Mac had been married — still was, in fact. Two years it lasted. The girl left him; not for another bloke, as it happened, but to live her own life and run a nursery in the Blue Mountains.
‘She got fed up with me,’ Mac told him, and put on a humorous look; but Mac’s humour, Digger knew by now, was a way of protecting himself, and you too sometimes, from the pain of things, ‘I never understood what she wanted, really. I reckoned I did, like most blokes, on’y I never had a clue really. She had a bad time, poor girl. Me too.’ When his brother died in a shipping accident in the Islands he had moved in with his sister-in-law, who was glad of the extra money and to have a man’s help with the boys. Mac got letters from her and had a pile, five in all, that he read over almost every night.
‘If anything happens to me, Digger,’ he said once. ‘I’d like you to have ’em.’
It was a solemn offer, and Digger, who felt the weight of it, was moved. ‘OK,’ he said.
He had had only one letter himself, from his mother, an angry one. His father had got himself wounded in Crete.
But more important to Digger in the end than Mac’s yarns, and the passionate and sometimes pedantic flights that put him pretty firmly, as Doug said, in ‘the ratbag brigade’, were the times when they just sat cleaning their gear or doing a bit of mending; saying nothing much, just quietly enjoying the company.
Self-possession. That was the quality in Mac that drew Digger. It was rare, and seemed, the more he thought about it, to be the one true ground of manliness. It was a quality he had never attained himself, and he wondered sometimes if he ever would. He had ants in his pants. That’s what his mother would have told him. Everything grabbed his attention and led him away from himself. He was always in a turmoil, never steady or still. The world was too full of interest. He got lost in it.
One of the things Mac introduced him to was music. It stood, for Mac, in some sort of middle position between talk and silence, with similarities, if you could imagine such a contradiction, to both, and it was this, Digger thought, that explained the link he felt between music and Mac’s particular brand of self-possession. If you understood the one, perhaps you would get a clear sight of the other.
He encouraged Mac to talk about the pieces he liked. Mac, who was a born teacher, was only too pleased to introduce him to bits of opera and things by Chopin and Fritz Kreisler.
‘Nessun dorma’, ‘none shall sleep’; that was a good one. They heard that one night during their first week in Malaya, in the early days before the Japs landed. Digger was amazed. It was in the open, under the stars, and almost a thousand of them had been sprawled there on the grass. But there was a lot of music to be heard at Changi, too. Fellows who had carried their records with them would bring their favourites along, and dozens of men, hundreds sometimes, would come in out of the dark to listen. Digger would sit back a little and take his cue from Mac.
Mac’s characteristic expression was a long-faced, half-woeful, half-comic look that went with his being, as Doug said, a ‘black-stump philosopher’.
‘The big trouble with you, mate,’ Doug would tell him, ‘is that you know too much fer yer own good. All it does is make ya mournful. Now, I ask you, what’s the use a’ that?’
‘I’m not mournful,’ Mac would insist.
‘A’ course you are. You’re about the mournfullest bloke I ever laid eyes on. Honest, Mac, you oughta take a dekko at yerself. I tell ya, mate, you look as if the world ended last Mondee and you just got news of it.’
These sallies were pure affection. They took in a side of Mac that in Doug’s opinion was excessive. He needed to be jollied out of it. It was his ratbag side, the side of all those failed, unforgotten utopias that blokes like Mac, dyed-in-the-wool idealists, would give their lives for — and other people’s lives as well if they could get them, all in the name of some future that most fellers didn’t want and couldn’t use and weren’t fit for, and couldn’t be made fit for either, unless you wrenched them this way and that till there was nothing left that was human in them.
Mac defended himself, lost his temper, became just the sort of angelic storm-trooper Doug accused him of being, then laughed and put on his self-deprecating, comic-suffering look, but refused to admit defeat.
Doug’s rough cynicism beat him every time, but somehow, when it was over, he was not beaten. He was self-possessed, Mac, but he was also passionate, and contradictory too. Only when he was leaning forward into the music and utterly absorbed by it were the different sides of him resolved. What you saw then — what Digger saw — was the absolute purity of him.
‘I’ll never be like that,’ Digger thought. ‘Not in a million years.’
Then Mac would catch him looking and wink, and what you saw then was the odd humour of the man.
When the chance came to move out of the camp and do some real work they leapt at it. The work was coolies’ work, hard labour at the docks, but they wanted the exercise. There was nothing dishonourable in it, if you didn’t see it that way. Besides, there would be good pickings among the piled-up stores in the godowns. Best of all, they would be on their own again, away from the sickness of spirit and irregular violence and filth of the camp. Nearly three hundred strong, they were to set up quarters in the abandoned booths and tea-gardens of the Great World, an amusement park where in the early days they had gone to drink Chinese beer, dance with taxi-dancers and have their pictures taken. From there they would march, each morning, in parties to the docks.
‘This is all right, eh?’ Digger said when he saw it. A fairground. It was like coming home.
They spent the first night cleaning the place up a bit and fixing showers. There was plenty of running water. Then, all washed and spruced up, they went for a walk through the alleys and lanes between the stalls. A real maze, it was, of lathe and crumbling plaster, with sketchy paintings, half-faded, of horses and misty-looking mountains and clouds, and avenues of bulls with bulging eyes and miniature pagodas. It seemed unreal with no crowd to fill it, none of the noise and sweat and cooking smells from food stalls or the smell of charcoal from smoky stoves.
They wandered in groups and kept meeting other groups at the end of alleys. Very odd they looked too, in their boots and baggy shorts and nothing else. Like kids, Digger thought, who’d got locked in after the store keepers had shut up shop and the taxi-dancers, the actors in the Chinese theatre and the sellers of potency pills and balms had all gone home.
They greeted one another shyly and had to make themselves small to get past in the narrow lanes, their skylarking self-conscious in so quiet a place. There was a moon. Everything looked blue. The walls were mostly blue anyway, ‘celestial’ blue. The reflections from them gave men’s faces, from a distance, a luminous, rather ghostly look. It was weird though not scary.
It was an interlude of pure play, but they were so subdued by the emptiness of the place, its peeling vistas and derelict squares, that it became dreamlike. At last they went whispering through the alleys like quiet drunks, still full of high spirits but afraid to wake someone.
Ourselves, Digger thought, as their boots echoed on the gravel and laughter came through the walls.
2
THEY HAD BEEN working all morning, a small party inside a larger, mixed contingent of Australians, British and Dutch, in one of the biggest godowns on the docks. It was an immense place like a cathedral, a hundred and fifty yards long and sixty wide, all slatted walls where the light that beat in was dazzling, and, high up in the gloom under the rafters, sunshafts swarming with dust.