David Malouf - The Great World

It was all you had, all they had left you. You kept feeding it and it kept falling away. Up here only the tools you carried, the picks and shovels, had the power to keep their true weight in the world. Just getting a fist around them, feeling the solidity of wood and steel, was a guarantee of something, as in straggling lines you picked your way towards the beginning of a path, stepping gingerly, always on the lookout, however hardened your feet had got, for a hidden stump or thorn, since the merest scratch could cost you a leg if the flesh broke and an ulcer formed. An ulcer could cover half a man’s leg, eating it away till there was more bone to be seen than flesh. The doctors would use a hot spoon then to jelly it out. If you were lucky you kept the leg. If you were less lucky you lost it. Being unlucky meant it lost you.

You got to be an expert at last on the tricks it could play, this body that was so crude and filthy a thing but was also precious and had to be handled now with so much delicacy. You watched for the smallest change in it, fixing your attention on every square inch of yourself, even the skin under your balls, and what normal man among them had ever done that ? It had an imagination of its own, and fellows who had none at all, or not of that sort, looked on astonished at the horrors it could produce, stared in amazement as the first brown patch appeared, then spread, and they began to go black.

Digger remembered a joke that Slinger had made. ‘Maybe yer a blackfeller, Digger, on the inside .’

He saw fellows now turn inside out. He saw the skin of a man’s face grow thick as elephant hide. He saw thin boys blow up till they were the size of the fat lady, though no one would have paid to look at them — there was no market for it, not up here. They got so big at last that they couldn’t move, even to turn on their pallets. Two of their mates would have to roll them; but gently, like a two-hundred-pound drum full of some dangerous fluid. Their balls would be the size of footballs, their dick eight inches round; but no one laughed, it wasn’t a joke. Only the skull with its familiar features stayed normal; but they were pin-headed now and the eyes in the tiny head were lost in terror at the dimension of what was happening all round them — ankles thick as tree-trunks, feet like balloons, but heavy , weights they couldn’t even think to lift.

‘If they keep on feedin’ us this rice our eyes’ll go slanty.’

Digger had laughed at the man who told him that — or might have done if he hadn’t seen the fury in the fellow’s eyes. He had felt superior to that sort of dirt ignorance.

But what was happening now made slanty eyes the mildest of changes. Their bodies had gone berserk and were dragging them back to a time before they had organised themselves into human form and come in from chaos.

There were occasions now when he thought Mac might have drawn the best bet after all. He was scared of these thoughts, which came without his will. They were dangerous. If you gave in to the least bit of despair the body would be onto it; it was on the watch for that sort of thing every minute, and you had to watch it . They watched one another. He would catch Doug’s eye on him, or Vic’s, or one of the others, and think, God, what is it? What can he see? Has it started?

When it did start, in Doug’s case, they pretended not to notice, not to see, either, the terror he was in, because he had discovered it even sooner of course, felt the little worry of it growing, beginning to swell.

They rolled him like a drum when the time came and carried him out on work-parties to make up the numbers as the Nips demanded. It was, all the time, a question of numbers. The Nips were fanatical about it.

‘Watch it, fellers,’ he joked as they lay him beside the track, ‘I spill easy.’

He lay there all day, patient and uncomplaining, every now and then shouting across to them just to keep himself in the swing of things and one of their number — the living. Then at nightfall they carried him back.

It was the jokes, Digger thought later, that kept Doug going. That little bit of health in him, a stubborn refusal to give in to the sheer weight of things, a belief in lightness. He emerged again out of the huge bulk of himself in the old form, rangy, tough, and more certain than ever now that he could survive whatever they put up to him.

Vic too felt he had passed through the monstrous stage and emerged in something like his old form; but in his case it was mental. The work was what saved him, or so he felt. Even the weight of a basket full of rubble cutting into the rawness of your shoulder could be a reminder that the body was still with you, still in the same line of gravity as stones.

If you accepted that, you could begin to live. If you couldn’t, you were done.

There was a way in which absolute deprivation confirmed him in a thing he had known from the start. Basically, when you get right down to it, we’ve got nothing.

He thought, and there was bitter humour in it, of the times Aunt James had snatched the bread off his plate and shouted ‘Let him do without!’ There had been so much malice in the old girl. Or maybe in her crazy way she had seen through into the future and was warning him.

He thought of those fellows under the tree outside Meggsie’s kitchen, wolfing soup from a bowl, and how he had felt then that he was on the wrong side of things, that he had got out of some shame and humiliation that had been meant for him too. Well, he had it now. Did that balance things?

‘I’m at rock bottom,’ he told himself. ‘I can face that. I didn’t get into the world on the promise of three meals a day and a silver spoon to bite on. There was no promise at all — not for my lot. If I have to live like this, right through to the finish, on nothing but will, I can do it. I know what real is. I’m not like Digger. I don’t need dreams.’

There were times when Digger’s way of seeing things maddened him. ‘This time next month,’ Digger would tell them — or next year, or by Christmas — ‘we’ll be outa this. The line’ll be joined up an’ they’ll take us back.’

There were plenty of fellows who thought like that. They were dreamers. Always on about the future.

He denied himself that luxury as he denied himself the luxury of the past. There was only one place where you existed with any certainty. That was here. The only line was the one that went downward, straight down through you into the earth. He clung to that with a dumb tenacity.

He reckoned this way because he was of a reasoning nature, taking pleasure in the hardness, the harshness of it, stripping himself of all illusion.

But in relying only on the body, he reckoned without its power, which he had already seen in other circumstances, to go its own way and think for itself. One day, in one of those moments when he had fallen out of space into mere time, when his mind lapsed in him and the moment he was in lay open to the flow of things, he raised his head and saw just ahead of him, coming from the opposite direction but in the same line, so that they must inevitably collide if one or the other did not leap aside, a figure he recognised, or thought he did — a big-shouldered, white-haired fellow for whom he felt a flicker of inexplicable warmth and interest. The feeling surprised him; and it was because he was diverted by it that he failed at first to see who it was.

It was himself: far off in a moment that was years ahead and which he was, it seemed, inevitably making for. He had no sooner realised this than the figure was on him and he felt his body open and let it through.

He did not look back. It was forbidden, he knew that. If he looked back they would both be lost.