by Cory Taylor
When I woke up and found myself back in my bunk with the blanket half off and my backside hanging out in the cold I wanted to die. While McMaster snored in the next bunk I would get up to go and take a shower before anyone else was awake. Under the freezing water I would contemplate how sick I was, a pervert, just like my father had known all along.
There were other times I tried to cure myself using some of the magazines that Bryant was always hawking around, but it never worked—no more than lying in my bunk before dawn trying to conjure up a vision of May wearing only her underwear, or using my weekly telephone call to ring her up and whisper sweet nothings back and forth down the line. The next time I saw her I told her. I didn’t mention Stanley. I just said I thought there was something not quite right about me.
‘You’ll get better with practice,’ she said.
She was only half-joking. It was over a month since I’d seen her at the farm and I was awkward in her company. We were sitting in a booth down the back of a cafe in Shepparton eating corned beef sandwiches and drinking strong tea with a bit of rum in it that I’d brought along to help me talk.
‘It’s not funny,’ I said.
She made an effort to look serious but it was obvious she had no idea what I was trying to tell her. Neither did I for that matter, not really. For instance, I still believed that my feelings for Stanley might be treatable.
‘Maybe I should see a doctor,’ I said.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘There might be something I can take.’ I wanted to believe this. I was impressed by something I’d heard from the other guards about the Jap pearl divers. According to rumour they liked to insert pearls under the skin of their pricks. I never asked why they would do something that painful but, in my ignorance, I decided it was some sort of a remedy.
May took hold of my hand and squeezed it.
‘I’ll help you,’ she said. ‘You don’t need a doctor.’
I hadn’t expected her to be so willing to assist. I was a little disappointed because a part of me had wanted her to berate me, then abandon me to my fate. Instead she was offering to cure me.
‘Why are you so good to me?’ I said.
‘Because I love you,’ she said, gathering up my hands now and clutching them like they were hers to keep. Which only made me more miserable, because all I could think of was the way Stanley had gripped my hand in the infirmary. It was as if all of May’s intimacies were only good for triggering memories of Stanley, and all of her declarations of love were only preludes to his declarations of love, even if these were purely imaginary.
I must have written Stanley about a dozen letters, then burned them as soon as I had signed them. I would go over to the schoolroom in the middle of the night and sit at one of the benches, scribbling on a sheet of school paper as if I was writing out lines as a punishment. I want you. I’ve wanted you from the first moment I saw you. I want to kiss you. I want to kiss your beautiful mouth, and then your neck and then your ear and then your cock. I’m dying of desire for you. I remember once I even decided that I should deliver one of these pitiful notes to Stanley in person so I could watch him read it before I set a match to it. But I only got as far as the gate to Compound C before I chickened out and retreated to the latrines. I made myself come over the page of filth I’d written, then tore it to pieces and threw the whole mess down the shithole.
After that I stopped writing letters and started writing bad poems instead, some of which I’ve kept. When I read them now I pity the boy who dreamed them up so ineptly and earnestly all those years ago. It reads like the worst schoolboy poetry, although occasionally there is a sentiment that stands out from the rest as if, just for a moment, something honest had silenced the sublime music with which I was trying to drown it out. There are no gods, wrote my seventeen-year-old self,
only suns and moons and stars without feeling,
telling us nothing about themselves except revealing
beauty to us on every day. In the mornings and at night,
we see each miracle by their light:
each flower, each bird, each hand, each eye
each look, each touch, each truth, each lie.
I can see what that boy was trying to do. He was trying to turn his lust into high-minded religious rapture, because that way it might be easier to bear.
10
It might have been that I was influenced at the time by Stanley’s religious conversion. If I was on night duty I made a point of hanging around at the back of the parade ground to watch him and his little band perform their prayers. The ritual took only a few minutes but it was still impressive. Just before dawn they would march out in the dark behind Baba-san and stand along the fence in a row. At first light they would sit down on their knees in the dust and bow to the rising sun. When the sun was up they would stand and make a formal bow to their teacher, Baba-san, and to Sawada, their leader. All of this was done in silence and with a simple reverence that affected me, despite my misgivings about its object, which I understood to be the Emperor.
After the ceremony, the boys trained, starting with warm-up stretches and ending with sprint races up and down the eastern length of the perimeter fence. Again, this was all accomplished in silence, apart from a few ritual exchanges back and forth. Baba-san didn’t run. He paced up and down with his felt hat pushed back off his forehead and his hands thrust in his coat pockets. If anything he resembled a horse-trainer watching his prize gallopers out on the track. Sometimes he noticed me watching the boys too, and he would wave and I would wave back, as if he and I were collaborators in the racing game. Stanley, on the other hand, made a point of refusing to look at me. He would only look at Sawada. He stuck by the other boy and did whatever he did. It was as if he wanted me to see how devoted he was to his new friend, and how useless to him I’d suddenly become.
As soon as they were finished their final run the boys lined up in front of Baba-san and bowed again, barking a rapid-fire call-and-response routine. Then they reverted from a disciplined squad into a rabble, all trying to trip each other up or ride piggyback as they made their way to their huts to shower and change for morning parade. I never watched them without a pang of jealousy, particularly Sawada, with whom Stanley jostled and joined arms as they walked along, sometimes sharing a cigarette, no doubt one of the Camels I’d given him.
Of course it puzzled me what Stanley or any of the others saw in Sawada. I’d only spoken to him once, when I was on escort duty, in charge of delivering him from the lock-up back to his compound. He was a thin, sallow boy with a face like a lizard and a head of wiry hair that grew straight out like bristles. When I asked him whether his mother had recovered from the chair-leg attack he ignored me.
‘He’s all yours,’ I said to the compound leader. Maeda was one of the old men I’d seen holding court with Baba-san in the mess hall. He was slight and a full head shorter than me, but he managed to intimidate me by his stare alone. As soon as my back was turned Sawada said something in Japanese to Maeda that made him laugh. I turned around and found Sawada smiling at me. He still didn’t say anything but his manner was so contemptuous it made me momentarily breathless.
Riley called him the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and told me that everything Sawada had learned he’d learned from Baba-san. ‘And now he’s got his hooks into Stanley,’ he said. ‘Which is a real shame.’
I said I thought it might be only temporary, that Stanley didn’t strike me as a joiner. Of course I was echoing what McMaster had said about Stanley, and hoping that he was right.
‘Any port in a storm,’ said Riley.
This was over breakfast in the guards’ mess one morning in the middle of July. McMaster and Riley had been discussing the situation in Burma—it seemed that the Japs were on the run, scrambling to get out by whatever means they could.
‘Anybody want to bet it’ll all be over before August?’ said McMaster.
Nobody took him up on it. Bryant already had a book running on t
he exact day of the Jap surrender, but everyone had it falling sometime around December after the Yanks had firebombed every town and village in the country.
‘Baba-san’s not giving up yet,’ said Riley. ‘I see he’s signing up some new storm-troopers.’
‘Delusions of grandeur,’ said McMaster.
I didn’t really understand why Baba-san was allowed to reign over his boys the way he did, but then I hadn’t been at Tatura long enough to understand its special pathology. Riley and McMaster both agreed that, as long as order was maintained, it was better to leave the internees to their own devices. If they were wrong-headed about the war then that wasn’t really anyone else’s problem but theirs, and anyway events would overtake them soon enough.
This insouciance about the Japs struck me as a brand of laziness, and it made me apprehensive to watch how the numbers at Sawada’s table kept increasing. My main concern was for Stanley, because I didn’t want him to get into any trouble. Within a few days of Stanley joining them, Sawada’s gang had commandeered a second table in the mess and filled it with recent converts to the cause. Baba-san liked to go over and preach to them occasionally. He’d been a language professor it was said, and he spoke in a monotone, as if he was delivering an interminable seminar. The one thing he never did was to smile.
‘He’s telling them the emperor needs them for a sunbeam,’ said Riley, pausing to watch them the next time we were on duty together.
I watched the way Stanley sat with his arms crossed and an expression of deep melancholy on his face. Whatever Baba-san was saying must have been upsetting, because all the boys looked equally downcast.
‘More bad news,’ said Riley.
‘Either that or his jokes aren’t very funny,’ I said. It still struck me as absurd that Stanley had turned into one of these sorrowful boys, when I’d formed such a different impression of him. I was in no position to know what had triggered his transformation. All I had to go on was our conversation outside the back of the schoolroom when he’d mentioned his ‘plan’. For all I knew he might have turned for no better reason than that he was easily bored and in need of some elaborate form of entertainment. Every time I saw him I looked for a sign that he was faking his conversion, playacting the role of religious disciple, but none was forthcoming.
Colonel Hollows must have sensed unrest brewing. He took to making speeches after morning roll call in which he advised everyone to keep calm. The war, he said, was coming to an end. The Americans had taken the fight right to the doorstep of the Japanese main islands. Thousands upon thousands of Japanese civilians had lost their lives in Okinawa, often at the hands of their own troops. Many thousands of Americans had also perished. The operations in Borneo and in Burma were designed to cut the enemy forces off from all remaining supply and command routes. Again and again, he told the internees that, although passions were bound to be running high, at this time the best course of action was to wait patiently for the inevitable end of hostilities and to refuse to react to rumour and speculation. He also warned that anyone who was found to be fanning unsubstantiated rumour, or to be plotting retribution in the camp, would be severely punished.
Pissing in the wind, McMaster called it. He didn’t think Hollows had a hope of stopping the rumour mill at Tatura, or of preventing talk of vengeance. ‘You might as well order them to stop breathing,’ he said.
Once I was more relaxed around them, I asked the kids what they thought about the war. They said America would win, but when I asked what would become of them once that happened, they went quiet. A lot of them were too young to remember where they’d lived before the war and struggled when I asked them to describe what it was like at home.
‘Do you want to go back there?’ I said.
Opinion was divided. A majority of the older ones said yes, but the younger ones said no.
‘Why not?’ I said.
‘I like it here,’ they said, parroting each other.
‘Why?’ I said.
Some mentioned their friends and some said that their mothers wanted to stay because it was better than Japan.
‘If we go back to Japan they’ll kill us,’ said one boy.
‘Who told you that?’ I said.
‘My brother,’ he said.
I knew his brother. He was one of Sawada’s followers. I assumed this was something he’d heard from Baba-san or Maeda.
‘Why would they kill you?’ I wanted to know, because there was every reason to believe that it might be true.
The boy shifted in his seat and hesitated to answer. I told him it was all right if he didn’t want to say anything, but then he suddenly stood up and started to speak very fast. It was as if this had been weighing on his mind for a long time, like an admission of guilt.
‘Because it isn’t right to be a prisoner. It’s a duty to sacrifice your life for your country and for your emperor, and anyone who doesn’t sacrifice his life is a traitor.’
The other kids glanced at each other and one or two giggled.
‘Do you believe that?’ I said.
When the boy didn’t say anything I told him to sit down. I asked the others what they thought and some of them said they didn’t agree.
‘My mum says it’s better to be a prisoner,’ said a boy called Ralph Endo, who rarely uttered a word.
‘Why does she think that?’ I said.
‘Because you get food and clothes for free,’ he said. ‘And you even get a doctor when you’re sick or you’re having a baby.’
Ralph’s mother had had two babies in the time she’d been in Tatura and was pregnant with a third, even though Ralph’s father was away at the single-men’s camp. According to Riley, the father of Ralph’s little half-sisters worked as a cook in the camp kitchens. His real name was Evans but the guards all called him Rabbit.
‘What will you do when the war’s finished?’ one of the girls asked me. She was from New Caledonia and everyone knew her as the kid who’d deserted the Jap school because of a disagreement with Baba-san about the emperor’s divine status. When she’d told Baba-san that she was a Catholic and believed in only one God, he’d slapped her so hard across the face that her cheek had split open. The scar was still visible.
I wasn’t prepared for the question so I blushed and made up an answer.
‘I’m thinking I might open a photography studio,’ I said.
They knew I had a camera because they’d followed me around one day while I took some shots of life around the camp. Another time I’d taken a group photo of them all lined up outside the schoolroom, as well as shots of a few of them on the tennis court with Stanley.
‘What if Japan wins the war?’ she said.
‘I don’t think that’s very likely,’ I said.
‘Neither do I,’ she said. But she looked worried anyway.
They all did, most of the time. I noticed how many of their games involved battles to the death. The boys enacted campaigns around the outside of the huts, involving pretend kamikaze missions and mass suicides. The girls took part as well, letting themselves be taken hostage and locked up in make-believe caves, then blown to bits with imaginary hand grenades they’d pretend to trigger on hearing that the Americans were coming to get them.
Disturbed by what he saw as an impending collapse in morale, McMaster came up with a plan to distract the kids from their grim preoccupations. Towards the end of July he decided to program an impromptu school concert. He put up posters all over the camp. Requests poured in from the parents wanting permission to help out. Stanley’s uncles promised him a circus show, and a few musicians decided to play for the older kids so they could stay up late and dance after the concert was finished. The women volunteered to work in the kitchen for the night and give some of the cooks a day off. Apparently it was a tradition in Tatura to stage such entertainments—film nights, Japanese festivals, musical evenings. McMaster told me to be prepared. ‘They’re a real eye-opener,’ he said.
Not everyone was as enthusiastic as he was about t
he Japs enjoying themselves in this way. A lot of the other men thought it was spoiling them. Bryant even suggested it was unpatriotic.
‘That’s a big word,’ said McMaster. ‘It’s just a bit of fun.’
We were drinking together one frigid evening, trying our best to stay warm.
‘I don’t see the point,’ said Bryant. ‘It just gives them ideas.’
‘Exactly,’ said McMaster. ‘It gives them something to think about other than their blighted lives. It shows off how much raw talent there is out there going to waste.’
There was a pause, during which I could see McMaster glancing at Bryant’s cards.
‘I reckon,’ said Donohue, in a kind of reverent whisper. ‘Speaking of talent, have you seen the pair on that Dutch sheila Sophie whatsername. She can’t be more than twelve years old.’
‘Eighteen,’ said Bryant. ‘I checked.’
‘What do you do?’ said Donohue. ‘Just go up and ask them?’
‘There’s no law against it,’ said Bryant.
‘What if you get caught?’ said Donohue.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Bryant. He smiled at me and took a swig of rum from the bottle. ‘Do you know what he’s talking about Artie?’
I told him my name was Arthur then laid down an unbeatable hand for him to inspect.
‘Bugger me,’ he said.
‘Not if you paid me a million quid,’ I said.
I let him slap me on the back and tug hard on my ear and then I told him to take his hands off me because I didn’t think it was normal the way he kept wanting to touch me.
He pinched my cheek hard enough to make it sting. ‘When’s your birthday again?’ he said. He knew very well when it was but he wanted me to tell him one more time in front of the others.
