David Malouf - The Great World

It was as if someone, in a visionary moment, had seen a machine out of the distant time to come, a steam engine, and had set out with only the most primitive tools and a hundred thousand slaves to build the line it would need to move on if it were to appear. If you could only get the line down, then the machine would follow — that was the logic. It was true, too. In this case it would happen.

So, if they could only finish the line and link up all the sectional bits of it, they would have made a way back out of here to where they had come from: the future. When the engine came steaming round the bend, its heavy wheels perfectly fitted to the track, the sleepers taking its weight, its funnels pouring out soot, they would know that time too had been linked up and was one again, and that the world they had been at home with was real, not an unattainable dream.

THE FEVERS CAME on every ten days.

The first time he was hit Digger looked up out of his delirium and saw Vic was there; squatting on his heels like a child and with a quick, animal look in his eyes. He was spooning rice up from a dixie, shovelling it fast into his wet mouth. Between his feet was a second dixie. Empty. When he saw Digger was watching he stopped feeding a moment and just sat, his eyes very wide in the broad face. Then, without looking away, he began to feed again, only faster.

‘That’s my rice he’s eating,’ Digger thought. ‘The bastard is eating my rice .’ But his stomach revolted at the thought of it. ‘Well, let him!’

When he woke again, Vic, a little crease between his brows, was sponging him with a smelly rag. He wore a look of childish concern, and Digger thought: ‘That’s just like him. Steals the food out’v a man’s mouth, an’ the next minute he’s trying to make up to him by playin’ nurse. Typical!’ But the dampness was so good, so cooling, and the hands so gentle, that Digger closed his eyes again and drifted.

What puzzled him was the utter candour of Vic’s look when he had caught him like that with the second dixie. He didn’t try to cover up. He wasn’t ashamed. There was something in that look Digger did not want to let go of. Some truth he needed to hold on to. He worried at it.

It was so different from the look he wore when he was offering you some bit of a thing as a gift. He would look sly then, calculating; but when he was stealing the food out of your mouth you saw right through into the man. It was an innocence of a purely animal kind, that took what it needed and made no apology, acting on that , not on principle.

Digger saw there was something to be learned from it: a hard-headed wisdom that would save Vic, and might, when the time came, save him as well.

The time came almost as soon as Digger was on his feet again and could go out to work. The fever took Vic now, and it was Digger’s turn to eat the second dixie, hold Vic when he raved, and use the cloth.

There was an affinity between them that was almost comical. When the one went down with it the other was well, time and about, ten days at a stretch. Vic accepted it as a fact of nature, a utilitarian arrangement that was good for both of them. Digger resisted at first — he had something against this cove that was fundamental — but when the fever struck him he had no option.

Their natures, though wildly out of order in other ways, were matched in this. They were made for one another. Digger was struck by the irony of it, but they were in a place now where ironies were commonplace.

Under the influence of this arrangement — the close physical unit they formed, the right on occasion to eat the other man’s rice, the unpleasant and sometimes revolting duties they had to perform for one another, and which Vic especially carried out with a plain practical tenderness and concern you would not have suspected in him — under the influence of all this, there grew up between them a relationship that was so full of intimate and no longer shameful revelations that they lost all sense of difference.

It wasn’t a friendship exactly — you choose your friends. This was different; more or less, who could say? There was no name for it.

The old bitterness died hard in Digger. Vic knew that and accepted it. It seemed to Digger at times that Vic sought him out just because of it. But that was his business.

There were days when they couldn’t stand the sight of one another. That was inevitable up here. They were always on edge. The petty irritations and suspicions they were subject to in their intense preoccupations with themselves made them spiteful and they would lash out in vicious argument. Digger was sickened by the hatefulness he was capable of. And not just to Vic either, but to poor old Doug as well. He would crawl away, humiliated and ashamed.

But there was something cleansing in it too. What came out in these senseless flayings of one another was the contempt they had for themselves and the filth they lived in; the degradation they accepted at the hands of the guards: and what was especially shameful to men who had thought the spirit of generosity was inviolable in them, the peevish grudging they felt for every grain of rice that went into another man’s mouth. It was a relief at last to get rid of the poison in you.

‘It’s amazing,’ Digger thought after a time. ‘I never meant to be, but I’m closer to this cove than to anyone, ever. Even Slinger. Even Doug.’

Then another thought would hit him: even Mac. Mac wouldn’t be as practical as this bloke is.

He hated himself for letting that thought through. It would just be there, a thought like that, because he was at his lowest. His resentment of Vic would be strong then, fed by guilt. He would draw off in revulsion from him, which was really a revulsion from himself, and was surprised each time at the way Vic bore it and put up with him.

It went back to that animal-innocent, candidly guilty look he had seen on his face when he was finishing off the second dixie. It was a look that risked judgement, even invited it, then revealed, through its utter transparency, that there was none to be made.

IN HIS FEVER bouts, Digger found himself passing in and out of his lives.

There were, to begin with, the conversations with his mother. They took place outside time as clocks or calendars measure it, neither before nor after.

He would be floating. He had a mouth and ears. He had his sex. But they were far off; further anyway than his fists, if he unclenched them, could have reached. She was talking to him in their old way, without words.

Digger? she was saying, Digger? You come on now. I will not let you die on me. You hear me, boy? You get breathing now, get feeding. I’ve given you this, Digger, and I’m determined you’re goin’ t’ have it. You know how I am if I set my heart on a thing. There are stars, Digger, there are gerberas, I planted ’em. There’s a whole lot more as well that I haven’t got time to go into. So you just buck up now and come on.

You see this? This is earth, boy, dirt. You’ll eat a whole peck of that before you’re through, before you die, I mean, an’ you haven’ had more than a few grains of it yet, you’ve got a whole lot more eating to do. So you just start to get it down, you hear me, Digger?

This is your mother talking. Oh, you know me, boy, don’t pretend you don’t. Don’t pretend you’re not awake, I won’t let you off that easy, you don’t fool me. I’ve got a whole lot more to say, Digger, and I won’t let you go deaf on me. I can be a terror, you know that. You’re always running out on me, or trying to — you an’ your father both! But believe me, Digger, I’m coming after you, there’s no running away from fate. You know that. I’ve got enough ghosts on my hands already, without you trying to be another one. I won’t have it, hear? Now you get breathing, boy, you breathe ! You come back into the real world and give up this dreaming. Here, take this.