Free When Colts Ran by Roger McDonald

internationalist malice – all those warnings he issued evaporating in history’s rush. Surveyor. Tanksinker. Road plantologist. Guardian of two and three. Parliamentary would-be. Soldier author. Husband and lover. Restive lover. Drunk.
    It made him smile, which hurt.
    None of the high points lasted. Just a feeling of survival as preparation. There he was in the Dove at six thousand feet, his racked shame gesturing to the nurse and being refused rum.
    The pain returned from twisting about, the shot wearing off, and, my God, Harris had shown him – all that peering and skirt-lifting and notable excitement for a man of good age coming to an angry point of expression. He’d ceased knowing himself. But it couldn’t be bettered either. Far to the east silver reflections in the blazing sky showed one salt lake after another, and in his mind he named them. Then he slept.
    Upon waking he confused where he was with being hard-biffed with distinctive effect another time. Prior to his boyhood commission he’d been promoted and demoted a few times in France, locked in a small barred cell formerly used by Froggy farmers for storage of agricultural lime and guarded by a sadistic Tommy. It steeled a man for humiliations in life if it didn’t break the spirit first. Birdy appeared one time and whaled into the surprised monitor with the lumpy hands of a farm boy. A good one was Birdy Pringle for taking specific redemptive action in a line of wrong. A matter of two men eye to eye, nothing wider, slogging it out. Though the ruckus that followed was an army blue in which Monash, no less, played the role of arbiter.
    The hospital was near the beach. Hairline fracture of a man’s skull was the diagnosis – severe concussion – he’d seen soldiers laughing and fighting with worse to carry on with, but didn’t want Rusty to see him cut low. So he waited a few days before sending a note. Months of living on the track had engraved lines on his face that weren’t there before. Dust spilled from his collars, sprayed from his socks.
    An orderly informed him: ‘Miss Donovan to see you downstairs.’ It was not Rusty who came on the day but her kid sister.
    At the hospital desk they said she’d gone to the corner deli.
    Wavelets lapped on the sand, the sun broiled in the west. An explosion of pulse-rate threatened to choke Buckler, squaring his forage cap and dress khakis and taking controlled breaths to calm himself. Before he reached the corner shop with its flyscreen door and rickety verandah posts he saw the kid, Bernadette. She stepped from the shadows sucking a lollipop and propelled him to the intersection and a waiting tram. Buckler looked behind to see if a fellow officer caught him leaving on foot rather than in a staff car with divisional chevrons fluttering, as he’d apparently boasted by a manner of irritated authority brought down from the north.
    He took a seat opposite the girl. They stared at each other, deciding what was up. The tram jerked into motion and began floating along. The conductor demanded tickets and Buckler paid. What a coach. What a come-down. It was how tinpot Napoleons arrived in their capitals covered in doubtful glory, escorted by urchins to the beds of their faithless Josephines. Or look at snub-nosed Bernadette and say it was how the righteous young discovered life, cheesed-off at their elders for reasons so obvious they could barely be given a name, except in this case – perfidious Buckler.
    â€˜Something eatin’ you?’ she said.
    â€˜Maybe.’
    It wasn’t so different from before, he told himself – buying time from nervous anticipation by sparring with a child. Those spells at the Hill when Bernadette brought love notes or carried them back innocently enough, as long as he gave her two shillings, a go-between skipping in scuffed sandals bearing Rusty’s teasing put-offs and her mixed signals of sentimental wording