10
‘Hell, it’s only natural,’ Flood said. ‘You hunt the beast, you kill it, you take the horns.’
There was a pause while he pulled a small piece of food from the back of his mouth and sucked his finger clean of it. He was evidently happy with the food at the compound, the bully beef and potatoes.
‘I heard one guy takes the heads – bleaches them out. Prob’ly be worth something when this is all over.’
‘He wouldn’t be able to lug around a sackful of heads,’ said Cray, who was propped against a tree, with a pad of paper and a pencil stub.
‘Bullshit.’ Flood spat and it landed heavily in the bracken. ‘Anyway, I’m starting a little collection of my own.’ He tried to catch Leon’s eye but Leon looked away and pretended he was listening to something else. ‘I’m gonna to take the trigger fingers.’
‘You’re full of shit, Flood.’ Cray shifted so that he was turned away from him.
Flood chuckled, then drew hard on his cigarette, the orange tip glowed bright enough to light up the sticky little mouth it poked from. As he exhaled he let out a few more humps and giggles, then looked away.
Leon busied himself with picking out the heavy green mud from the grooves of his boot with a twig. He started shaping mud round twigs, using it like modelling clay. It wouldn’t hold together that well when it was dry, so he kept it small. His father had made a sugar model of him when he was born, made it the right size so that it fitted with the wedding figures from their cake. When he’d been about five, his father had taken the baby down out of the bell jar to show him. It was in a cradle that rocked when you nudged at it. A blue striped blanket came up to his chin and his pink fingers clutched at the edge of it, minute dots of white for fingernails. The cradle fitted right in the middle of his palm, the size of a sugared almond. When the shop bell rang and his father went to serve a customer, Leon had simply popped it into his mouth, without even really thinking about it. The sugar had been old, but it was still sweet, and when he took it out of his mouth again the colours had all run and the thing looked a mess. His mother walked in just in time to see the baby go back into his mouth and her scream brought his father running.
‘What in hell?’
Leon kept his mouth closed over the baby.
His mother had tears in her eyes and a hand over her mouth. ‘He’s eating his baby self,’ she whispered. They stared at him in silence. He blinked.
His father’s face went red, then he laughed loudly so the place echoed. ‘Well, then, I suppose that’s fine,’ he said. ‘Taste good, does he?’
Leon nodded, his mother stared and his father went back to the front of the shop, still giggling, saying over and over, ‘My word. My word, my word. There’s sugar in the blood for you.’
The mud baby that Leon made, sitting in the damp shade of a rubber tree, was in swaddling, no arms or legs, just a little blackish-greenish grub, with two seeds from a split pod of some kind for eyes. With a grass stalk he put in details – eyelashes, a smile, a triangle nose and circles for cheeks. He put it in a strong patch of sunlight on the root of the tree and left it to bake. Cray was oiling the handle of a machete. He held it up to show Leon and passed it to him, so that he could see that on the wooden handle were all kinds of carvings, birds and leaves of minute detail.
‘For the wife,’ Cray explained, ‘she wanted something’d be good in the garden – we got this fireweed and bramble problem. Got this old promise to sort it out when I get back.’
Leon felt the weight of it in his hands. ‘’Sa keen handle – where’d you find it?’
‘Took it off a Cong. Shot him in the throat and took his knife.’
He held Leon’s gaze for a moment before pulling hard on his cigarette and looking down at the ground. ‘Carved those things meself.’
Leon nodded. ‘She’s a beaut.’ Some sort of bird laughed loudly. ‘Really nice. You work on wood back home?’
Cray looked up again, squinting and nodded. ‘Mainly I make rocking chairs.’
Leon carried on nodding and handed back the blade. ‘Funny place, this.’
‘That is the f*cking truth, mate.’
When it was time to move on, he checked on the mud baby and found it had dried a shade lighter. Stupid to want to take it. But he wrapped it carefully in a fat leaf anyway. It’d fall to pieces. He put it into a zippered pocket and shifted his pack on to his back, careful not to knock it. He shook his head at himself and made off after Cray.
In the night, along with the things that loped in the undergrowth, the tide of mosquitoes and biting beetles that hissed and whined around Leon’s ears, there was the sound of heaving. Someone was sick and in between the cries of the man Leon could hear a neighing, a rucking up of earth with claws like something rejoicing in the sound. He pulled his soft cap over his ears and curled in a tight ball, the butt of his gun poking at him like the cold nose of an animal.
When the sun came up, it was Flood who lay chalkily under his netting, an orange crust round his mouth, to be lifted out with his malaria. Leon breathed shallowly. Of all the bastards to get sick.
‘That means you get the gun, old matey,’ said Pete, planting the thing at his feet. ‘Clive’s your second.’ He passed over the extra rounds and felt the machine gun heavy in his hands. It was like he’d never held one, never trained with the rest of them. To kill a man. To kill thirty men. All at once. There was a moan from Flood and he felt anger rising in him. Couldn’t the bastard just live with it? It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that the arsehole was faking it. Better to pretend to be sick than shoot yourself in the foot. But he saw a greenness in Flood’s skin where the jungle had crept into his blood and was pushing out of his pores. He stood with his new gun, his back to the section, not looking at anyone, trying not to think.
They waited for the sound of blades in the air.
‘By the time we set out, it might all’ve been over,’ Leon said to Cray, who had slid himself down the trunk of a tree and was unwrapping a barley sugar. He offered one to Leon, and when he refused Cray insisted, tapping the thing on Leon’s boot.
‘Yep, but. If we set out now, we might all be dead in five hours’ time.’
‘How do you reckon we’re any less likely all to be dead if we wait?’
‘Nup – it’s lore. It’s like – I can picture myself saying to my son in a few years – however long it takes till a kid’ll understand these things – I can see it – I’m sat there with my wife round a feed of whiting and there’s a beer in my hand. Lena’s wearing this flower print dress she’s got – couldn’t fit into it last time I saw her – too big with bub. And I’m telling the boy about it. Telling him how to survive something like that.’
Cray tapped his helmet with another barley sugar. ‘Got to just think yourself safe, then no f*cker’ll touch you.’
‘Right,’ Leon said, the sweet hard against his cheek. ‘S’pose it’s easier if you’ve got a girl in a nice dress to think about.’
Cray reached into his thigh pouch and brought out a wallet. He snaffled through it. ‘Tell you what, old matey,’ he said. ‘Just for today, youse can borrow my wife. Just till you get used to holding on to that gun.’ He handed over a folded photograph. It was colour, the woman was small-nosed with prominent canine teeth. Her dress was dark with an orange spidery flower print. Her hair was long down the sides of her face. She held her hand to her forehead in a salute. The beginnings of a pregnancy showed around the front of the dress.
‘Just before training started.’
Leon handed the picture back, nodding. ‘She’s a lovely-looking woman.’
‘Careful.’
‘I mean she looks lovely.’
Cray looked at the photograph and smiled, his chest rose. ‘Haven’t seen the boy yet. S’posed to be a picture coming, but what with the post . . .’
Leon nodded. ‘How old would that make him?’
‘Seventeen days.’
Leon bit the barley sugar in half and blinked away an image he didn’t want to know about. Cray sprayed with bullets against dark green, blood leaking from his mouth. He looked away and breathed through his nose. Something coursed through the leaves to one side of them, but Cray didn’t seem to hear it.
The sound of the Hewie caught in the wind. When he was hoisted up, they all waved but Flood was still, a crust of a man, his mouth a hole.
‘Pretty crook way for a soldier to go, I reckon,’ said Pete but Leon wasn’t sure he agreed. He thought about the clean sheets Flood would be tucked into, about the quiet at night, the soft touches of nurses.