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.
~~~
Stretching time, welcoming the warmth of the afternoon sun on their back, the two women, one black, one white, sitting together in silence, a calmness born of familiarity, dozy, comfortable, their long friendship wrapped up in the surrounding stillness, their only activity was to make occasional tracings in the sand.
Miki was aware they should be heading back, give a hand to Jimmy and the boys to help pack up the last of their camp but this was precious time and she wanted their solitude and companionship to last as long as possible. After they shipped out it would be a long time before they saw each other again. Bernie Blackburn; Jimmy’s wife, a Wujal Wujal woman and her friend, her connection to the Bloomfield, the three of them partners in crime these past few years.
They were an odd trio––a skinny old WW11 vet who hadn’t made it any further south than Port Douglas after the war; his wife from the Kuku-Yalanji; and herself, Caroline Patrick, Miki to her friends, a thirty-six-year old woman with a price on her head, in hiding from the Queensland and the Commonwealth Police.
The way it was, Australia, 1971.
Repeatedly, she etched '38' in the sand beside her, rubbing nit out '38' furiously each time.
The sun’s rays highlighted the grains of sand sticking to the hairs on her legs. Like head lice, she thought, recalling their 4th class being marched to the washroom by Sister Redempta to have their heads drenched in a putrid rinse and sent home with a note. They all knew who’d given them nits but it would be eternal damnation for them if they so much as mentioned the scruffy Homes girl. Not that Sister Redempta or the other sisters’ threats had carried as far as the bus stop. Kids were cruel back then. Adults weren’t much better was the thought clouding her memory when the silence was suddenly broken.
‘Mik?’ said Bernie. ‘I been watching you a while, girl. There’s pain behind them baby blues.’ Bernie pointed to the numerals repeated in the sand. ‘Wanna talk?’
Miki hurriedly rubbed out the numbers. A tangle of sweaty curls chafed against her back as she sprang up and brushed the seat of her pants and her sandy limbs. She checked her watch and extended her hand to Bernie. ‘C’mon. Better be getting back.’
‘Not likely his number’s gonna come out, y’know that.’ Bernie was looking up at her. ‘It won’t, y’know.’
‘No?’ she let her hand drop. ‘You know that, for sure?’
‘No. But even if it does … and it’s not gonna … it’s not your fault.’
Bernie tapped her on the back of the leg, a motherly reprimand. ‘It don’t do you no good, all that rubbish you got goin’ on in that pretty head of yours, Mik. Time to start beating up on yourself’s if it happens. Mightn’t even have registered, y’know.’ It was a long speech for the normally taciturn woman and having said her piece, Bernie returned to tracing her own symbols in the cooling sand.
Miki stood watching over Bernie, thinking of other times, seeing Bernie as a younger woman sitting in the dust with Lily, both of them doing their intricate drawings, the patient mother teaching her precious little daughter the old ways. Painting on the smooth Bloomfield River stones and strips of white bark. ‘He would have registered, Bernie. He’d have been brain-washed from the moment they got their hands on him. First in line when the doors opened last month, you can bet.’
‘July,’ Bernie corrected.
‘Yeah,