The Narrow Road to the Deep North (47 page)

Dorrigo Evans looked downwards, and though he could see nothing, it reminded him that few had that one key to survival, boots. Holding a lantern at ankle height, he walked slowly along the first row, looking at the bare feet, some badly infected, some swollen with beri-beri, some with stinking ulcers so large and vile that they were like angry craters eating almost to the bone.

He stopped at one: a severe, untreated ulcer that had left a thin strip of intact skin down the outer side of the calf, the rest of the leg being a huge ulcer from which poured offensive, greyish pus. Sloughing tendons and fasciae were exposed, the muscles were tunnelled and separated by gaping sinuses, between which he could glimpse a raw tibial bone that looked as if a dog had gnawed it. The bone, too, was starting to rot and break off into flakes. He lifted his gaze to see a pale, wasted child. No, Chum Fahey could not go.

Report to hospital when parade has ended, said Dorrigo Evans.

The next man was Harry Dowling. Dorrigo had successfully removed his appendix three months ago, a triumph in such circumstances of which he was proud. And now Dowling seemed in not the worst shape. He had shoes and his ulcers were only mild. Dorrigo looked up at him, put his hand on his shoulder.

Harry, he said, as gently as he could, as though waking a child.

I am become a carrion monster.

The next in line was Ray Hale, whom they had managed to bring through cholera. He too Dorrigo touched on the shoulder.

Ray, he said.

Thou art come unto a feast of death.

Ray, he said.

Dread Charon, frightful and foul.

And so Dorrigo continued on, up and down the lines of those he had tried to save and now had to pick, touching, naming, condemning those men he thought might best cope, the men who had the best chance of not dying, who would most likely die nevertheless.

At its end, Dorrigo Evans stepped back and dropped his head in shame. He thought of Jack Rainbow, whom he had made to suffer so, Darky Gardiner, whose prolonged death he could only watch. And now these hundred men.

And when he looked up, there stood around him a circle of the men he had condemned. He expected the men to curse him, to turn away and revile him, for everyone understood it was to be a death march. Jimmy Bigelow stepped forward.

Look after yourself, Colonel, he said, and put out his hand to shake Dorrigo’s. Thanks for everything.

You too, Jimmy, Dorrigo Evans said.

And, one by one, the rest of the hundred men shook his hand and thanked him.

When it was done, he walked off into the jungle at the side of the parade ground and wept.

WE’RE NOT SURE
what he knows, a nurse said. She had seen his dog-black eyes glistening with a life of their own under the neon tubes of the ward. I think he hears me, though, she said. I do.

Broken as he was, he could recognise that it was a fine room he had been given, looking out on giant fig trees with their flying roots and lush greenery. But he did not feel at home. It did not feel his place. It was not the island of his birth. The birds cried differently at dawn, harsh, happy calls of green parrots and gang-gang parrots. Not the soft, smaller, more complex trilling of birdsong, of the wrens and honeyeaters and silvereyes of his island home, the fetching return call of the jo-witty, all the birds he now wished to fly and sing with. It was not a road rolling from the cup of a woman’s waist over a pewter sea to a rising moon.

For my purpose holds
, he whispered—

What’s he saying? asked one nurse.

He’s raving, said a second. Better get a doctor. It’s the morphine or the end, one or the other, or both. Some say nothing, some give up on breathing, some rave.

As politicians, journalists and shock jocks competed in their ever wilder panegyrics of a man they had never understood, he was dreaming of just one day: of Darky Gardiner and Jack Rainbow, of Tiny Middleton. Mick Green. Jackie Mirorski and Gyppo Nolan. Little Lenny going home to Mum in the Mallee. Of one hundred men shaking his hand. One thousand others, names recalled, names forgotten, a sea of faces. Amie, amante, amour.

Life piled on life, he mumbled, every word now a revelation, as if it had been written for him, a poem his life and his life a poem.

—something more . . . something more . . . he had lost some lines somewhere and he no longer knew what the poem was or who had written it, so totally now was the poem him. This grey spirit, he thought despondently, or was he remembering?—yes, that was it—

And he felt shame and he felt loss and he felt his life had only ever been shame and loss, it was as though the light was now going, his mother was calling out, Boy! Boy! But he could not find her, he was returning to hell and it was a hell he would never escape.

And he remembered Lynette Maison’s face as she slept, and the Glenfiddich whisky miniatures he had drunk before he left, and Rabbit Hendricks’ illustration of Darky Gardiner sitting in an opulent armchair through which little silver fish swam, in a Syrian village in which Yabby Burrows and his spiked hair was about to dissolve into Syrian dust. And somehow it made no sense to him that the picture survived and would be reproduced endlessly, but Yabby Burrows was gone and to his life no future and no meaning could ever be attached. There was someone in a blue uniform standing above him. Dorrigo wanted to tell him he was sorry, but when he opened his mouth only drool rolled out.

He was in any case hurtling backwards into an ever faster swirling maelstrom of people, things, places, backwards and round and deeper and deeper and deeper into the growing, grieving, dancing storm of things forgotten or half-remembered, stories, lines of poetry, faces, gestures misunderstood, love spurned, a red camellia, a man weeping, a wooden church hall, women, a light he had stolen from the sun—

He remembered another poem, he could see the poem in its entirety, but he did not want to see it or know it; he could see Charon’s burning eyes staring into his but he did not want to see Charon, he could taste the obol being forced into his mouth, he felt the void he was becoming—

—and finally he understood its meaning.

His last words, as witnessed by a Sudanese orderly:

Advance forward, gentleman. Charge the windowsill.

He felt a snare tightening around his throat; he gasped and threw a leg out of the bed, where it jerked for a second or two, thumping the steel frame, and died.

THE LONG NIGHT
waxed, the slow quarter-moon continued rising through black rungs, the night moaned with many groans and snores. Bonox Baker turned up at the officers’ tent with the news of Darky Gardiner’s drowning. By the light of a kerosene lantern, Dorrigo Evans entered it in his diary as murder. The word seemed inadequate. What didn’t? In his small shaving mirror, which lay next to the diary, he glimpsed his frightful reflection, hair hoary and unkempt, fierce eyes lit with fire and a filthy rag hanging around his neck. Had he become the ferryman? He turned the mirror upside down. It was almost midnight, and he knew he should try to get a few hours’ sleep so he might have the strength to make it through another day. He wanted to be first at the dawn parade to meet the hundred men as they arrived and wish them well before they left.

A bag of mail had arrived that morning with the truck, the first any of them had seen for nine months. As ever, the correspondence was random. Some men received several letters, many men none. There was one letter for Dorrigo Evans from Ella. He had intended to wait until now, the end of his day, for the immense pleasure of reading it, so that he might fall asleep with it filling his dreams, but he felt so home sick on seeing the letter when it was handed to him in the morning before the parade he had torn it open and read it there and then. He could not believe her news. All day it had haunted him. Rereading it now at the end of the day he still found it impossible to digest.

The letter was six months old. It ran to several pages. Ella wrote that although nothing had been heard from Dorrigo or, for that matter, from his unit for over a year, she knew he was alive. The letter talked of her life, of Melbourne in all its mundane detail. All this he could believe. But unlike other men, who pored over every sentence of their letters and cards from home, only one detail registered with Dorrigo Evans. Enclosed with the letter was a newspaper cutting headed ADELAIDE HOTEL TRAGEDY. It told of how, after a gas explosion in its kitchen, the King of Cornwall hotel had burnt down with the loss of four lives, including that of the much-respected publican, Mr Keith Mulvaney. Another three people were unaccounted for and believed to have also perished, including two guests and Mrs Mulvaney, the publican’s wife.

Dorrigo Evans read the newspaper cutting for a third and then a fourth time. Outside it was raining again. He felt cold. He pulled his army blanket round him tighter, and by the light of the kerosene lantern he once more read Ella’s letter.

One of Daddy’s friends high up made some enquiries for me with the coroner’s office in Adelaide, Ella wrote. He said it had now been made official, but because of the tragedy and people’s feelings and morale and all that they’ve kept it out of the paper. They had to use teeth. Can you imagine? Poor Mrs Keith Mulvaney is now among the confirmed dead. I am so sorry, Dorry. I know how fond you were of your uncle and aunt. Tragedies like this make me realise how lucky I am.

Mrs Keith Mulvaney?

For some time the name made no more sense than the news.

Mrs Keith Mulvaney.

She had only ever been Amy to him. He had no idea it was a lie, the only lie Ella ever told him.

He put out the kerosene lantern to conserve fuel and lit the stub of a candle. For a long time he watched the flame refusing to die. The smoke tapered into tiny smuts that played up and down in the pulsing areolae of candlelight. He looked at the light, at the smuts. As though there were two worlds. This world and a hidden world that was a real world of wild, flying particles spinning, shimmering, randomly bouncing off each other, and new worlds coming into being in consequence. One man’s feeling is not always equal to all that life is. Sometimes it’s not equal to anything much at all. He stared into the flame.

Amy, amante, amour, he whispered, as if the words themselves were smuts of ash rising and falling, as though the candle were the story of his life and she the flame.

He lay down in his haphazard cot.

After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding.

Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page.

But there was nothing—the final pages had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding. There was no last page. The book of his life just broke off. There was only the mud below him and the filthy sky above. There was to be no peace and no hope. And Dorrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end.

He would live in hell, because love is that also.

He put the book down. Unable to sleep, he stood up and went to the edge of the shelter beyond which the rain teemed. The moon was lost. He relit the kerosene lantern and made his way to the bamboo urinal on the far side of the camp, relieved himself, and on his return noticed growing at the side of the muddy trail, in the midst of the overwhelming darkness, a crimson flower.

He leant down and shone his lantern on the small miracle. He stood, bowed in the cascading rain, for a long time. Then he straightened back up and continued on his way.

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Epub ISBN: 9781448192243

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Published by Chatto & Windus 2014

First published in Australia by Knopf Australia 2013

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Copyright © Richard Flanagan 2013

Richard Flanagan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

Chatto & Windus

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