David Malouf - The Great World

She passed him something. It was a thread and he saw now that she was unravelling the sleeve of an old grey jumper he had worn holes in. Beginning at the shoulder, he watched the stitches hop back over invisible needles as the rows ran backwards from shoulder to cuff and the sleeve passed through an invisible wall into non-existence. He had to wind faster and faster to keep the wool running over his fist.

It was another version of her talk, this, and he couldn’t resist it. The thread ran between them, dark and fast, till the whole jumper, which he had worn through four winters and slept in, and which had his smell on it — sleeves, front, back — was gone, and there were nine balls of clean knitting-wool in her lap.

He began to fear almost more than the physical racking this having to face up to her each time the fever took him.

She never let up. He would thrash about, drowning in sweat, but she wouldn’t let him off the hook.

He made himself an eel, eels are slippery. He reduced himself to just a mouth and eyes — no ears, no sex, no fingers; but she got furious, hauled him out and thumped him into shape.

He tried going on all fours. Digger, she yelled, are you out there, you little grub? That’s Ralphie’s. Now you come in.

He stayed out. There were stars, there were gerberas. It was thundering and Ralphie was tonguing his neck, he could feel the thickness of Ralphie’s tongue rasping.

He knew he was out of his body. Well, good, he thought, that’s one way! It was the lightness of his head and his sex that told him that.

He got down in the dirt. He was swallowing it, getting down his peck. When he found Ralphie’s water-tin, the water he lapped up was the water of life — cool, sweet, slaking this thirst he had been tormented by, which was not the thirst of his body but of what his body had left when it shook him off.

He lapped and lapped — Ralphie didn’t mind, didn’t begrudge him the water he got from the dried-up bowl; or the bone either, which was alive with maggots. He got his teeth into it, defying the flies. It filled the hunger in him, fed some earlier body than the one he had abandoned, and did him good. Some animal part of him, which he loved as he had loved Ralphie, and which was Ralphie, wolfed it down, maggots and all, took the strength from it and was enlightened. He felt the strength gather in him; and lightly, on all fours, began to run light-footed over the earth. Under the moon, past bushes that lay low before him so that he could leap over them, across plains that burned but did not blister. He ran and ran and had breath for it, and came in the early morning down the track to Keen’s Crossing.

He woke feeling refreshed and fed. His dreaming body had fed his thin, racked frame, slaked its thirst, licked him into life again.

‘I’ll live,’ he thought, ‘this time. I’ll live.’

COMING IN FROM the line they would be so exhausted sometimes that a man might nod off with his bowl in his hand before he had taken a single mouthful.

‘That horse is done for,’ he would shout, right out of his sleep. ‘Better shoot the poor brute.’ Or: ‘Don’t you move, Marge. I’ll get it.’

The others would stare in wonder at his having got so quickly away, and would be reluctant to call him back.

That was one of the things the body could do.

Once they were sitting over their bit of a meal when Ernie Webber, one of the fellows who had been with them since the Great World, made one of his ‘remarks’.

He was a likeable fellow, Ern, but very poorly educated, a windbag, inclined, with great assurance and whether you asked for it or not, to give you the benefit of his thoughts. ‘I was perusing the papers once,’ he would say — it was one of his typical openings — and go on then with some rigmarole of a thing, half-heard and largely misunderstood, that was so plain foolish it was hard to keep a straight face sometimes. Newcomers took it for a subtle brand of humour and might offend Ern by laughing outright. What he said on this occasion was no more foolish than usual. ‘I knew there was gunna be trouble,’ he said. ‘I said we’re gunna have trouble with this feller Musso. Soon as I seen he was linkin’ up with them niggers, them Abbysiniums.’

‘Them who?’ This was Clem Carwardine, a fellow who generally said very little. His tone now was so scathing that they sat up shocked. Ernie was a joke and his ignorance under protection. He sat blinking now.

‘My God,’ Clem said with a savagery he had never shown them before, ‘I thought a chook was about the most brainless object in the universe, but compared with some of you blokes a chook is Einstein.’

‘That your last word on relativity, is it Clem?’ Doug put in. He was trying to turn the thing into a joke, but Clem’s look was murderous.

‘A half-witted six-year-old knows more than you,’ he told Ern. ‘You brainless article!’

Ern was too confused to be indignant. He couldn’t believe that Clem Carwardine, who was such a nice bloke, could turn on him, and so savagely. Older than the rest of them, and very well spoken, he had never acted superior. He was looking at them now with such utter contempt and fury that they felt embarrassed for him; but there was a kind of puzzlement in his look too, as if he was as surprised as they were at what had just come out of his mouth. The puzzlement increased, then, without another word, he jerked his head back, shot his feet out and keeled over backwards.

He was dead. Cardiac malaria. Just like that. It seemed wicked to Digger, who liked the man, that his last moments should be so uncharacteristic, and that it was this they would remember of him. Ernie was especially upset. He kept harking back to it as if there was something in the event that he had failed to grasp and for which he was to blame.

The body could do that too.

They had never given them much thought, these rough and ready bodies of theirs. You got that drummed into you early: not to look at it, not to touch. A half-dozen schooners got down fast before closing time, and if it was too fast you puked. A run at football on Saturday arvo. A bit of love-making, easy exercise. Nothing fancy or too passionate. Nothing out of the ordinary. If you got a scratch you dobbed a drop of Solyptol on it if you were particular and waited for the scab to form. Warts maybe, whitlows. Chilblains in winter if it was cold enough. Measles, mumps, chickenpox. That was about the limit of it. The body went its own way. It was serviceable. You could forget it was there.

Up here the body ruled. You watched it night and day, you got obsessed with it as you saw the flesh fall away and the ribs and the big knuckle-joints come through.

They wouldn’t have believed, if anyone had told them, how fast it could go, the meat they carried, all that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had shoved into their mouths to build the big frames they had brought up here and the muscle to stock them with. They needn’t have bothered, those black pudding and porridge eaters, those kids tucking into the dripping, spreading it thick and wiping a crust round the bowl. It could fall away overnight under the right circumstances, till you looked like someone who had never, in all of time going back and back, known more than the few mouthfuls of pap they were getting now, that were as thin as slime and went right through you, and when you squatted, ran down as slime.

They had had no idea that the equality they claimed and thought they had already achieved would be like this. For each man the same scoopful of thin gruel morning and night.

The big blokes were the first to go, and took hardest the indignity their bodies heaped upon them of needing more than their fair share and of being the weaker for it. They went quickly, some of them. It was pathetic. They hadn’t known (and might have expected, in the normal way of things, never to have brought home to them), how much of what they were was dependent only on the meat.