The Narrow Road to the Deep North (25 page)

There’s always a good thing if you think about it, Darky Gardiner said.

You betcha, Darky, Sheephead Morton said, opening his dixie, splitting his lunch rice ball in half and putting one portion in his mouth.

And that was that. There was nothing that could be done, and soon they would have to start moving again. As he lay there, Darky Gardiner felt his tin dixie press hard into his side and was reminded how hungry he was, and how in that small tin box was a golf ball of rice that he could eat now. It was muddy from his fall, but it was food. And back in camp was his condensed milk, which he now resolved he would have that night. And that was a good thing too.

He forced himself to sit up. So many good things, really, thought Darky Gardiner. If only it wasn’t for the pain in his feet, his aching head, and that the more he thought about the possibility of food, the hungrier he felt, it would be as good as it could get, all things considered.

Next to him, he could hear Sheephead Morton swallowing. A few others followed suit. Some took just a few grains of rice from their ball; some scoffed the whole thing in a gulp.

What’s the time? Darky Gardiner asked Lizard Brancussi, who somehow had managed to keep a watch.

Seven-fifty a.m., Lizard Brancussi said.

If he ate his rice ball now, thought Darky Gardiner, he would have nothing more to eat for another twelve hours. If he kept it, he would have five hours until their short lunch break—five hours in which he could at least look forward to the prospect of food. But if he ate it now, he would have neither food nor hope.

It was as if there were two people inside him, one urging sense, caution, hope—for what is the rationing of nothing, but the act of a man who hopes to survive?—and the other declaring itself for desire and despair. For if he waited until lunch, wasn’t there then a further seven hours without food? And what difference does it make if you don’t have food for twelve hours or seven hours? What is the difference, after all, between starving and starving? And if he ate now, wouldn’t that better his chances of surviving the day, of evading the blows of the guards, of having the energy not to misstep or make a mistaken blow that could lead to a potentially life-threatening injury?

And the demon of desire was strong in Darky Gardiner now, and his hand was reaching around to grab his dixie from his G-string when Sheephead Morton pulled him to his feet. The rest got back up, and Lizard Brancussi took the sledgehammer Darky had been shouldering, not out of any spirit of compassion but because they were in this, as in so many things, a strange animal, a single organism that somehow survived together. And Darky Gardiner was at once enraged that he was being so cruelly robbed of his food and relieved he would still have his rice ball for lunch. And in this strange mood of fury and relief he began trudging along again.

Then Darky Gardiner fell for a second time.

Give me a mo, boys, he said when they went to pull him back up.

They stopped. Some of them put down their tools, some squatted, some sat.

You know, Darky said, as he lay there in the wet darkness of the jungle floor, I always think of those poor bloody fish.

What you on about now, Darky? Sheephead Morton asked.

He was on about Nikitaris’s fish shop. In Hobart. How he used to take his Edie there for a feed after they had been to the flicks on a Saturday.

Couta and chips, he told them. Flake’s good, but couta’s sweeter. There was a big tank there, full of fish swimming round. Not goldfish—real fish, mullets and cocky salmons and flatties—fish like what we were eating. And we’d watch them, Darky Gardiner said, and even then Edie thought it must be sad for them, pulled out of the sea and ending up in that bloody awful fish tank, waiting for the fryer.

He’s always on about Nikitaris’s fish shop, Lizard Brancussi said.

I never thought how that’s their prison, Darky Gardiner said. Their camp. And I feel sick now thinking about those poor bloody fish in Nikitaris’s tank.

Sheephead Morton told him he was a potato cake short of a packet.

Darky Gardiner told them to go on or the Goanna would be into them. He said he’d make his own way in his own time.

None of them moved.

Go on, cobbers, he said.

None of them moved.

He said he would just lie there a few minutes longer and think about Edie’s breasts, that they were very beautiful and he needed to spend some time alone with them.

They said they weren’t leaving him.

He said he was the NCO and to get going.

Go! he suddenly yelled. It’s a fucking order. Go!

A fucking order? Sheephead Morton asked. Or just an order?

Yeah, funny, Darky Gardiner said. Funny as Rooster MacNeice reciting
Mein Kampf
. Go on. Fuck off.

They got to their feet if they were sitting or straightened up if they were standing and slowly got moving again. Darky was almost immediately lost to sight and to mind. The path grew muddy and treacherous, passing through slimy slots in jagged limestone, where feet could be and often were badly slashed. They began to quickly spread out, a prisoner’s place in the line more or less determined by his illness. A small band, no more than a dozen men, still miraculously well and fit out front, at the other end those who kept falling and stumbling, sometimes crawling, and in between those who were now taking their turn carrying the stretchers of the sick. And then were the men, fit though they were, who stayed with their mates, helping, holding, never giving up.

And so their hapless column went on, making its way along the narrow corridor they had made through the great teak trees and thorny bamboo of the jungle, too thick to allow any other form of passage. They went on trudging and falling, they went on stumbling and slipping and swearing as they thought of food, or as they thought of nothing, they went on crawling and shitting and hoping, on and on in a day that had not yet even begun.

DANTE’S FIRST CIRCLE,
Dorrigo Evans said to himself, as he walked out of the ulcer hut and headed across the creek and down the hill to continue his morning rounds at the cholera camp, a forsaken collection of open-walled shelters, roofed with rotting canvas. Here all with cholera were isolated. And here most died. He had a classical name for many of their miseries: the track to the Line was the Via Dolorosa, a name the prisoners in turn had picked up on and turned into the Dolly Rose, and then, simply, the Dolly. As he made his way, he ploughed his bare feet through the mud as a child, head bowed as a child, interested as a child neither in where he was going nor in what might happen next but only in the furrow his foot opened that vanished a moment later.

But he was not a child. He jerked his head up and walked erect. He had to project purpose and certainty, even when he had none. Some were saved, yes, he thought to himself, perhaps trying to persuade himself he was something more than a bad actor. Some we save. Yes, yes, he thought. And by keeping them isolated, they save the others. Yes! Yes! Yes! Or some of the others. It was all relative. He could count himself king, he thought—but he would not count and he would not think, for he was north-north-west of no south, that was all he could think, nonsense words, even his thoughts were not his own, hawks being handsawn. In truth, he no longer knew what to think, he lived in a madhouse beyond allusion, far less reason or thought. He could only act.

At the cholera compound perimeter, beyond which only those with the terrifying affliction and their carers were permitted to pass, he was met by Bonox Baker, who had volunteered to be an orderly, with the news that two more orderlies had themselves gone down with cholera. To volunteer to be an orderly was a sort of death sentence in itself. Though Dorrigo accepted the risk he ran as part of his calling as a doctor, he never understood why those who could avoid it chose such a fate.

How long have you been here, Corporal?

Three weeks, Colonel.

Bonox Baker’s stripling body rose up from two absurdly oversized and now battered brogues. He had acquired these while working in a Japanese work gang on the Singapore wharves, along with a carton of Bonox powder cans that had disappeared within a day and a new name that would remain with him for life. While everyone else was ageing by decades, sixteen-year-olds turning seventy, Bonox Baker was proceeding in the opposite direction. He was twenty-seven and looked nineteen.

Bonox Baker attributed his rejuvenation to the failure of Japan’s war. Though not evident to anyone else in that POW camp deep in the Siamese jungle, to Bonox Baker this failure was obvious. He regarded the war as an immense personal campaign directed by Germany and Japan against him, with the sole aim of killing him, and so far, by staying alive, he was winning. The POW camp was just an irrelevant oddity. Bonox Baker always aroused a certain curiosity in Dorrigo Evans.

Since the cholera started, Bonox? he asked.

Yes, sir.

They walked to the first shelter, where the most recent cases were put. Few ever made it to the second tent, where the survivors recuperated as best they could. Many in the first shelter were dead in a few hours. It was for Evans always the most despairing of the tents, but it was also where his real work lay. He turned to Bonox Baker.

You can go back, Bonox.

Bonox Baker said nothing.

Back to the main camp. You’ve done your share. More than your share.

I think I’d rather stay.

Bonox Baker halted at the tent entrance, and Dorrigo Evans with him.

Sir.

Dorrigo Evans noticed he had lifted his head and was for the first time looking directly at him.

I’d rather that.

Why, Bonox?

Some bloke has to.

He raised a crumbling canvas flap and Dorrigo Evans followed him through the flared nostril of the tent into a stench, redolent of anchovy paste and shit, so astringent it burnt in their mouths. The slimy red flame of a kerosene lantern seemed to Dorrigo Evans to make the blackness leap and twist in a strange, vaporous dance, as if the cholera bacillus was a creature within whose bowels they lived and moved. At the far end of the shelter, a particularly wretched-looking skeleton sat up and smiled.

I’m heading back to the Mallee, fellas.

His smile was wide and gentle, and served to make even more grotesque his monkey-like face.

Time to see the old dears, the Mallee boy said, flower-stem arms waving, yellow-ulcered mouth blossoming. Bugger me! Won’t there be some laughs and tears when they see their Lenny’s come home!

That kid started out half a larrikin and ended up not quite the full quid, Bonox Baker said to Dorrigo Evans.

Won’t there just? Eh?

No one answered the monkey-faced Mallee boy with the moony smile, or if they did, it was with low moans and soft cries.

Them Vics took any bugger, Bonox Baker said. How he conned ’em into taking him into the army I don’t know.

The Mallee boy lay back down as happily as if he were being put to bed by his mother.

He turns sixteen next month, Bonox Baker said.

Amidst the slurry of mud and shit was a long bamboo platform on which lay forty-eight other men in various stages of agony. Or so it seemed. One by one, Dorrigo Evans examined the strangely aged and shrivelled husks, the barked skin, mud-toned and black-shadowed, clutching twisted bones. Bodies, Dorrigo Evans thought, like mangrove roots. And for a moment the whole cholera tent swam in the kerosene flame before him. All he could see was a stinking mangrove swamp full of writhing, moaning mangrove roots seeking mud forever after to live in. Dorrigo Evans blinked once, twice, worried it might be a hallucination brought on in the early stages of dengue fever. He wiped his running nose with the back of his hand, and got on with it.

The first man seemed to be recovering; the second was dead. They rolled him up in his filthy blanket and left him for the funeral detail to take away and burn. The third, Ray Hale, had made such a recovery that Dorrigo told him he could leave that night and go onto light duties the following day. The fourth and the fifth Dorrigo Evans also pronounced dead, and he and Bonox Baker similarly furled their corpses in their reeking blankets. Death was nothing here. There was, Dorrigo thought—though he battled the sentiment as a treacherous form of pity—a sort of relief in it. To live was to struggle in terror and pain, but, he told himself, one had to live.

To make sure there was no pulse here either, he reached down and picked up the wrinkled wrist of the next curled-up skeleton, a still pile of bones and stinking sores, when a jolt ran through the skeleton and its cadaverous head turned. Strange, half-blind eyes, bulging glassily and only dimly seeing, seemed to fix themselves on Dorrigo Evans. The voice was slightly shrill, the voice of a boy lost somewhere in the body of a dying old man.

Sorry, doc. Not this morning. Hate letting you down.

Dorrigo Evans gently placed the wrist back on the dirty skin of a chest that sagged over its protruding ribs as if pegged out to dry.

That’s the way, Corporal, he said softly.

But Dorrigo’s eyes had momentarily looked up and been caught by Bonox Baker’s gaze. In his fearless superior’s eyes the orderly thought he could see a strange helplessness that for a moment approached fear. Abruptly, Evans looked back down.

Don’t say yes, he said to the dying man.

The skeleton slowly rolled his head back around and returned to his strange stillness. The few words had emptied him. With the tips of his fingers Dorrigo Evans traced the lank, wet hair on his wrinkled forehead, combing it away from his eyes.

Not to me or any bugger.

And so the skeletal pair continued on—the tall doctor, his short offsider, both nearly naked—the orderly with the absurd pair of oversized brogues and army slouch hat, its brim outrageously wide on his pinched face; the doctor with his greasy red bandana and his slanting officer’s cap looking as though he were about to hit the town in search of women. Everything about their procession felt to the doctor an immense charade, with his the cruellest character: the man who proffered hope where there was none, in this hospital that was no hospital but a leaking shelter made up of rags hung over bamboo, the beds that were no beds but vermin-infested bamboo slats, the floor that was filth, and him the doctor with almost none of the necessities a doctor needed to cure his patients. He had a greasy red bandana, a cap on an angle and a dubious authority with which to heal.