The Great World

by David Malouf

  They rolled him like a drum when the time came and carried him out on work-parties to make up the numbers as the Nips demanded. It was, all the time, a question of numbers. The Nips were fanatical about it.

  ‘Watch it, fellers,’ he joked as they lay him beside the track, ‘I spill easy.’

  He lay there all day, patient and uncomplaining, every now and then shouting across to them just to keep himself in the swing of things and one of their number – the living. Then at nightfall they carried him back.

  It was the jokes, Digger thought later, that kept Doug going. That little bit of health in him, a stubborn refusal to give in to the sheer weight of things, a belief in lightness. He emerged again out of the huge bulk of himself in the old form, rangy, tough, and more certain than ever now that he could survive whatever they put up to him.

  Vic too felt he had passed through the monstrous stage and emerged in something like his old form; but in his case it was mental. The work was what saved him, or so he felt. Even the weight of a basket full of rubble cutting into the rawness of your shoulder could be a reminder that the body was still with you, still in the same line of gravity as stones.

  If you accepted that, you could begin to live. If you couldn’t, you were done.

  There was a way in which absolute deprivation confirmed him in a thing he had known from the start. Basically, when you get right down to it, we’ve got nothing.

  He thought, and there was bitter humour in it, of the times Aunt James had snatched the bread off his plate and shouted ‘Let him do without!’ There had been so much malice in the old girl. Or maybe in her crazy way she had seen through into the future and was warning him.

  He thought of those fellows under the tree outside Meggsie’s kitchen, wolfing soup from a bowl, and how he had felt then that he was on the wrong side of things, that he had got out of some shame and humiliation that had been meant for him too. Well, he had it now. Did that balance things?

  ‘I’m at rock bottom,’ he told himself. ‘I can face that. I didn’t get into the world on the promise of three meals a day and a silver spoon to bite on. There was no promise at all – not for my lot. If I have to live like this, right through to the finish, on nothing but will, I can do it. I know what real is. I’m not like Digger. I don’t need dreams.’

  There were times when Digger’s way of seeing things maddened him. ‘This time next month,’ Digger would tell them – or next year, or by Christmas – ‘we’ll be outa this. The line’ll be joined up an’ they’ll take us back.’

  There were plenty of fellows who thought like that. They were dreamers. Always on about the future.

  He denied himself that luxury as he denied himself the luxury of the past. There was only one place where you existed with any certainty. That was here. The only line was the one that went downward, straight down through you into the earth. He clung to that with a dumb tenacity.

  He reckoned this way because he was of a reasoning nature, taking pleasure in the hardness, the harshness of it, stripping himself of all illusion.

  But in relying only on the body, he reckoned without its power, which he had already seen in other circumstances, to go its own way and think for itself. One day, in one of those moments when he had fallen out of space into mere time, when his mind lapsed in him and the moment he was in lay open to the flow of things, he raised his head and saw just ahead of him, coming from the opposite direction but in the same line, so that they must inevitably collide if one or the other did not leap aside, a figure he recognised, or thought he did – a big-shouldered, white-haired fellow for whom he felt a flicker of inexplicable warmth and interest. The feeling surprised him; and it was because he was diverted by it that he failed at first to see who it was.

  It was himself: far off in a moment that was years ahead and which he was, it seemed, inevitably making for. He had no sooner realised this than the figure was on him and he felt his body open and let it through.

  He did not look back. It was forbidden, he knew that. If he looked back they would both be lost.

  Still in a state of astonishment, he kept his eyes dead ahead, and when the next breath came, he took it. But a little of the warmth and affection he had felt still glowed in him.

  ‘Well,’ he told himself, ‘if that’s how it’s to be I’ve got no option, have I, but to stick it out?’

  8

  DIGGER’S MOST PRECIOUS possessions, since he had only the one short note of his own, were the letters he had inherited from Mac. Folded small, he had carried them from camp to camp and got them safe through all searches.

  He knew them by heart, of course. No trouble about that when he knew so many plays off and had in his head the names and numbers of the whole unit. The letters were just a few hundred words. But the words themselves were only part of it.

  Reading took time. That was the important thing. Constant folding and refolding had split the pages, and in the continuous damp up here the ink had run and was hard to read. Each time he took them out, especially if his hands were shaking and wet, he ran the risk of damaging them. But he liked the look of the unfolded pages, their weight – very light they were – on his palm. Even the stains were important. So was the colour of the ink, which differed from letter to letter, even from page to page of the same letter, so that you could see, or guess, where Iris had put the pen down in mid-sentence to go off and do something. So what you were reading was not just words.

  He would close his eyes and imagine her being called to the door. The baker’s lad, that would be, with a basket on his arm and the warm loaves covered with a cloth. (He would tear the corner off a loaf while they weren’t looking and pop it warm into his mouth. Lovely, it was.) Or one of the boys would be calling. Ewen looking for his football socks – weren’t they dry yet? – or Jack nagging for a coconut ice-block. Digger let his mind rove. He knew enough from what Mac had told him at one time or another to find his way about the house. It was one of the ways, just one, of getting back.

  He did not gorge himself. He read one letter only and took his time. But there were days when he needed to gorge himself, and then he would read all five at once, then over again.

  It was a strange business. Since the letters already existed in his head before he even started on them, it had to be a process, almost simultaneous but not quite, of letting each word fall out of his mind just before he came to it, so that he could discover it anew.

  Playing music must be like that. Even if you had played a piece a thousand times over, and your fingers knew it on their own, you would have to clear your head of all knowledge of the next note so that your fingers, when they found it, could surprise themselves.

  ‘I’ve planted sweet-peas,’ she wrote on St Patrick’s Day.

  That was over two years ago. The sweet-peas would have sprouted, climbed the trellis, come out, filling the yard with their sweet smell, then died again; but he could still smell them where they had gone back into the earth, and still see them as well in the colours she named, pink, mauve, white. He could see the whole wall of them, pale green, with leaves that were scratchy to the fingertips, like the legs of a praying mantis, and the light shining through; the trellis repeating itself in shadow on the sun-blasted weatherboard; the poles tall as a row of men, but sweet-smelling, opening their buds that were set flaglike at a stiff right-angle to the stalk, white, mauve, pink.

  Cut, in a tight little bunch, they would sit in a glass in the front room. He saw the room empty, with the curtains drawn against the sun, which could be strong, even in winter, and the glass with its two kinds of light, one air, one water, and the pale stalks and paler blossoms on a table in the centre of it. He would stand in the hallway and breathe the smell of sweet-peas and it revived him.

  When the sun went down and the room grew dark, the glass was still there, the water still central and a source of light. He would lower himself into its coolness, its clearness, at the centre of the dark, quiet room. In the rooms on the other side of the hallway opposite,
the breath of sleepers: in one room Iris, in the other the boys, Ewen and Jack, still safe in their boyish dreams, and out the back in a third room, the closed-in sleep-out, Mac’s records and his piles of books.

  Back and back he went to that house he had never been in. He let Mac show it to him again, room by room. They were shining, both; all cleaned up, their hair combed wet, their feet washed.

  There was a wooden rack over the sink with plates in it, thick white ones. They leaned there, drying, and had been washed a thousand times with a block of Sunlight soap in a little wire cage-like contraption, and rinsed, lifted out of the water and left. Beautiful, they were. He could have sat at the table and just looked at them forever, over and over. Because it happened that way, over and over.

  Regularly, three times a day, the plates were taken down, set on the cloth, used and washed again. That was the beauty of it. Order, repetition.

  But how boring! The same thing, day in day out, over and over! For him that was just the beauty of it. The cloth shaken out in the yard and the sparrows flying down. Light on the lovely glazed and crazed smoothness of the plates in the rack. The calendar on the wall turned to the right month, and the days, black or red, coming up in their numbers, workdays, weekends, the next page already there, and the next and the next all the way to Christmas.

  In the dark, while the house slept, he waited quietly in the kitchen, his spirit touched by the light off those plates, in his hands the dryness of a bit of stale bread. There was a whole bowl of it, set out for the morning, to feed the chooks. His spirit broke off a bit and swallowed it – the chooks won’t mind, he thought, though he could hear them shifting their claws on their perches in the dark.

  Once, standing there, he heard a movement behind him and Iris came in in her nightgown. She didn’t see him, of course. She walked right past him to the sink, took a glass, filled it with water from the tap, and drank, very slowly, gazing out into the dark yard.

  He watched her as if the ordinary act was miraculous.

  It was miraculous. It slaked his thirst.

  9

  MEMORY WAS A gift, when they really set themselves to it.

  Lists. You started one and it could be extended forever, back and back, and gone over endlessly, and what you called up became a magic formula for keeping yourself in the world or for wiping yourself, temporarily, out of it.

  For some it was a numbers game. What they went back to was the number-plates of the various cars they had owned or had driven at times for the firms they worked for. These numbers were it. Got into the right order, like the combination of a safe, they were a key that would unlock the universe. Only you had to get the order right, and it wasn’t all that easy since the right order had nothing to do with the one in which these numbers had first come into your life. The right order was the right order, the one that would work. If you got it at last the engine would kick over, and powered by the six or eight cylinders of all those Buicks and Chevvies and de Sotos and Fords, it would take you out.

  For others it was railway stations. The stations for instance out from Redfern on the Western Line. They went through them slowly, in morning heat sometimes but at others in the chill of smoky winter, on their way to work. The line ran high above the street. Below you could see barefoot men walking greyhounds alongside parks, kids on their way to school with little satchels on their backs, leggy girls, the older ones in checked gingham. Then, after a bit, you took the same journey back. Only at dusk this time and with the names in the reverse order. Factory sirens would be howling over the flat swamplands. You would have a slick of grease on your thumb. The faces along the platform blurring, and the train moving too fast now for you to catch the headlines on the news-boards as you plunged into sleep.

  For others again it was the names of all the girls they had done it with. Even if you only got a finger in, it counted. The Muriels and Glorias and Pearls and Isobels going right back to when you were in sixth grade and first could.

  The names first, then details. Where each one was: behind the baths, or on a bench under a school somewhere, or in the back of a parked truck. And when: in the Christmas holidays or on a Queen’s Birthday long weekend, getting hold of the weather if you could, what she had on – the shoes, if any, the bra and panties, the colour and pattern of her frock, and the sweat-smell, or the soap-smell of what it had been washed in. Or the feel of leather (smooth or with seams) where it stuck to your bare arse in the back of the Vaux, or the splintery floor under the canvas seats at the Elite, and the taste of vanilla malted or popcorn in her mouth, or Wrigley’s Spearmint, or the fried fat of chips. Ah, chips! Now that would be something.

  On the menu at Matter’s Boarding House for Men, the same menu each week over the seven nights, beef stew, shepherd’s pie, etcetera. The gravies – lovely! And the picture over the sideboard, a Pears’ print of a little girl about two in a sun-bonnet, standing in the nuddy in a galvanised iron tub . . .

  Or the words of all the songs in the Boomerang Songbook for March 1941: ‘I was watching a man paint a fence’. Or the rhymes their sisters and other little girls skipped to in the evenings after school, on the hot concrete under the sleep-out, while they were doing their history homework (Oliver Cromwell and the Civil War), or setting the wing of a balsawood plane with a dob of glue on a matchstick, and might stop a minute to have a quick pull on the bed –

  Over the garden wall

  I let the baby fall

  Me mother come out and give me a clout

  That almost turned me inside out –

  cleaning up quickly afterwards with a stiff hanky, the smell of it and of the glue.

  Others the no-hoper horses they put good money on, that never came in, and all the winners of the Melbourne Cup back to 1861, Archer.

  Others the cows in a dairy herd: Myrtle, Clover, the Gypsy Princess, Angel, Sugarpie, Queenie, Minnie the Moocher.

  What Digger remembered, and after a certain time in an official capacity, was the name and number of every man in the unit; including those who had been killed or gone missing and been replaced, then the replacements; and where each man was sent after the surrender; to Sandakan in Borneo, to Blakang Mali Island, the greatest bashing and punching show in Malaya, so they said, or who drew paradise and stayed on in Changi, or who went to Thailand, and in which force and to which camp. Official. All stored that information, safely, permanently, in the last place the Nips would think of looking.

  He was so unremarkable, Digger, looked so like all the rest of them, barefoot, filthy, in a lap-lap, all bones, that no one could have guessed what he carried along with the pick over his shoulder or the basket with its weight of rubble and stones.

  Once committed to memory these names would be there forever. The whole unit could be called up and paraded in his head, the dead right there with the living, all clean and in good shape again, whether they had drawn a short straw or a long and wherever they were.

  Digger remembered them, and their names and numbers. And they, each one, remembered whatever it was they needed to keep them halfway in the world or halfway out of it: number-plate numbers, girls, songs, stations, all the flavours of milkshakes and malteds they served at the Mermaid Café, all the shops up and down Elizabeth or Queen or George or Swanston Street, both sides, the names of horses or dairy herds. Put it all together and something, secretly, was being kept alive. What an army marches on when it is no longer marching.

  But there were others, Vic was one, who had no time for memories, even sweet ones. What they clung to were the things they could touch, the few bits and pieces they had managed to hang on to, some of it from back before Changi, the rest picked up along the road, at this stopping place or that, and were keeping for the day when it might come in useful: Singer sewing-machine needles, nails, screws, bits of rope or twine, keys, batteries, cards out of a broken pack, folds of newspapers – objects that elsewhere would have been trash, hardly worth stopping for, but were precious relics up here, and useful too, since you could tra
de them one for another and have something new in hand.

  Vic had started off with quite a hoard. Small things mostly, that all went into a single pocket of his shorts, where he could turn them over; not idly, but letting his mind go with them. His fingertips knew every one.

  But over the months he had traded some for a fag-end or a bit of something he needed urgently and didn’t have; or for things, once or twice, that had taken his fancy in a childish way though there was no point to them. Other things, infuriatingly, had gone lost. Stolen maybe – he had his suspicions; about some things and some men. Or they had fallen through a hole in his shorts that he had found too late. In the end he had only one thing left: two and a half yards of white cotton thread tied in a loop. He had that in the left-hand pocket of his shorts, quite safe, and was keeping it, come what may.

  He could have traded it a dozen times and had refused. A length of thread like that would come in handy sooner or later, it was bound to. He’d need it to keep his shorts together, or for some other reason, and if he didn’t have it then, where would he be? Besides, he liked the feel of it. Hours he spent just rubbing his thumb and forefinger over it. He got teased for that: ‘Watcha doin’, Vic? Playin’ pocket billiards?’ Finally he hung on to it just for itself, whether it was useful or not. Because it was the last thing he possessed.

  It had been white at first. Now it was a brownish colour. What worried him was that it might go astray. He kept checking every five minutes or so to see that it was still there. He took precautions. If he lost it he would be done for.

  10

  ‘COOLIES,’ THE MAN behind him whispered, and Digger had time to take a quick look. Just a glance, because one of the Koreans was close, who would knock you down as soon as look at you.

  They were working at night now, a real speedo. Bamboo fires were blazing all down the lines. They reddened the walls of the cutting and threw weird shadows. Other, more substantial shadows stopped, shovelled, staggered under basketloads of rubble in a din of bellowing and raucous shouts and blows as the guards ranged up and down. There was a haze of dust that the fires turned to hanging flame. Their bodies in it were alight with sweat, but high up, where it thinned out in the dark, the air was bruise-coloured, a sick yellow, then black.