David Malouf - The Great World

They were jam-packed together in a heap, no space between them, hard bone against bone; but he felt himself entirely cut off; at an immense distance from the shouting, the panic, the hot presence of the others as they pressed against him. It was as if space now had developed the capacity to expand that just a moment back had belonged to time. He tried to make the laws of time and space operative again in his body, to get himself back into the world the others were in. If there was a price to pay for that he would pay it. He had no illusions about what they must think of him.

Everything that came to his senses had a ghostly quality, yet he had never been so aware of his own physical presence, the sensitivity of his lips which when he ran his dry tongue over them were all puffed with blood, the lightness of his belly, the terrible flexibility of his wrists.

Whenever, in flashes, his mind worked, all that had happened came back to him, and he was flooded with shame. But always it was his body that had the final word, and his body thought differently. It lived for itself and did not care.

‘How could I let it happen?’ he asked himself, ‘how could I?’ When the moment for action came and he should have moved into the gap he had opened, he had hung back and done nothing. He had stood there, too slow to move, too astonished that the moment he had been waiting for had actually come. Or this body he was lumbered with, always slower than the spirit, or cannier, or more cowardly, had acted in its own interests, and while it hovered there — it could only have been a second or two — the world had moved on, pushing him away to one side. The blades had come down and missed him. His body saved itself, and him, but shamefully, leaving him with a lifetime to face of the life it had bought for him. And the most shameful thing of all was that he could live with it. He was breathing hard. All his blood was pumping. He was full of the smell of himself.

His body was driving it home to him. You won’t die, son. Not of this.

The guards, themselves shocked to silence now at what had been done, began to get them to their feet, urging them gently, like children. No one among them, guard or prisoner, was ready yet to meet another man’s eye.

Vic too got to his feet. No one looked at him, and he felt a little rush of defiance come over him, like a child who has been unjustly accused. He began to find arguments in his own defence. He hadn’t asked Mac to step in between him and whatever fatality he had provoked. ‘I didn’t ask him to!’

They formed a line again and went quietly to their work, and when they came back through the godown with their load Mac’s body was no longer there.

They moved quietly, scarcely daring to breathe. As if sound, any sound at all, might set something off again. When one man jostled a chain and a length of it fell and rattled, they jumped like frogs, all of them, as if even the clank of iron against iron could send out ripples and break a head.

When he got his meal Vic did not know how to act, whether or not he could sit with them. He was still tense and close to tears, but determined now to tough it out. He took his dixie and sat a little way away from where Digger and another fellow, Ernie Webber, were already eating.

But when Doug came in he saw immediately how things were and came without fuss and sat at Vic’s side, but did not look at him.

Digger did. He looked up, noted what had happened, then looked away and went on chewing.

Seeing it, Vic put his head down, animal-like, and plunged his spoon into the mush. He ate. He was ravenous — that was the body again. He was ashamed but he couldn’t get enough of the sticky mess he was shoving into his mouth. He could have eaten pounds of the stuff, and still it wouldn’t have satisfied the craving he felt. He ate fast, with his head down like an animal, and the tears that welled up in him were tears of rage.

Slowly in the days that followed his life came back and began once again to be ordinary and his own.

His wound was still raw in him, and when his mind moved back to that fraction of a second before Mac went down, his blood quickened, he stepped forward, and his youthful spirit did what it had to do to save his honour. He died happy.

The awakening from this dream sent a wave of new shame over him. He would flush to the roots of his hair and look about quickly to see if any of the others had seen it.

He went out on the usual work parties and in the same group; taking the weight of the sack on his bent back and trotting with it to the place where it could be dumped, welcoming the opportunity it offered to lose himself in the exhaustion that extinguished thought. The young guard was there each day and acted as if nothing had happened. They ate their meal in a group just as before, shared what they scavenged, and Vic got his share. When he scavenged something he offered it round and even Digger took it. The lump in his throat began to melt.

‘I am nineteen,’ he told himself. He did not offer this as an excuse. His youth, if anything, was an affliction. It made things hard for him. What he meant was, ‘Nineteen is all I’ve got.’ It seemed, as the sum of what he had experienced, a large thing. But what he was thinking of was the future. ‘All this,’ he thought, ‘can be made good in time, if I get it. All I need now is time.’ Putting his head down in an animal way and getting on with it was the first step.

It wasn’t simply a matter of outliving his shame and the blood on his hands; but of proving to them, whoever they might be, that this life of his that had got itself saved, by whatever means, had been worth saving.

Meanwhile he dealt with the others as they dealt with him. He was prepared for the hostility Digger showed him.

They had never been close, but there was in Digger’s avoidance of him now a harder quality, a kind of contempt. What it said was: for me you are not there, you’re dead; you died back there where you ought to have done, instead of him . And in his old way, while deeply resenting this, he also, in another part of his nature, accepted it. Digger became the one among them whose good opinion he most cared for — because he knew Digger would not give it.

He deliberately put out of his mind the Warrenders and his old life, feeling that in betraying himself he had betrayed them, too. It hurt him to look at what he had done through their eyes, even more through Lucille’s. He set himself to live in the present. That is where he would remake his life. But once, in a dream, his father came to him. It was something he had dreaded. He shrank into himself.

He was drunk, of course, and there was a smirk on his face. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘fancy meetin’ you here. Fancy you an’ me bein’ in the same boat, eh?’ He was delighted that Vic had been brought so low. ‘We’re the same kind after all.’

‘No we’re not,’ Vic told him. ‘ You might think we are.’

‘Oh? Why don’t we ask yer mates?’

He laughed at that, a dribbling laugh, and Vic thought again of all those hours he had sat out in the dark of the woodpile in a trance of blood.

‘So how does it feel, eh? Still think yer better’n the rest ’v us? I s’pose you’ll be askin’ now fer a second chance.’ He paused, and Vic quaked. ‘Well, good luck t’ ya! — But did you ever give me one?’

It haunted him, that, but he put it out of his mind with all the other things he had decided to turn his back on. He had his life to save.

DIGGER TOO WAS in turmoil. It shook him that he could feel so much hostility, and to one of their own blokes too, not even a Jap. The thoughts that came to him, the wish to see Vic pay or for the events in the godown to take a different turn and for him to be the one, scared Digger. He wouldn’t have believed he was capable of that sort of vindictiveness. But the loss he had suffered was too raw in him to be amenable to reason. There were things, he decided, that you couldn’t be reasonable about — and oughtn’t to be, either. But then he thought: ‘Where was I when Mac needed me? What did I do?’