The Narrow Road to the Deep North Read online

  Kick it! he heard someone yell. Kick the fucker before the bell rings and it’s all over.

  And in the deepest recesses of his being, Dorrigo Evans understood that all his life had been a journeying to this point when he had for a moment flown into the sun and would now be journeying away from it forever after. Nothing would ever be as real to him. Life never had such meaning again.

  4

  CLEVER BUGGER, AREN’T we? said Amy. She lay on the hotel room’s bed with him eighteen years after he had seen Jackie Maguire weeping in front of his mother, twirling her finger in his cropped curls as he recited ‘Ulysses’ for her. The room was on a run-down hotel’s third storey and opened out onto a deep verandah which—by cutting off all sight of the road beneath and beach opposite—gave them the illusion of sitting on the Southern Ocean, the waters of which they could hear crashing and dragging without cease below.

  It’s a trick, Dorrigo said. Like pulling a coin out of someone’s ear.

  No, it’s not.

  No, Dorrigo said. It’s not.

  What is it, then?

  Dorrigo wasn’t sure.

  And the Greeks, the Trojans, what’s that all about? What’s the difference?

  The Trojans were a family. They lose.

  And the Greeks?

  The Greeks?

  No. The Port Adelaide Magpies. Of course, the Greeks. What are they?

  Violence. But the Greeks are our heroes. They win.

  Why?

  He didn’t know exactly why.

  There was their trick, of course, he said. The Trojan horse, an offering to the gods in which hid the death of men, one thing containing another.

  Why don’t we hate them, then? The Greeks?

  He didn’t know exactly why. The more he thought on it, the more he couldn’t say why this should be, nor why the Trojan family had been doomed. He had the sense that the gods was just another name for time, but he felt that it would be as stupid to say such a thing as it would be to suggest that against the gods we can never prevail. But at twenty-seven, soon to be twenty-eight, he was already something of a fatalist about his own destiny, if not that of others. It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words—all the words that did not say things directly—were for him the most truthful.

  He was looking past Amy’s naked body, over the crescent line between her chest and hip, haloed with tiny hairs, to where, beyond the weathered French doors with their flaking white paint, the moonlight formed a narrow road on the sea that ran away from his gaze into spreadeagled clouds. It was as if it were waiting for him.

  My purpose holds,

  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

  Of all the western stars until I die.

  Why do you love words so? he heard Amy ask.

  His mother died of tuberculosis when he was nineteen. He was not there. He was not even in Tasmania, but on the mainland, on a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Melbourne. In truth, more than one sea separated them. At Ormond College he had met people from great families, proud of achievements and genealogies that went back beyond the founding of Australia to distinguished families in England. They could list generations of their families, their political offices and companies and dynastic marriages, their mansions and sheep stations. Only as an old man did he come to realise much of it was a fiction greater than anything Trollope ever attempted.

  In one way it was phenomenally dull, in another fascinating. He had never met people with such certainty before. Jews and Catholics were less, Irish ugly, Chinese and Aborigines not even human. They did not think such things. They knew them. Odd things amazed him. Their houses made of stone. The weight of their cutlery. Their ignorance of the lives of others. Their blindness to the beauty of the natural world. He loved his family. But he was not proud of them. Their principal achievement was survival. It would take him a lifetime to appreciate what an achievement that was. At the time though—and when set against the honours, wealth, property and fame that he was now meeting with for the first time—it seemed failure. And rather than showing shame, he simply stayed away from them until his mother’s death. At her funeral he had not cried.

  Cmon, Dorry, Amy said. Why? She dragged a finger up his thigh.

  After, he became afraid of enclosed spaces, crowds, trams, trains and dances, all things that pressed him inwards and cut out the light. He had trouble breathing. He heard her calling him in his dreams.

  Boy, she would say, come here, boy.

  But he would not go. He almost failed his exams. He read and reread ‘Ulysses’. He played football once more, searching for light, the world he had glimpsed in the church hall, rising and rising again into the sun until he was captain, until he was a doctor, until he was a surgeon, until he was lying in bed there in that hotel with Amy, watching the moon rise over the valley of her belly. He read and reread ‘Ulysses’.

  The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

  Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

  ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

  He clutched at the light at the beginning of things.

  He read and reread ‘Ulysses’.

  He looked back at Amy.

  They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said.

  5

  WHEN HE AWOKE an hour later, she had painted her lips cherry-red, mascaraed her gas-flame eyes and got her hair up, leaving her face a heart.

  Amy?

  I’ve got to go.

  Amy—

  Besides—

  Stay.

  For what?

  I—

  For what? I’ve heard it—

  I want you. Every moment I can have you, I want you.

  —too many times. Will you leave Ella?

  Will you leave Keith?

  Got to go, Amy said. Said I’d be there in an hour. Card evening. Can you believe it?

  I’ll be back.

  Will you?

  I will.

  And then?

  It’s meant to be secret.

  Us?

  No. Yes. No, the war. A military secret.

  What?

  We ship out. Wednesday.

  What?

  Three days from—

  I know when Wednesday is. Where?

  The war.

  Where?

  How would we know?

  Where are you going?

  To the war. It’s everywhere, the war, isn’t it?

  Will I see you again?

  I—

  Us? And us?—

  Amy—

  Dorry, will I see you again?

  6

  DORRIGO EVANS FELT fifty years pass in the wheezy shudder somewhere of a refrigeration plant. The angina tablet was already doing its work, the tightness in his chest was retreating, the tingling in his arm had gone, and though some wild internal disorder beyond medicine remained in his quaking soul he felt well enough to return from the hotel bathroom to the bedroom.

  As he walked back to their bed, he looked at her naked shoulder with its soft flesh and curve that never ceased to thrill him. She partly raised a face damasked with sleep, and asked—

  What were you talking about?

  As he lay back down and spooned into her, he realised she meant a conversation earlier, before she had fallen asleep. Far away—as if in defiance of all the melancholy sounds of early morning that drifted in and out of their city hotel room—a car revved wildly.

  Darky, he whispered into her back, as though it were obvious, then, realising it wasn’t, added, Gardiner. His lower lip caught on her skin as he spoke. I can’t remember his face, he said.

  Not like your face, she said.

  There was no point to it, thought Dorrigo Evans, Darky Gardiner died and there was no point to it at all. And he wondered why he could not write something so obvious and simple, and he wondered why he could not see Darky Gardiner’s face.

  That’s flipping inescapable, she said. />
  He smiled. He could never quite get over her use of words like flipping. Though he knew her to be vulgar at heart, her upbringing demanded such quaint oddities of language. He held his aged dry lips to the flesh of her shoulder. What was it about a woman that made him even now quiver like a fish?

  Can’t switch on the telly or open a magazine, she continued, warming to her own joke, without seeing that nose sticking out.

  And his own face did seem to Dorrigo Evans, who had never thought much of it, to be everywhere. Since being brought to public attention two decades before in a television show about his past, it had begun staring back at him from everything from charity letterheads to memorial coins. Big-beaked, bemused, slightly shambolic, his once curly dark hair now a thin white wave. In the years that for most his age were termed declining he was once more ascending into the light.

  Inexplicably to him, he had in recent years become a war hero, a famous and celebrated surgeon, the public image of a time and a tragedy, the subject of biographies, plays and documentaries. The object of veneration, hagiographies, adulation. He understood that he shared certain features, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him. He’d just had more success at living than at dying, and there were no longer so many left to carry the mantle for the POWs. To deny the reverence seemed to insult the memory of those who had died. He couldn’t do that. And besides, he no longer had the energy.

  Whatever they called him—hero, coward, fraud—all of it now seemed to have less and less to do with him. It belonged to a world that was ever more distant and vaporous to him. He understood he was admired by the nation, if despaired of by those who had to work with him as an ageing surgeon, and mildly disdained and possibly envied by the many other doctors who had done similar things in other POW camps but who sensed, unhappily, that there was something in his character that was not in theirs which had elevated him far above them in the nation’s affections.

  Damn that documentary, he said.

  But at the time he had not minded the attention. Perhaps he had secretly even enjoyed it a little. But no longer. He was not unaware of his critics. Mostly he found himself in agreement with them. His fame seemed to him a failure of perception on the part of others. He had avoided what he regarded as some obvious errors of life, such as politics and golf. But his attempt to develop a new surgical technique for dealing with the removal of colonic cancers had been unsuccessful, and, worse, may have indirectly led to the deaths of several patients. He had overheard Maison calling him a butcher. Perhaps, looking back, he had been reckless. But had he succeeded he knew he would have been praised for his daring and vision. His relentless womanising and the deceit that necessarily went with it were private scandals and publicly ignored. He still could shock even himself—the ease, the alacrity with which he could lie and manipulate and deceive—and his own estimate of himself was, he felt, realistically low. It was not his only vanity, but it was among his more foolish.

  Even at his age—he had turned seventy-seven the previous week—he was confused by what his nature had wrought in his life. After all, he understood that the same fearlessness, the same refusal to accept convention, the same delight in games and his same hopeless hunger to see how far he might push a situation that had driven him in the camps to help others had also driven him into the arms of Lynette Maison, the wife of a close colleague, Rick Maison, a fellow council member of the College of Surgeons, a brilliant, eminent and entirely dull man. And more than one or two others. He hoped in the foreword he had that day been writing—without bothering it with unnecessary revelation—to somehow finally put these things somewhat to rights with the honesty of humility, to restore his role to what it was, that of a doctor, no more and no less, and to restore to rightful memory the many who were forgotten by focusing on them rather than himself. Somewhere he felt it a necessary act of correction and contrition. Somewhere even deeper he feared that such self-abasement, such humility, would only rebound further in his favour. He was trapped. His face was everywhere but he could now no longer see their faces.

  I am become a name, he said.

  Who?

  Tennyson.

  I’ve never heard it.

  ‘Ulysses’.

  No one reads him anymore.

  No one reads anything anymore. They think Browning is a gun.

  I thought it was only Lawson for you.

  It is. When it’s not Kipling or Browning.

  Or Tennyson.

  I am a part of all that I have met.

  You made that up, she said.

  No. It’s very—what’s the word?

  Apposite?

  Yes.

  You can recite all that, said Lynette Maison, running a hand down his withered thigh. And so much else besides. But you can’t remember a man’s face.

  No.

  Shelley came to him on death, and Shakespeare. They came to him unbidden and were as much a part of his life now as his life. As though a life could be contained within a book, a sentence, a few words. Such simple words. Thou art come unto a feast of death. The pale, the cold, and the moony smile. Oh, them old-timers.

  Death is our physician, he said. He found her nipples wondrous. There had been a journalist at the dinner that evening who had questioned him about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Once, perhaps, the journalist said. But twice? Why twice?

  They were monsters, Dorrigo Evans said. You have no comprehension.

  The journalist asked if the women and children were monsters too? And their unborn children?

  Radiation, Dorrigo Evans said, doesn’t affect subsequent generations.

  But that wasn’t the question and he knew it, and besides, he did not know whether radiation’s effects were transmitted. Someone a long time ago had told him that they weren’t. Or that they were. It was hard to remember. These days he relied on the increasingly fragile assumption that what he said was right, and what was right was what he said.

  The journalist said he had done a story on the survivors, had met and filmed them. Their suffering, he had said, was terrible and lifelong.

  It is not that you know nothing about war, young man, Dorrigo Evans had said. It is that you have learnt one thing. And war is many things.

  He had turned away. And after, turned back.

  By the way, do you sing?

  Now Dorrigo tried to lose his memory of that sorry, awkward and frankly embarrassing exchange as he always did, in flesh, and he cupped one of Lynette’s breasts, nipple between two fingers. But his thoughts remained elsewhere. No doubt the journalist would dine out on the story forever after, about the war hero who was really a warmongering, nuke-loving, senile old fool who finished up asking him if he sang!

  But something about the journalist had reminded him of Darky Gardiner, though he couldn’t say what it was. Not his face, nor his manner. His smile? His cheek? His daring? Dorrigo had been annoyed by him, but he admired his refusal to bend to the authority of Dorrigo’s celebrity. Some inner cohesion—integrity, if you like. An insistence on truth? He couldn’t say. He couldn’t point to a tic that was similar, a gesture, a habit. A strange shame arose within him. Perhaps he had been foolish. And wrong. He was no longer sure of anything. Perhaps, since that day of Darky’s beating, he had been sure of nothing.

  I shall be a carrion monster, he whispered into the coral shell of her ear, an organ of women he found unspeakably moving in its soft, whorling vortex, and which always seemed to him an invitation to adventure. He very softly kissed her lobe.

  You should say what you think in your own words, Lynette Maison said. Dorrigo Evans’ words.

  She was fifty-two, beyond children but not folly, and despised herself for the hold the old man had over her. She knew he had not just a wife, but another woman. And, she suspected, one or two others. She lacked even the sultry glory of being his only mistress. She did not understand herself. He had the sourdough smell of age. His chest sagged into shrivelled teats; his lovemaking was unrelia
ble, yet she found it strangely wholesome in a way that defied sense. With him she felt the unassailable security of being loved. And yet she knew that one part of him—the part she wanted most, the part that was the light in him—remained elusive and unknown. In her dreams Dorrigo was always levitating a few inches above her. Often of a day she was moved to rage, accusations, threats and coldness in her dealings with him. But late of a night, lying next to him, she wished for no one else.

  There was a filthy sky, he was saying, and she could feel him readying to rise once more. It was always moving away, he went on, as if it couldn’t stand it either.

  7

  WHEN THEY ARRIVED in Siam in early 1943 it had been different. For one thing, the sky was clear and vast. A familiar sky, or so he thought. It was the dry season, the trees were leafless, the jungle open, the earth dusty. For another, there was some food. Not much, not enough, but starvation hadn’t yet taken hold and hunger didn’t yet live in the men’s bellies and brains like some crazed thing. Nor had their work for the Japanese become the madness that would kill them like so many flies. It was hard, but at the beginning it was not insane.

  When Dorrigo Evans lowered his gaze, it was to see a straight line of surveyors’ pegs hammered into the ground by Imperial Japanese Army engineers to mark the route of a railway that led away from where he stood at the head of a party of silent prisoners of war. They learnt from the Japanese engineers that the pegs ran in a four hundred and fifteen-kilometre line from north of Bangkok all the way through to Burma.

  They outlined a route for a great railway that was still only a series of limited plans, seemingly impossible orders and grand exhortations on the part of the Japanese High Command. It was a fabled railway that was the issue of desperation and fanaticism, made as much of myth and unreality as it was to be of wood and iron and the thousands upon thousands of lives that were to be laid down over the next year to build it. But what reality was ever made by realists?