Amongst the Dead by Robert Gott Page B

dark-haired, fair-skinned man in his early fifties, supported by crutches, broke from the group and swung towards us.
    ‘Welcome,’ was all he said before retreating. I don’t know whether it was our sensibilities or his that he was protecting, but he proffered no hand for us to shake.
    ‘Thank you,’ Brian said, and then, addressing the audience, he repeated loudly, ‘Thank you.’
    I moved the gramophone a safe distance from us and wound its handle. I suddenly felt sick with nerves, and wished Glen was with us to dazzle these people with the impossibility of his magic. I placed the record on the turntable and lowered the needle to its spinning surface. The opening bars of ‘In the Mood’ crackled forth, and Brian and I assumed our positions. It wasn’t a perfectly executed jitterbug, but it was all right. The dust rose around us, and the sweat poured off us, and our audience called out for more; so we rewound the gramophone and did it again.This time we improvised new steps, and I tossed Brian over my hip as if he weighed nothing. We stood panting, vaguely astonished that two men doing a competent demonstration of an American dance could provoke such applause and laughter. Brian raised his hands, and they fell silent. He walked around the edge of the half-circle they’d formed, catching people’s eyes, drawing their attention to him, and creating the impression that something significant was about to happen. At the far corner of the arc he began to speak the opening lines of ‘The Geebung Polo Club.’
    ‘It was somewhere up the country in a land of rock and scrub,’ he said, and he looked about him as if this were the very land in question. He gestured to great effect, and spoke the verse with startling and hilarious clarity, assuming the poshest of voices to describe the Cuff and Collar polo team, and reverting to an exaggerated drawl to bring the Geebung Polo Club to life. Until I heard Brian perform it, I wouldn’t have picked Paterson’s poem as anything more than faintly amusing doggerel. But, whether they understood it or not, his listeners laughed themselves silly.
    Brian bowed and handed over to me. I decided to change the pace, and sang for them, in my light tenor, one of Feste’s songs from Twelfth Night . I think perhaps I ought to have sung, ‘What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter.’ It was only after I’d launched into, ‘Come away, come away, death, and in sad cypress let me be laid,’ that I thought it wasn’t absolutely on the money. I noticed conversations breaking out before I’d quite finished. The applause was merely polite, which I resented. It’s never pleasant to be patronised, but to be patronised by lepers is really beyond the pale.
    ‘I think we’ve lost them,’ I said.
    ‘We?’
    ‘They’ve been sitting in the sun for a long time.’
    We were rescued from the need for further discussion by a part-Aboriginal girl who approached us, one arm held from sight behind her back, and said, ‘Show us. Show us that one. That dance.’
    ‘All right,’ Brian said before I could stop him, and he began organising the audience into laughing pairs. Over the next two hours, we painfully taught those who were willing the rudiments of the jitterbug, and both Brian and I became so engrossed in the task that all squeamishness fell away, and I forgot myself to such an extent that I placed my hand in the leprous hand of an elderly Malay woman, and danced closely with a European woman whose face bore no resemblance to what it once must have been. She didn’t speak, and I had to overcome her reticence by almost forcing my attentions upon her. It must have been a long time since anyone had touched her, and I don’t know whether her streaming eyes were a symptom of her condition or a response to physical contact.
    At the end of the lesson, in the heat of the courtyard, in the mean shadow of the lazaret, we all lined up, and Sister Lucille wound the gramophone. As the music began, our large