David Malouf - The Great World

The one or two nights a week that she came to his room were when they had been out to a show and the boys could be left with something cold. Digger could always get someone to cover for him. She never stayed late, nor did she ever invite him to stay at Bondi Junction; and even later, when things were on a settled basis and he came up from Keen’s Crossing and stayed overnight, they preserved the fiction of being no more than friends. She made up a bed for him on the sleep-out and came to him there.

It was the boys she was thinking of. ‘I’m a middle-aged woman,’ she told Digger lightly. ‘Forty-three,’ and she shook her head in a girlish way, as if in her real self she didn’t believe it. ‘Oh, you mightn’t think of that, but they do. I’m supposed to be past all this. That’s how young people think.’

The boys wouldn’t have worried, even at the beginning, and certainly not later; or so Digger thought. She was observing her own code.

He would lie, still in his singlet, and watch her undress, liking best the moment when, in just her petticoat at last, she would tilt her head first to one side, then to the other, and take off her earrings; then her rings; the pearl-and-diamond engagement ring first, then the wedding band, placing them carefully on the marble top of the wash-stand. This was the real sign of her nakedness. That she kept on her petticoat and he his singlet had nothing to do with it.

Later, when she got up, he would lie and watch her do the whole thing in reverse.

Only when she came to the earrings, then the engagement and wedding ring, was she no longer naked for him.

IN THE AFTERNOON he liked to sit quietly for an hour or so in the bar of the Waratah. Towards five it got crowded, and by half-past fellows would be ordering in half-dozens and lining the glasses up along the sill. He’d slip off then, get a bite to eat and stroll round in a leisurely way to the club.

One afternoon he was holed up in a corner, just enjoying the soft light and the scent of coolness, when he glanced up for no particular reason and Vic was there. He was on a stool at the other end of the bar and had been watching him; goodness knows for how long.

Digger felt a jolt of panic. It was uncanny the capacity this cove had for unsettling him. The once or twice they had run into one another there had been a kind of constraint that had grown at moments to open hostility.

Vic eased himself off the seat, and when he came up it was with a look of surprise and feigned indifference that made Digger furious. Why could he never be open with you? This was no accidental meeting. He had been hearing all week about this bloke who was asking around for him.

‘So, what’ve you been up to?’ Digger asked when they were settled over a beer.

Vic looked at him, and there was a little play of light in his eyes. He was preparing some cock-and-bull story, some lie maybe, that he wouldn’t even expect you to believe. He would just throw it out in contempt, and defy you to take offence at the effrontery of it. ‘Blast ’im,’ Digger thought. But when he spoke it sounded like the truth.

‘Been out west,’ he said. ‘Moree.’

‘Oh? You don’t come from out there, do ya?’

Digger was holding himself in, keeping calm and at a distance. It struck him how little he knew of the bread-and-butter things of Vic’s existence. What he did know he wanted to keep away from. It was too intimate for here. He felt a weakness in his gut. He was inwardly trembling. At the mere sight of Vic a shadow of fever had flickered over him and his body was responding to it now with shivers.

‘Nah,’ Vic said. ‘Thought I’d go out an’ take a look at what we were supposed to be fighting for.’

Digger looked up enquiringly.

‘We might as well ’ave let the bastards have it,’ he said, ‘if you want my opinion.’ He laughed, tipped his head back, opened his throat and poured down the rest of his beer.

‘He’s been on the booze,’ Digger thought. ‘Or he’s off-colour somehow. Crook.’ He felt the pull on him to say something now, as if, for all Vic’s offhandedness, what was really being appealed to was an arrangement between them that was still in operation, because there was no way it could not be. Digger was shaken. He had thought, back here, that he might be finished with all that, that this place was to be all beginnings. But once bitten there was no shying away. The medicos had told them that.

‘What about you?’ Vic was asking. ‘How they treatin’ ya?’

‘Oh, good,’ Digger said, and swallowed. ‘Pretty good.’

He could barely speak. Suddenly he had seen what it was in Vic that touched him, and it was something he did not want to touch.

They had been prisoners of the Japs up there; anyway, he had been; so were Ern and Doug and the rest. It was one of those things that just happened to you, if you were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place. But that wasn’t how Vic saw it. The Japs for him were only part of it, so it hadn’t ended for him. It was still going on. ‘What’s more,’ Digger thought, ‘he wants to drag me into it.’ He had even kept the look of a prisoner. And deliberately too, or so Digger thought.

It was a sickness he did not want to get too close to. Maybe you could pick it up just by seeing it in someone, someone you were too close to; or just by realising it could exist.

‘Thought I’d try the big smoke again,’ Vic was telling him. ‘Give it another shot.’

He looked up. There was only one thing Digger could say. ‘Got a place?’ he asked, and looked quickly away.

‘Yair,’ Vic said after a moment, and Digger could feel the tension break between them. ‘Yair, I’m all right that way. Thanks, mate.’

They sat for a time in silence, Digger all emotion, Vic calmer now. They talked. Digger’s mind began to wander. He kept falling through holes in the conversation that were no bigger than single words sometimes, but the distance he fell was hundreds of miles. He began to sweat. All that brutalisation up there had left a weakness in him, a part of his mind that was open on one side to absolute darkness, and the stench that came from that direction was so powerful at times that he gagged on it, not daring to turn his head, even in the clearest sunshine, for fear of having to face again the tattered columns of them, big-boned, filthy, with their muddy eyes and outsized hands and feet.

They went out into the street together, stopped at a pie stall and sat down side by side in the gutter to down a pie.

Digger barely tasted his. Vic offered to finish it. When they parted on the footpath outside the club he was still shaking, and he knew for certain now. It was the malaria. A return bout.

It hit him harder than he expected. He was carried back, not just months, but three or four thousand miles, to a place of jungle heat and wetness that had nothing to do with geography — he knew about geography — but was a condition his body had surrendered to once and could never now be free of. With the physical symptoms came all the troop of events and visions and ghosts he had thought he might be rid of back here. He had thought she might rid him of them, but no power on earth could do that.

He was one again among others and could barely make himself out among them, they were all so tattered and thin. They closed in on him, stifling his breath, and when he tried shifting in the ranks to get a glimpse of her, of her sunlit figure through the press, they were too many; thin as they were, mere bones some of them, as if they had just hauled themselves upright out of the mud, they stood between him and even the smallest chink of sunlight, holding their hands up like begging bowls with nothing in them, and each one in a whisper saying the syllables of their own name over and over, as if only in that way could it be kept in mind, in their own mind or anyone’s. Anyone’s.