6
A SACK OF letters from Australia had arrived with the bogged truck. This was a rare and unexpected pleasure. The POWs were aware that the Japanese withheld almost all mail, and such was the excitement that before breakfast was over the sack had already been opened and its contents distributed. Dorrigo was delighted to receive his first letter in almost a year. Before he even looked at the handwriting, he knew from its stiff card envelope that it was from Ella. He resolved not to open it until the evening, holding off on the pleasure of feeling that, somewhere else, another, better world continued on, a world in which he had a place and to which he would one day return. But almost immediately his mind rebelled and he tore open the envelope, so excitedly unfolding the two sheets that he partly ripped them. He began reading in a greedy fury.
Two-thirds of the way down the first page, he halted. He found himself unable to go on. It was as if he had jumped into a car and accelerated straight into a wall. The letters of Ella’s elegant copperplate hand kept scattering and rising off the page as dust motes, more and more dust motes bouncing off one another, and he was having trouble bringing her face to his mind. It seemed too real and entirely unreal at the same time.
He didn’t know whether it was the malaria attack he was still recovering from or exhaustion or the shock of receiving the letter, his first for the best part of a year. He reread it but was lost in a memory at once precise and imprecise, the dust motes brighter and wilder, the late-day sun more blinding than ever, and yet he could not see her face clearly. Thinking: The world is. It just is.
He could remember sitting in the baby Austin baker’s van as he drove towards the coast, could smell its acrid horsehair upholstery and stale flour, feel its burning sting in the Adelaide heat as he began visiting his uncle’s hotel regularly, his stomach wild with nervousness, his mouth dry, his shirt too tight, his heartbeat a conscious thud. The hotel, which came to his mind as if he were there once again: the verandahs deep and dark; the rusty filigree iron flaking crusts; the wind-raked sea topaz-scattered; the distant, crackling sound of Leslie Hutchinson singing ‘These Foolish Things’, heard as if while bodysurfing a shallow wave. But of Amy’s face he could remember nothing.
What, he wondered, was this desire to be with her and only her, to be with her night and day, to hang off even the dreariest of her anecdotes, the most obvious of her observations, to run his nose along her back, to feel her legs wrapping around his, hear her moan his name, this desire overwhelming everything else in his life? How to name this ache he felt in his stomach for her, this tightness in his chest, this overwhelming vertigo? And how to say—in any words other than the most obvious—that he now was possessed of only one thought which felt more an instinct: that he had to be near her, with her and only her.
She craved demonstrations of affection. The tritest of gifts always moved her, reassured her that his feeling for her had not evaporated. For her the gifts, the declarations, were necessary. What else did she have as proof of them? Denied the possibility of being a couple, this was the only evidence she could have, now and later, that she had once known such joy. Perhaps Amy, in her heart, so unlike Dorrigo, was a realist. Or so he thought. And so one day when they were together in the city he had withdrawn almost his entire savings to buy her a pearl necklace. It was a single pearl exquisitely mounted on a silver chain. It reminded him of looking out over her waist at the road made by moon over sea. She had rued his folly, twice told him to return it, but her delight was undeniable. For she had what she wished for, though she could never wear it publicly: proof of them. Even now he could see the necklace. But of her face nothing.
When you first saw me in the bookshop, he had said as he did up the triangular necklace clasp and kissed the back of her neck. Remember?
Of course, she said, a finger on the pearl.
Now I wonder if it was at that moment that you somehow joined us?
What do you mean?
But he hadn’t known what he had meant and he had been frightened by where his thoughts were leading. If it were so, did he have so little control over his life? He remembered swimming at the beach one morning, waiting for her to return from town. An undertow had grabbed him and swept him some hundreds of yards along before he could escape it.
The undertow, he had said. Of us.
She had laughed. It’s a beautiful necklace, she said.
Even now, he could see the necklace’s miniature moon rippling the shop’s electric light; he could see the triangular clasp resting on the nape of her neck, framing that faintest, most beguiling conifer ridge of down. But the dust motes were suddenly everywhere, the noise of the rain was rising and he could not see her face, he could not hear her voice, Bonox Baker was at his side saying it was tenko, and Amy was not there.