David Malouf - The Great World

Digger was astonished by what was revealed to him, the glimpse he got behind the scenes into a world he had thought till now was unshakeably solid.

‘But I told you it was a game,’ Vic told him. ‘Didn’t you believe me?’

The magic for him lay in the very thing that Digger found so unsettling, the extent to which the structure he was erecting, for all its being underwritten out there by so much that was real and touchable, was a secret one, visible only to himself, Digger, his advisers and a few collaborators who were in the know. But it was solid enough. ‘There’s banks in this, Digger,’ he would whisper, when he saw that Digger had doubts, and he would name them. But Digger, instead of being consoled, was terrified. Men drew their wages, their families put clothes on their backs and bread into their mouths, bought TV sets and video recorders; buildings went up; produce was shifted; a whole society breathed and ate and slept — but the basis of it all was no more than air, no more than promises, trust.

Vic laughed. ‘But what else could it be?’ he asked, as if Digger were a child. And Digger was scared by that, too. By common agreement they fell into the habit of talking as little as possible of all this, and then only in the lightest terms.

‘Agh,’ he said now, hauling his tackle in, ‘this is a mug’s game. Let’s see if Jenny’s got a cuppa tea,’ and he made to move, but Vic stopped him.

‘Not yet, eh? Let’s wait a bit. It’s early enough.’

Digger was surprised but made no objection. He stowed his line, leaned back, and they settled and sat in silence. There was nothing unusual in it — they could spend long periods just sitting; but he was uneasy just the same. It was the third time in a week that Vic had just turned up like this.

‘I’m on tenterhooks,’ he had confessed the first time, ‘about this bit of business we’ve got on. This last bit. You don’t mind, do you?’ He was worried about the market. ‘I want t’ get all this finalised,’ he said, ‘a bit sooner than we thought. The market’s too high. In fact that’s good for us, it’s what we need. Only I don’t trust it.’

But they had none of that sort of talk today. It was something else.

Vic, his boots set down carefully in the dirt, his back hard against a she-oak, felt the silence swell; out over the swarming river, but back too into the clearing where the store was and beyond into the trackless scrub. But the real expansion was in him. Sitting quietly now with his head back, he saw from outside him, above and at a distance, these two old blokes sitting at ease beside a river, and it seemed miraculous to him that one of them, against all the odds, should be himself. Miraculous, too — there was no other word for it — that this breath should be here for him to catch hold of, and that this moment, just after four on an autumn afternoon in 1987, should have been waiting up ahead for them to reach it; like the leaves here that threw shadows on his hands, and had also been growing slowly towards it, and having arrived now, were turning over with a sound that was just perceptible if you listened, a little shush and scratch against the stillness.

‘Listen, Digger,’ and Digger was disturbed for the second time by something new in his voice, ‘do you remember a cove called Anson?’

Digger sucked his cheeks in and looked out at the river. After a little he said: ‘Anson, yes. John Archibald.’

Vic let out a long breath. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’d be him,’ though in fact he had never till now heard these other names. He could not have explained, even to Digger, the ease he felt at having them spoken.

He was a jackaroo from up Singleton way, twenty, maybe twenty-one or — two. Claimed to have played half-back for one of the state teams but was almost certainly lying. ‘What year was that, mate?’ one of the others had challenged. Vic remembered the lie.

One day early on, sitting in the sun in just their shorts, they had played a game of draughts. They were seated on either side of an upturned drum, he couldn’t remember where, but the heat was intense and the sunlight blinding. Changi. Or it might have been earlier, on the ship going up.

Blue eyes. Hair bleached to unruly straw. Rough, very cocky, and dead sure when they sat down that he would win.

‘Only I was surer,’ Vic thought, and could feel even at this distance the little spurt of triumph, the joy in his own good fortune and skill, as the move came up and he took it, ‘Ha, I’ve got ya!’

The look of utter astonishment on Anson’s face — that too had been such a pleasure to him. The feller couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t hide his irritation either. He had been so certain he would win.

They were in different mobs and had nothing to do with one another after that, even when they found themselves in the same camp up on the line. Then one day, in a period when they were working sixteen hours at a stretch and were half dead on their feet, in a trance most of them, so sick and brutalised they hardly knew where they were, he had been sitting over his bit of midday rice, and in glancing up for some reason — no reason, in fact — had seen Anson squatting just yards away at the side of the track.

There was no modesty among them, they were past all that; but he looked away, and then, after a moment, looked back again, just as Anson, with a worried frown half-turned to glance behind him (they all did that) and inspect what he had done. Vic saw it too, and their eyes met.

They were mostly indifferent to one another by now, too preoccupied with their own terrors to care how the next man felt. But they all knew what a white turd signified. Cholera. It was a sentence of death.

He meant nothing to him, that fellow; but he had thought he would never forget his look — or the stab of panic he felt in his own bowels — as that bit of intelligence passed between them.

He had forgotten it, of course, in time. As he had forgotten so many other things. Till just this week it had come back to him as if no time at all had gone by, just seconds. The man, moving back into himself, got to his feet and stood there, his fingers working clumsily to adjust his shorts.

The man, the man — but what was he called? It seemed shameful to Vic that he could not remember, though in fact they had only spoken the once. He worried his way through the alphabet, finding other names that he had also forgotten, but not that one. Then he took his mind off it and it was there.

What he had been struck by, after that first glance of panicky recognition, was the mildness with which Anson stood watching his own fingers deal with his shorts; with the ordinary but quite tricky business of hooking them up so they wouldn’t fall. He had felt a kind of awe at the futility of it, as if a cold hand had been laid on him, too. He was amazed (but there was horror in it too) at the distance Anson had come since their draughts game. There was no truculence in him, none at all. With a kind of dumb patience he stood tying the rag-ends together, then turned and moved away.

But what he thought now was something different: that it had taken him forty years to accept the hard facts of existence, whereas that fellow Anson had got there in just months.

Digger sat quiet.

Anson. He came early on the list. After Amos, Reginald James. He could have gone on if Vic had required it. To Aspie, Ball, Barclay, Baynes, Beeston. .

There were nine more after that. Then Curran.

GREAT EVENTS DO not always cast a shadow before them. In Malaya in 1941 the Japanese Imperial Army arrived on rickety bikes. It didn’t look like the first part of a triumph or a moment from history.

You saw them pedalling up the track between the rubber trees, rifles slung across their backs, glasses ablaze, rubber boots and leggings working up and down. Very spindly, the bikes looked. The riders sweated in their heavy gear. You took aim, squeezed gently, and the whole enterprise went haywire, the rider waving his arms about as if he believed there was something up there, the hem of a garment or the big toe of one of his ancestors, that he could grab hold of to hoist himself aloft. He scrabbled for it. Meanwhile the wheels went spinning, gravity insisted, and rider and machine slewed off into the ditch. It was comic.