He had already placed Bluey accurately as a solid, unimaginative fellow, a good messmate and a good go-ashore oppo. He was vindicated in his judgement when he saw the hotel bum brushed aside by a group of civilians, and then saw Bluey quietly slip a ten-shilling note into the rheumy-eyed old man’s dirty hand. Bluey’s head came back furtively to the bar, and caught Gellatly watching him.

  “Might be glad of a fiddley meself one day,” he muttered sheepishly, and hid his face behind his glass.

  Bill Smith was, as his name implied, simply strong, decent and unargumentative. He smiled at Bluey’s jokes, nodded when Corby growled some pithy vulgarism against the idiots who ran the Navy, and listened with unaffected interest when Gellatly spoke. Now and again, he looked at the barmaid and said, “Same again, please,” and that was about the sum total of his verbal contribution to the afternoon’s entertainment. But he was a pleasant bloke to have there.

  Gellatly’s analytical interest in his new messmates was more than the natural enquirings of his educated mind—he knew that he was senior to Corby in rank, both in time and in gunnery rate. It followed, therefore, that he would be the leader of the team in whatever the future held for them. It was because of this that he felt, and consciously recognised, his vague worry about the relationship between Corby and Whitey.

  Whitey seemed, so far, to be quiet and well-disciplined. But he must be sensible of his origins down south amongst this totally white population, and it only needed a veiled sneer, or some word like “blackboy” to explode his quietness into the violent activity of which his superbly muscled body gave warning. Or so Gellatly thought, sipping and listening in that carefree bar. He caught sight of himself momentarily in the large mirror behind the bottles, and he grinned inwardly at the seriousness of the brown face looking back at him. Here he was, a couple of hours after joining the diving school, already plotting disruption amongst its members.

  “What’s up with you bastards?” he said suddenly, and downed what was left in his glass. “I came in here to drink, not mark time!” He slapped his glass on the bar.

  Bluey looked at him in a surprise that turned rapidly to an unholy joy.

  “Brother,” he grinned, “you asked for it! Come on, Anna, show a leg!”

  They ate hamburgers at the Cafe de Wheels outside the main gate leading on to Garden Island though Gellatly was not too clear how they had got there from Rushcutters Bay. They sat in the dark on a ledge in one of the loading bays of the long warehouse, and before he had started on his second hamburger Gellatly felt the sobering, blotting-paper effect of the first, added to the fish and chips they had bought outside the hotel. So that he was sensible enough for his nerves to tighten to alertness when he heard Corby say, mouthing through the food at his lips:

  “How d’you like this white man’s tucker. Whitey?”

  Gellatly was about to take a bite. His mouth stayed open a little, the hamburger held a few inches from his face, and he looked quickly at the aborigine, squatting down on his heels on the road before them. Whitey quietly picked a piece of tomato from between his two buns and threw it on the ground. Then he said, still quietly:

  “I’ve been eating it for a long time, Blubberguts.”

  Gellatly thought he detected a slight emphasis on the word “blubber”. It might have been because Whitey was talking with his mouth full. Then Bluey said, loudly:

  “Strike me up a flamin’ gum tree! You bastards know the time? Come on—we’ll never get there before the grog’s gone!”

  Bill Smith stared at him, nodding his head.

  “Hell, yes, Bluey. You’re right there.”

  Gellatly wasn’t sure if Bluey’s outburst had been deliberate, or bore no relation at all to what Corby had said. Maybe even Corby had meant nothing derogatory. Swaying a little, Gellatly got to his feet, screwing up the tissue paper in which his food had been served.

  “Now look here,” he argued, staring at Corby, and his mind was conscious of the fact that already he was playing the part of peacemaker. “I start swimming or something on Monday. Don’t you reckon we’ve had enough? What the hell more have you got on?”

  He staggered as a ham-handed blow caught him between the shoulder-blades.

  “It’s on all right, me old townie!” Bluey also, he had learned, hailed from Brisbane. “On for young and old. Out at Redfern. Tons of grog, lashings of skirt. And no bloody Yanks. They hate their guts out where we’re goin’.” He pushed his cap back, so that his weathered-brown face was halo’d with a red fringe vivid even in the street lights. “Tonight, townie, we celebrate!”

  “Celebrate what?” Gellatly asked, leaning forward towards him and then swaying back on his heels. “We haven’t finished the bloody course yet, y’know.”

  “No!” shouted Bluey triumphantly. “But we’re just startin’ it! See? Celebration!”

  “Oh hell,” groaned Gellatly, and put on his cap. “Who’s gonna sling my hammock tonight?”

  “Maybe you’ll have somethin’ softer to lie on,” Bluey grinned, and then laughed aloud at his own wit. In the middle of the guffaw his head swung towards a swathe of light coming down the curve of road from King’s Cross. “Taxi!” he roared, and when it had swept uncaring past him, a single man in the back seat, Bluey growled. “Bloody Yanks! What have they got that I haven’t—and where can I get it?”

  “Good looks,” growled Corby from the loading dock, “and dough.”

  “Yeah? Marie don’t need no dough for what she’s got. Come on—it looks like the flippin’ train ternight.”

  Gellatly had never been in this part of Sydney before. The terrace-houses closely lining the streets seemed grimy and crouched together against whatever a more comfortable world might say of them. And yet, on this wartime Saturday night, there was a sense of gaiety and pleasure. Most front doors stood open to the warm breeze, men and women leaned over front railings, and there was a hardly a house which did not have music—canned variety—issuing from its hallway in syncopated blasts. Couples passed them on the footpath, and more than once they met groups like themselves, similarly laden with brown-paper parcels of beer.

  Saturday night! The “at-home,” the cocktail party, the soiree of the working class. Here, on this magical night, both front and back doors were open, with a couple in the fridge; the cocktails were compounded of a hot moon peering like a great, benign eye through chimney-pots, the excitement of anticipation and freedom from a week’s work and worry, with a stirring of cold beer for the blokes and gin for the sheilas: and the music drooled or blared from cooperative radio stations and from the light-flickering juke boxes in the milk bars.

  They rolled on, further from the station. The neon sign outside a hotel jerked on and off, exploding its hard light in the air. They hesitated outside the talk-filled bar, and Bluey urged them on. They were all in first-class physical shape, and now they were almost sober again. It took an effort to pass the bar, yet they did, and Gellatly smiled briefly to himself—even here the long-ingrained discipline was at work, though none of them would have admitted it They had somewhere to go, and in the form of Bluey they had someone to remind them of their object. Their training did the rest—unobtrusively, but definitely.

  Gellatly felt it again, as he had when they had bundled laughing out of the train—the indefinable excitement, the sense of camaraderie and closeness with shipmates on a run ashore in what was to most of them a “foreign” port. He had had this flash of feeling in Madagascar, and Bombay, and Malta, in Singapore and in Portsmouth. Though he had never seen any of them before this morning, he was probably closer to his new friends than any of those men drinking in the bar were with theirs: the closeness of similar dangers shared, of side-by-side living, of unspoken pride in their Service—the loyalty, the unexpected faith which binds together a ship’s company.

  Bluey gave them a sudden wide-toothed grin and turned abruptly in through an iron gate in a set of iron railings.

  There was the front bedroom, then the lounge, then the kitchen, and the three rooms were being used. A narrow and steep set of stairs ran upwards from the lounge-room, but there didn’t seem to be anybody up in the two second-storey bedrooms. All the laughter and the singing and the drinking were concentrated in the three lower rooms.

  Bluey was greeted with exaggerated catcalls of delight, as though it needed only his presence for the fun to really start. Gellatly did not bother about remembering the names he was introduced to—that would come later, when things warmed up. He noticed some pretty girls, some fair, and others whom he discarded from his mind and his intentions at once. In this sailor’s game you had to be quick and definite —there was no time to choose leisurely, work up and then pick your time for striking. You had a girl tonight, you had to work fast tonight—you might get back on board, having made a date for the next night, and find yourself two hundred miles at sea by the time you were due to meet her. Strike while the iron’s hot had, in Gellatly’s case, a wider implication than the mere furtherance of human industry.

  So, while he smiled and shook hands and accepted a frothing-over glass of beer, his ready eye roved. He met Marie, who lived in the house and was dragged up, laughing, by Bluey. Gellatly looked into a flushed, powdered face, topped also by red hair. Bluey’s was natural.

  “Hyah. Give! You on this new ship with Bluey, huh? Jeez. I hope it don’t sail soon.”

  Bluey hugged her, his arm around her hips and his hand pressing in low down on her stomach. Gellatly thought with a grin of the prospect of their concrete ammunition lighter sailing to sea. He was about to put her mind at ease when the significance of what she had said struck him. Bluey, obviously, had told her he was attached to a new ship. Just as obvious was his real reason for keeping the truth from her. The thought that the work of his new section required absolute secrecy to ensure its success was a sudden and sobering thought to the young petty officer. Had he been asked straight out what he was doing in the Navy, his common sense and normal caution would have made him parry the question. But he had not been asked, and it had taken this henna-haired girl to awaken his caution.

  “I don’t think she’ll sail for a while yet,” he assured her, smiling, and her own smile withdrew a little at the educated tone of his voice.

  Grinning in appreciation of their mutual secret, Bluey dragged her away. She said when they were clear:

  “Bit up in the air, ain’t he, Blue?”

  “Clive? Hell, no. One of the best. He’s goin’ for officer, but he’s still one of the boys, all right.” He put his other arm around her—the movement went unnoticed in the unrestrained atmosphere prevailing—and nibbled her ear with his mouth. “He’s gonna be my new boss. Now you be nice to him. see?”

  She arched her well-defined bosom away from him. “How nice?”

  “Not that bloody nice!” Bluey grinned. He pulled her back to him. “Upstairs tonight?”

  “Jeez. Blue, don’t you think of nothin’ else? The party’s just started.” But her eyes were closed a little, promising, as she moved her lips slightly against him.

  “Marie ...!”

  She eased his hands down from behind her. “Come on, get me a beer,” she said quickly.

  Gellatly was alone for a moment. He looked around at the crowded room. There were one or two soldiers’ uniforms, but most of the men were civilians—fitters and turners, dockyard workers, factory hands, he assumed; men so important they could not be spared from the war effort to go to war.

  He grinned openly at his thoughts—that taxi driver had started the poison. These blokes really were important—somebody had to turn the shell casings and process the fuses ... He bent his head to drink, and he looked up in time to see a girl pass him with a knock-down look out of her black eyes. His own eyes followed her with abrupt interest. She was slender, and wore a black dress of some shiny material that sheathed her body, outlining her buttocks like—and he grinned as he thought of the naval description—two apples held in a silk handkerchief.

  He stood and watched her move down the room with all his eyes, and he felt a surge of quite unreasonable annoyance as a man sitting in an armchair under the angle of the second-storey stairs reached up quickly and pulled her down into his lap. For one instant, before she ran her fingers through his dark hair, she looked back at Gellatly. That look decided him.

  He walked slowly towards them, and instead of sizing up the man who now had his arms right round the girl’s slim waist, he stared at her legs. He could not help it. She was leaning back in his lap, her head against the wall behind her, and her legs stretched out one higher than the other. They were lovely legs, silk-sheathed, her feet in high-heeled shoes, and the arc of her instep was something exquisite to see. She looked like a model for a stocking advertisement. The only sour note in the picture’s composition was the male reason for her legs stretching out like that. Gellatly stopped in front of them.

  “Hello,” he said politely, “my name’s Gellatly.”

  He was looking at the man, not the girl. He did not want, nor did he expect, trouble. The dark man looked back at him, and his eyes were veiled and directionless, like the eyes of a boxer. His lips thinned over his white teeth as be met Gellatly’s affable smile.

  “So?” he said.

  The girl came upright on his lap, a quick graceful movement. She was very dark, with her hair cut short and fringed on her forehead. Her skin was smooth and creamy, and her mouth was a scarlet wound in the whiteness of her face.

  “Nice to know you ... Clive,” she smiled.

  She had either been told, or had asked, about him. His pleasure was in his smile when he said to her:

  “Which leaves me in the dark ...”

  She stood up, smoothing her dress down over her thighs.

  “Rita,” she told him. “Rita Hagar.”

  Before Gellatly could answer the promise in her eyes the man had risen. He rose in one swift muscular reaction. The smile stayed on Gellatly’s lips, but went out of his eyes as he saw that movement.

  “My name’s Fenelli,” he said, and the way he said it made it clear that he was not interested in giving information—it was meant to establish, through the relation of the two names, his relation with the girl. Gellatly thought, That’s where the dark skin and hair come from. He saw Fenelli’s arm move out to encircle Rita’s waist again; he saw her instant and quick twist of negation, and Fenelli’s arm then lift up so his hand was laid on her shoulder.

  Somebody’s ready for a change, he grinned to himself—and somebody else mightn’t like that. He said:

  “How are you?” Without the addition of a Christian name the words sounded oddly flat. He did not offer his hand, for Fenelli’s right hand was still on the girl’s shoulder. He took his eyes from Fenelli’s and caught the girl’s glance, travelling slowly down the tall length of his body. There was no lascivious expression on her face. It wasn’t needed; her action spoke for her feelings. Bluey’s voice reached them, loud and raucous through the laughter and talk.

  “Hey, lend a hand here, you bludgers! Haul this stuff out of the way. That music’s going to waste.”

  He was answered by willing shouts and hands.

  Quickly the chairs and settees were dragged back, some of them out into the kitchen. The space left was not large, but it was no smaller than some of Sydney’s smart night clubs offered their more particular patrons. Gellatly saw the space cleared, and he heard the music from the wireless. He looked at the girl and he knew intuitively that this was the time to make his play, if he was to get her. He said, as his arm went out to her:

  “Like to dance?”

  Her intuition matched his. She answered “Yes,” at once, at the same time as she moved forward clear of Fenelli’s restraining hand. The next moment she was in Gellatly’s arms and they were whirling in the middle of the floor. They eased down from that initial whirl, for other couples were now dancing, and Gellatly almost gasped aloud when he took Rita in a slow step along the far wall. It was not only her mouth and face that were sensual, he decided. She was sensual all over. She was pressed in so close against him that he had actual difficulty in making his steps. He gave it up, and swayed in a corner, feeling his mouth dry and fire shooting up through his body. He had been at sea a long time.

  Destroyer men are quick thinkers—they have to be. Gellatly had been in destroyers most of his time. He said in a low voice:

  “I’m taking you home.”

  If he had expected coquetry, he was surprised. She looked up at him, and what he saw naked in her face made him clutch her to him convulsively.

  “What about him?” he asked throatily.

  “Leave that to me. He doesn’t own me. you know.”

  “You could have fooled me.” Gellatly grinned, and saw his mistake at once when her face tightened and she forced away from him.

  “No man owns me!” the almost hissed, and in a flash of psychological insight Gellatly guessed that her vehement refutation of the charge stemmed from her irresistible liking for men. She liked men and wanted them, but she would retain some independence.

  “Take it easy,” he soothed her, and drew her back. “You just let me know when you’re ready and we’ll move on.”

  “Not yet,” she said quickly. “We can’t go yet—”

  “Of course not. But give the word. Okay?”

  She moulded in against him, her dark head on his shoulder.

 

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