Free Amongst the Dead by Robert Gott Page B

you. I think it was the shrapnel that made me wonder if I hadn’t over-reached myself on this occasion.
    ‘The army,’ said Luther, ‘despite all appearances to the contrary, is an efficient bureaucracy. I asked the Amenities people to do me a favour and lend me some entertainers from one of the concert parties, just for one day for a specialised job. You were volunteered.’
    ‘By whom?’ Glen asked.
    ‘I just do the paperwork. I put in the request, and it came back in the affirmative.’
    ‘All this sounds a bit irregular,’ Brian said, although he couldn’t possibly know what was or wasn’t regular in the army.
    ‘Well, it’s the nature of the exercise,’ Luther said. ‘I take it you haven’t been briefed at all about this?’
    We shook our heads in unison, like fairground clowns waiting for someone to push ping-pong balls down our throats.
    ‘It’s straightforward, really. We just want you to pop across for a few hours to a place called Channel Island. It’s close by, out in the harbour a bit. A quick boat trip. The people there have had a rough trot and could do with a bit of light entertainment.’
    ‘I suppose they were badly hit by the bombings,’ I said, now knowing how much havoc had been wrought in the harbour.
    ‘No,’ Luther said, ‘they weren’t hit at all. It’s like the Japs deliberately avoided hitting Channel Island.’
    Brian drew his eyebrows together, a facial expression he’d used since childhood to signal dubiousness about what he was hearing.
    ‘What,’ he asked, ‘is the missing piece of information here?’
    Luther coughed.
    ‘Channel Island is a leprosarium.’
    He looked at each of us in turn.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘My ears are still ringing from the bombs, but just for a moment I thought you said “leprosarium”.’
    ‘You’ll be relieved to know that there’s nothing wrong with your hearing. Channel Island is indeed a leprosarium.’
    ‘What,’ asked Glen, ‘is a leprothingo?’
    In the calm voice of a patient teacher explaining something to a dull child, Brian said, ‘A leprosarium, Glen, is a place where lepers are sent for treatment.’
    ‘Lepers? You want us to entertain lepers?’ Glen asked, and the disgust in his voice was unmistakeable.
    I said nothing for a moment, and was busy taking internal umbrage at the thought that someone, somewhere, had assessed my talents as being suited to a leper colony.
    ‘There are seventy of the poor bastards out there on Channel Island. Men, women, and children.’
    ‘No way am I going to catch leprosy,’ Glen said. ‘Khaki dermatitis was bad enough. I’m a magician. I need all my fingers for my work.’
    ‘You can’t catch leprosy from a single visit,’ Luther said. ‘You have to be exposed to it for a very long time, and even then you have to be unlucky. Besides, you’re being asked to sing and dance for them, not sing and dance with them.’
    ‘It’s all very Father Damian of Molokai,’ I said. ‘Do we have a choice?’
    ‘Of course, but I didn’t think …’
    ‘Good,’ Glen said. ‘I’m not going. I don’t mind being shot at, but this is germ warfare, and that’s against the Geneva Convention.’
    There was something so fierce and ugly in Glen’s tone that I felt a compulsion to distance myself from him.
    ‘These people aren’t our enemies, Glen.’
    ‘You don’t even know who they are, you stupid bastard, and I don’t care who they are. They’re lepers, and I’m sticking with tradition and having nothing to do with them.’
    ‘All right,’ Brian said. ‘Will and I will go.’
    If he was expecting Glen to change his mind, he was disappointed. He stuck to his guns with a sullen stubbornness that made me see in him the revolting child he must have been.
    After little more than two hours’ sleep we woke to a slate-grey morning. The colour of such a morning in Melbourne would suggest a chilly day ahead. Here in Darwin the air didn’t seem to need the sun to heat it. The sky