After eating, following an instinct he would not later be able to understand, he left Luna Park to walk the few miles into downtown Melbourne.
He passed through the Albert Park area, making for South Melbourne and the river. His sense of direction had always been good; after a couple of years he knew the city’s geography pretty well, even if he had trouble reading the street signs. These suburbs were not entirely deserted, but almost. He saw a few people in shut-up houses, peering fearfully through northfacing windows – looking out for a menace Luke still knew nothing of. Here and there late-goers fled, mostly on foot. Electric trams stood silent on their rails, useless. A few shops had been broken into.
And Luke saw, a couple of times, a sight he had never witnessed before: the dead bodies of white folk.
He crossed the Yarra by the Queens Bridge. Now he was in a grid of streets, the expensive part of the city. In those days Melbourne was still was a young town, and later he would learn something of its history: the Gold Rush money on which it had been founded, the banking crash of ’93 that was still talked of in hushed tones three decades later. With an instinct driven by a never-assuaged hunger he made for the Queen Victoria Market, a sprawling development with craft and clothing stalls crammed in among the food vendors. Luke knew this place; on market days it was crowded with a miscellany of folk, from gowned academics from the colleges to black-robed Italian grandmothers pushing carts. Rough types came for the petty thieving; Luke had often come here for the waste, and a bit of begging if he had to. Today, as elsewhere, the place was mysteriously deserted. But the bins behind the stalls offered rich pickings, of cold meat, stale bread, half-eaten sugary cakes. Luke considered finding a bag and filling it; he might never have a chance like this again. But the ability to run away was his key survival skill, and you couldn’t do that if you were burdened. He decided he would come back to the market later, and fill his belly when he needed to – if his luck held.
In the meantime, he was free, even of hunger.
On a whim, he made his way a short distance across town, to Swanston Street, and the State Library of Victoria. He knew that this was a building full of books, and he even had a dim idea of what books were for, even if his own reading was barely enough to pick out his own name. What interested him about the Library was the tremendous dome that topped it – supposedly, he had heard people say, the largest concrete dome in the world. Later he would learn that that hadn’t been quite true, a local’s boast. But still, this boy who ate from garbage cans and slept in the corners of an amusement park liked the idea that he could stand here and just look at something that couldn’t be bettered anywhere in the world. It is an image I like: the ragged Aborigine boy, in the deserted street of that white folks’ city, illiterate, unwashed, abused and ignored, standing on that sloping lawn before the pillars of the front portico – alone, and yet inspired by a monument to knowledge.
That was when the Martian fighting-machine appeared, looming over the Library, there at the heart of Melbourne.
Luke would later be surprised how little fear he experienced. But then for a boy from the outback, everything about the city was astonishing: the great buildings of the business district, so tall they looked as if they might topple over at any moment. Even the Ferris wheel at Luna Park, as tall as a Martian and even more massive, was more alarming than a fighting-machine at first glance.
For a moment the Martian simply stood there, as if gazing down at the boy, as he gazed up at it. But then glittering tentacles writhed about its cowled superstructure, and it wielded a device like a heavy cannon. Luke had seen guns before. He turned and ran, fast and hard. But he was curious enough to glance over his shoulder.
The Heat-Ray made the library’s dome explode in a hail of concrete shrapnel, and the incineration of the precious books began with a tremendous flare of flame.
Luke had overheard white folk talking of their justification for taking his ancestors’ land and driving them towards extinction. When the Europeans had landed in Australia it had been a terra nullius, they said, a land belonging to no one, a land as empty in law as if the native people did not exist at all. And the victory of the Europeans had been the result of a war of steel against stone. Now, thought Luke, even as he ran, whatever that tremendous machine was – he wondered if it might be Japanese, for he had heard the gentlefolk of Melbourne expressing fears at the territorial ambitions of those foreigners – now this country was seeing the waging of a new war: not steel against stone, but heat against steel.
He ran and ran, laughing.
13
IN PEKING
If Luke Smith slept through the invasion of Australia, when the Martians came to Peking – they landed a couple of hours after Australia – at first Tom Aylott didn’t believe that there was an extraterrestrial threat at all. ‘That was China for you in the Twenties,’ he told me years later in Sydney, when I met him after the launch of his own book on those times. ‘You wouldn’t have thought it could get any madder. But then…’
He had been shaken awake at around six a.m. by a friend, a Chinese student called Li Qichao. ‘You come! War! You see!’
Li, an ardent disciple of Sun Yat-Sen and a visionary of a future Chinese democracy, was barely twenty-one. A bright, ambitious boy from the country, his education disrupted, he had come to the city to learn as much as he could of the realities of power and diplomacy. While waiting for destiny to call he survived by means of various part-time clerical posts – and he had fallen in with Tom Aylott.
But he was prone to be excitable, and Tom tried to turn over. ‘Yeah, yeah. Wake me when the house is on fire, Qichao…’
Tom himself was only twenty-two, but he was making a name for himself as an energetic correspondent for The Times of London. That morning Tom was having trouble surfacing from another riotous night with other young westerners in the bars of the Legation Quarter, as it was known, an area within the walls of the Inner City itself that had long been claimed as a protectorate by western governments and companies.
And after all, in those days war was no novelty in China. The Boxer Rebellion against foreign meddling, had been only twenty years in the past; the last Qing Emperor, a boy called Puyi, had abdicated just ten years before; there had been a breakdown of order in the country since the death of the first strong-man President, Yuan Shikai, in 1916. Peking was still the residence of the internationally recognised Beiyang government, but in practical terms much of the country was in the hands of one warlord faction or another, or else prostrate under foreign control.
But here was Li shaking Tom vigorously, with his English disintegrating as it often did under stress. ‘War coming, Tom!’ he insisted. ‘War coming!’
And now Tom thought he could hear it: a distant crump of explosions, the sound of running feet, women and men shouting – and the wail of frightened children, a sound that was all too familiar in Peking.
Tom’s first thought was: story.
He forced himself fully awake. He was already in his shirt, underwear and socks; he grabbed his pants, jacket and shoes. Despite Li’s protestations he used the small bathroom – his bladder was too full to allow any other course.
‘You come! Fighting close!’
‘Sure, Qichao, sure,’ he called over his shoulder while buttoning up. ‘Who is it this time? The Zhili, the Fengtian – where the hell is my Kodak? The Kuomintang, even?’