Read Online Loving, Faithful Animal by Josephine Rowe - Free Book Online Page B

I’ll go for a stroll in Vung Tau and let a girl get her hand in me pocket.
    They’d Medivaced him out in time but there wasn’t much left to work with. That handful of teeth and jawbone—what happened to that? Remember someone saying to put them in an envelope and post it to Johnny Gorton. Nah, Gorton got his face fucked up when he was RAAF. Send it All the Way to LBJ.
    Blokes losing it over weird shit. Driving over guys in APCs without batting an eyelid, or joking after Finch tripped a jumping jack. For me next trick … But Reed didn’t want to say goodbye to his weaselly little pet. Sooking and chucking stones as it rippled off into the jungle.
    Coming home to The Price Is Right and I Started a Joke . Coming home to Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh .
    All those months spent charging sandbags screaming Nog , screaming Gook . Then Simon says, Game’s over now, son. Simon says, Get ya shit and shake hands, boys.
    The first hot shower. Couldn’t leave. Even after the water went tepid. Tetch rapping on the door: knock, knock, knock. Knock, knock, knock. Mum? I reckon he’s died in there. Could’ve. It was that good.
    Smack was like that. The long, hot bath of it.
    Wasn’t like he ever bit anyone, just a big kitten really. But the whiny civvies. So that was that, he had to go. To the zoo, poor fella. Hell, rather shoot him than send him to the zoo.
    My Lai all over the papers. Calley striding across the front page on his way to Fort Benning. How can you say you didn’t know ? Foxy in the front bar, speaking into his pint. Well, that’s well and truly fucked us. Tarred us all with the same ugly brush.
    Taxi driving, two months. Wouldn’t have been so bad except for all the bleeding penitents. Like piloting a confession booth on wheels. The things I’ve seen, the things I’ve done … Boo friggen hoo.
    Word got around that one of the new recruits—drunk as a skunk after a boozer—goes down and liberates Kepala. That was the word: liberate. No zoo for you! No zoo for you! Don’t know if it’s a true story but it’s a good story.
    Blonde on St Kilda Beach, high summer. She smelled like a dead thing down there, but did her anyway, it’d been that long. Shaking the sand out of a shoe back at the rooming house and wondering when the clap might set in.
    Bricklaying. Three weeks.
    Coming to on the floor with a neck ache and half a belt. Should’ve bought an RM Williams. Nothing to do but laugh. And wear a scarf for the next fortnight; never mind it’s the middle of a heatwave. Looked like a fag trying to look like John Wayne.
    Repat, six weeks. Crossword puzzles. Breadboard for Mum.
    TPI, you Nasho muppet? What’d you see we didn’t see?
    The way people’s eyes lit up for Long Tan but stayed dull as dishrags at the mention of Coral-Balmoral. Might as well be talking about a law firm. Stopped talking.
    Airless furnace of the projection booth. Trapped up there and all the time the sound like great wings. Funny, couldn’t do it nowadays. Would start sweating at the stairs. But there was something about it then. Bossless. Godlike. Looking down on all those silly buggers, cramming Jaffas into the black pits of mouths, laughing popcorn at the big screen.
    Saw her running up the steps of the Capitol with her sister. Can’t even remember what the film was. Gone with the Win d ? Goodbye, Mr Chips ? Just looking down through the bio-box porthole for the back of her braided head, nearly missing the cue marks.
    Smell of her clean hair. Like something from childhood. Something unreachable. Her pointy, kittenish face, before parts of it started to fall.
    Passenger seat of the Corvette. Twenty years old and they’d given her that flashy car. A good lot of miles already clocked up on it but still. Stubble catching on the see-through stuff of her underwear. Said she liked that: manly. Biting through that flimsy mesh to taste her, slick, salty like