It was three years since Sgt Carlos Martinez had gone to Afghanistan with the rest of his SAS unit. He wrote regularly but his letters never divulged the nature of his mission nor what he was going through in that distant hell. Rabbit tried to read between the lines to get as close to Carlos as possible. He dwelt upon each word that contained so much of one who was so near to his heart at all times.Time had not lessened his closeness. The words were from the depth of Carlos’ being, from his brain, from his mind and heart and if they also contained the scent of the Afghan desert air, the scent of concealed Talib fighters all around him, it also contained the warmth of his friend’s concern for him here in far away Australia.
He went into the cafes they loved to drop in to and have a coffee or something to eat. It seemed as if Carlos was always about to return from buying a paper, or from the loo. His shadow would fall over the table when a waiter approached for the order. Rabbit sometimes looked around half expecting to see his smiling bearded face. And the waiter would look around too, but somewhat bemused.
Rabbit would go down to the beach and spread his towel where they usually sat and listened to the breakers surging in. They’d sit and listen, and they seldom had anything to say to each other. The closeness was all. Salt air would whip across their faces as the sea breeze blew the sand about.
After dinner Rabbit walked the streets where they’d walked after they’d had a few at one of their favourite pubs. He would seek out those friends who knew them and Carlos would be there in the friend’s eyes or he would hear his voice in the voices of friends and their jokes and laughter. The friends never felt they were being used as transport by someone they were never to meet again in this life, someone they were never going to have a drink with again.
Those who would keep faith with the dead, go down to God’s little acre and hear the many howls of grief and anger rising from the marble monuments. But Carlos could never be returned to the earth that once bore him. Rabbit had learnt some time later from other Diggers who had returned from Afghanistan that there had been nothing left of Sgt Carlos Martinez after the roadside bomb blew the jeep to pieces with him in it. As he thought of him he could smell his blood. Carlos’s shadow swirled before him in a saraband for his lonely lover and slowly settled down on his bony shoulders like a cape.
It came to Rabbit one day that he needed to return to Salmon Head Beach near Cossack. That was where they would go whenever Carlos got leave. There was a shack that they had built bit by bit over the years. Rabbit opened the creaking door and got in to escape the strong sea breeze that had bowled him along the three kilometre trudge from where he had left the four wheel drive. He lit the stove with some driftwood and brewed a cup of tea. From a canvas sling bag he took out a message stick and a sheet of paper. He sat for some time wondering what to say to one who meant life and death to him, whose reality he was so wrapped up in all the time they had known each other. With his thin sharp blade he cut out the secret symbols of the message he intended sending all these years but hadn’t done so. But he felt that now was the time he should.
He went down to the beach one more time and gathered driftwood that had come to him from unknown distant shores, perhaps from Indonesia or even from another continent, or from another world. It had been caressed by waves and wind, home to thousands of tiny sea creatures all of whom by know must have died and gone down to the ocean floor to form a deposit for seaweed to germinate and be home to marine microbial life in the dark watery world where currents raced over sand and seaweed.
He arranged the firewood in a pattern he had never used before ..He brought fire to the mystical structure, and when he had got a strong blaze of wildly dancing flames going he introduced his message stick into its hissing and roaring dance of a short lived life till the winds whipped it out with a savage and final hiss as spray and sand ended it all.
Later that evening, when the stars began to appear like messengers from afar, Rabbit took the ashes of what remained of the message stick and smeared his head and body with it and then he waded into the water to deliver the sacred message to one who called to him.
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