The Narrow Road to the Deep North Read online

  Ron Jarvis made some more enquiries for me, he said, wiping his lips with a handkerchief. There was a POW who made it out. They’re not telling the families yet. National morale, I suppose. And, I suppose, they wait for confirmation through other channels. Red Cross and so on.

  Telling the families what, Keith?

  I knew you’d want to know, Amy. I can’t bring myself to tell his family, though—it’s not my place, in any event. I’d be breaching a confidence. To say nothing of national security. This is strictly between us.

  There’s nothing to tell, Keith. What are you carrying on about?

  The escapee confirmed that Dorrigo Evans died in one of the camps.

  Amy’s thoughts were distant and odd. It occurred to her that Keith loved her, something she had not thought for a very long time.

  Amy, believe me, Dorrigo’s dead. He died six months ago.

  Keith Mulvaney’s words, his boyish voice, spilled out onto the corridor floor tiles, black and white squares.

  I knew you’d want to know, he said.

  His words ran down the empty hallway and over its threadbare coconut mat runner, searching for Amy. But she was gone from the room.

  Keith Mulvaney felt as a man who has killed something so that he might eat. He had wanted to say something else, something so true that it would justify the terrible lie he had just told. He wanted to say, I love you. Instead, he whistled Miss Beatrice onto his lap.

  I think that’ll do, Keith Mulvaney said to the dog as he tickled her under the ear. Yes, that’ll do her.

  He took solace in the knowledge he had not lied. It was true that the death was not yet confirmed, but Ron Jarvis had been unequivocal: among the list of names the POW had provided the authorities was a Major D. Evans. He thought that they could be happy together. It was a matter of work and time.

  Surely, he said to Miss Beatrice. Surely.

  Later that evening he found Amy by herself, cleaning the dining room’s kitchen. The room’s perpetual odour seemed if anything stronger, but its wet cream tiles and steel gleamed in the electric light. She was without emotion, telling him she still had more to do, and renewed her scrubbing as he stood watching from the doorway.

  Only after he’d gone did she drop the rag she had been using and crumple. She crouched on the floor, like a child. She banged her foot up and down on the tiled floor. But she felt nothing. She wanted to pray to whatever might exist. But she knew he was dead, that the world does not allow for miracles, that people die, and that she could not stop them dying; that they leave you and you love them more, and still she could not stop them dying.

  Sitting in his russet armchair in their lounge room, tamping his pipe in readiness for a pre-bedtime smoke, his head laid back on the antimacassar, Keith Mulvaney felt a runnel of sweat down his left temple. He never heard the explosion that, with the subsequent fire, reduced the gracious four-storey stone hotel to smouldering rubble, charred beams and a two-sided façade.

  A world of dew

  and within every dewdrop

  a world of struggle.

  Issa

  1

  A DROP DRIPPED.

  Tiny, whispered Darky Gardiner.

  The noise of the monsoonal rain flogging the canvas roof of the long, A-framed shelter—bamboo-strutted and open-walled—meant Darky Gardiner could hardly hear himself. The clamour of the rain made such nights only more desolate, worse, in a way, than the days when he was just trying to survive but at least had company to do it with. The jungle shuddering in sheets of noise, the incessant drumming of mud churning as the rain slammed into it, the strange slaps and punches of invisible water runs, all of it he found dismal.

  Another drop dripped.

  Carn, cobber, hissed Darky Gardiner. Move over.

  Darky Gardiner had no idea how long it was since he had got back to his tent after helping fetch an abandoned Japanese truck; he had looked for his place among the twenty POWs who slept up and down its length on two lice-infested bamboo platforms, only to find Tiny Middleton, the prisoner who lay to the right of him, had rolled over and taken up almost all of his sleeping spot on the platform. It left Darky jammed on his side next to Tiny, directly under a bamboo pole along which beads of water ran and fell onto his face. Tiny felt like a brick wall collapsing on him, yet, thought Darky, he would be lucky to weigh six stone. Now that Tiny was covered with ringworm, Darky hated touching him. And so he hissed again—

  Fucksake, Tiny.

  It was clear Tiny Middleton heard nothing. Darky Gardiner raised a wrist over his face to check the time. There was nothing to see; he had sold his illuminated watch for a tin of Portuguese sardines some months before. He dropped his arm. The good thing, Darky told himself, was that it was still dark. He was wet and weary, but he could rest a few more hours. Darky was always looking for the good thing, no matter how small, and consequently he often found it. Though he was awake now, the good thing was that he didn’t have to get up and go to work on the railway but could sleep longer. That was good, and he would enjoy that sleep, if he could just get Tiny to move. Putting thoughts of ringworm aside, he pushed against the body lying next to him.

  Move over, you fat prick.

  After a while Darky gave up and lay on his side, with his back to Tiny, and his head tucked into his body in such a way that put it just out of range of the drip. He figured, he knew stupidly, that somehow his back was less likely to catch ringworm than his front. Curled up in his own darkness, safe in the knowledge no one would know, Darky reached above his head to his kitbag and pulled it down the platform to his chest. After some awkward fossicking in the dark, he removed from it what he knew to be two small miracles: a boiled duck egg and a can of condensed milk.

  The milk or the egg? he wondered. Which one?

  In the end he decided that the milk—which he had stolen from the Japanese truck—could be saved for an indefinite period without going off, and hence was better kept, if only for a few more days. Rabbit Hendricks had traded him the duck egg for a paintbrush Darky had stolen from the field satchel of a Japanese officer passing through the camp on his way to the battlefields of Burma. His method in thievery was based on speed and discretion: he never took so much as to demand investigation, just enough, instead, to help him jog along.

  Rabbit Hendricks, in turn, had been given two duck eggs by the camp’s Japanese commander in return for sketching some postcard pictures of him and some of his cronies—presumably to send back to lovers and families in Japan. While the Japanese occasionally made use of Rabbit’s talents in this way, they would most likely kill him if they saw the sketches and watercolours he had made of the daily life of the camp—the hideous labour, the beatings, the torture—and for this reason Rabbit Hendricks kept them carefully hidden. But his work was at an end. The evening before, finishing their shift on the Line, Rabbit had been gripped by a horrific cramp and had to relieve himself immediately. Before he had even stood up, Chum Fahey, who was working near him, was staring. Rabbit Hendricks turned. Beneath him, he saw that his bowels had written his fate in a puddle of rice-water coloured shit. The POWs had come to fear this more than the Japanese since the cholera had broken out nine days earlier.

  Chum Fahey and two others had helped Darky carry Rabbit back on a crudely improvised stretcher up and down the Dolly—a jungle track that connected the Line with their camp three and a half miles away—a painfully slow task that was not quickened by a search in the dark for Rabbit’s dentures, lost in a violent bout of retching. With difficulty they made their way through the night jungle—their only guides home muddy ruts and the distant groans of the sick POWs who were ahead of them—finally arriving back at camp a little before midnight covered in mud and watery vomit. Rabbit Hendricks, along with his watercolour set, his sketchbook and his secret drawings, had then disappeared into the cholera compound where ever more were sent and from where only a handful returned. And all that remained of him was the blackened duck egg, the shell of which Darky Gardiner now adroitly
peeled off in just three pieces.

  The rain fell once more with a great heave, and the movement made a fresh, damp breeze that blew for a moment through the pitiful shelter that served as their barracks, washing away the stench of shit and decay that was all the men who slept up and down the hut on two long bamboo platforms. Darky felt the breeze as a form of hope, and he tried to tell himself that this was another good thing. But the rain began dripping on his face again, and when he tried to roll over, Tiny was still there, and, when he again shoved him, Tiny remained immovable, snoring, dead to the world.

  Can you just bloody well shove over, Tiny?

  Fuck the fuck up, Darky, yelled someone down the platform.

  There was nothing Darky could do with Tiny. He stank too. The rain came back strong, and what with his feverish head and the noise it was sometimes hard to know what was inside his head and what was outside. He was thinking of when he first met Tiny, a bull of a man, who had stripped down and strutted around in his magnificent body flexing, rearing, crowing. Like a rooster rooting on a Sunday morning, Chum Fahey had said.

  Even on the starvation rations they were given, Tiny’s loss of weight seemed only to emphasise the magnificence of his body. It seemed to hone rather than waste his physique. Tiny’s body had triumphed over everything: the malaria, the dysentery, the pellagra and the beri-beri. None of the diseases that laid low and began killing the other men seemed to affect him, as though his magnificence was in itself a form of immunity. Somehow the camps had not reduced him, nor the Japanese broken him.

  Tiny’s job was to make holes in the rock by slowly pounding a steel bar into the face with his sledgehammer until the hole was the required depth. When there were enough holes, a Japanese engineer filled them with explosive and blew that section. Darky was Tiny’s offsider, holding the steel bar, giving it a quarter-turn after each blow to help it drill down. Tiny worked with energy uncharacteristic of any other prisoner and prided himself on finishing his work quota before anyone else. It was his triumph over his Japanese captors.

  Show them little yellow bastards what a white man is, he would say.

  He didn’t seem to notice that the Japanese then demanded everyone else do the same.

  That fucking Tarzan will do for us all, said Sheephead Morton.

  If Tiny set a new record for the work—as he seemed regularly intent on—the Japanese engineers would make that the new daily quota, and others less strong would suffer while working to fulfil it.

  For fucking fuck’s sake, tell him, Sheephead Morton said to Darky.

  Tell him what?

  Ee-fucking-nough. Nough.

  Nough nough or just nough?

  Fuck off.

  Cobber, Darky said later to Tiny, you might want to back off.

  Tiny smiled.

  Just a bit. Not every bloke can work at your rate, Darky said.

  Tiny was a devout gospel-haller. With an eerie smile, he said, The Lord gave us this body to work with, to rejoice in.

  Well, there’s another bugger you don’t hear from much these days. But we’ll all be seeing Him soon enough if you don’t back off. Because otherwise you’ll be the death of everyone, Tiny.

  The Lord will see us right. That’s the way I look at it.

  And Tiny, the muscular Christian, held himself like a runner at the end of the hundred-and-ten-yard sprint, hands on hips, slightly relaxed, body halfway between exertion and relaxation, taut, perfect, staring at Darky Gardiner with his thin, maddening smile.

  Slowly, Darky grew to hate Tiny. Each new quota the Japanese engineers demanded in the alien metric measurement—first a metre a day, then two metres, then three metres—Tiny met in less time than the Japanese allowed, and then everyone else—the fevered, the starving, the dying—had to match that mad-man’s work load. All the others tried to go slow, to do less, to save their diminished energies for the necessary task of survival. But not Tiny, his stomach rippling, his chest heaving, his brutish arms flexing. He treated it like the shearing sheds in which he had once worked, as if it were all still some stupid competition, and come evening he’d be the gun ringer yet again. But his vanity was only benefiting the Japanese and killing the rest of them.

  The Speedo came. Now, there was only the Japanese pushing them with ever more beatings and ever less food to work ever harder and ever longer during the day. As the POWs fell further behind the Japanese schedules, the pace grew more frantic. One night, just as the POWs were falling exhausted on their bamboo platforms, to sleep, the order came to return to the cutting. So the night shifts began.

  The cutting was a slit through rock, six metres wide and seven metres deep and half a kilometre long. Lit by fires of bamboo and crude torches made of rags stuffed in bamboo and fed with kerosene, the naked, filthy slaves now worked in a strange, hellish world of dancing flames and sliding shadows. For the hammer men it required greater concentration than ever, as the steel bar disappeared into the darkness of shadow as the hammer fell.

  That first night, for the first time, Tiny struggled. He was malarial, his body was shuddering and his movement with the sledgehammer was not a beautiful rise and fall, but a painful effort of will. Several times Darky Gardiner had to jump out of the way when Tiny lost control of the hammer. After less than an hour—or maybe it was a few hours—after, Darky could not remember exactly how long—Tiny raised the hammer halfway and let it fall to the ground. Darky watched in astonishment as Tiny staggered round in a half-circle, a sort of jig back and forth, and dropped to the ground.

  A guard with a short, muscular body and a mottled complexion came up: the Goanna. Some said the Goanna had vitiligo and that was why he was mad, and others just said he was mad and best avoided in any situation. A few said he was the devil himself—inexplicable, unavoidable, pitiless, and also, on odd occasion, as if in a final torment, bewilderingly kind. But as no one up there on the Line much believed in God anymore, it was hard to believe either in the devil. The Goanna just was, much as many wished he was not.

  The Goanna looked at them working for a moment and very slowly turned away to look elsewhere, as if thinking, and equally slowly turned back. These strange, stilted movements were an inevitable precursor to an outburst of violence. He thrashed Tiny with a long piece of heavy bamboo for a minute or two, and afterwards gave him a few almost desultory kicks in the head and stomach. As bashings by the Goanna went, Darky didn’t think it was so bad. What was different was Tiny Middleton.

  Where once he had tensed and absorbed blows and kicks in a manner that bordered on insolent, as though his body was harder than any beating, now he rolled around on the blasted rock cutting like a thing made of rag or straw. He absorbed the blows and whacks like a sack. And at the beating’s end, Tiny did something remarkable. He began to sob.

  The Goanna was stunned. With Darky, he looked on in amazement. No one ever cried on the Line. It couldn’t have been the pain or the humiliation, thought Darky, nor could it be the despair or the horror, because everyone lived with that.

  Shaking his head, shadows of flames clutching at his sweat-greased, filthy body, Tiny now half-slapped, half-clawed at his chest as if he was trying to beat the shadows away and failing. It seemed to Darky that he was accusing his body, because this mighty body had always triumphed, had carried that small mind and tiny heart so far, only for it now—in that strange, hellish half-tunnel of flame and shadow and pain—to cruelly and unexpectedly betray him. And with his body wavering, Tiny was lost.

  Me! he cried out as he beat and tore at himself. Me! Me!

  But what he meant, none of them really knew.

  Me! he continued to cry out. Me! Me!

  Darky helped Tiny to his feet. With one eye on the Goanna, Darky took the sledgehammer and handed Tiny the steel bar. Tiny squatted, held the bar in the hole they had been working on, watery eyes firmly fixed on it, and Darky raised and dropped the sledgehammer. When he raised it a second time he had to ask Tiny to twist it a quarter-turn. The hammer fell and rose, Tiny was im
mobile, clutching the steel bar as though it were some necessary anchor, and again Darky asked Tiny to twist the steel bar a quarter-turn. He asked Tiny as gently as he would a toddler for its hand, and in the same voice he kept saying to Tiny the rest of the night, Turn’er—turn’er, mate—turn’er. And in this manner they continued with their work, as though everything was copyright. Turn’er—turn’er, mate, Darky Gardiner would incant, turn’er.

  But something had changed.

  Darky knew it. He watched over the next few weeks as Tiny’s magnificent body began to fade away. The Japs knew it and seemed to bash Tiny regularly now, and with more vicious intent. And Tiny seemed not to care about this either. The lice knew it. Everyone had lice, but Darky noticed how they began to swarm over Tiny from that day. And Tiny seemed not to care that his body was overrun with them, no longer worried about washing or where he shat. Then came the ringworm. As if even fungi knew it, sensing the moment a man gave up on himself and was already as good as a corpse rotting back into the earth. And Tiny knew it. Tiny knew he had nothing left inside him to stop what was coming.

  Darky stuck by Tiny, but something in him was revolted by that formerly big man, that once proud man, now a shitting skeleton. Something in Darky could not help but think Tiny had let go, that it was a failing of character. And such a thought, he knew, was simply to make himself feel better, to make him think he would live and not die because he still had the power to choose such things. But in his heart he knew he had no such power. For he could smell the truth on Tiny’s rancid breath. Whatever that stench was, he worried that it was catching and he just wanted to escape it. But he had to help Tiny. No one asked why he did; everyone knew. He was a mate. Darky Gardiner loathed Tiny, thought him a fool and would do everything to keep him alive. Because courage, survival, love—all these things didn’t live in one man. They lived in them all or they died and every man with them; they had come to believe that to abandon one man was to abandon themselves.