The Narrow Road to the Deep North (21 page)

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 for 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, and 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.

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.

Two guards led by the Goanna made their way down the hut’s central aisle as the prisoners stood to attention in front of the communal bunks on either side. The Goanna upended one kitbag into the mud outside, slapped another man for no apparent reason, and then halted in front of Darky Gardiner.

The Goanna took his rifle off his shoulder, and with a long, slow movement picked up Darky Gardiner’s blanket with the tip of his rifle barrel and dropped it onto the muddy ground. For a moment he looked down at the filthy blanket, and then he looked back up. He screamed, and with all his strength slammed the rifle butt into the side of Darky Gardiner’s head.

The prisoner dropped but was too slow in raising an arm to shield himself as another guard kicked him across the face. He managed to writhe sideways under the protection of the bamboo sleeping bench, but not before the Goanna got a good kick in on his head. And then, as abruptly as it started, it was over.

The Goanna continued with his strange, stilted walk down the hut aisle, slapping Chum Fahey for no discernible reason, then disappeared with his entourage out the other end. Darky Gardiner rose to his feet, somewhat unsteadily, his head still confused, his mouth salty with blood, his body covered in the foul mud that lay beneath the sleeping platform.

The fold, Jimmy Bigelow said.

It wasn’t that bad, Darky said.

He meant the bashing. He spat out a gob of blood. It tasted too salty and too rich for a body as wasted as his. He felt dizzy. He put a finger in his mouth and felt the molar that had taken the kicks. It was wobbly, but with luck it would hold. His head was not right.

You forgot the fold, Sheephead Morton said.

I folded the fucking fucker, Darky Gardiner said.

With a smouldering cigarette butt he had just lit and now held between his thumb and forefinger, Jimmy Bigelow pointed at his own blanket.

See, he said.

The fold was facing outwards.

Your fold faced inwards, Sheephead Morton said. Against nip regulations. You know that.

The Goanna thought you was taking the piss, Jimmy Bigelow said, having a puff. Here—he held out the soggy cigarette butt for Darky.

Jimmy Bigelow’s hand was covered with cracked scales, and was badly infected, all yellow and reds. Sickness terrified Darky Gardiner. It got hold of you and it would not let you go.

Here, Jimmy Bigelow said. Take it.

Darky Gardiner didn’t move.

Only death is catching round here, Jimmy Bigelow said, and I ain’t got that. Rightio?

Darky Gardiner took the smoke and—without letting it touch his lips—held it up to his open mouth.

Yet, Jimmy Bigelow said.

Darky took a pull on the cigarette. He watched four men carrying a bamboo stretcher stumble up towards the hospital.