Читать книгу Goodbye Lullaby - Jan Murray - Страница 4

She was aiming for a shot of the the enormous Ulysses, already picturing it as the star of her cover, not daring to breathe behind her camera for ear of scaring off the magnificent creature. Suddenly, from somewhere above the rainforest’s canopy she heard them. Choppers! Two of them at a guess.

She flung the Leica into her rucksack and took off for the beach in a panic, bashing through the undergrowth, leaping the slippery logs blocking her path.

A quick sign of the cross. No more than a flick of the wrist. Habit. A lapsed Catholic unable to let go a lifetime’s conditioning.

She had warned them. Be careful. Called out to them about box jellyfish, about crocs, about the deadly irukandji. It was the Coral Sea, for God’s sake, not Bondi. Good, but why hadn’t she warned them about army surveillance helicopters?

She pushed a large spiky palm away from her face and kept stumbling forward through the tropical denseness towards the clearing and the beach.

They were three ordinary city kids, one from Sydney, the other two from Melbourne. Would they even be conscious of threats from overhead? She doubted it. They had put up with a bitch of a road trip, eaten dust, hid under the hessian bags whenever they caught sight of a vehicle coming at them they figured might spell trouble. But even before she’d brought the Jeep to a halt they’d leapt out and taken off through the rainforest, headed for the beach.

Like ferrets out of a cage, she thought as she ran, her ear cocked for the sounds of the rotor blades.

What would happen once she breached the rainforest and lost the protection of the thick canopy, faced the endless stretch of sand out there? Miles and miles of it, white silicon sand. The Bloomfield. A person had nowhere to hide on that unblemished canvas. Anyone running down the beach would be of interest. Someone running and gesticulating to three conscription-aged youths would be of particular interest to the men up there in those army helicopters.

She was a fool to let them run off like that. Unlike them, she knew the territory and knew the dangers. It was her job to deliver them safely to the Blackburns.

She cursed again, remembering her own situation which was every bit as precarious as theirs. She would be no good to anyone behind bars. She put on more pace, dodging the fallen logs and taking the sprawling roots of the ancient figs at a leap, trying to avoid being torn by the treacherous wait-awhile vines hanging down in her path.

The choppers were coming closer. Estimation? About three or four minutes away. Definitely two of them up there. Iroquois. Following the line of the Bloomfield.

The line of the Mekong.

Run, woman, run! Her boot tangled with a vine, sending her flying, landing face-down in a clump of fungi.

She staggered back up and brushed red spores off her khakis, ignoring the hurt, taking off again until breathless, she pulled up just short of the beach.

Another flick-of-the-wrist blessing before quitting the rainforest, she made a run for it out into the open and scudded along the fringe of the beach. With luck––or God––on her side the giant spreading mangrove roots and the sparsely distributed coconut palms would offer at least some protection from the men above.

Stamping the bleached corals and shells into the hot sands beneath her boots, hurtling over sprawling tangled roots, she came closer to the part of the beach where her charges, distant figures down at the water’s edge, were splashing in the surf, still unaware of danger.

Once she was lined up with them she called out but they were too far down the beach and having too good a time mucking about to hear her. Or, more urgently, to hear the military helicopters heading for them.

She picked up a coconut and considered hurling coconuts up into the sky and down towards the beach until she gained their attention but realized that even flying coconuts would stand out against all the whiteness. Men trained to detect movement in heavy jungles would have no problem spotting the slightest movement on such a blank canvas as this beach. She dropped the coconut, looked up in the sky and, with the choppers getting closer, knew she had no option but to drag them back under cover. She was about to risk her run down to the surf when she felt a tap on her back.

Jesus!

She jumped and spun around, the blades of her hands already up in front of her body, a defensive instinct honed years ago. She dropped them back to her side and glowered.

‘Don’t ever do that again, Jimmy! You scared the fuck out of me.’

‘A bloody man wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of you, girly. You’re a killer! Where’d you learn that martial arts bunkum?’

‘Long story. You wouldn’t want to know.’

Being angry with herself, she was bound to snap at the poor man. She hadn’t heard him come up behind her but ought to have known he would be in the rear. He would have heard the choppers, too, an old army man like Jimmy.

‘Reckon the bastards didn’t see ‘em, y’know.’ The old man took a few steps towards the water, put two fingers to his mouth and gave a piercing whistle, signaling to the swimmers.

It worked. He tossed his head back in the direction of the choppers. ‘Head’n back to Townsville. Back to base.’

Jimmy Blackburn, WW11 veteran, a Burma Railway survivor, one of a kind and a person she loved without reservation. Seeing him standing there, stripped to the waist, as was his way, she wondered whether his frame had ever been anything but this skeletal and leathery. A few childhood years with fleshy contours maybe, before the Army and the Japs pared him down to what he became; a wiry, bandy-legged whippet of a man and one whose conversation was as lean and rock-hard as his torso. Jimmy swore and cursed with gusto but all other conversation was pared to the bone.

With the choppers having turned and now flying south of the delta she turned her attention to the kids running up the beach towards her and Jimmy, and saw they were still fooling about, kicking up sand and flicking their shirts at each other, behaving like the kids they still were. She spared them a smile, but was concerned. She looked up to the skies. ‘You think they spotted us?’

‘Any bastard come’n for us, got a shit-load of headache. We're tucked in pretty good.’

The youths skidded to a halt just short of where she and Jimmy stood. He clipped the three of them around the ears. The youths responded with a Peace sign and turned back to chasing and wrestling each other in the sand.

Fractious lion cubs. She allowed herself a moment to smile.

‘Pull camp, y’reckon?’ said Jimmy, surveying the skies.

‘Thought you said we’re staying here to night?’ The curly headed youth tussling his mate with a head-lock had stopped fooling around long enough to make the enquiry of his elders.

‘Change of plan,’ said the old man.

Jimmy, for all his bravado, must be worried about those choppers, thought Miki. But it wasn't the case with her charges; they were off again along the beach, picking up coconuts and smashing them in competition against the trunk of a massive mangrove tree.

‘They still don’t get it,’ she said to her comrade with a shrug.

‘Ratbags.’

‘They’ll learn soon enough, poor buggers.’ She shook her mop of sweat-damp hair and attempted to tie it up on top of her head but as soon as she moved, so did the top-knot. ‘We should hit the highway as soon as it’s dark, you reckon?’

There was no reply. The old man had already cut a path back through the undergrowth.

She put her fingers to her lips, curled her tongue and whistled to the youths. Not a patch on Jimmy’s shrill command. She needed to polish it. Her father had taught her how to do it––two fingers stretching the corners of your mouth, curl your tongue like a tunnel and blow.

But that was another life.

She turned and headed back inside the jungle, not wanting to dwell on the past, not wanting to think about the father who became a stranger to her all those years ago.