David Malouf - The Great World

‘Right? Now ,’ the voice said, ‘this is it. Right, mate? I’m gunna get you up . Upsadaisy! Right?’

Vic was astonished. Digger was just skin and bone but the weight of him was enormous. It must be the mud he was coated in. No, he thought, it’s something else. It’s the weight of death, heavy as lead in him. So heavy maybe I can’t do it. He struggled and the sweat began to stream faster on him.

‘That’s good , that was good, Digger. We’re there now. We’ve made it.’ He stood still, supporting Digger who also supported him. He could hear the mad activity there on the surface of the water, where the stars touched it and you could see them beginning to swarm.

‘Don’t worry, fishies,’ he said, in a voice he recognised as his own from when he was maybe three years old, ‘we’re coming. Only a little while now.’

‘Now,’ the voice said, and half-supporting, half-dragging him where he hung under the stars (what was supporting them ?), led him forward.

It was a river. Digger saw the gleaming surface of it, coal-black and churning. ‘What is this?’ he thought. ‘What does he think he’s doing? This won’t help.’ The word that had come into his head — it was a word he had never used as far as he could recall — was baptism. But all Vic did was lead him a little way in: one pace, another. He felt the warmth of it rising to just below his knees. It was alive. He could feel the life of it.

‘What is it?’ he asked, childlike. ‘What’s happening?’

‘It’s the fishes,’ Vic said. ‘Don’t worry, they won’t hurt.’

‘What?’

‘Shh, don’t scare ’em, you’ll scare ’em. They’re only tiddlers. They won’t hurt.’

Vic too was in a kind of wonder at it. The idea of it had sickened him at first, just the idea: of being fed off by greedy mouths. But in fact it was soothing. The stars high up, so still; and underwater there, in what seemed like silence but wouldn’t be, close up, the jaws fighting for their share of the feast. And all you felt from up here, from this distance, was a pleasant contact . The touch of their savagery was soft.

‘It tickles,’ Digger said foolishly.

‘Yair, they’re just tiddlers,’ Vic told him, and he was laughing now. It was so weird, and he had such a sense of the good they were doing him. ‘It’ll be over in a minute.’

It would be over when they drew blood.

Digger understood at last, but thought it must be a dream. He could hear the fish in a bright wave swarming at the edge of the bank where they stood offering themselves.

There was a smell these last days that had got right into his head. He knew what it was. It was the news of his own corruption, the smell, still as yet a little way off, of his own death. It had sickened him. Now, slowly, he felt the smell recede. All the stink and ooze of it was being taken back into the world, away from him, into the mouths of the living and turned back into life there. He felt the bump bump of gristle as the small fry darted in and their snouts bounced off bone. They were feeding off him, savagely, greedily tearing at the flesh, and what they were giving him back was cleanness.

When he came back into himself and looked about he was standing knee deep in oily water, stars overhead, so close he could hear them grinding, and he could hear the tiny jaws of the fishes grinding too, as starlight touched their backs and they swarmed and fought and churned the blackness to a frenzy round his shins.

‘Did any of that happen?’ he asked Vic later, when they lay exhausted in the dark.

‘Yes, it happened, an’ it’ll save us. I told you it would. It works .’

DIGGER, IN THE methodical way that was habitual to him, kept track of each day that passed. He could tell you, if you were bothered to know such a thing, what day of the week it was, in which month; how long it was now till Christmas (how many weeks and days), how long since they had left Changi, how many days and nights they had taken on the road up, how many they had been at work on the line. It mattered to Digger that this bit of order should be maintained in his life. In a place where so much had been taken from them, perhaps permanently, this business of time-keeping, which was after all something the Japs had no control over (it was between you and the sun) represented a last area of freedom to him, a last reminder too of what had been essential to the way they had lived back home.

It was no small thing, this capacity to place yourself accurately in time, this bit of science it had taken so many centuries to get right. It was worth holding on to, gave a form to what otherwise might run right through your hands.

So in his monkish way, which Doug teased him over, Digger could be relied on, when any question of times or dates came up, to deliver an answer on the spot.

The surrender? That had been Sunday, 15 February 1942. Not long after, third week in April, they left Changi for the Great World — Mac had died on 7 June. (This was a date in Digger’s personal calendar. He did not mention it; but three times now he had kept the anniversary.) In October, the 4th to be exact, they had gone back to Changi, and on 22 April the next year, 1943, had begun the long journey into Thailand: five days and nights on the train, crowded into cattle wagons, then a series of night-marches through jungle camps where cholera was raging, twenty nights in all. From then till the day they started back down the line and crossed the border again into Malaya was a hundred and eighty-nine days. Eighteen months it was since then. Just on.

Other things, big and small, had been happening in the world. Most of it they knew nothing of. The dates Digger recorded, the periods — Changi, the Great World, Thailand, Changi again — that was their war. It was three years and six months since they had become prisoners.

He knew well enough how little these measurements told. The days were not equal. Nor were the hours. Nor were the minutes, even.

That minute and a half in the godown, for instance, in which Mac had been killed — there was no way of fitting that into a system that needed sixty minutes to an hour and twenty-four hours to a single revolution of the earth. Some of those days they had worked up there, speedo , as the body recorded them, had been centuries, strung out in an agony for which there were no terms of measurement at all. He knew all that.

Their history took place in its own time. But it had to be fitted to the time the rest of the world was moving through or you wouldn’t know where you were, outside your own sack of nerves. The two rimes didn’t fit. They never would. Digger knew that as well as the next man. But you kept both just the same and made what you could of it.

So it was three and a half years, just on, as the calendar showed it. August 1945.

ALL THE SIGNS now were that it was coming to an end, might even be over already, days, even weeks ago, so that in fact (in one version of it) they might already be free. If that was true their watches would be showing the wrong time. They had no certain news, but something had happened. You could feel it.

For the past six months they had been at work on a series of tunnels the Japs were digging across the strait in Johore Baahru, a protection for their troops in case of invasion. Vic was with Digger, and Doug had been there too till he got caught in a cave-in and lost an arm. The work was dangerous. They tunnelled into the side of a hill with just picks and shovels, shoring the walls as they went; but the earth was waterlogged after the rains and there were many accidents, the air in the tunnels was foul, and the heat so fierce that they could work for only minutes before they were gasping for breath. If one tunnel collapsed they started in on another just yards away. Now there was this rumour that it was all over anyhow.