by David Malouf
5
THE FEVERS CAME on every ten days.
The first time he was hit Digger looked up out of his delirium and saw Vic was there; squatting on his heels like a child and with a quick, animal look in his eyes. He was spooning rice up from a dixie, shovelling it fast into his wet mouth. Between his feet was a second dixie. Empty. When he saw Digger was watching he stopped feeding a moment and just sat, his eyes very wide in the broad face. Then, without looking away, he began to feed again, only faster.
‘That’s my rice he’s eating,’ Digger thought. ‘The bastard is eating my rice.’ But his stomach revolted at the thought of it. ‘Well, let him!’
When he woke again, Vic, a little crease between his brows, was sponging him with a smelly rag. He wore a look of childish concern, and Digger thought: ‘That’s just like him. Steals the food out’v a man’s mouth, an’ the next minute he’s trying to make up to him by playin’ nurse. Typical!’ But the dampness was so good, so cooling, and the hands so gentle, that Digger closed his eyes again and drifted.
What puzzled him was the utter candour of Vic’s look when he had caught him like that with the second dixie. He didn’t try to cover up. He wasn’t ashamed. There was something in that look Digger did not want to let go of. Some truth he needed to hold on to. He worried at it.
It was so different from the look he wore when he was offering you some bit of a thing as a gift. He would look sly then, calculating; but when he was stealing the food out of your mouth you saw right through into the man. It was an innocence of a purely animal kind, that took what it needed and made no apology, acting on that, not on principle.
Digger saw there was something to be learned from it: a hard-headed wisdom that would save Vic, and might, when the time came, save him as well.
The time came almost as soon as Digger was on his feet again and could go out to work. The fever took Vic now, and it was Digger’s turn to eat the second dixie, hold Vic when he raved, and use the cloth.
There was an affinity between them that was almost comical. When the one went down with it the other was well, time and about, ten days at a stretch. Vic accepted it as a fact of nature, a utilitarian arrangement that was good for both of them. Digger resisted at first – he had something against this cove that was fundamental – but when the fever struck him he had no option.
Their natures, though wildly out of order in other ways, were matched in this. They were made for one another. Digger was struck by the irony of it, but they were in a place now where ironies were commonplace.
Under the influence of this arrangement – the close physical unit they formed, the right on occasion to eat the other man’s rice, the unpleasant and sometimes revolting duties they had to perform for one another, and which Vic especially carried out with a plain practical tenderness and concern you would not have suspected in him – under the influence of all this, there grew up between them a relationship that was so full of intimate and no longer shameful revelations that they lost all sense of difference.
It wasn’t a friendship exactly – you choose your friends. This was different; more or less, who could say? There was no name for it.
The old bitterness died hard in Digger. Vic knew that and accepted it. It seemed to Digger at times that Vic sought him out just because of it. But that was his business.
There were days when they couldn’t stand the sight of one another. That was inevitable up here. They were always on edge. The petty irritations and suspicions they were subject to in their intense preoccupations with themselves made them spiteful and they would lash out in vicious argument. Digger was sickened by the hatefulness he was capable of. And not just to Vic either, but to poor old Doug as well. He would crawl away, humiliated and ashamed.
But there was something cleansing in it too. What came out in these senseless flayings of one another was the contempt they had for themselves and the filth they lived in; the degradation they accepted at the hands of the guards: and what was especially shameful to men who had thought the spirit of generosity was inviolable in them, the peevish grudging they felt for every grain of rice that went into another man’s mouth. It was a relief at last to get rid of the poison in you.
‘It’s amazing,’ Digger thought after a time. ‘I never meant to be, but I’m closer to this cove than to anyone, ever. Even Slinger. Even Doug.’
Then another thought would hit him: even Mac. Mac wouldn’t be as practical as this bloke is.
He hated himself for letting that thought through. It would just be there, a thought like that, because he was at his lowest. His resentment of Vic would be strong then, fed by guilt. He would draw off in revulsion from him, which was really a revulsion from himself, and was surprised each time at the way Vic bore it and put up with him.
It went back to that animal-innocent, candidly guilty look he had seen on his face when he was finishing off the second dixie. It was a look that risked judgement, even invited it, then revealed, through its utter transparency, that there was none to be made.
6
IN HIS FEVER bouts, Digger found himself passing in and out of his lives.
There were, to begin with, the conversations with his mother. They took place outside time as clocks or calendars measure it, neither before nor after.
He would be floating. He had a mouth and ears. He had his sex. But they were far off; further anyway than his fists, if he unclenched them, could have reached. She was talking to him in their old way, without words.
Digger? she was saying, Digger? You come on now. I will not let you die on me. You hear me, boy? You get breathing now, get feeding. I’ve given you this, Digger, and I’m determined you’re goin’ t’ have it. You know how I am if I set my heart on a thing. There are stars, Digger, there are gerberas, I planted ’em. There’s a whole lot more as well that I haven’t got time to go into. So you just buck up now and come on.
You see this? This is earth, boy, dirt. You’ll eat a whole peck of that before you’re through, before you die, I mean, an’ you haven’ had more than a few grains of it yet, you’ve got a whole lot more eating to do. So you just start to get it down, you hear me, Digger?
This is your mother talking. Oh, you know me, boy, don’t pretend you don’t. Don’t pretend you’re not awake, I won’t let you off that easy, you don’t fool me. I’ve got a whole lot more to say, Digger, and I won’t let you go deaf on me. I can be a terror, you know that. You’re always running out on me, or trying to – you an’ your father both! But believe me, Digger, I’m coming after you, there’s no running away from fate. You know that. I’ve got enough ghosts on my hands already, without you trying to be another one. I won’t have it, hear? Now you get breathing, boy, you breathe! You come back into the real world and give up this dreaming. Here, take this.
She passed him something. It was a thread and he saw now that she was unravelling the sleeve of an old grey jumper he had worn holes in. Beginning at the shoulder, he watched the stitches hop back over invisible needles as the rows ran backwards from shoulder to cuff and the sleeve passed through an invisible wall into non-existence. He had to wind faster and faster to keep the wool running over his fist.
It was another version of her talk, this, and he couldn’t resist it. The thread ran between them, dark and fast, till the whole jumper, which he had worn through four winters and slept in, and which had his smell on it – sleeves, front, back – was gone, and there were nine balls of clean knitting-wool in her lap.
He began to fear almost more than the physical racking this having to face up to her each time the fever took him.
She never let up. He would thrash about, drowning in sweat, but she wouldn’t let him off the hook.
He made himself an eel, eels are slippery. He reduced himself to just a mouth and eyes – no ears, no sex, no fingers; but she got furious, hauled him out and thumped him into shape.
He tried going on all fours. Digger, she yelled, are you out there, you little grub? That’s Ralphie’s. Now you come i
n.
He stayed out. There were stars, there were gerberas. It was thundering and Ralphie was tonguing his neck, he could feel the thickness of Ralphie’s tongue rasping.
He knew he was out of his body. Well, good, he thought, that’s one way! It was the lightness of his head and his sex that told him that.
He got down in the dirt. He was swallowing it, getting down his peck. When he found Ralphie’s water-tin, the water he lapped up was the water of life – cool, sweet, slaking this thirst he had been tormented by, which was not the thirst of his body but of what his body had left when it shook him off.
He lapped and lapped – Ralphie didn’t mind, didn’t begrudge him the water he got from the dried-up bowl; or the bone either, which was alive with maggots. He got his teeth into it, defying the flies. It filled the hunger in him, fed some earlier body than the one he had abandoned, and did him good. Some animal part of him, which he loved as he had loved Ralphie, and which was Ralphie, wolfed it down, maggots and all, took the strength from it and was enlightened. He felt the strength gather in him; and lightly, on all fours, began to run light-footed over the earth. Under the moon, past bushes that lay low before him so that he could leap over them, across plains that burned but did not blister. He ran and ran and had breath for it, and came in the early morning down the track to Keen’s Crossing.
He woke feeling refreshed and fed. His dreaming body had fed his thin, racked frame, slaked its thirst, licked him into life again.
‘I’ll live,’ he thought, ‘this time. I’ll live.’
7
COMING IN FROM the line they would be so exhausted sometimes that a man might nod off with his bowl in his hand before he had taken a single mouthful.
‘That horse is done for,’ he would shout, right out of his sleep. ‘Better shoot the poor brute.’ Or: ‘Don’t you move, Marge. I’ll get it.’
The others would stare in wonder at his having got so quickly away, and would be reluctant to call him back.
That was one of the things the body could do.
Once they were sitting over their bit of a meal when Ernie Webber, one of the fellows who had been with them since the Great World, made one of his ‘remarks’.
He was a likeable fellow, Ern, but very poorly educated, a windbag, inclined, with great assurance and whether you asked for it or not, to give you the benefit of his thoughts. ‘I was perusing the papers once,’ he would say – it was one of his typical openings – and go on then with some rigmarole of a thing, half-heard and largely misunderstood, that was so plain foolish it was hard to keep a straight face sometimes. Newcomers took it for a subtle brand of humour and might offend Ern by laughing outright. What he said on this occasion was no more foolish than usual. ‘I knew there was gunna be trouble,’ he said. ‘I said we’re gunna have trouble with this feller Musso. Soon as I seen he was linkin’ up with them niggers, them Abbysiniums.’
‘Them who?’ This was Clem Carwardine, a fellow who generally said very little. His tone now was so scathing that they sat up shocked. Ernie was a joke and his ignorance under protection. He sat blinking now.
‘My God,’ Clem said with a savagery he had never shown them before, ‘I thought a chook was about the most brainless object in the universe, but compared with some of you blokes a chook is Einstein.’
‘That your last word on relativity, is it Clem?’ Doug put in. He was trying to turn the thing into a joke, but Clem’s look was murderous.
‘A half-witted six-year-old knows more than you,’ he told Ern. ‘You brainless article!’
Ern was too confused to be indignant. He couldn’t believe that Clem Carwardine, who was such a nice bloke, could turn on him, and so savagely. Older than the rest of them, and very well spoken, he had never acted superior. He was looking at them now with such utter contempt and fury that they felt embarrassed for him; but there was a kind of puzzlement in his look too, as if he was as surprised as they were at what had just come out of his mouth. The puzzlement increased, then, without another word, he jerked his head back, shot his feet out and keeled over backwards.
He was dead. Cardiac malaria. Just like that. It seemed wicked to Digger, who liked the man, that his last moments should be so uncharacteristic, and that it was this they would remember of him. Ernie was especially upset. He kept harking back to it as if there was something in the event that he had failed to grasp and for which he was to blame.
The body could do that too.
They had never given them much thought, these rough and ready bodies of theirs. You got that drummed into you early: not to look at it, not to touch. A half-dozen schooners got down fast before closing time, and if it was too fast you puked. A run at football on Saturday arvo. A bit of love-making, easy exercise. Nothing fancy or too passionate. Nothing out of the ordinary. If you got a scratch you dobbed a drop of Solyptol on it if you were particular and waited for the scab to form. Warts maybe, whitlows. Chilblains in winter if it was cold enough. Measles, mumps, chickenpox. That was about the limit of it. The body went its own way. It was serviceable. You could forget it was there.
Up here the body ruled. You watched it night and day, you got obsessed with it as you saw the flesh fall away and the ribs and the big knuckle-joints come through.
They wouldn’t have believed, if anyone had told them, how fast it could go, the meat they carried, all that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had shoved into their mouths to build the big frames they had brought up here and the muscle to stock them with. They needn’t have bothered, those black pudding and porridge eaters, those kids tucking into the dripping, spreading it thick and wiping a crust round the bowl. It could fall away overnight under the right circumstances, till you looked like someone who had never, in all of time going back and back, known more than the few mouthfuls of pap they were getting now, that were as thin as slime and went right through you, and when you squatted, ran down as slime.
They had had no idea that the equality they claimed and thought they had already achieved would be like this. For each man the same scoopful of thin gruel morning and night.
The big blokes were the first to go, and took hardest the indignity their bodies heaped upon them of needing more than their fair share and of being the weaker for it. They went quickly, some of them. It was pathetic. They hadn’t known (and might have expected, in the normal way of things, never to have brought home to them), how much of what they were was dependent only on the meat.
It was all you had, all they had left you. You kept feeding it and it kept falling away. Up here only the tools you carried, the picks and shovels, had the power to keep their true weight in the world. Just getting a fist around them, feeling the solidity of wood and steel, was a guarantee of something, as in straggling lines you picked your way towards the beginning of a path, stepping gingerly, always on the lookout, however hardened your feet had got, for a hidden stump or thorn, since the merest scratch could cost you a leg if the flesh broke and an ulcer formed. An ulcer could cover half a man’s leg, eating it away till there was more bone to be seen than flesh. The doctors would use a hot spoon then to jelly it out. If you were lucky you kept the leg. If you were less lucky you lost it. Being unlucky meant it lost you.
You got to be an expert at last on the tricks it could play, this body that was so crude and filthy a thing but was also precious and had to be handled now with so much delicacy. You watched for the smallest change in it, fixing your attention on every square inch of yourself, even the skin under your balls, and what normal man among them had ever done that? It had an imagination of its own, and fellows who had none at all, or not of that sort, looked on astonished at the horrors it could produce, stared in amazement as the first brown patch appeared, then spread, and they began to go black.
Digger remembered a joke that Slinger had made. ‘Maybe yer a blackfeller, Digger, on the inside.’
He saw fellows now turn inside out. He saw the skin of a man’s face grow thick as elephant hide. He saw thin boys blow up till th
ey were the size of the fat lady, though no one would have paid to look at them – there was no market for it, not up here. They got so big at last that they couldn’t move, even to turn on their pallets. Two of their mates would have to roll them; but gently, like a two-hundred-pound drum full of some dangerous fluid. Their balls would be the size of footballs, their dick eight inches round; but no one laughed, it wasn’t a joke. Only the skull with its familiar features stayed normal; but they were pin-headed now and the eyes in the tiny head were lost in terror at the dimension of what was happening all round them – ankles thick as tree-trunks, feet like balloons, but heavy, weights they couldn’t even think to lift.
‘If they keep on feedin’ us this rice our eyes’ll go slanty.’
Digger had laughed at the man who told him that – or might have done if he hadn’t seen the fury in the fellow’s eyes. He had felt superior to that sort of dirt ignorance.
But what was happening now made slanty eyes the mildest of changes. Their bodies had gone berserk and were dragging them back to a time before they had organised themselves into human form and come in from chaos.
There were occasions now when he thought Mac might have drawn the best bet after all. He was scared of these thoughts, which came without his will. They were dangerous. If you gave in to the least bit of despair the body would be onto it; it was on the watch for that sort of thing every minute, and you had to watch it. They watched one another. He would catch Doug’s eye on him, or Vic’s, or one of the others, and think, God, what is it? What can he see? Has it started?
When it did start, in Doug’s case, they pretended not to notice, not to see, either, the terror he was in, because he had discovered it even sooner of course, felt the little worry of it growing, beginning to swell.
