David Malouf - The Great World

Mac’s characteristic expression was a long-faced, half-woeful, half-comic look that went with his being, as Doug said, a ‘black-stump philosopher’.

‘The big trouble with you, mate,’ Doug would tell him, ‘is that you know too much fer yer own good. All it does is make ya mournful. Now, I ask you, what’s the use a’ that ?’

‘I’m not mournful,’ Mac would insist.

‘A’ course you are. You’re about the mournfullest bloke I ever laid eyes on. Honest, Mac, you oughta take a dekko at yerself. I tell ya, mate, you look as if the world ended last Mondee and you just got news of it.’

These sallies were pure affection. They took in a side of Mac that in Doug’s opinion was excessive. He needed to be jollied out of it. It was his ratbag side, the side of all those failed, unforgotten utopias that blokes like Mac, dyed-in-the-wool idealists, would give their lives for — and other people’s lives as well if they could get them, all in the name of some future that most fellers didn’t want and couldn’t use and weren’t fit for, and couldn’t be made fit for either, unless you wrenched them this way and that till there was nothing left that was human in them.

Mac defended himself, lost his temper, became just the sort of angelic storm-trooper Doug accused him of being, then laughed and put on his self-deprecating, comic-suffering look, but refused to admit defeat.

Doug’s rough cynicism beat him every time, but somehow, when it was over, he was not beaten. He was self-possessed, Mac, but he was also passionate, and contradictory too. Only when he was leaning forward into the music and utterly absorbed by it were the different sides of him resolved. What you saw then — what Digger saw — was the absolute purity of him.

‘I’ll never be like that,’ Digger thought. ‘Not in a million years.’

Then Mac would catch him looking and wink, and what you saw then was the odd humour of the man.

When the chance came to move out of the camp and do some real work they leapt at it. The work was coolies’ work, hard labour at the docks, but they wanted the exercise. There was nothing dishonourable in it, if you didn’t see it that way. Besides, there would be good pickings among the piled-up stores in the godowns. Best of all, they would be on their own again, away from the sickness of spirit and irregular violence and filth of the camp. Nearly three hundred strong, they were to set up quarters in the abandoned booths and tea-gardens of the Great World, an amusement park where in the early days they had gone to drink Chinese beer, dance with taxi-dancers and have their pictures taken. From there they would march, each morning, in parties to the docks.

‘This is all right, eh?’ Digger said when he saw it. A fairground. It was like coming home.

They spent the first night cleaning the place up a bit and fixing showers. There was plenty of running water. Then, all washed and spruced up, they went for a walk through the alleys and lanes between the stalls. A real maze, it was, of lathe and crumbling plaster, with sketchy paintings, half-faded, of horses and misty-looking mountains and clouds, and avenues of bulls with bulging eyes and miniature pagodas. It seemed unreal with no crowd to fill it, none of the noise and sweat and cooking smells from food stalls or the smell of charcoal from smoky stoves.

They wandered in groups and kept meeting other groups at the end of alleys. Very odd they looked too, in their boots and baggy shorts and nothing else. Like kids, Digger thought, who’d got locked in after the store keepers had shut up shop and the taxi-dancers, the actors in the Chinese theatre and the sellers of potency pills and balms had all gone home.

They greeted one another shyly and had to make themselves small to get past in the narrow lanes, their skylarking self-conscious in so quiet a place. There was a moon. Everything looked blue. The walls were mostly blue anyway, ‘celestial’ blue. The reflections from them gave men’s faces, from a distance, a luminous, rather ghostly look. It was weird though not scary.

It was an interlude of pure play, but they were so subdued by the emptiness of the place, its peeling vistas and derelict squares, that it became dreamlike. At last they went whispering through the alleys like quiet drunks, still full of high spirits but afraid to wake someone.

Ourselves, Digger thought, as their boots echoed on the gravel and laughter came through the walls.

THEY HAD BEEN working all morning, a small party inside a larger, mixed contingent of Australians, British and Dutch, in one of the biggest godowns on the docks. It was an immense place like a cathedral, a hundred and fifty yards long and sixty wide, all slatted walls where the light that beat in was dazzling, and, high up in the gloom under the rafters, sunshafts swarming with dust.

The dust was from the chaff bags they were lumping, or that others had lumped before them. They were choking with it. Their eyes were raw, their hair thick with it, they were powdered to the navel with a layer of fine dust that streaked where the sweat ran and where it got into their shorts, and went sodden round their balls, painfully itched and rubbed. It was a kind of madness they moved in. Half-naked, and barefoot mostly, they stumbled through a storm in which they were shadows bent low and tottering under the hundredweight sacks.

The guards too suffered. They had swathed their mouths and nostrils in knotted scarves, but the dust got in under the collars of their uniforms, clogged their lashes, and hung on their brows with an eerie whiteness. They wore heavy boots and leggings, the sign that they were masters here, but sweated for it.

Generations of coolies, Chinese for the most part, but Tamils too, had worked to unload ships and stock these godowns with bales of rubber, wool and cotton; sacks of flour, salt, sugar, rice; and cartons of corned meat, condensed milk, apricot halves and pineapple chunks in cans. A new sort of coolie, they were clearing it now to be shipped as spoils of war to the new masters of this corner of the earth.

Vic humped his sack with the rest. It was an animal’s work though a man could do it, and the dust was a torment, but none of that worried him. Neither did the weight, the two hundred pounds laid on his neck, which he had to trot a hundred yards with. He could do it. He was strong enough. And there was something in him that these things could not touch. He was lit up with the assurance of his own invulnerability. Had been all morning. There was no reason for it.

He knew the danger of such moods. They had dogged him all his life. In the drunkenness of his own power and youth he would lose track of things, grow reckless, and out of sheer physical exuberance say something sooner or later that he did not mean to say, or blindly strike out. That was the danger. He knew this. He was watching himself.

What hurt him, and in the most sensitive part of himself, was that somewhere not so very far away, fiery battles must be taking place, fought by fellows no older than himself, and no more daring either — part of a war that would be talked of for all the rest of his life, and which he would have no share in; no campaign ribbons, no medals, no stories to tell except this shameful one. He would live through this stretch of history and be denied even the smallest role in it.

He was sufficiently certain of his own courage to believe that in the ordinary circumstances of the soldier’s life he would, given the chance, have acquitted himself in a quite superlative way. He had spent his youth studying to be noble. But the world he was in now was a mystery to him. You do not prepare yourself for shame.

The guards were edgy. All this dust and the heat of the place maddened them. They too were young. They resented having to stand guard over coolies. To restore their own sense of honour they would suddenly strike out, and there was no way of knowing when the blow was coming or where from. Out of the storm of dust, that’s all, whack! and you took it.