Amongst the Dead Read online

  ‘It is up there, mate. It gets so your balls go mouldy.’

  With the unpleasant image of what was lurking behind Glen Pyers’ flies now lodged in my mind, we crossed Princes Bridge, and at his insistence paused for a drink in the bar of Young and Jackson’s Hotel.

  ‘You two look fit enough,’ he said — a compliment perhaps provoked by Brian’s paying for the beer. ‘I was bloody fit as a Mallee bull before Milne Bay. That was back in August. We hardly got to perform at all up there. I’ve never worked so bloody hard in my life, or been so bloody scared. They had us stretcher bearing, digging, driving, shooting at the fucking Japs — you name it. Got to do a bit of magic here and there, and then this fever hit. Thought I was going to die. Hoped I was, at one stage.’

  Before what began to look like a rapid descent into maudlin reflection could gather speed, I distracted Glen by asking him what he meant by ‘magic.’

  ‘I was a magician on the Tivoli circuit before the war. So that’s what I do in the shows. Bit of mind reading, sleight-of-hand, that sort of thing. What’s your act?’

  ‘Shakespeare,’ I said.

  Glen Pyers laughed.

  ‘Christ Almighty. You’ll be shot by your own audience if you trot that stuff out.’

  ‘I think you’d be surprised at how receptive audiences can be.’

  ‘Well, yes. Yes, I would. And you, Brian? What does the army need you for?’

  Brian has always had an alarming tendency to blurt out the truth. Given that we were now, strictly speaking, in the employ of Army Intelligence, and given that we’d been instructed to trust no one — and no one would surely include Corporal Glen Pyers — I experienced a moment of trepidation when I thought Brian was about to reveal that his acquaintance with the great craft of acting came no closer than having been a teacher — a profession notorious, it’s true, for attracting those with the desire to act but without the talent to back it up. Brian looked over his beer at Corporal Pyers, furrowed his brow and, with intense seriousness — as if he were delivering very bad news indeed — said, ‘I’m a comic.’

  It took Corporal Pyers’ fevered brain a moment to make sense of the dichotomy between what was said and how it was said, but when he got it he bestowed the acknowledgement of a broad smile.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s see what we can scrounge in the way of dress-ups.’

  He led us to the Tivoli Theatre in Bourke Street, an establishment I’d visited only twice before — both times against my will, and both times at the behest of my late father who, when I look back on it, seemed determined to expose me, in the guise of birthday treats, to experiences more calculated to appal and alarm than to reward or entertain.

  I think I must have been fourteen when he first took me to the Tivoli, and I distinctly recall letting him know that I thought it common, vulgar, and dull — a formless concatenation of grotesquery. Quite apart from the dreary warbling and mirthless comedians, I have a strong memory of being repulsed by an acrobat of such horrifying spinal elasticity that, with very little effort, he could assume a position where the slightest nudge would result in his head disappearing up his own arse. After the show, I mentioned to my father that vaudeville seemed to be a place where unattractive people with unappealing skills played to undiscerning audiences.

  He took me again on my birthday the following year — having forgotten, I suppose, my distaste. I recall, though, that I reiterated it firmly. The year after that, the only thing that prevented, yet again, another visit to the Tivoli was my father’s death. In most respects he was taken too early; in this one, he was taken not a moment too soon.

  Brian’s face lit up when he saw the Tivoli bill. He had a taste for the vulgar — witness his now-distracted wife, Darlene. Brian and the Tiv were old friends. He actually insisted that this was what real theatre was all about, not the frightful drawing-room comedies that infested the grander theatres in town. (Not that there was anything on at the moment, grand or otherwise.)

  When we reached the theatre it was close to four o’clock, and the two o’clock show had recently released its hostages into Bourke Street. A few of them, including one or two American soldiers, were loitering around the garish billboards which ludicrously declared that the price of a ticket would deliver the extravagance that is the Folies Bergères. What the patron would actually see was a bevy of local girls in skin-coloured body tights, forbidden by law to make a move, with befeathered dancers moving amongst them to the moaning of a popular ballad.

  ‘This,’ said Brian, ‘is a humdinger of a show.’

  I remained silent.

  Corporal Pyers led us down the side of the theatre and into a warehouse behind it. This was clearly the storage space and workshop for the theatre. Props leaned against walls, scrims and backdrops were in various stages of being painted or retouched, and racks of costumes were lined up, awaiting repairs.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said, and disappeared through a door beyond which, I presumed, lay offices. He returned a moment later with a severe-looking woman dressed with the self-conscious eccentricity of a person who believed that employment in any capacity in the theatre demanded quirkiness of appearance. She wore pince-nez that forced her head down to enable her to look over them, and her neck was strangled by a loop of over-sized amber beads — raw, shapeless, and ugly. She might as well have strung links through rubble, and worn that. She was holding a slip of paper, and looked Brian and me up and down.

  ‘I’m not happy about this, Glen,’ she said, and the familiar way in which she spoke his name indicated prior acquaintance. ‘The army can’t just go on requisitioning our costumes like this. We’re as hard-pressed as everybody else getting decent materials.’

  ‘This,’ said Corporal Pyers, ‘is Joycey Dover.’

  ‘I’m William Power,’ I said and held out my hand. She took it, exposing to my notice a ring that looked more like an attachment with a medical purpose than a piece of jewellery.

  ‘I’m Brian,’ said Brian, and merely nodded.

  ‘All right,’ said Joycey Dover. ‘What do you need, Glen?’

  Glen manoeuvred Brian and me so that we stood back-to-back.

  ‘Same height, more or less; same weight, more or less; same frame, more or less. This makes things easier. So, one set of tails in my size — black. White’s hopeless. One set in their size. Toppers, of course. Collapsible. That’s all really, Joycey. We haven’t come to strip the cupboard bare.’

  He then turned to us.

  ‘Which of you is the femme?’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘Why is it necessary for either of us to be the femme?’

  ‘What’s a femme?’ Brian asked.

  ‘A femme, Brian,’ I said, ‘is a man who dresses as a woman, and not in sensible tweed and flat shoes.’

  ‘No,’ Corporal Pyers said, and walked to a rack of costumes. ‘More in this line.’

  He pulled forth a satin sheath which would have looked fabulous clinging to Jean Harlow’s body, and not quite so fabulous clinging to mine or Brian’s.

  ‘What about you, Glen?’ I said. ‘You look thin enough to carry off a dress like that.’

  He smiled.

  ‘I’m the magician, I’m afraid, unless one of you gentlemen is The Great Levante. The men up north expect the magician to have a pretty sidekick.’

  He raised an eyebrow. Brian was out of his depth, I could tell. I didn’t want him getting cold feet this early in the piece, so I agreed to be fitted for the dress.

  ‘I’m not saying I’ll do it,’ I said quietly to Pyers, ‘but if it’s altered to fit me, it’ll also fit Brian. We’ll work out who’s doing what later.’

  Joycey Dover manhandled me into a corner and told me to undress. Despite being conscious that both Glen Pyers and Brian were watching me with smirks on their faces, I did so without hesitation. A pr
ofessional actor doesn’t baulk at a simple fitting. Wardrobe mistresses are like sculptors. To them, a body is little more than an armature on which they hang cloth instead of clay. I stood in my underwear as she measured me and jotted down figures.

  ‘You’ll have to take everything off,’ she said. ‘The dress can’t be adjusted properly if it’s competing with singlet and underpants.’

  Without batting an eyelid, I did as requested, and Joycey Dover slid the satin sheath over my head. I closed my eyes and thought of England as she tucked and pinned.

  ‘Very nice,’ she said. ‘It fits well, but you’ll have to tape your bits down at the front. You can’t go on stage with a bulge sticking out the front of the dress.’

  Brian had the gall to guffaw like a schoolboy.

  ‘That’s something that won’t be such a problem for you, Brian,’ I said.

  It took only a few more minutes to be fitted with a wig and to find a pair of shoes that almost fitted. When I took stock of myself in the mirror, my reflection wasn’t the grotesque, pantomime dame I was expecting. With a bit of make-up and a close shave I felt I could give some of the Tivoli scrubbers a run for their money. Not that it would come to that. I’d decided that Brian was to be the femme in this outfit. I had more to offer than a lithe silhouette.

  Afterwards, when Corporal Pyers had headed off with his bundle of costumes, Brian didn’t take the opportunity to pass any remarks about my appearance as a woman. I knew he wanted to, but I suppose he thought that if he remained silent he’d escape the grim possibility of his winding up as the femme. In the tram on the way up to our mother’s house in Princes Hill, I told him frankly that, as he had no other skills to offer, slipping into a satin sheath would have to substitute for talent.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’ll see,’ and he managed to inject a surly, defiant note into this otherwise bland riposte.

  Our mother’s anxiety about our imminent departure was mollified by the assurance that we’d be seeing our youngest brother, Fulton, to whom she wrote every day, and from whom she heard little. This was hardly surprising, given that he’d been posted to Darwin, and Darwin wasn’t ideally placed at this time for normal postal deliveries. I now knew, as well, that Fulton wasn’t even in Darwin, but that he was somewhere ‘out bush’ with the North Australia Observer Unit. Our first loyalty was to Army Intelligence, and neither Brian nor I revealed to our mother the truth about Fulton’s position. She was sufficiently pleased that we were able to confirm that Fulton was alive and well, and that in only a few short weeks, when we returned, we would be in a position to bring her more detailed news about her youngest son.

  I was perfectly, and unconcernedly, aware that our mother had a hierarchy of affection where her three children were concerned. I came a distant third behind Fulton and Brian, perhaps because as the oldest I reminded her most strongly of our late father. It hadn’t escaped my attention that whenever she pointed out the similarities they were attached to traits she considered unpleasant. I was only sixteen when my father died, so I can’t confirm the truth or otherwise of Mother’s observations. Given that she’d been having an affair with the family solicitor, Peter Gilbert, even before her husband’s death, I’d respectfully submit that her views on my character must, at the very least, be open to question. I have no objection to being least favoured, but I confess a resentment towards being ill-favoured; and if it weren’t unseemly, at the age of thirty-two, to express such a resentment, I would do so. My strong sense of personal dignity forbade raising such matters with Mother. Her indignation would have been epic, and I’ve never been fond of the epic form.

  Over dinner that night, we told Mother as much as we could about our new roles in defeating the Japanese menace.

  ‘I’m not at all sure,’ she said, ‘that I understand any of this. Are you, or are you not, soldiers?’

  ‘Not soldiers exactly,’ said Brian. ‘We’ll be in uniform, but that’s sort of part of the act.’

  ‘Our job, Mother,’ I explained, ‘is to raise morale, and no one’s going to shoot at us.’

  ‘Your morale-boosting efforts haven’t really been all that successful in the past, do admit, darling,’ said Mother, with chatty indifference to my feelings.

  ‘Fortunately we won’t have to battle the collective simple-mindedness of the general public,’ I replied. ‘Soldiers are hungry for entertainment, and if I were out in the middle of nowhere I’d certainly appreciate hearing a bit of Shakespeare for a change, instead of the drone of the moron I’m obliged to bunk with.’

  Mother looked at me over the rim of her raised teacup.

  ‘Don’t despise your audience, Will. They’ll know it, and they might throw grenades instead of flowers.’

  I was rescued from the necessity of defending myself by the arrival of Mother’s lover, Peter Gilbert. I hadn’t yet reconciled myself to the fact of their relationship, let alone to its duration. I had no wish to cast moral aspersions against my mother — although her affair with Gilbert did begin adulterously — but I couldn’t quite bring myself to greet him with anything but cool disdain. He was, anyway, impervious and insensitive to my feelings about him. Brian shook his hand warmly, and their cosy display of mateship was so cloying that I couldn’t prevent my lip from curling with disgust. Mother saw it, and shook her head slightly. I’m sure if we’d been alone this would have been one of those occasions when she claimed I reminded her of my father. I excused myself and retired.

  I didn’t sleep well, and not because of my agitation about Peter Gilbert and Mother, but because of my excitement at the prospect of returning to the stage — my natural home, and the only place where, in the guise of various characters, I could truly be myself.

  The following morning, Peter Gilbert, still in his pyjamas, intruded upon me in the bathroom while I was shaving.

  ‘It’s customary to knock,’ I said.

  ‘A custom more honourecd in the breach than the observance?’ he said, and inflected it upwards to indicate that he considered the quote so apt as to be witty.

  ‘As you see,’ I said while drawing the razor carefully across my chin, ‘the bathroom is occupied.’

  ‘And by the very person to whom I wish to speak.’ He sat on the side of the bath and crossed one leg over the other. ‘It isn’t actually any of your business, so I’m telling you this more as a courtesy than a duty. Your mother and I intend to formalise our relationship. You’ll no doubt be appalled by the resulting change in our connection; but the fact is, when we’re married, you’ll become my stepson.’

  ‘Should I congratulate you?’

  ‘It wouldn’t kill you.’

  I caught his eye in the mirror.

  ‘We should learn to tolerate each other, Will.’

  I turned to face him.

  ‘My father has been dead for sixteen years. For all of that time, and longer, you’ve been having an affair with my mother, and neither of you thought it worthwhile to mention the fact to Brian, to Fulton. or to me.’

  Peter Gilbert actually smiled.

  ‘That’s true up to a point, but both Brian and Fulton were aware of how things stood between your mother and me, and we assumed you must have known, too, but that you chose never to discuss it — a strange obstinacy, if you don’t mind my saying so, very like your father’s. To be fair, we never really talked about it with your brothers, either. It was all terribly discreet.’

  Here he paused and coughed.

  ‘I had my own family, you see.’

  ‘So this was adultery on a biblical scale.’

  ‘Fortunately, Will, we don’t get stoned to death in this country for loving the right person and marrying the wrong one.’

  I turned back to the mirror and finished shaving.

  ‘So, now you’re divorced and free to marry.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m widowed.’r />
  I couldn’t hide the disbelief in my voice.

  ‘You were waiting for your wife to die?’

  ‘That’s what you do when you marry a Catholic.’

  He stood up.

  ‘Now you know.’

  He crossed to the bathroom door but, before leaving he said, ‘I have two children, Will. Both of them are grown up, of course. Cloris is twenty-eight and John is twenty-six. You’ll meet them when you come back from up north.’

  I was so distracted by this avalanche of unwanted information that all I could think of to say was, ‘Your last name is Gilbert and you called your son John? Isn’t that a little vulgar?’

  ‘My father’s name was John. Not everything is connected to the movies.’

  He left. I splashed water on my face, and a little bay rum, and returned to my bedroom to get dressed.

  Chapter Two

  setting out

  OUR FAREWELLS HAD BEEN AWKWARD; or, at any rate, mine had been. Mother and I had had no time to discuss her impending nuptials, and we were both aware, as she kissed me lightly on the cheek, that this rather large and important issue had not been broached. She’d no doubt read my silence on the matter as disapproval — and she wasn’t a million miles from being right about that — but her response was a familiar demonstration that my feelings weren’t, after all, of much interest or importance to her. She sent me off with that small, reluctant kiss, and a chilly smile — a smile that had begun warmly when it was turned on Brian, but which had lost all its heat by the time it was directed at me.

  Brian and I arrived at Victoria Barracks as instructed, at eight o’clock on the dot. James Fowler and Corporal Pyers were there already, and on the floor in the office were three kit bags. Folded on a chair were two uniforms, and beside the chair were two pairs of shoes.

  ‘As soon as you change into these,’ James said, ‘you belong to us.’