The Narrow Road to the Deep North (24 page)

He was panting now. As Nakamura’s blows continued falling he concentrated on running through the hospital admissions again, the ones recovering, the light duties men; as Nakamura hit him on this side of his face, then that, he counted again the number of sick in the hospital—perhaps forty—who, if properly handled, might just be capable of being transferred onto light duties—as long as they were very light—and the same number of the best of the light-duties men could then be put into the work parties. The combined number was four hundred and six. Yes, he thought, that’s the maximum number he could find, four hundred and six men. And yet today, as Nakamura hit him again and again, he knew it would not be enough. He would have to give up to Nakamura even more men.

As suddenly as he had begun, Major Nakamura stopped beating him and stepped away. Nakamura scratched his shaved head and looked up at the Australian. He stared hard and deep into his eyes, and the Australian returned his stare, and in that exchange of glances they expressed everything that was not in Fukuhara’s translation. Nakamura was saying he would prevail, come what may, and Dorrigo Evans was replying that he was an equal and that he would not submit. And only with that silent conversation finally done did the haggling resume in this strange bazaar of life and death.

Nakamura named the figure of four hundred and thirty men and would not budge. Evans blustered, held firm, blustered some more. But Nakamura had begun scratching his elbow furiously and now spoke forcefully.

The Emperor wills it, Fukuhara translated.

I know, Dorrigo Evans said.

Fukuhara said nothing.

Four hundred and twenty-nine, said Dorrigo Evans and bowed.

And so the day’s deal was done and the business of the day began. Dorrigo Evans momentarily wondered whether he had won or lost. He had played the game as best he could, and every day he lost a little more, and the loss was counted in the lives of others.

He went over to the Wailing Wall and laid the sick man down by the log with the other sick, and was about to go to the hospital and begin the selection when he had the feeling he had lost or misplaced something.

He turned back around.

In the same way it covered logs, sleepers, fallen bamboo, railway iron and any number of other inanimate things, the rain now snaked over Tiny Middleton’s corpse. It was always raining.

YOURS, ISN’T IT?
Sheephead Morton asked, proffering Darky Gardiner a sledgehammer at the depot where the prisoners collected their tools. He had huge hands like vices and a head that he himself described as rougher than the road out of Rosebery. His name came not from his looks, but from his childhood growing up in Queenstown—a remote copper mining town on the Tasmanian west coast, a land made in equal parts of rainforest and myth—where for a time his family had been so poor that they had only been able to afford sheepheads for food. His gentleness when sober was only matched by his violence when drunk. He loved fighting, and once drunk he had challenged an entire busload of diggers returning from leave in Cairo to take him on. When told to shut up and sit down, he had turned to Jimmy Bigelow and, shaking his head in disgust, summed up a world of contempt with just eight words: You don’t get rats out of mice, Jimmy.

Tiny’s, Darky Gardiner said.

Tiny had marked the best hammer in the camp’s collection by notching a T at the top of the handle so that he or Darky would recognise it each morning.

It’s the best hammer, said Sheephead Morton, to whom such things mattered. The handle’s a bit splintered but the head’s a good pound heavier.

And while Tiny had his strength and they had been on a piecework system, it had been the best sledgehammer. Every blow had the extra power of its weight, slamming the drill harder and deeper and helping Tiny and Darky finish their quota early. You just had to be as fit and strong as Tiny had been to keep lifting it and dropping it accurately.

He thought it helped, said Sheephead Morton, waiting for Darky Gardiner to take the hammer.

For all of them now, though, it was not about getting the work done but surviving the day. Darky Gardiner was too weak to lift the heavy hammer, hour after hour, each time holding its drop accurately so that it hit the bar flatly and cleanly, blow after blow. Now he only looked for the light hammers, the useless hammers, and tippy-tapped away, trying not to hurt himself or whoever was holding the bar, trying to conserve enough strength for the next blow, trying to survive another day.

Helped him into the grave, said Darky Gardiner, picking up a light sledgehammer with a loose head.

They all just wanted whatever was lighter to carry now, lighter to lift, easier to survive another day with. He could jam the head with some bamboo, thought Darky Gardiner. Come the day’s end he would be that little less exhausted. He balanced the hammer handle across his collarbone to have the most comfortable support for its weight. Feeling the lightness of the hammer there, he was almost happy, were it not that his head felt ever heavier.

A low murmur swept the prisoners like a breeze and then was gone. For really, what was there that could be said? They shuffled away and began the walk to the Line along the Dolly. With two Japanese guards up front and several coming up behind, they fanned out into single file. The least sick prisoners led the way, followed by the men with the seven stretchers carrying those too sick to walk but decreed by the Japanese fit enough to work, a position in the Line where they could be helped along but would not hold up everyone. Behind them followed men in various stages of decrepitude, with those on makeshift crutches bringing up the tail.

Fucking Christmas pageant, said someone behind Darky Gardiner.

He concentrated on the legs in front of him. They were filthy and skeletal, the muscles of their calves and thighs ragged sinews that disappeared where their buttocks should have been.

Even before this grotesque caravan reached the small cliff at the camp’s far edge, where the prisoners had to climb a bamboo ladder tied together with wire—a rickety affair that had to be tested at each rung and never taken for granted—Darky Gardiner wanted to lie down and sleep forever. Above the ladder was a series of foot holds, slimy with rain and stinking, muddy shit, where the early-morning exertion had brought on an inevitable response in the near-naked prisoners as they climbed.

They worked together, passing up tools through a human chain, hauling up the weaker, somehow getting the stretchers up without mishap. The communal strength that this spoke of left Darky Gardiner feeling a little less weary and a little stronger when he reached the top of the cliff. And he needed all his strength, for he was that day the sergeant in charge of a gang of sixty men.

The morning light was still dim, and once they left the cliff and entered the jungle the world grew black and the track seemed darker and more confused than Darky Gardiner recalled it. Darky Gardiner did all he could to be a good gang leader, to get around the guards as much as it was possible, finding ways of cheating their quotas, of taking whatever opportunity presented itself to steal something of value, as long as the theft could not be traced, of keeping the bashings down, of helping the men of his gang survive another day. But today he was not himself. He had some bad fever—dengue, malaria, scrub typhus, cerebral malaria—it was hard to know what it was, and it didn’t matter anyway, and he instead tried to focus on helping his men. He took a heavy coil of wet hemp rope off young Chum Fahey, whose shin was an ulcerated mess. Chum had borrowed his cousin’s birth certificate to enlist, had been in the army for three years and was yet to turn eighteen. Darky had seen boys like Chum break like a stick once life turned against them. He threw the coiled hawser over his left shoulder to balance the sledgehammer on his right.

As they moved up the track, Darky Gardiner devoted his mind to reading the path in front of him and disciplining his exhausted body to place a foot or leg this way and not that, in order that he not injure himself. He had always been nimble. Even when he felt about to fall, he still had in his weakened state the ability to recover. He still retained enough strength in his thighs and calves to make the adept small leaps and twists to miss one obstacle, and use another—a rock, a log—to avoid some energy-sapping puddle or mess of fallen thorny bamboo.

And again he tried to tell himself how this was a good day and how lucky he was in his strength, which helped preserve itself; for Darky Gardiner understood that weakness only created more weakness, that every misstep led to a thousand more, that every time he balanced on his toes on one craggy piece of limestone it mattered to concentrate on getting the next step to the next craggy rock or slimy log right, so that he would not fall and hurt himself, so he might do the same again tomorrow and all the days after that. But he did not believe, as Tiny Middleton had, that his body would save him. He did not want to end up clawing his chest crying out
Me!
Darky Gardiner did not have many beliefs. He did not believe he was unique or that he had some sort of destiny. In his own heart he felt all such ideas were a complete nonsense, and that death could find him at any moment, as it was now finding so many others. Life wasn’t about ideas. Life was a bit about luck. Mostly though, it was a stacked deck. Life was only about getting the next footstep right.

The prisoners heard a curse and their Indian file stopped. When they looked up and back they could see that Darky Gardiner had snagged his boot in a limestone cleft. Darky twisted back and forth and finally freed his foot. There was a laugh. The boot’s upper was on Darky’s foot, but the sole had completely separated, the makeshift stitching having torn apart, and was still stuck in the rock cleft.

Darky reached down and the sole tore in two when he pulled it out. He dropped the pieces, his shoulders sagged, maybe he swore, maybe he didn’t. They were far too lost in their own battles to notice, and they all just had to start on their way again. He too kept stumbling forward, shuddering, the remnant of the boot flapping around his ankle. Then he yelled in pain as he jerked his leg back, fell and could no longer get up.

He’s looking fucked, said Chum Fahey.

His shoe’s fucked, said Sheephead Morton.

Same thing, said Chum Fahey.

Without boots or shoes most men struggled to last long. Without boots or shoes it was only a matter of days or hours before a foot was cut or wounded by bamboo thorns, rocks, the endless blasted sharp rock fragments that were the floor of the cutting. Sometimes, within hours, an infection began that in days would turn septic and within a week become a tropical ulcer, the ulcers that were leading so many men to their deaths. Some men who had spent their lives in the bush didn’t seem to be too affected and survived well enough, some even preferring to go bare footed. But Darky Gardiner wasn’t a West Australian stockman like Bull Herbert, or a blackfella like Ronnie Owen. He was a Hobart wharfie and his feet were soft and vulnerable.

The column halted, waited, relieved for the break. Darky Gardiner was thinking of a pie he had once had, steak and kidney with a shortcrust pastry and a lush chutney, anything that took him away from that jungle. His mouth was salivating; the chutney was apricot, the gravy peppered. But he could not stop panting.

Mate? Sheephead Morton said.

Yeah, mate, Darky Gardiner said.

Getting better, mate?

Sure, mate.

Gotta get better, mate.

Yeah, mate, Darky Gardiner said.

As he panted and puffed for a good half-minute more, trying to get his breath, he watched a monkey. It sat hunched up in the lowlying branch of a tree a few yards down the track, shivering, hair wet through.

Look at that poor little bloody bugger, Darky Gardiner said finally.

He’s free, you idiot, Sheephead Morton said, parting his own wet hair with his saveloy fingers and putting his slouch hat back on. When I’m free I’m going to get back home to Queenstown, I’m going to get on the piss and I’m not going to get off it till I get to a hundred.

Yeah, mate.

Ever been to Queenie, mate?

The rain kept on. Neither man said anything for a while. Darky Gardiner wheezed.

Nuh, mate.

There’s a big hill there, Sheephead Morton said. Mountain, really, and on one side there’s Queenie and on the other side is Gormanston. Middle of nowhere. Two mining towns. Rainforest once. The mines killed the lot. Not a fern left to wipe your arse with. Nowhere else like it in the world. Looks like the fucking moon. On a Saturday night you can get pissed, go over the hill, have a fight in Gormy and then come back home to Queenie. Where else in the world can you do that?

AS THEY WAITED,
there was little further talking because there was really little to talk about. Every man was trying to rest, to give his body what respite he could before the onslaught of labour for which he had neither the reserves of strength nor energy that might have made it bearable. Sheephead Morton lit up a rollie made from some local tobacco and a page of a Japanese army manual, inhaled deeply and passed it on.

What we smoking?

The
Kama Sutra
.

That’s Chinese.

So?

How’s his foot? asked someone from up the back.

No good, Sheephead Morton said, lifting Darky’s foot up and flicking some mud away. He moved the foot around his face as though it were a navigational instrument he was using to take a bearing.

The webbing’s split between his big toe and the next. Pretty bad.

Someone suggested that they could make a new sole for his shoe upper come the evening back at camp.

That’s the good thing, Darky Gardiner said. Still got the boot, eh?

No one spoke.

And I just need to rustle up a new sole and I’m back in business.

Reckon so, Darky, Chum Fahey said.

Everyone knew that there was no leather or rubber in the camp worthy of the name that could be pressed into service for a sole that would last even the walk to the Line, far less a day of labour.