His foot came down; he took the full weight of the sack again, and found himself gasping for breath. Like a man who had run miles bearing a message he was too breathless now to deliver — and anyway, it had gone clean out of his head.
Still in a panic, shouting and slapping now even at one another in their recriminations over what had occurred, the guards forced them into a mass, drove them with canes, battens, a wall of rifles, till they were huddled in a close heap on the floor of the godown, hands locked behind their heads, heads hard down between their kneecaps.
They kept their eyes lowered, not daring to look up. To show the guards something as alive and jelly-like as an eyeball might be to set them off again. They were still shouting and shoving at one another, entirely out of control.
Digger forced his head down, his fingers so tightly knuckled that he felt he might never get them unstuck. His heart hammered. He was rigid but quaking. The guards were all round them, kicking up dust, dancing about in a rage at one another, uttering gutturals and shrill howls.
On one side incomprehensible crazy activity. On the other this heart-pounding, frozen immobility in which they sat squeezed into a single mass just where they had fallen.
Digger had Vic’s mouth at his ear. He could smell the foulness — terror was it? — of his breath. The sweat was pouring off him, off all of them. What he had thought at first must be Vic’s arm twisted and caught between them was another man’s altogether. It hardly mattered.
He saw very clearly then what they were at this moment: meat, very nearly meat. One flash second this side of it.
‘There is a line,’ he thought. ‘On one side of it you’re what we are, all nerve and sweat. On the other, you’re meat.’
All herded together and with the breath knocked out of them, they were right on the line. Things could go either way with them. Only when the Japs stopped yelling at one another, and rushing about in a panic, and began to move again at a human pace, and they were allowed to unlock themselves from one another and lift their heads, would they be back again on the right side of things.
For Mac it was too late. He had already been pitched across, and was lying over there somewhere — even Digger did not dare shift his head to see where it might be, but it was unnervingly close. Back in the half-dark of the godown, in a scrabble of wet dust; but further than that too, in a dimension, close as they all were to it, that was already beyond reach.
Vic too sat hunched and painfully twisted, in a silence he thought must be a kind of deafness — one of the guards must have deafened him — since all round he could see them shouting. There was an invisible membrane between him and the world. Inside it he was choking for breath.
They were jam-packed together in a heap, no space between them, hard bone against bone; but he felt himself entirely cut off; at an immense distance from the shouting, the panic, the hot presence of the others as they pressed against him. It was as if space now had developed the capacity to expand that just a moment back had belonged to time. He tried to make the laws of time and space operative again in his body, to get himself back into the world the others were in. If there was a price to pay for that he would pay it. He had no illusions about what they must think of him.
Everything that came to his senses had a ghostly quality, yet he had never been so aware of his own physical presence, the sensitivity of his lips which when he ran his dry tongue over them were all puffed with blood, the lightness of his belly, the terrible flexibility of his wrists.
Whenever, in flashes, his mind worked, all that had happened came back to him, and he was flooded with shame. But always it was his body that had the final word, and his body thought differently. It lived for itself and did not care.
‘How could I let it happen?’ he asked himself, ‘how could I?’ When the moment for action came and he should have moved into the gap he had opened, he had hung back and done nothing. He had stood there, too slow to move, too astonished that the moment he had been waiting for had actually come. Or this body he was lumbered with, always slower than the spirit, or cannier, or more cowardly, had acted in its own interests, and while it hovered there — it could only have been a second or two — the world had moved on, pushing him away to one side. The blades had come down and missed him. His body saved itself, and him, but shamefully, leaving him with a lifetime to face of the life it had bought for him. And the most shameful thing of all was that he could live with it. He was breathing hard. All his blood was pumping. He was full of the smell of himself.
His body was driving it home to him. You won’t die, son. Not of this.
The guards, themselves shocked to silence now at what had been done, began to get them to their feet, urging them gently, like children. No one among them, guard or prisoner, was ready yet to meet another man’s eye.
Vic too got to his feet. No one looked at him, and he felt a little rush of defiance come over him, like a child who has been unjustly accused. He began to find arguments in his own defence. He hadn’t asked Mac to step in between him and whatever fatality he had provoked. ‘I didn’t ask him to!’
They formed a line again and went quietly to their work, and when they came back through the godown with their load Mac’s body was no longer there.
They moved quietly, scarcely daring to breathe. As if sound, any sound at all, might set something off again. When one man jostled a chain and a length of it fell and rattled, they jumped like frogs, all of them, as if even the clank of iron against iron could send out ripples and break a head.
When he got his meal Vic did not know how to act, whether or not he could sit with them. He was still tense and close to tears, but determined now to tough it out. He took his dixie and sat a little way away from where Digger and another fellow, Ernie Webber, were already eating.
But when Doug came in he saw immediately how things were and came without fuss and sat at Vic’s side, but did not look at him.
Digger did. He looked up, noted what had happened, then looked away and went on chewing.
Seeing it, Vic put his head down, animal-like, and plunged his spoon into the mush. He ate. He was ravenous — that was the body again. He was ashamed but he couldn’t get enough of the sticky mess he was shoving into his mouth. He could have eaten pounds of the stuff, and still it wouldn’t have satisfied the craving he felt. He ate fast, with his head down like an animal, and the tears that welled up in him were tears of rage.
Slowly in the days that followed his life came back and began once again to be ordinary and his own.
His wound was still raw in him, and when his mind moved back to that fraction of a second before Mac went down, his blood quickened, he stepped forward, and his youthful spirit did what it had to do to save his honour. He died happy.
The awakening from this dream sent a wave of new shame over him. He would flush to the roots of his hair and look about quickly to see if any of the others had seen it.
He went out on the usual work parties and in the same group; taking the weight of the sack on his bent back and trotting with it to the place where it could be dumped, welcoming the opportunity it offered to lose himself in the exhaustion that extinguished thought. The young guard was there each day and acted as if nothing had happened. They ate their meal in a group just as before, shared what they scavenged, and Vic got his share. When he scavenged something he offered it round and even Digger took it. The lump in his throat began to melt.