The Great World

by David Malouf

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, childlike. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘It’s the fishes,’ Vic said. ‘Don’t worry, they won’t hurt.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shh, don’t scare ’em, you’ll scare ’em. They’re only tiddlers. They won’t hurt.’

  Vic too was in a kind of wonder at it. The idea of it had sickened him at first, just the idea: of being fed off by greedy mouths. But in fact it was soothing. The stars high up, so still; and underwater there, in what seemed like silence but wouldn’t be, close up, the jaws fighting for their share of the feast. And all you felt from up here, from this distance, was a pleasant contact. The touch of their savagery was soft.

  ‘It tickles,’ Digger said foolishly.

  ‘Yair, they’re just tiddlers,’ Vic told him, and he was laughing now. It was so weird, and he had such a sense of the good they were doing him. ‘It’ll be over in a minute.’

  It would be over when they drew blood.

  Digger understood at last, but thought it must be a dream. He could hear the fish in a bright wave swarming at the edge of the bank where they stood offering themselves.

  There was a smell these last days that had got right into his head. He knew what it was. It was the news of his own corruption, the smell, still as yet a little way off, of his own death. It had sickened him. Now, slowly, he felt the smell recede. All the stink and ooze of it was being taken back into the world, away from him, into the mouths of the living and turned back into life there. He felt the bump bump of gristle as the small fry darted in and their snouts bounced off bone. They were feeding off him, savagely, greedily tearing at the flesh, and what they were giving him back was cleanness.

  When he came back into himself and looked about he was standing knee deep in oily water, stars overhead, so close he could hear them grinding, and he could hear the tiny jaws of the fishes grinding too, as starlight touched their backs and they swarmed and fought and churned the blackness to a frenzy round his shins.

  ‘Did any of that happen?’ he asked Vic later, when they lay exhausted in the dark.

  ‘Yes, it happened, an’ it’ll save us. I told you it would. It works.’

  13

  DIGGER, IN THE methodical way that was habitual to him, kept track of each day that passed. He could tell you, if you were bothered to know such a thing, what day of the week it was, in which month; how long it was now till Christmas (how many weeks and days), how long since they had left Changi, how many days and nights they had taken on the road up, how many they had been at work on the line. It mattered to Digger that this bit of order should be maintained in his life. In a place where so much had been taken from them, perhaps permanently, this business of time-keeping, which was after all something the Japs had no control over (it was between you and the sun) represented a last area of freedom to him, a last reminder too of what had been essential to the way they had lived back home.

  It was no small thing, this capacity to place yourself accurately in time, this bit of science it had taken so many centuries to get right. It was worth holding on to, gave a form to what otherwise might run right through your hands.

  So in his monkish way, which Doug teased him over, Digger could be relied on, when any question of times or dates came up, to deliver an answer on the spot.

  The surrender? That had been Sunday, 15 February 1942. Not long after, third week in April, they left Changi for the Great World – Mac had died on 7 June. (This was a date in Digger’s personal calendar. He did not mention it; but three times now he had kept the anniversary.) In October, the 4th to be exact, they had gone back to Changi, and on 22 April the next year, 1943, had begun the long journey into Thailand: five days and nights on the train, crowded into cattle wagons, then a series of night-marches through jungle camps where cholera was raging, twenty nights in all. From then till the day they started back down the line and crossed the border again into Malaya was a hundred and eighty-nine days. Eighteen months it was since then. Just on.

  Other things, big and small, had been happening in the world. Most of it they knew nothing of. The dates Digger recorded, the periods – Changi, the Great World, Thailand, Changi again – that was their war. It was three years and six months since they had become prisoners.

  He knew well enough how little these measurements told. The days were not equal. Nor were the hours. Nor were the minutes, even.

  That minute and a half in the godown, for instance, in which Mac had been killed – there was no way of fitting that into a system that needed sixty minutes to an hour and twenty-four hours to a single revolution of the earth. Some of those days they had worked up there, speedo, as the body recorded them, had been centuries, strung out in an agony for which there were no terms of measurement at all. He knew all that.

  Their history took place in its own time. But it had to be fitted to the time the rest of the world was moving through or you wouldn’t know where you were, outside your own sack of nerves. The two rimes didn’t fit. They never would. Digger knew that as well as the next man. But you kept both just the same and made what you could of it.

  So it was three and a half years, just on, as the calendar showed it. August 1945.

  14

  ALL THE SIGNS now were that it was coming to an end, might even be over already, days, even weeks ago, so that in fact (in one version of it) they might already be free. If that was true their watches would be showing the wrong time. They had no certain news, but something had happened. You could feel it.

  For the past six months they had been at work on a series of tunnels the Japs were digging across the strait in Johore Baahru, a protection for their troops in case of invasion. Vic was with Digger, and Doug had been there too till he got caught in a cave-in and lost an arm. The work was dangerous. They tunnelled into the side of a hill with just picks and shovels, shoring the walls as they went; but the earth was waterlogged after the rains and there were many accidents, the air in the tunnels was foul, and the heat so fierce that they could work for only minutes before they were gasping for breath. If one tunnel collapsed they started in on another just yards away. Now there was this rumour that it was all over anyhow.

  Some fellows said no, it couldn’t be. It wouldn’t end. If it did the Japs had orders to kill the lot of them. They knew too much of what had gone on. They would be herded into the tunnels and machine-gunned or walled up there. That sort of talk, Digger argued, was madness. They couldn’t have got this far, come through so much, those hundred and eighty-nine days for instance, to be gunned down like dogs.

  He was used to the wild speculations that spread among them. For years now they had been living on them. Like the great sea battle they had got so excited about just after they arrived in Thailand, which had raged for days and days with terrible casualties and would certainly now bring an armistice. Off the north coast of Western Australia, that was supposed to have been, near Broome; the whole Jap navy done for. Only it must have taken place nowhere at all, or in some bloke’s head, because nothing more was heard of it.

  Sydney was wiped out by incendiary bombs. The Japs were at Coff’s Harbour, and Menzies, pig-iron Bob, had flown to Manila to sue for peace. That was another bit of news. What had come of that?

  The Japs had set up a puppet government at Townsville. Artie Fadden was at the head of it. Artie Fadden!

  The Russians had moved into Manchuria. The Yanks had invaded Japan from mainland China and were in the suburbs of Tokyo. It was a matter of days now – two weeks at the most.

  This phantom war, whose triumphs and defeats they clung to because their lives depended on it, would in some ways remain more vivid to them than the real one, when at last they learned of it; or they would go on confusing the two, uncertain which was which.

  It was an odd thing to have lived and died a little in a history that had never actually occurred; to have survived, as some of them had, on the bit of hope they had been given by the fall of Yokohama at Christmas 1943, or succumbed, as others di
d, in the gloom that descended when a few weeks later Churchill died and New Zealand surrendered, both on the same day.

  Occasionally, by accident, some fact out of a quite different set of occurrences would get through to them and they would be utterly bamboozled. What were the Japs doing in New Guinea if the Americans were already swarming over the home islands?

  They lived off rumour, and rumour, often enough, sprang out of some man’s sleep. So what could you believe?

  This latest thing, for instance, that it was already over. Best to take it with a grain of salt – that was Digger’s view. Let it get your hopes up, if that’s what you needed, but don’t put money on it.

  Still, it affected them as everything did, and in different ways.

  Some men who had hung on till now, bad cases of malnutrition or beriberi, just gave up and died. It was good news as often as not that finished a man.

  Others seemed dazed. The prospect of going home again scared them. They couldn’t imagine how they could ever settle to it. How they could just walk around the streets and pretend to be normal, look women in the eye again after what they had done and seen, ride on trams, sit at a table with a white cloth, and control their hands and just slowly eat. It was the little things that scared them. The big things you could hide in. It was little ones that gave a man away.

  Vic was one who thought like this. The more the rumours spread and the closer it got, the more fiercely he rejected the possibility.

  ‘They’re fooling themselves,’ he told Digger. ‘They’re mugs.’ He was vehement about it. The optimism of some people infuriated him.

  ‘We’ve heard all this before. It won’t end. Not like this, it won’t. It can’t end.’

  The truth was he didn’t want it to, that’s what Digger thought. He’s a difficult cuss. You never knew which way he was going to jump – he didn’t himself half the time.

  They began to draw apart now that they no longer needed one another. Digger shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, if that’s what he wants.’

  Vic kept away from Doug too, and from all their former mates; turned sulky, drew into himself.

  ‘He’s a bastard. I knew that all along,’ Digger told himself, but was hurt just the same. He owed a lot to this fellow. His life, maybe. Certainly a leg. These were things that Digger could not easily forget. There were times, up there, when they might have known all there was to know about one another, things you’d never find out about a man, never have to, in the ordinary run of things. It meant something, that. But back here, at the edge of normality, these were matters that could not be alluded to.

  ‘He’s ashamed of all that,’ Digger thought. ‘It’s something he doesn’t want to know about.’

  What surprised him was that Vic seemed closer to breaking down now than in any of their worst moments in Thailand.

  It was time that troubled Vic. The opening up of a line into the future would take him back now into the life he left four years ago.

  So long as he had been able to hold a view of things in which time was just moments, then days, each one destroying itself in the next; so long, that is, as it was a process without sequence, he could face himself and hang on. Living was vertical. You stood up new in each moment of it, and if you were strong, and luck was with you, you got from one moment to the next. It was all moments and leaps. But now he had to take on again the notion of a self that was continuous, that belonged to the past and was to have a life again in the future. That’s what scared him – the need to carry forward into the ordinariness that was coming a view of time, and of your whole life in it, that he had had to suppress in himself simply to stay alive.

  He was twenty-two, just turned. Years, he would have, if the vision that had come to him, back there, was a true one, and his body told him it was.

  He had done better than some others. Digger had lost all his teeth. He was gummy. Doug had lost an arm. He himself looked whole but felt that he had lost everything.

  He had had no word from the Warrenders for more than two years. They had written often in the early days, Pa had anyway, and there was always an added word or two from the girls or Ma, but they had had no mail at all in Thailand, and he had got nothing in the hand-outs since they got to Malaya.

  In his years with the Warrenders he had never spoken of the life he had known before he came to them, of his parents and all that world up the coast. He had buried that, kept it to himself.

  Of course Pa had got a glimpse of it. But then Pa, amazingly, had known his father, though he couldn’t imagine what he had known. Pa, understanding by instinct how he might feel about it, and in accordance with his own manly principles, had never alluded to it. So he had kept all that to himself, hoarding it up in the most secret part of him as a thing he would not speak of or let anyone see.

  He would not speak of this either, once it was over; since it was pretty certain now that it soon would be. He would push it deep down into himself, face it on his own, and deny, if asked, that he had ever been here: ‘No, mate – not me.’

  That’s how it would be for him, and how it had to be. Strange? Is that strange? It’s the way I am.

  Maybe he wouldn’t go back at all, that’s what he had begun to think. He was too changed. He didn’t want them to see (them least of all) what had been done to him, and he knew only too well what that was because he could see it in others. It would kill him if he had to see himself through their eyes. Lucille’s for instance.

  He had (he couldn’t help it) a kind of contempt for what he had become that was the last resort of his wounded pride. The mere sight of other men sickened him. Their necks all vein and gristle, the tottering walk they had, like old blokes you saw going home just on closing time with a bottle of cheap plonk in a brown-paper bag; the silly, hopeful chatter they went in for, the rumours, the schemes – chicken farms were what they were all for running when they got back; most of all the smell they carried, which wasn’t just sweat or shit or green vomit but of what four years of slavery had done to them, sickness of the spirit. It marked you forever, that. There was no way you could get rid of it.

  But as the time got closer and the rumours wilder and maybe nearer the mark, old needs and desires began to reappear for no other reason than that they might be capable again of fulfilment; he was racked. And with them, quite unsought, came visions, so real at times that his whole body would be filled with such sensual warmth and yearning, raw need, happiness, and sudden choking emptiness, that he thought he might pass out. Was that what it was to be like?

  The visions appeared of their own accord, and in no particular sequence: a stockinged foot, a hairpin, the unbuttoned strap of a suspender. They were the ingredients of spells, his body practising its own form of witchcraft, or they were the symptoms of madness – that’s what he thought. But their power was overwhelming. His blood raced and burned, he hardly dared close his eyes. And they came as well when his eyes were open. His mind, or his body, was an infinite storehouse of such vision, of acts and objects he had pushed down into the dark and which were reappearing now to claim connection. Was this madness or some deep healing process? Either way it was a torment to him.

  One image especially kept coming back and back, a kind of waking dream. It was of the house at Strathfield, the hallway just inside the front door, with its high white ceiling and pavement of blue, white and brown terracotta tiles.

  A radiance as of the westering sun filled it – but that, his reason told him, was impossible: the house faced south. Still, there it was and there he was.

  As the light settled out and his heart, which appeared to be the real source of it, slowed at last to normal pace, and since it had been free-floating, came to rest again under his ribs, he saw that Lucille was there, just turning on the second step.

  Something had caught her attention. She was looking towards him with a little line of puzzlement between her brows, as if she knew someone was there but was too dazzled by the unaccustomed light to see who it was. He knew he could not call out
to her. But his heart was beating so loud he thought she might hear that.

  After a moment, still puzzled, she turned and went on up and he was left standing, but quietly now and full of contentment, as if some sort of assurance had been given him.

  None had, of course, and with the part of him that was rational and clear-headed he knew it, so what was he doing?

  Still, the image, or the dream, or whatever it was, stayed warm in him and kept coming back.

  15

  VIC, FRESHLY WASHED and combed, in clean shirt, clean shorts and a new pair of boots, a bit light-headed just with the knowledge that he could go anywhere he pleased, down this alley or that, was out walking in the freed city. They were all out somewhere, rushing here and there like kids in a fairground, not knowing what to try first.

  He had come out alone and was in a part of the town he did not know, along a foul canal. He didn’t know anywhere in Singapore, not really. He had never had a chance to.

  It was a low place, all peeling walls, coal smoke from kerosene tins, and footpaths filthy with squashed fruit and dog-turds and cinders and bloody-looking spit. He had wandered down here looking for he didn’t know what. Nothing. Anything. It wasn’t any place he had intended to be.

  Bicycles passed in droves, all honking. Children sat half-naked on the ground. Salesmen, squatting, had laid out on upturned butter-boxes, or low tables covered with a cloth, the few things, whatever it was, that they had to sell. Suddenly he stopped dead and stood stupidly staring.

  What had caught his eye was a pyramid of six cotton-reels on a tray, one of them a sickly green, another royal blue, the rest white, but all dusty and soiled looking. The only other thing on the tray was a packet of needles.