David Malouf - The Great World

So far as Meggsie was concerned, he would always be on probation. That was the nub of the thing.

Apart from Mr Warrender, to whom she was fiercely loyal, there was only one man Meggsie had any time for. This was the actor Sessue Hayakawa. Vic knew him because he had been one of his mother’s favourites too.

‘He’s a dream,’ Meggsie would tell Vic and the girls when they came bustling into the kitchen to scrape bowls.

‘I thought he was a Jap,’ Vic would say cheekily.

‘Well, ’e’s a gentleman. Which is more than can be said fer you, young feller, with them hands .’ She meant his nails weren’t clean, but he was ashamed of his big hands and hid them. ‘Yer not in the race.’

‘The Jap race,’ he said under his breath (this was for the girls), and giggled. But the girls were not amused. A year back they would have been, but only Ellie laughed now, out of loyalty, and he felt oafish.

‘He’s suaaave ,’ Meggsie told them, and Vic had a vision of the sleek, cruel, broodingly attentive lover she must dream of, who stood at the furthest possible distance from what she had known in the flesh. From ‘fellers’, as she would have put it, ‘round here’.

‘Well,’ he thought, ‘yes, but she’s never had to change his sheets.’

‘What does Meggsie think of her dreamboat now?’ he wrote home after the Japs hit Pearl Harbor, still smarting, long after, from the snub he had felt and the disadvantage she had put him at in front of Lucille. But it would be four years before he got his answer.

THE EARLY DAYS at Changi were all idleness and neglect. The Japs, caught out by the suddenness of the collapse and the falling into their hands of so many thousands, had no idea as yet what to do with them. Left to their own devices, they did nothing. Even Doug, after his first picnic vision of it, fell quiet and was depressed.

To Digger it was terrible. The daily hanging about in irregular groups, the looseness, the disorder: sudden outbreaks of rebellious anger, then periods when the whole place seemed ghostly and they were struck, all of them, with the sleeping sickness.

The time they were in, like the unenclosed space of the camp, was limitless. Without boundaries it had no meaning. Young fellows who only weeks before had been full of fight and spirit, setting up races with one another, or boxing, or riding out on bicycles to the Happy World to have their fortunes told and play rough and find girls, shuffled about now like old men in a hospital yard, sucking fags, swapping rumours, feeding petty grievances. They neglected everything: let a grain of rice fall for the flies to swarm over; at the latrines were too lazy to cover their shit. Their insides went liquid. Everything they ate turned to slime.

This was despondency in its physical form, so childish and shameful that grown men wept at it. ‘I hate this,’ Digger told himself. ‘It’s worse than anything.’ It was the sun scrambling their brains. It was lack of activity. It was the shame and desperation they felt at being sold out by the higher-ups. It was the failure of the officers to impose order. It was their native slackness and refusal to accept authority — those were the theories.

But slowly, as the days went by, a kind of order began to emerge. It was rudimentary enough, a simpler version of the old one, but it grew in such fits and starts and bits and pieces that you could make nothing of it.

Makeshift shelters began to appear, flimsy affairs knocked up from whatever the men could scrounge. Cook-houses were established. Three times a day food was doled out, rice and a few vegetables with maybe a lump of fish in it, and you spent a good hour sometimes hanging about in lines. A few of the officers, who still had faith in the civilising power of education and saw in the enforced idleness and boredom of the lower ranks an opportunity that might never recur, set up a school. They had textbooks, and a blackboard and chalk. They called themselves a university and gave lectures on all sorts of things. Digger went along once and heard a talk on Ancient Rome — the monetary reforms of the emperor Diocletian. Another time it was the Soviet Union, but that occasion ended in a ding-dong battle over Stalin’s pact with Hitler, and the anger on both sides was murderous.

Mac tried to talk Digger into doing French. They sweated over a lesson or two, but learning a language would take years, even Mac saw that, and they had no idea what they would be doing next week.

‘You’d be better off learnin’ bloody Japanese,’ Doug told them. ‘On’y I don’t s’pose they’re bloody offerin’ that. Bad for morale.’

Standing in line one day, waiting for his issue of rice, Digger found himself addressed by a fellow he had never seen before. He was muttering. All Digger had done was turn his head a little to see who it was.

‘They’re all bloody thieves in this camp,’ the boy told him passionately. ‘I lost a fucken good fountain-pen. Some bastard swiped it straight outa me pack!’

Another fellow, half behind the other, half beside, gave a scornful laugh. ‘You could’a done worse,’ he said. He turned to Digger. ‘He don’t even know how to write.’

‘Yair? Well what’s that gotta do with it?’ the first boy shouted. ‘Eh? Eh?’ and he began to jab the heel of his hand into the other’s shoulder. ‘I traded that pen fer a fucken good pair a’ socks. A man oughten’a steal from ’is mates.’

Faced with this fiercely honourable proposition the other fellow shrugged and turned away.

‘Me name’s Harris,’ the boy told Digger, ‘Wally’ — as if he had seen that Digger was the one man in all this throng who might remember it for the rest of his life. He waited for Digger to respond but Digger drew away. He had nothing to do with these men. He had been late lining up, that’s all. He had his own mob. But the boy would not be put off.

‘I oughten’a be here by rights,’ he confided. ‘I’m on’y sixteen. I lied to ’em. Me mum didn’ mind.’

Standing with his dixie and spoon in hand and the hat far back on his curls, his expression was a mixture of cocky satisfaction at his own cleverness and dismay at where it had got him. He was trying to interest Digger. He was one of those fellows that no one notices and he was eager now to pick up with someone, anyone, having grasped by instinct that you could only survive here if you had mates.

‘I could’a done a good swap for that pen,’ he said, ‘it was a real goodun. Listen,’ he said, dropping his voice so that the other fellow could not hear, ‘waddaya reckon I oughta do? I don’t feel so good. I got the shits all the time, I’m crook. What can I do?’

But Digger was at the head of the line now. He took his rice and moved away. He saw the boy turn and look after him, but there were dozens of fellows like that, who once the ranks were open were helplessly adrift.

‘I don’t eat it,’ another man told him, another stranger, when he was once more in the line. ‘I don’t eat the shit.’ Digger wondered then why he was lining up for it. He was a big, heavy-shouldered fellow, blond, red-faced, pustular.

‘If they keep feedin’ us this muck, and we keep eatin’ it, our eyes’ll go slanty. Dja know that? This professor tol’ me. It’s what the bastards want! T’ make fucken coolies of us. They hate white men.’

Digger frowned. Was he crazy? He was dancing about behind Digger with his dixie all washed and ready in his hand. Half crazy with hunger, he looked.

‘On’y I don’t eat it, see? They can’t make yer, can they? They won’t get me! I’d rather bloody starve! All it does anyway is give yer the shits.’