red.

  He can’t see out of his left eye, and sweat, or blood, is in his right. He falls to his knees. His head is going to burst, his heartbeat in his ears. He’s on fire, sweat dripping down his nose, and the icy ground is calling him. He’ll rest for a second. Curl up and kip in the feathery snow for a minute, promise, one minute.

  The snow is fluffy and inviting. His back throbs, pulsing down his legs and beating in his mouth. A kiss of iron on his tongue.

  The snow screams as it falls.

  It blankets him, soothes him, holds him close like Rose’s warming hands. The wind plays Collopy like an instrument, but Collopy is dead. The night shrieks. The snow is bloody hot. Red is screaming, somewhere up the line.

  His last glimpse of Gallipoli is black-and-white socks by his face, the flick of Banjo’s tail against his head before the cat scampers into no-man’s-land, fading into the snow that gathers Alan up and drops him into the deep sleep.

  35 See Arthur Pyke, The Annotated Letters of Alan Lewis VC. Sometimes, reading Alan’s letters, I feel like he’s channelling my own thoughts: a thousand miles from home, experiencing new emotions, anxious and excited and lonely and homesick. We have a lot in common. Eager to prove our worth. Deeply romantic. Hidden depths of bravery waiting to surface. And then sometimes, Alan’ll relate a story about Nugget, and I realise I’m more like his Irish friend than I care to admit – over-ambitious, a little dim, but always with the best interests of those I love at heart.

  36 Rose Porter speaking to Arthur Pyke, from The Annotated Letters of Alan Lewis VC, p. xxi. And he continues to influence the lives of those around him to this day. I ran round to Em’s last night with a bottle of chilled prosecco to share my big news. Guess what? I wanted to surprise her.

  She was sitting on the couch, and she did a little shoulder shuffle and smiled, because she’d definitely heard the clink of the glasses as I got the champagne flutes down from the cupboard.

  What?

  Guess.

  I’m tired, Matt, just tell me. She stretched her arms behind her, rolled her head back and forth and waited. I waited too.

  Guess, I said, chuckling. She stared up at me, impatient.

  I got the AARC!

  Oh? she squinted.

  The later research career grant. The AARC. The one I applied for a few months back. You helped me fill out the form?

  Uhuh.

  It’s not a ton of money, but I’m on the right track.

  Her eyes kept flicking back to the screen. I pulled the bottle of bubbly out from behind my back.

  Means when I finish, I’m pretty much guaranteed a professor position. Her eyes swung back to me at the mention of a potential job.

  We’ll get a new place, together. Fancy dinners out. Holidays to Paris, or Barcelona, or Rome. The house and the dog and the dream life.

  Guaranteed?

  Just have to finish it.

  What if you’re wrong?

  I’m not wrong.

  Em supports me. She really does. She understands how hard the academic game can be. She pushes me and enables me to get up each day and plug away, and she reads chunks of chapters she knows nothing about and smiles and tells me I’m amazing. I know it’s hard to get excited about a dead soldier and some poems, but this is the most important thing I will ever do. It’s not like Alan is going anywhere, but I’m so impatient to be living the life I know I should be living – waking up with Em every morning, walking our dog around the common, teaching classes on Alan’s poetry, book signings in the evening. It’s coming.

  Congratulations, baby. I know what this means to you.

  We drank the bubbly and curled up to watch reality TV. I’d been hoping for a celebratory blowjob, but I’m willing to wait.

  37 Pyke, The Annotated Letters, pp. 211–245. Which only goes and makes me feel bad about getting home yesterday and buying flowers and a block of chocolate and standing around outside Em’s place for two and a half hours in the hopes of a romantic surprise, not knowing she went for a quick drink after work with one of her mates and wouldn’t come straight home, and then when she finally does get home, I’m so cold I can’t move my fingers and she says she shouldn’t be eating chocolate on her diet, but thank you, that’s so sweet, you weren’t waiting long were you? And between my half-baked lies and the sound of my teeth chattering, I’m thinking, I should have been writing.

  38 Pyke, The Annotated Letters, p. 224. Like Em bringing lunch into work for both of us, so when our breaks intersect we can sit in the courtyard, and I buy her a Diet Coke, and we can laugh about the undergrads running past, until, inevitably, the Prof calls her mobile and she’s needed back inside to show him how to send a text or explain what a meme is, or to make a decision on one of the thousands of tiny inconsequential details about the party: Black or white ribbons? Gold balloons? Are peacock feathers too much? For future reference, when it comes to the Prof and Em planning a party, peacock feathers are NEVER too much.

  39 Margaret Cline, ‘Review of The Annotated Letters of Alan Lewis VC by Arthur Pyke’, in The Australian Literary Review, Issue 8, Volume 36, August 1977, p. 79. Numerous sources have reported on the popularity of the local women among the fighting men, and it should come as no surprise that the men – stuck behind the lines for long periods of time with money to spare and not much to spend it on – turned to the brothels of the area in search of a good time. Perhaps Lewis’s feelings about his mate’s habits are most accurately reflected by the fact that any letters with reference to brothels and drinking remain unsent.

  40 The letter ends with Nugget hiding from an angry father inside the steam room of a local bath, wearing nothing but his slouch hat, surrounded by half-naked Egyptians (Pyke, The Annotated Letters, pp. 68–69). For further information, see Reginald T. Lloyd, Twenty-Four Hours in Amiens, Frobisher Publishing, Melbourne, 1993, or multiple sections in Terry Kinloch’s Devils on Horses. The closest I came to a backpacker fling myself was, perhaps ironically, in Kraków, after a sombre day spent visiting Auschwitz. Can’t remember her name, which makes me a terrible person. She was American. Doing her own thing, making her way around the tourist traps, blowing off steam before getting a ‘real job’ back home. She came into the communal lounge room in the hostel and asked if anyone wanted to get dinner. I happened to be sitting there, reading, and hungry, so I said yes.

  We went for Polish pizza. We were both in need of a stiff drink.

  First round was on me.

  One drink led to one bottle, led to a second bottle, led to drinking cheap Polish vodka in the hostel common room, led to sharing a joint in the courtyard, led to her jerking me off in the hostel bathroom. I imagined us visiting the salt mines together. Catching up again in Berlin. Visiting war memorials together.

  The next morning when I woke she’d already checked out. No note. She said one day she wanted to run a marathon. I felt like Alan, alone in the middle of it all.

  41 Unless otherwise stated, all lines of poetry are taken from the Unknown Digger’s original papers, which I had the pleasure of examining in the archives of the Australian War Memorial over the course of a week in Canberra, late summer 2010. I never would have guessed then that I’d eventually move to London to figure out who wrote them, meet the love of my life, and write a thesis on my childhood hero Alan Lewis. Funny how things work out.

  42 See Jennifer Hayden, Unearthing the Unknown Digger, Chapter 8: ‘Red Poppies’.

  43 Arthur Pyke, The Annotated Letters, p. 104. Em’s still at work planning her party. She messaged and said she might have to do an all-nighter. She said she missed me. She signed off with a whole screen of kisses.

  44
For more instances of misspelled words or incorrect grammar in the works of the Unknown Digger, I refer you to Chapter 6: ‘Black Lines’, in Hayden’s Unearthing the Unknown Digger, which focuses on the poems themselves and looks closely at the word counts, inaccuracies and physical data available.

  45 See M. Denton, ‘Comparing Language Choices in Diametric Data Packets’ in Australian Literary Journal, Issue 4, Volume 66, April 2017.

  46 See The Annotated Letters, p. 113, where Lewis re-enacts Red’s hapless bartering at an Egyptian bazaar, or pp. 200–202, where Nugget stars as Mary in a regimental production of the nativity. Em has this same remarkable ability to find the positive in any situation. She’s been working late most nights this week on this party for the Prof she’s in charge of planning. I know she’s stressed, and I’m happy she’s doing what she enjoys, but tonight we missed my mate’s one-man theatre show because she forgot about it. Of course, I’m the muggins left waiting in the cold for two hours messaging and calling and leaving progressively more insane-sounding messages until she finally walks out and reminds me there’s no reception in their office.

  You could have left without me, she says, eyes darting behind my head, like she’ll be able to see the show if she can find it in the distance.

  I’d never forget about you.

  Well, now I feel terrible.

  Somehow, I’m in the wrong, and it’s my fault for wasting twenty quid on tickets. I call it Emnesia, this gift of hers, to forget things she’s been told a thousand times. She walks away, faster than me. I have to run to catch up. Somehow, it’s me keeping her waiting. Em would send letters home from the war that made it sound like the most amazing experience imaginable. Em’s letters would give people FOMO. Fuck, I love her.

  47 The Annotated Letters, p. 204. One of the most beautiful examples of Alan Lewis’s (until now) unexamined capacity for beautiful imagery and poetic luminosity.

  48 In M. Denton, ‘Comparing Language Choices in Diametric Data Packets’, I argued for the creation of a numerical scale for comparing themes and/or tone, with which the subjective correlations could be represented with scientific accuracy. I continue to believe in the importance of statistical comparisons, and mathematical equivalency will always convince me more than beliefs ever will. Em says I’m a pathetic romantic, but I say I’m a scientist.

  49 L.S. Herdsman, ‘Ocker Imagery in the Unknown Digger’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Issue 3, Volume 35, 2000, pp. 76–92, which I would counter with my own personal observation: there is beauty in war. There is ample evidence of that. There is a perverse but profound beauty in Lewis’s heroism and self-sacrifice. There is even a certain beauty in his death.

  Conflict breeds beauty.

  Last night I got into a huge argument with Em because her fucknugget of an ex-boyfriend, Dan, who I’ve only met in passing, saw me on the tube and asked how she was doing.

  You spoke to him, about me? she said when I told her, her voice frozen.

  He saw me, babe.

  Don’t call me babe.

  I’ve never called her babe before. We hate the word babe. But for whatever reason, it feels like I’m supposed to say it in this argument. So now I live in this weird alternate reality where I’m the kind of douchebag who calls his girlfriend ‘babe’, un-ironically.

  After everything, she snarls, everything you did to him.

  That’s the kicker. Everything I did to him. Like fucking Em in the work toilets was a solo activity. Like Em’s black G-string wasn’t balled up in her jacket pocket after we disappeared for half an hour in the middle of dinner. Everything I did to him.

  Everything I did?

  Don’t sound surprised.

  Don’t surprise me.

  And stop smiling – is this a joke to you?

  I don’t even realise I am smiling, I’m that angry. Em’s this little spitfire of rage in front of me, and her rage magnifies how beautiful she is, and despite myself, I smile. But the fact she made me smile makes me angrier, which makes her angrier, and the whole cycle keeps looping around, feeding on itself, and even furious, I can’t help but love my tiny beautiful raging demon, who adores me, but swears she wants to see me dead.

  What are you doing talking to Dan in the first place?

  Fuck him, I said, he’s the past. You can’t start to care now.

  What?

  You wouldn’t have done what we did if you cared then, so don’t pretend to care now.

  She flipped. She threw this vase her mum gave her at the wall, mid-scream. It shattered. Porcelain everywhere. Her scream fizzled. I walked out.

  50 M. Denton, ‘Comparing Language Choices in Diametric Data Packets’. And sometimes life’s just hell. Where are you going? Em yelled after me.

  I’m done.

  I walked away. I was going to come back in a few minutes, once we’d both calmed down, but I liked the imagery of walking away down the centre of the road in the dark, leaving her mess behind me. Halfway down the street she caught up to me, wearing tiny silk pyjama shorts and her nipples crazy-obvious in the chill, with these stupid fluffy bunny slippers on she hides at the back of the closet if people come over. Stood in the middle of the road, spotlighted by the streetlight.

  I’m sorry, she whispered.

  I whispered back. What? I can’t hear you.

  I’m sorry. Please come back home.

  You were just telling me to leave.

  I know, she said.

  But now you want me back?

  I’m just tired. The party is killing me. And I didn’t think it would smash like that.

  I don’t think she’s been more beautiful than she was in that moment. Truly open. On the street in fluffy slippers. She wants her life to be like the movies but without the consequences, because in the movies they don’t show you the scene after the fight where you vacuum the carpet six times and you can still feel bits crunch under your feet when you walk by. I found fragments in Em’s hair for weeks after, like those Japanese airmen who emerged from the jungle years after the Second World War finished. There’s a terrible beauty in that.

  That’s what I’m talking about. The light and dark.

  Without war, we wouldn’t have the poems. Without Em’s temper I wouldn’t have been standing, freezing cold, in the middle of the street, knowing I want to marry this bunny-slippered hand grenade.

  51 In the poem, roses are found ‘climbin’ on the trellis’, while Lewis describes them as a ‘tangle’, evoking a similar feeling of overgrown wildlife, ‘climbing’ up and over the garden. Whether the Porter garden contained a trellis is no longer possible to ascertain. Tangled is also how I’d describe the murky circumstances of Em and I coming together, during which certain definitive relationship stepping stones became blurred. For a time, the beginning of our relationship overlapped with the end of her relationship with Dan.

  52 The Annotated Letters, pp. 98–99. Also, the house Em continues to live in is the house she and Dan once called their own, and Dan, thanks to his job in the City, still pays half the rent until Em finds another place as big or bigger, or gets a pay rise, or I finish this book and the world recognises my genius, I make loads of money and she decides she’s ready to move in with me (which I think we can all agree would be the simplest solution).

  So, when Em left that dinner with her knickers in her jacket pocket, she arrived home to Dan, like nothing was wrong, and fell asleep next to him, or curled up around him or however they used to sleep – that’s not my point – my point is she woke up to breakfast in bed, while down the road, I walked home by myself, passed out in my jeans, and woke with the taste of cobwebs in my teeth. She didn’t care about Dan’s feelings then, so how can she be angry about what we did, now?

  I once escaped out the back window as Dan arrived through the front door. When I say we’ve only met in passing, I mean it.

  53 Em prefers daffodils and tulips. Though she does have a black rose tattooed on her upper thigh, who could forget, which she drunkenly admitted to me
on one of our first dates was covering up a self-administered tattoo of her first boyfriend’s name: Vaughn, she laughed as she told me the story, can you believe I dated someone called Vaughn?

  She also enjoys a lily; she’s been nurturing one on her bedroom windowsill for the past six months, hoping it lasts the winter and blooms again when it’s a bit warmer. Can also confirm, from personal experience, that a nice bouquet of wildflowers, delivered to her front door with new cologne and a freshly laundered shirt, will always lead to that wild, sweaty, heart-bursting-in-your-chest, what-did-I-do-to-deserve-this-goddess type of sex we’re all searching for.

  54 The Annotated Letters, p. 210. Rose was a nurse at the time, applying for a position in one of the frontline hospitals, though she was rejected for service overseas because of her asthma. We have no evidence of Rose writing any poetry herself, though she wrote long letters to Lewis every Sunday afternoon. And didn’t everyone write poetry back then anyway? That’s why Alan being the Unknown Digger makes so much sense to me – university-educated, heroic, romantic, funny – it would actually be more surprising to me if Alan never wrote a single line of poetry.

  ‘University-educated, heroic, romantic, funny’ – Em says this is how women write about the Prof in their emails: he wrote this cute coffee table book about human habits, and it’s been on the bestseller list for months, and he’s been on Graham Norton and Alan Carr and Jonathan Ross – writing in and asking him to study their habits, wink-wink. Last month we found out he was being awarded what is, in all essence, a lifetime achievement award, at the ripe old age of early-fortysomething. He’s eleven years older than me, but who’s counting? Anyway, the Prof put her in charge of organising this big shindig Friday night to celebrate (see Footnote 38 – gold balloons and peacock feathers), so she’s been working really hard the last few nights. Write a book, make a few jokes on the late-night chat circuit, smile for the cameras, and whaddya know – universal acclaim.