David Malouf - The Great World

For others again it was the names of all the girls they had done it with. Even if you only got a finger in, it counted. The Muriels and Glorias and Pearls and Isobels going right back to when you were in sixth grade and first could.

The names first, then details. Where each one was: behind the baths, or on a bench under a school somewhere, or in the back of a parked truck. And when: in the Christmas holidays or on a Queen’s Birthday long weekend, getting hold of the weather if you could, what she had on — the shoes, if any, the bra and panties, the colour and pattern of her frock, and the sweat-smell, or the soap-smell of what it had been washed in. Or the feel of leather (smooth or with seams) where it stuck to your bare arse in the back of the Vaux, or the splintery floor under the canvas seats at the Elite, and the taste of vanilla malted or popcorn in her mouth, or Wrigley’s Spearmint, or the fried fat of chips. Ah, chips! Now that would be something.

On the menu at Matter’s Boarding House for Men, the same menu each week over the seven nights, beef stew, shepherd’s pie, etcetera. The gravies — lovely! And the picture over the sideboard, a Pears’ print of a little girl about two in a sun-bonnet, standing in the nuddy in a galvanised iron tub. .

Or the words of all the songs in the Boomerang Songbook for March 1941: ‘I was watching a man paint a fence’. Or the rhymes their sisters and other little girls skipped to in the evenings after school, on the hot concrete under the sleep-out, while they were doing their history homework (Oliver Cromwell and the Civil War), or setting the wing of a balsawood plane with a dob of glue on a matchstick, and might stop a minute to have a quick pull on the bed –

Over the garden wall

I let the baby fall

Me mother come out and give me a clout

That almost turned me inside out –

cleaning up quickly afterwards with a stiff hanky, the smell of it and of the glue.

Others the no-hoper horses they put good money on, that never came in, and all the winners of the Melbourne Cup back to 1861, Archer.

Others the cows in a dairy herd: Myrtle, Clover, the Gypsy Princess, Angel, Sugarpie, Queenie, Minnie the Moocher.

What Digger remembered, and after a certain time in an official capacity, was the name and number of every man in the unit; including those who had been killed or gone missing and been replaced, then the replacements; and where each man was sent after the surrender; to Sandakan in Borneo, to Blakang Mali Island, the greatest bashing and punching show in Malaya, so they said, or who drew paradise and stayed on in Changi, or who went to Thailand, and in which force and to which camp. Official. All stored that information, safely, permanently, in the last place the Nips would think of looking.

He was so unremarkable, Digger, looked so like all the rest of them, barefoot, filthy, in a lap-lap, all bones, that no one could have guessed what he carried along with the pick over his shoulder or the basket with its weight of rubble and stones.

Once committed to memory these names would be there forever. The whole unit could be called up and paraded in his head, the dead right there with the living, all clean and in good shape again, whether they had drawn a short straw or a long and wherever they were.

Digger remembered them , and their names and numbers. And they, each one, remembered whatever it was they needed to keep them halfway in the world or halfway out of it: number-plate numbers, girls, songs, stations, all the flavours of milkshakes and malteds they served at the Mermaid Café, all the shops up and down Elizabeth or Queen or George or Swanston Street, both sides, the names of horses or dairy herds. Put it all together and something, secretly, was being kept alive. What an army marches on when it is no longer marching.

But there were others, Vic was one, who had no time for memories, even sweet ones. What they clung to were the things they could touch, the few bits and pieces they had managed to hang on to, some of it from back before Changi, the rest picked up along the road, at this stopping place or that, and were keeping for the day when it might come in useful: Singer sewing-machine needles, nails, screws, bits of rope or twine, keys, batteries, cards out of a broken pack, folds of newspapers — objects that elsewhere would have been trash, hardly worth stopping for, but were precious relics up here, and useful too, since you could trade them one for another and have something new in hand.

Vic had started off with quite a hoard. Small things mostly, that all went into a single pocket of his shorts, where he could turn them over; not idly, but letting his mind go with them. His fingertips knew every one.

But over the months he had traded some for a fag-end or a bit of something he needed urgently and didn’t have; or for things, once or twice, that had taken his fancy in a childish way though there was no point to them. Other things, infuriatingly, had gone lost. Stolen maybe — he had his suspicions; about some things and some men. Or they had fallen through a hole in his shorts that he had found too late. In the end he had only one thing left: two and a half yards of white cotton thread tied in a loop. He had that in the left-hand pocket of his shorts, quite safe, and was keeping it, come what may.

He could have traded it a dozen times and had refused. A length of thread like that would come in handy sooner or later, it was bound to. He’d need it to keep his shorts together, or for some other reason, and if he didn’t have it then, where would he be? Besides, he liked the feel of it. Hours he spent just rubbing his thumb and forefinger over it. He got teased for that: ‘Watcha doin’, Vic? Playin’ pocket billiards?’ Finally he hung on to it just for itself, whether it was useful or not. Because it was the last thing he possessed.

It had been white at first. Now it was a brownish colour. What worried him was that it might go astray. He kept checking every five minutes or so to see that it was still there. He took precautions. If he lost it he would be done for.

‘COOLIES,’ THE MAN behind him whispered, and Digger had time to take a quick look. Just a glance, because one of the Koreans was close, who would knock you down as soon as look at you.

They were working at night now, a real speedo . Bamboo fires were blazing all down the lines. They reddened the walls of the cutting and threw weird shadows. Other, more substantial shadows stopped, shovelled, staggered under basketloads of rubble in a din of bellowing and raucous shouts and blows as the guards ranged up and down. There was a haze of dust that the fires turned to hanging flame. Their bodies in it were alight with sweat, but high up, where it thinned out in the dark, the air was bruise-coloured, a sick yellow, then black.

Through the sweat in his eyes, and the hanging dust, Digger saw them on the track: Indians, Tamils probably, half-naked in lap-laps (like us, he thought) and carrying little bundles of next to nothing, a water bottle, sometimes a stove or lamp. For nearly an hour they passed, and every two or three minutes, stretching upright and keeping an eye out for the guard, he dragged his wrists across the sweat of his brow and got a quick look.

Here and there among them were families, women with babies on their hip, but they were men mostly, and mostly young men, though a few of them were old.

He had seen them working along the railroads up country and in road gangs in the towns, camping just off the pavement in orange tents or stretched out on a bedroll in the dirt. Now they were here. They had changed masters, that’s all. Another empire to build.

He thought of the look on that fellow’s face who had told him once, ‘They wanna make coolies of us’: the savage indignation of it, at the violation of all that was natural in the world, their unquestionable superiority as white men; but there was also the age-old fear in it of falling back and becoming serfs again.