The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

  2

  WHEN THE EGG was ready—damp and waxy between his fingers—Darky Gardiner could smell its overpowering promise, slightly sickly in its richness. He had it almost to his lips when he stopped, considered and sighed. He shook Tiny’s sleeping form not hard but insistently.

  As Tiny finally roused, Darky held the egg near his nose and hushed him be quiet. Tiny grunted, and Darky halved the egg with his spoon. Tiny held out his hands in a cup, as if it were a sacrament he was receiving, to make sure no crumbling yolk was lost. And into Tiny’s cupped hands Darky now added half a small fried rice ball that he had saved beneath his blanket from a previous meal.

  In the wet dark where no one could see or hear them, in the black solitude where no one would ask how it was that they had extra food, they began surreptitiously to eat. Darky ate slowly, enjoying every morsel, his mouth salivating so wildly that he worried at the loud sloshing sound he made. But it was lost in all the other wet noises of the night.

  He licked the sooty grease off his fingers. The egg and rice ball sat in his stomach a rancid lump, stayed in his throat a sour, fatty flame. He was not going to die. He no longer cared that Tiny had taken up most of his space. He could still feel the rice grains on his lips, still taste the gorgeous grease and rich yolk in his mouth, and his mind felt dizzied, then sleepy. He was unsure whether he was drowning or in some bed that was also a table full of crayfish and apples and apricot crumbles and roast legs of lamb, a dry bed of clean blankets and a fire at its foot, sleet slapping the small bedroom window beyond. He had eaten, he wished to eat more, he was sinking deeper and deeper, he was at the table, and he was asleep.

  When he next awoke, his stomach was a fist. It was still dark. His mouth tasted of soap, and a terrible gripping pain contorted his shrivelled belly. He sat up, half-groaning, half-gasping with the effort, grabbed a kerosene tin he kept full of water at the base of his sleeping spot, and began walking barefoot through the dark and mud and rain towards the benjo, as the Japanese insisted the camp latrine be known.

  Some distance from the tents, the benjo was a trench twenty yards long and two and a half yards deep, over which the men precariously squatted on slimy bamboo planking to relieve themselves. The bobbing excrement below was covered with writhing maggots—like desiccated coconut on lamingtons, as Chum Fahey said. It was a vile horror. When the prisoners competed in devising ways of doing in their most hated guard, they joked of one day drowning the Goanna in the benjo. Even for them, a more terrible death was hard to conceive.

  The tiger fires which the Japanese had ordered to be kept burning all night had long ago been swamped and killed by the incessant rain. The world was dark, with the monsoon clouds blocking much of the light of the stars and moon; the jungle soaked up most of what else was left. Darky Gardiner made his way in short awkward hops as he clasped his stomach with his free hand, trying not to wrench his guts with any large or abrupt movement into giving way too early. Half-doubled up, he made his way by vague black outlines through the shanty camp of rickety bamboo shelters. From within came the groans and snores and sudden gasps of other POWs, which may have been from pain or grief or memory or dying. Or all of these. And washing every sound of exhaustion and anguish and hope into the mud was the inexorable drone of the torrential rain.

  By now fully awake from the pain that gripped his abdomen, and panting with the intense effort of walking without shitting himself, Darky was still some way from the benjo when he slid off the greasy shoulder of the path and into its muddy centre, up to his ankles in filthy mud. He momentarily panicked. His sudden, frantic effort to get back up on firmer ground excited his bowels. He felt an abrupt loss of extreme tension and, with a relieving rush, realised he was shitting himself in the middle of the camp’s main path.

  A terrible exhaustion overwhelmed him, his arse burnt like fire, his head swam wildly, and he just wanted to lie down in the mud and shit and sleep forever. But he fought this feeling because his stomach was again tightening like a garrotte, and once more he felt a stinking gravy exploding out. He was panting now with the effort; having emptied himself completely, his bowels felt immediately full again.

  He gave himself over to his body, strained once more and hated himself that he had done this, that he could not even make it to the benjo, that he had spread his filth where other men would walk in the morning. He thought of the Big Fella’s injunctions to observe strict hygiene, how they all now saw cleanliness—in so far as it was possible—as essential to their survival. And though there was nothing he could do about it, he still felt ashamed and defeated.

  There was no way of separating his shitty stream from the deep mud, that endless and ceaseless muddy, shitty world. It was already being ploughed by the rain and transformed into something else, an inescapable and deadly decay that was everything and everybody and returning them all to the jungle. Next time, he told himself, no matter what, he would make it to that fucking awful shitter. Finally there was an unsatisfactory motion that he knew would have produced nothing more than some mucous with an oily blood-streak striping it.

  Finished, dizzy from the effort, Darky slowly drew himself back up to a fully erect posture, staggered a few short steps off the path, and with the water in his kero tin began washing himself as best he could. His buttocks felt little more than ropes. He spent some time cleaning his anus, which, in its strange prominence amidst his wasted flesh, left him with him a deep sense of disgust. He was suddenly chilled, and his thighs and calves shivered wildly as he washed them down. He stifled a scream with a strange gulp as he splashed water over the tropical ulcer the size of a teacup on his leg, and consoled himself that keeping this wound clean was a good thing. It had to be kept clean. His mind felt not right—the malaria, he guessed—his senses at once too sharp and too blurred. But this much remained vivid and strong within him, this much he knew: it was easy to give up. Which was, to Darky’s mind, however fevered, not just a bad thing, but the very worst thing. The path to survival was to never give up on the small things. Giving up was not getting to the benjo. Next time, he vowed, he would get there, no matter how hard it was.

  His feet, lost in the mud, were condemned to exist in filth, and so, cleaned as much as was possible, he walked back through the shit and slush to his tent and his place on the bamboo platform. He crawled back under his filthy and foul-smelling blanket, dragging his shitty feet up with him. His last thought before a bedraggled exhaustion carried him off to sleep was how he was again hungry.

  3

  AS THE LAST notes of Jimmy Bigelow’s bugle playing of ‘Reveille’ dribbled away into the dank dawn, Rooster MacNeice opened his eyes. A spreading grey light painted the wall-less tent he slept in and the fetid mud, the filth, the hopelessness of the POW’s jungle camp beyond, into flat shades of iron and soot. Further away the teak rainforest was a black wall.

  Before he was even properly awake, Rooster began that morning as he did every morning, with the first of several exercises in the self-discipline which he knew would ensure his survival, mentally, physically and morally. He commenced by reciting under his breath the page of Mein Kampf he had memorised the night before. He found that the parts with Jews in them—which was much of the book—were the easiest. They had a galloping rhythm that made them less difficult to memorise, the word Jew a helpful recurrent chorus. But now he was lost in the early history of the Nazi Party in Bavaria and he was struggling. Where were the Jews, wondered Rooster MacNeice, when you really needed them?

  Bomb landed on Buckingham Palace, a voice nearby said. Took out the King and Gracie Fields.

  As he pulled himself to the edge of the bamboo bench and scratched his thigh, and then more vigorously his crotch, Rooster MacNeice continued whispering to himself about the bravery of the early stormtroopers. He felt something hard and shell-like in his crotch and crushed it, then felt another and another, and only then did he begin to feel the itch and bite of the lice that lived in the bamboo slats.

  One thing I’ll say fo
r the Japs, an old man said on noticing his itching, they bugger you so completely you can even sleep through lice eating your balls for breakfast.

  Rooster realised it was Sheephead Morton talking. He looked a haggard seventy, but he couldn’t have been more than twenty-three or twenty-four.

  I thought someone said that Gracie Fields was with a dago, said Jimmy Bigelow, dented bugle in hand, as he walked back into the tent. Didn’t they defect to Mussolini?

  That was just a rumour, Chum Fahey said. This time I got the good oil from some Dutchies who came through the camp the other day. Dutch as I am. Half-caste wops, most of ’em. They said the Russkies lost at Stalingrad, the Yanks have invaded Sicily, Musso’s been overthrown and the new dago government is calling for peace.

  Rooster MacNeice had a scraggly ginger beard and the habit, when concentrating, of sucking it up from his lower lip and chewing on it. As he chewed on his whiskers he recalled that, the previous week, the rumour had been that the Russians won at Stalingrad. That was clearly bolshie propaganda, he thought. Most likely from Darky Gardiner. He’d say that sort of thing. Rooster MacNeice hated bolshies but on balance he hated Darky Gardiner more. He was a common and dirty man, and like most half-castes not to be trusted. He also couldn’t abide Gardiner’s habit—until the Speedo put an end to anything that wasn’t work or sleep—of sometimes standing on a teak stump at the camp’s edge singing ‘Without a Song’ as the POWs hobbled in of a night from the Line. Other men seemed to like it; Rooster MacNeice hated it.

  And hate was a powerful force for Rooster MacNeice. It was like a food to him. He hated wogs, wops, gyppos and dagos. He hated chinks, nips and slopes, and, being a fair-minded man, he also hated poms and yanks. He found so little in his own race of Australians to admire that he sometimes found himself arguing that they deserved to be conquered. He returned to reciting Mein Kampf under his breath.

  What you rabbiting on about now, Rooster? asked Jimmy Bigelow.

  Rooster MacNeice turned to the bugler who had only recently been transferred into their tent and had no idea of his morning ritual. Rooster MacNeice thought Jimmy Bigelow was a Victorian, and so he freely told him that to stop his intellect stagnating amidst the convict-bred, card-playing, football-worshipping, horseracing-addicted Tasmanians—in whose tent they had both ended up and who were anything but what Australians should be—he had set himself the task of committing to memory an entire book, a page a day.

  Rightio, Jimmy Bigelow said, not daring to tell Rooster MacNeice that he was from the Huon Valley and had enlisted with Gallipoli von Kessler. But as a way of passing a war, he went on, there are worse things than four-a-game crib.

  The mind! said Rooster MacNeice. The mind, James!

  Gallipoli von Kessler asked him if he had thought of playing five hundred, saying that though some people said that five hundred was perhaps a brainier game than crib, he didn’t necessarily agree, but it might be more Rooster’s fancy. It was really bridge without the bad company.

  Of course, I am not sure if any book would help them, said Rooster MacNeice, looking around at his other tentmates to avoid looking at von Kessler. They have the fatal stain.

  Rightio, Jimmy Bigelow said, having no idea what Rooster was on about, and Rooster just kept on, about how he hated Mein Kampf, how he hated Hitler, and how he hated having to memorise a page of this sausage-eater’s nonsense every day. But in the Javanese POW camp at the time he began this exercise in mental discipline it was the only book he had been able to find; besides, he said, his beard glistening slightly with saliva, it was good to know the arguments of the enemy and, in any case, the content was meaningless for the purposes of his exercise. He didn’t say he was surprised by how much of Hitler’s manifesto made sense to him.

  One of the Dutchie wops was on to it, I tell you, Chum Fahey said. I’d trust him. I sold him my greatcoat.

  Rooster MacNeice asked what he got for his coat.

  Three dollars and some palm sugar. And a book.

  A coat’s worth ten at least, said Rooster MacNeice, who also hated Dutchies of any origin. What’s the book?

  It’s a good Western.

  This infuriated Rooster MacNeice.

  You may want nothing better than Murder at Red Ranch or Sunset on the Corral, he burst out, but God help Australia if that’s the Australian mentality.

  Chum Fahey asked if Rooster MacNeice would be willing to swap his Mein Kampf for this? He held up a well-thumbed and very grubby copy of Sun Sinking, Sioux Rising.

  No, Rooster MacNeice said. No, I would not.

  The morning light, though still dim, was slowly bringing their tent into indigo relief. The rising conversation of waking prisoners abruptly halted, and all turned in one direction, looking over Rooster MacNeice’s shoulder. A muted laughter rippled up the platforms, and one after another the prisoners wiped their eyes to make sure that what they were seeing was what they were seeing. Rooster MacNeice turned his head. It was the strangest, most unexpected thing ever. He sucked his whiskers back in.

  Many men had begun to worry that their post-war performance would be permanently affected by the complete loss of desire that starvation and disease had brought to almost all. The doctors reassured them it was merely a matter of diet; and with that sorted, they would be fine. But still the prisoners had wondered if they would be functioning men at the end of their ordeals. None of them could remember the last erection they’d had. Some worried if they’d be able to keep their wives happy when they got home. Gallipoli von Kessler said he didn’t know a bloke who’d had a hard-on for months, while Sheephead Morton claimed not to have cracked a fat for over a year.

  It was, then, a most miraculous sight—as unmissable as it was remarkable—that they saw rising before them.

  Old Tiny, said Gallipoli von Kessler. There he is, knocking on death’s door, and he’s like a bloody bamboo in the wet.

  For rising up from the still-slumbering, skeletal form of Tiny Middleton—the once muscular Christian himself, asleep on his back, oblivious to all attention, happily dreaming of some sinful pursuit, his depravity unaffected by starvation and sickness—there stood, sticking up like the regimental flagpole, a large erection.

  It was, they agreed, a heartening thing, no less so given how low Tiny Middleton had sunk in recent weeks. The sight was so remarkable that everyone kept their voices down as they wakened others and motioned at them to look. Amidst the low laughter, lewd jokes and general joy the sight brought, one man objected.

  Is that the best we can do? Rooster MacNeice asked. Laugh at a man when he’s down?

  Chum Fahey observed that Tiny looked pretty up to him.

  You men have no decency, Rooster MacNeice muttered. No respect. Not like the old Australians.

  I’ll cover him for you, Rooster, said Darky Gardiner. Picking up a large fragment of duck eggshell by his thigh, he leant across and carefully placed it atop the erect penis.

  Tiny slumbered on. His hatted cock rose above them like a fresh forest mushroom trembling ever so slightly in the early-morning breeze.

  It’s wrong to mock, Rooster MacNeice said. We’re no better than the lousy nips if we do that.

  Darky Gardiner pointed at the eggshell, which looked like a mitre cap of sorts.

  He’s been promoted to pope, Rooster, Darky Gardiner said.

  Damn you, Gardiner, Rooster MacNeice said. Leave the poor man alone and allow him some decency.

  He pulled himself up to a full sitting position, stood up and walked to where Tiny Middleton slept. Leaning up between Tiny’s splayed legs, Rooster MacNeice reached out to take away what was to him a degrading joke.

  Just as his fingers closed around the eggshell, Tiny Middleton awoke. As their eyes met, Rooster MacNeice’s hand froze on the eggshell, perhaps even crushed it slightly. Tiny Middleton drew himself up with a rage and an energy wholly out of proportion to his wasted body.

  You fucking pervert, Rooster.

  When—in humiliation and to the mockery of all, a
nd the laughter of Darky Gardiner in particular—Rooster MacNeice returned to his place on the sleeping platform, he made a distressing discovery. On rummaging around in his kitbag for Mein Kampf to check his memorisation, he found that his duck egg—bought three days earlier and hidden in his kitbag—had vanished. He thought on that missing egg, and on the duck eggshell Darky Gardiner had placed on Tiny Middleton, and he knew that the Black Prince had stolen his egg.

  There was of course nothing that could be done about it—Gardiner would deny the theft, the others would laugh even more, perhaps even enjoy the idea of the theft. But at that moment he hated Gardiner—a man who had stolen off him and then used that theft to humiliate him—with an intensity and savagery that far exceeded any ill feeling he had towards the Japanese. And hate was everything to Rooster MacNeice.

  4

  DARKY GARDINER DRESSED, and because, like everyone else, he had no clothes other than the slouch hat he put on his head and the cock rag he wore night and day—a filthy G-string that covered the cock and little else—it took no time to dress. He made his bed and, because it was no bed, that also took Darky Gardiner no time. He folded his blanket in the regulation Imperial Japanese Army fashion, and then put it in the place defined by Imperial Japanese Army regulations—at the foot of his sleeping space on the bamboo bench. The rain stopped. The sound of dripping jungle gave way to jungle birds calling in droplets of sound.

  He picked up one of his eight remaining possessions, his dixie mess kit—two battered tin bowls nesting inside each other, serving as plate and mug and food box—and was clipping the wire handle hairslide-like to his cock rag when a cry went up. Some guards were making their way to their hut for a surprise inspection. There was a flurry of desperate activity as blankets were folded, kitbags made plump and neat, and various contraband hidden as best could.