Goodbye Lullaby: New Edition

By JAN MURRAY

A little boy lost. A country at war. A promise made long ago that cannot be forgotten. As a sixteen-year-old in the Fifties, Miki Patrick is forced to surrender her baby son. It's now 1971 and the anti-war activist with a price on her head risks her freedom to find her somewhere child and keep him out of an unrighteous war. The drama played over two decades revolves around the feud between Miki and her best friend since childhood, the whip-smart, potty-mouthed Jude Brenner. The troubled teenagers made a pact. Each believes the other broke it. It will take Vietnam to bring them together again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Aug 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781922309372

JAN MURRAY

Jan Murray has lived long enough to have had several professional occupations but the one she is most proud to proclaim from on high is that of mother, having raised five amazing children to adulthood. At fourteen, frustrated by her lack of education, Jan left school, taking it upon herself when her fifth child was born to matriculate and then undertake a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Political Science. Juggling motherhood with study, she graduated from Macquarie University with Honours, working as a researcher, speech writer and press officer for several federal politicians before starting up a PR consultancy in the early eighties. Jan Murray & Associates (JMA) became a successful boutique consultancy with many high profile accounts to its credit. Eventually, after a decade of serious corporate fun launching entertainment, tourism and property projects, managing the media profiles of the rich and famous and heading up some useful (and mostly altruistic) fund-raising projects, Jan decided it was time to leave the spin business to others, opting to follow a dream and take up the solitary life of a writer, setting her sights on writing and producing the Great Australian Screenplay. Although credible actors such as Kiefer Sutherland and Claudia Karvan were attached, Sweet Surrender is still languishing in a bottom drawer waiting for several millions of dollars to attach themselves to it before the cameras can roll. Meanwhile, Jan was invited to appear as a guest on an episode of the legendary Beauty & the Beast agony aunt show produced by Foxtel and screened on Channel Ten five days a week. Somebody upstairs must have liked her confrontational, leftie style because she was still there a decade later, going head-to-head with the late, great Stan Zemanek. More than once, Jan was thrown off the show but, thanks to popular demand, was brought back again each time. It seems the viewers saw her as their champion and enjoyed seeing her sock it to the Beast on their behalf! Presently Jan is a full-time, fulfilled writer and, because she is in favour of the widest possible spread for her books, she values her association with Harlequin.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Goodna (Brisbane) 1950

‘I should never have told you!’ Miki wailed.

‘So you actually did it?’ said Jude. 

They were sitting together on the wooden bench, which wrapped around the big peppercorn tree down at the far end of the schoolyard. All through their lunch hour she had been begging Jude to act sensibly, forget about what she told her and pose for the camera. All she needed was for the idiot to stand under the tree––with their school building in the background––and then go down to the big gates and stand in front of them looking outwards. Jude beneath the fancy iron gates of St Benedicts Catholic College for Girls staring out at their future was the picture she needed most, her main shot, her metaphor. 

'You let him put it in?' 

'Quit it!'

Jude, the lunatic. She hadn't expected her dearest, closest friend to make fun of her, she thought as she watched Jude laying on her back writhing around, touching herself down there through her tunic and staring up at the sky as if Clark Gable were about to fall into her arms.  Her long hair trailed in the dust. Too bad. Even if ants crawled into it and ate her brains out, she wasn’t going to tell her. At this moment, she didn’t even like Jude. She liked herself even less.

‘Did it hurt?’ said Jude, springing up, alert and ready to be shocked. ‘Was there blood, Mik? What did you do while he was doing it, that’s what I want to know, that’s the bit I can never work out. What did you actually do? Did you just lie there and let him put it in? Did you scream or anything? Do you talk when it’s in there? Come on, spill the beans! You have to tell! You have to. It’s me, remember!’

Words tumbling over themselves, Jude making her feel awful. Not meaning to.

‘God! I can’t believe this!’ said Jude. ‘Miss Goody-Two-Shoes! You’ve actually gone and done it! And I haven’t! You actually beat me to it, you know what it feels like to have it in there, have a boy inside you!’ Jude leapt off the bench and threw out her arms, spinning herself around in a full circle. ‘World, I don’t believe it!’ she called out.

Neither did she, thought Miki, and if her mother hadn’t sent her over to the Manning’s after school to collect the pay envelope Mrs Manning had forgotten to leave on the sideboard that afternoon it would never have happened. Her mother’s wages. Doctor Leonard T. Manning’s house.

‘Was it huge, Mik?’

‘Shut up!’ A rush of blood to her cheeks.

‘Like a palace inside, I bet.’

She had to admit, she had been impressed by the Manning’s house. It was bigger than any house she had ever been in before, overflowing with furniture and stuffed cushions, vases and china things that looked as though they were sitting around waiting for someone to tell them why they were there, someone to do something with them other than just pass by them in the hall. The house felt like a museum, so big and only him and his parents living in it. So much furniture for her poor mother to polish every week. That had been her biggest impression of the Manning mansion. Fancy mirrors everywhere. She was struck by why people would need so many mirrors unless it was to make it look as if there were really more people in there than just the three of them rattling around in the big place.

‘So no one was home when you went around there, right? Except, of course, young Donald.’ Jude skipped backwards, dancing in a circle around Miki. ‘Donny, Oh Donny, Donny,’ she teased, pressing both hands to her heart and tossing her head back, her eyes rolling to heaven.

‘Come on, Jude, stand still for me, please? For the tenth time?’ Miki pleaded, waving her Box Brownie in the air. ‘You said you’d do this.’ 

‘Everyone knows you’ve had a mad crush on Donald Manning. Ever since the sports carnival.’ She turned to Miki, grinning. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? It’s those big hairy legs, those muscles. Oh, Donny, Donny, hold me in your arms and never let me go.’  

Miki felt her lunch come up into her throat and for an instant, imagined she might vomit or pass out. She gave Jude a shove. 

‘Before the bell goes. Come on.’ She had Drama with Miss Batson after lunch and wanted to clean up before class went in. They were performing the first two scenes from Act iii of Romeo and Juliet and it was her turn to give the talk. At least Romeo and Juliet was something she wanted to talk about. There was nothing she wanted to say about Donald Manning. She hated him. From the bottom of her heart.

‘Okay,’ said Jude. ‘How about this for a good shot, Miss World’s Greatest Photographer? How’s this? This do?’ With a vacant look on her face, her tongue lolling out and the bent knuckle of her little finger jammed at her nostril, Jude faced the camera.

‘Idiot! When you’ve finished pretending to excavate the roof of your antrum maybe you’ll act sensibly for me, huh?’  

As well as being sex crazed, Jude was also the most frustrating best friend anyone ever had, thought Miki. Always the clown. The bell would go soon and she really wanted to complete her portfolio for Family, Friends and Interesting Things by Caroline Patrick, and it would not be complete without the gate shot, their school years. 

She brushed the flies from her face and tried not to get herself into too much of a lather about the album but it was important to capture her subject under St Bren’s gates looking outward to the world beyond their college. She wanted her pictures to tell stories. The gate one would be about her and Jude and their future, about school and the big wide world outside that would be all theirs, one day. When they were both school teachers and had saved enough money, they were going to Tahiti. That was their big life plan. The Moon and Sixpence was one of their favourite novels. They were taking turns to read it to each other. Whoever had a daughter first was going to call her Tiaré.

She could feel the sun scorching her back and the sweat trickling down her legs. And the flies; she could do without the flies, she thought, flicking at them repeatedly. The flies were making it hard to keep her camera steady on the subject. All she needed was for Jude to stop clowning around long enough so she could click the shutter and then go down to the gates for the last shot, then to the bubblers and wash up.

‘Was it romantic? I bet it was.' Jude spun around, her arm hugging her waist as she looked up to the sky. 'Oh God, Mik, I bet it was so romantic!’ 

‘Please? Jude? Be a sport!’ 

She held the Box Brownie against her midriff, her feet apart, her head bent over the camera and her right eye focusing down the lens. The school building stayed where it was, but not Jude, the flibbertigibbet.

It was hard, however, not to love your best friend, frustrating as she was, thought Miki. Jude. Her sister. Almost. In everything but blood, they were sisters. She couldn't remember a time when Jude wasn't in her life. But she was also the most annoying creature on the face to the earth. Just look at her! 

She tried to control her giggles watching Jude skipping around the peppercorn tree and trailing her lunch paper behind her like some Chinese dancer. If Jude caught her laughing, she would be encouraged to keep clowning.

She let the camera drop to her side, her hand through the diagonal strap keeping it against her leg as she looked away from Jude’s antics to a vanishing point, something stationary she could concentrate on while she composed herself. 

'Donny, Donny, my darling. Make love to me, Donny,'  Jude crooned.

Flicking her plaits back over her shoulder, Miki moved forward with a scowl and a renewed determination. She had to get angry with her subject, start demanding some co-operation instead of this juvenile idiocy.

Wind had kicked up the playground dust. Taking a clean handkerchief, she flicked gritty particles off her lens, noting she had only three shots left on her roll. Would there be a moment this side of Christmas when Jude wouldn’t be cavorting around that stupid tree or pulling an idiotic face or preening like Ava Gardener or shoving a finger up her nose and sticking her tongue out like the village idiot? 

Or turning around and giving a bum show of navy bloomers to the camera? 

Click! The sound of the shutters opening and closing, a sound that usually thrilled her.

'Dam!'

Involuntarily, she had clicked the button and captured Jude's silly antic. Too trigger happy, she cursed. Too impulsiveness. She couldn’t use such a dopey photo, and she couldn't afford to waste film either. Now she only had two shots left. She wanted to show her family how brilliantly she was using their precious birthday gift. They already had a problem with Jude.  Lots of people did.

‘Brenner!  Do that tie up!’ The command came loud and shrill. 

Looking over her shoulder, Miki saw the speaker striding across the grass towards them. When she looked back at Jude, she saw rebellion in Jude’s eye. Here’s trouble, she thought.

‘Look at you! You're a disgrace, Brenner!’ The senior  advanced on them. ‘Let that belt out at least six inches before I report you,’ she said as she pointed at Jude’s tucked in waist-line.

The prefect was a pale, thin stretch of a girl, her uniform perfect in every detail, not a wisp of hair out of place, shiny shoes, school badges and her panama at the regulation angle. She stood with her arms folded and her feet apart, glaring, making it clear who was in charge. It was obvious from the look she gave Jude that she was not impressed with Jude’s disheveled appearance.

‘You're fine, Patrick. You can go!’ said the senior. ‘Go on, beat it. Go, go!’

Miki turned back to Jude. Oh God, don’t do it. Jude was responding to this mean Year-12 girl with her usual bad attitude. Jude hated being called Brenner, but more than that, she hated being told what to do by prefects. Jude had an aversion to prefects, and now she stood frozen in position, the long piece of lunch wrap held high above her head, her left foot poised ready to twirl herself into her scarf dance routine, and brazenly out-staring the scowling prefect. 

It was hilarious but if she giggled now it would only get Jude into more trouble. She saw how ironic that it took this sour prefect to finally get Jude to strike a graceful pose.  She coughed to cause a distraction.

‘Go! Go!’ the prefect yelled at Miki for the second time before turning back to Jude. 'You, Brenner! You are a little smart-alec Jew who shouldn’t even be at this school and wouldn’t be only Legacy’s paying your way. Everybody knows that.’

Miki stepped up to the girl. ‘Don’t you dare say that! It’s not fair.’

‘I’ll say what I like, thank you!’ The senior glared at her. ‘I told you to vamoose, didn’t I? What are you still doing here, anyway? Scat!’

Instead of moving off, Miki turned from the senior and faced Jude. It wasn’t fair on Jude, such an insult, but everyone hated this stuck-up prefect anyway, and it struck Miki that the girl might even be able to do what she hadn’t been able to do; get Jude to stand still and look half sensible. It wasn’t exactly the shot she'd planned, but a shot of the school building, with Jude in the foreground being arrogant to a prefect might fit the story of their school days, anyway.

‘Hey, Jude?’ she called when she had her subject in the frame.

The prefect stood glaring at the pair of them.

Jude looked at Miki. Her face lit up when she spied the camera. She gave a thumbs-up sign.

Miki looked down the lens. 

Jude straightened up.

Miki pressed the red button. 

‘Finally!’ she muttered to herself, rolling the film forward to the last shot. It was a shame that not all of the building was in the shot but she was already warming to this less formal and studied element of her art.

Under the continued scrutiny of the prefect, Jude made a half-hearted go at straightening her tie and letting out her belt. 

Judith Miriam Brenner––one of the school’s smartest students but also one of the school’s least co-operative students. Jude was high on their list of juniors to harass. The prefects despised poor Jude who couldn’t help she was Jewish. Couldn’t help that she was smarter than them. Couldn’t help that she wouldn’t stand for being told what to do. Not by idiots, Miki reasoned. Not by most people, if it came to that.

Under the prefect’s hostile gaze, Jude slowly and methodically picked pieces of lint from her navy box-pleated uniform. She pulled up her black stockings and polished the toes of her lace-ups by rubbing their dusty surface across the back of her hosiery. All achieved without taking her eyes off her persecutor.

Miki recognized Jude’s expression; a condescending smirk that would be read  by Miss Bossy Boots as insubordinate

‘Did you drop that?’ It was the wax lunch wrap, the Isadora Duncan scarf.

Jude stared insolently at the senior. 

‘Pick it up!’

Jude obeyed. She handed it to the prefect who scrunched it.

‘They yours?’ the senior barked, pointing at a pile of shrivelled orange peels scattered on the dusty ground a little way off.

Jude rolled her eyes. She looked down at the dried peel then threw a withering look at the prefect.

‘Did you drop them? Answer me, Brenner!’ The prefect came in closer, hands thrust on her hips. ‘Well, did you? Did you?’ the girl shouted.

‘Yeah...’ said Jude as she looked from the prefect to the desiccated peel and back again. ‘... sometime last century.’ 

Miki suppressed a giggle. One to Jude!  Prefect, nil! 

‘Well pick them up! At once!’ She put her hands on Jude's shoulder and pushed her down, hard to the ground. 'Every last piece!' She threw the lunch wrap at Jude. 'Do it, Brenner!'

Miki knew better than anyone about her friend's short fuse. She held her breath. 

But Jude took the bully's abuse as if she were born to be persecuted. She stared up at the senior from her crouched position in the dust and threw a military salute. ‘Yes'm!’ 

Jude’s resentment was reinforced by her tight smile. At her own pace, with attention to detail, and using only her left hand, she began gathering up the stale peel and laying them carefully on the spread-out lunch wrap. St Brendan’s authority was being challenged by the slow pace of the work. Miki could see by the rigid stance of the bully standing over Jude, the anger levels rising. 

‘Move it!’ barked the infuriated seventeen-year-old to the insubordinate fifteen-year-old at her feet. 

Jude smiled as one hand worked the ground and the other stayed in her tunic pocket.

‘Okay, then, Brenner. That’s how you want to play it? Then see me after school!’ The frustrated girl looked as if she might slap Jude's face any minute to settle the score.

Detention orders. The missed bus. The long walk home in the heat carrying heavy school bags. The two of them.  Good one, Jude, Miki cursed.

Jude was still bent over her one-handed job, picking up every last bit of dried-up peel as she advanced closer and closer to the large feet of the prefect towering over her.  

Jude's face was at the hem of the senior’s tunic. 

The prefect held her ground. Miki knew she had not seen the secret signal that had just passed between herself and Jude. Or seen what it was that Jude had flashed at her in her open palm.  

But she had seen it. And she knew immediately what was about to happen. And what was expected of her. 

She brought the Box Brownie to her chest again, and again, with steady hands looked down its lens. Her last shot, she realized as she kept her index finger poised on the red button and held her breath. Her last, but they had to do it. 

Jude shot her the signal.

She had the prefect's head and shoulders in perfect focus.   ‘Smile, everyone!’ she called out.

The stunned senior turned to look at the student she had forgotten about. 

In the space of that second, Jude sprung up and jammed the cigarette into the corner of the senior’s open mouth. 

‘Gotcha!’ said Miki triumphantly, as she heard the familiar click and lowered her camera to her side.

‘Tut, tut!’ Jude waved a finger as the apoplectic senior as the girl hurled the cigarette across the playground. ‘Quell horror!  Wait till Sister Augusta sees this! Wait till she finds out!’ called Jude to the retreating figure. ‘Or should we talk? About that detention stuff?’

They watched the older girl melt into a distant playground group. Miki returned the Box Brownie with its exposed roll of film to its leather case. She would need to save up her pocket money to buy a new roll of Kodak. But one thing was for certain; they would be on the school bus this afternoon. 

‘C'mon, genius. The bell’s going any minute,’ yelled Jude as she ran past, flicking Miki’s plaits. ‘Do you want to take this picture of me down there, or don’t you?’ 

Jude ran down the sloping lawn to the gates and positioned herself in front of the ornate ironwork, centring herself perfectly under the St Brendan’s College sign. Her body was slightly turned as she looked out onto the wide world beyond. 

‘What are you waiting for?’ she called to Miki, indicating the distant figure of their victim. ‘An encore or something?’

PART ONE

–1–

The Daintree Rainforest 

(Far North Queensland) 1971

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.

~~~

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, okay. July.’ She tried to blot out a painful scene, one she knew only too well; the twice a year procession of nineteen-year-old youths lining up at their local Labour and National Service office. Filling in those hateful forms. She had used her fifteen minutes of fame during the previous registration fortnight to torment the Government, exposing their Birthday Lottery for the sick joke it was.  But had he seen it? And would it have made him question his country’s involvement in the war if he had? Or like everyone else in Australia who didn’t want to get on the wrong side of good old Uncle Sam, would he have written her type off as the idiot fringe, hippy protesters?

More importantly, how would she ever know?

She squatted down on her haunches and scooped up a handful of the fine sand, holding it in her palm for a time before she spread her fingers and watched as the grains slipped through and were lost among the myriad others on the beach. ‘All our somewhere children, Bernie? Where do you suppose––?’

‘Let it go!’ Bernie heaved herself up onto her feet, not as adroitly as Miki had done but a graceful enough effort for the large woman she was. She brushed the sand from her backside. ‘You’ve gotta let it go, Mik. You just plain gotta let it go sometimes.’

Bernie was right.  Cultivate a mind that clings to nothing, said the Buddha. Easier said than done, though. ‘Why should we let it go?’ 

‘Because it bloodywell kill’s you if you don’t.’

Yes, it kills you, alright.

She checked the skies before leaving the cover of the mangroves and started down to the water’s edge. Today was a day of trepidation, of dark feelings. Resentment. Shame. Regret. Bitterness. Anguish. Longing. Let her at it, she could write the thesaurus on the darker emotions.

‘Think about it,’ Bernie said, coming up to her and placing a hand on her shoulder. ‘We’re making fools of the bastards, girl. We chip away at things. At their power. We’re like bloody termites. An army of white ants, that's us.’

Despite her mood, she cocked an eyebrow at her friend and grinned. ‘White ants?’

Bernie got the joke. 

‘Well, yeah, some of us aren’t so bloody white but y’know what I mean, you ratbag.’ 

Bernie ground the heel of her bare foot into the wet sand, twisting it so that tiny bubbles surfaced around it, betraying a secret universe. ‘They can’t see us. Don’t mean we’re not there, though. We’re doing the damage, Mik. With our marches ‘n things.' She pointed up to their transfer camp inside the rainforest. 'With all this ... the kinda stuff we’re doing up here.’

Bernie waved her arm to the sky, to where the choppers had been. ‘We got 'em worried, that’s for sure. Canberra’s gonna have to rethink what they doin’, I reckon. Jus’ can’t keep sending our kids over there. Waves of ‘em come’n back dead or ruined. The country’s over it, fair-dinkum. The buggers are gonna wake up one day ‘n find their game’s up. Whitlam’s gonna wipe the floor with ‘em. End the whole bloody mess, I reckon.’

'You’d like to think so.’

‘Honestly, Mik, we’re the secret army. The bloody secret army and they better watch out ‘cause we’re coming for ‘em!’ 

Bernie locked fingers with Miki and they walked along the water’s edge, trailing their feet in the coolness of the sea. ‘We’re making fools of the buggers, alright. You more than anyone.' She slapped Miki's backside. 'Oh, yeah, sister. You, more 'n any of us, my famous friend.’

‘Infamous friend.’

‘Notorious friend.’ Bernie laughed. ‘I can just see ‘em, the stupid buggers! Kaper Kops!’  She wiped away the tears with the back of her hand.

Miki wasn't laughing. ‘Yeah, and now that young man back in there, and the other two, and all the others we've shipped off ... they're heading for God knows what kind of life now, Bernie.’ She kicked at the wave as it washed over her feet. ‘And I’ve got a price on my head. So you tell me; whose the stupid bugger? You tell me. Tell me who’s the idiot. Sure, I made fools of  ‘em but now that boy … and me … are on the run.'

The pair walked on in silence for several minutes, each away with her own thoughts. Miki put an arm around Bernie's shoulder. ‘I did  strike a blow for him though, didn’t I?’

‘Him? Yeah. How else was you gonna reach out to your boy, Mik? You got it right, I reckon.’

‘And make other mothers think about their sons' call-up.’

‘You had to do it, girl. And that kid in there, he was up for it anyway. You didn’t twist ‘is arm. And the Gov’ment had it coming to ‘em, I reckon.’ Bernie put her arm around Miki's waist. ‘Sorry I laughed back there but sometimes you have to, don’t you? Just thinkin' about those Sydney coppers running around like chooks with no heads, it cracks me up ... it fair-dinkum cracks me up, Mik. You and the kid already out the back door and on your way, and them chasin’ their bloody tails!’

‘Those blokes up in the sky, Bernie? They're no laughing matter, though. They’re the real thing. 

She slowed her pace, dropping back from Bernie to dawdle along the shoreline, her mind drifting back to March and the rush of blood to the head that had made her risk hers and young Jamie Richardson’s freedom.

Bernie might be right; James Richardson had been up for it.

She had met him through their network and he had been full of idealism and youthful bravado. But as the adult, she ought to have tempered that, tried cautioning him that he would be making himself a massive target. She ought to have warned him but instead, she jumped at the idea. 

~~~

Emanuel Sachs could loosely be called a colleague. She had used Manny when she put her Mauritius documentary together four years ago and they had occasionally bumped into each other at rallies; she holding up banners and marching, he directing an ABC camera crew.  

In more recent times, he had become the enfant terrible of Australian current affairs, the producer responsible for political reportage on This Day Tonight. Along with Adrian Clarke, Sachs was the reason the ABC was off-side with the hawks in government. Clarke had jumped at her interview idea, according to Manny. Nothing in advance for the media, however. ‘If the guys upstairs in Mahogany Row get a whiff of the set-up, I’ll be out the door on the end of a large boot.’ It had to appear spontaneous. Gate-crash the studio, that was the deal.

They were let in through the back entrance of the studio and asked to wait in the dark behind a Playschool prop. The segment on the plight of farmers in the Riverina was winding up. She looked sideways at her young charge and saw the eagerness. And something else. James Richardson’s mother had died eight months ago. He told Miki he thought his mother would approve, that she would be on Miki's side, the Save Our