‘I am nineteen,’ he told himself. He did not offer this as an excuse. His youth, if anything, was an affliction. It made things hard for him. What he meant was, ‘Nineteen is all I’ve got.’ It seemed, as the sum of what he had experienced, a large thing. But what he was thinking of was the future. ‘All this,’ he thought, ‘can be made good in time, if I get it. All I need now is time.’ Putting his head down in an animal way and getting on with it was the first step.
It wasn’t simply a matter of outliving his shame and the blood on his hands; but of proving to them, whoever they might be, that this life of his that had got itself saved, by whatever means, had been worth saving.
Meanwhile he dealt with the others as they dealt with him. He was prepared for the hostility Digger showed him.
They had never been close, but there was in Digger’s avoidance of him now a harder quality, a kind of contempt. What it said was: for me you are not there, you’re dead; you died back there where you ought to have done, instead of him. And in his old way, while deeply resenting this, he also, in another part of his nature, accepted it. Digger became the one among them whose good opinion he most cared for — because he knew Digger would not give it.
He deliberately put out of his mind the Warrenders and his old life, feeling that in betraying himself he had betrayed them, too. It hurt him to look at what he had done through their eyes, even more through Lucille’s. He set himself to live in the present. That is where he would remake his life. But once, in a dream, his father came to him. It was something he had dreaded. He shrank into himself.
He was drunk, of course, and there was a smirk on his face. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘fancy meetin’ you here. Fancy you an’ me bein’ in the same boat, eh?’ He was delighted that Vic had been brought so low. ‘We’re the same kind after all.’
‘No we’re not,’ Vic told him. ‘You might think we are.’
‘Oh? Why don’t we ask yer mates?’
He laughed at that, a dribbling laugh, and Vic thought again of all those hours he had sat out in the dark of the woodpile in a trance of blood.
‘So how does it feel, eh? Still think yer better’n the rest ’v us? I s’pose you’ll be askin’ now fer a second chance.’ He paused, and Vic quaked. ‘Well, good luck t’ ya! — But did you ever give me one?’
It haunted him, that, but he put it out of his mind with all the other things he had decided to turn his back on. He had his life to save.
3
DIGGER TOO WAS in turmoil. It shook him that he could feel so much hostility, and to one of their own blokes too, not even a Jap. The thoughts that came to him, the wish to see Vic pay or for the events in the godown to take a different turn and for him to be the one, scared Digger. He wouldn’t have believed he was capable of that sort of vindictiveness. But the loss he had suffered was too raw in him to be amenable to reason. There were things, he decided, that you couldn’t be reasonable about — and oughtn’t to be, either. But then he thought: ‘Where was I when Mac needed me? What did I do?’
He and Mac had crossed for the last time at the loading point. Mac had been next in line behind Vic, and as he took the load on his neck and tottered past he had caught the look Mac flashed him, just the tail of it, through the sweat and his lank hair which was streaming.
It was nothing special. One of those little gestures of easy, affectionate contact that keep you going, that’s alclass="underline" that make the ground firmer, that’s all. But in that moment they had been just twenty, maybe thirty seconds away from it. Would he have seen something if he had been more alert? That’s what stumped him. Mac was just thirty seconds from death. They had been looking straight into one another’s eyes.
Fifty feet further on, trotting now with his neck bowed under the weight of the sack, he had heard a ruckus and turned awkwardly on one foot to see what it was.
It was Vic. He had known that immediately. Who else would it be? A sack had burst, and figures were struggling in a storm of white, one of them, from the bulky shape of him, a guard.
Could he have glimpsed Mac’s face then, in the confusion of the moment, through the cloud of floury dust? He thought he had; the image of it was so clear in his head.
A face wiped of all expression is what he saw. Or maybe that was just the flour Mac had been showered with in the exploding storm. But what Digger thought he saw was the look that might come over a man who is on the brink of extinction, and knows it, and has already let the knowledge of it possess and change him. An impersonal look of neither panic nor despair; which was the certainty of his own death passing physically from head to foot through him, a kind of pallor, and changing him as it went.
It was Mac’s sad-faced mournful look, as Doug would have put it, which they had seen him wear on a thousand occasions, only raised now to the highest pitch, so that everything that was personal in it was gone, and yet it was utterly his own look that you would have known anywhere.
Had he really seen that, or was it what his mind had pictured to fill some need of its own? He could never be certain now. But as time went on the image stayed clear, if anything, grew sharper. So in the end it was what he might never have seen at all that meant most to him.
He also had the pile of letters Mac had left him. When, months later, they were organised into forces and sent to Thailand, the letters went with him.
4
THEY WERE AT a place called Hintock River Camp, one of dozens of such work-camps that stretched for three hundred miles between the Malay and the Burmese borders. The map of it was not clear to them, because their knowledge of these countries was limited to the patch of jungle that shut them in, and because the line they were on was as yet an imaginary one.
It ran in a provisional fashion from Bangkok to Rangoon, and their job, under the direction of a Japanese engineer and several thousand Japanese and Korean guards, was to make it reaclass="underline" to bring it into existence by laying it down, in the form of rails and sleepers, through mountain passes, across rivers, and even, when the line met them, through walls of rock. Eventually all the bits of it would link up. Till then, they were concerned only with their own section, with bamboo, rock, rain and the rivers of mud it created, the individual temperament of their guards, the hours of work the Japs demanded of them (which kept increasing), the length of rail the authorities decided should be laid each day or the length of tunnel completed, and their own dwindling strength. The limits of their world were the twenty or so attap huts that made each encampment — one of which was set apart as a hospital, or rather, a place for the dying — and the site, off in the jungle, where their daily torment took place.
They had come up here from the railhead at the Malayan border in a series of night marches, since it was too hot to move by day, and had passed many such camps, some better than the one they were in, one or two of them a lot worse. These camps either had native names like Nakam Patam, Kanburi, Nan Tok, or they had been given the sort of name you might have used for a creek or a camping spot at home: Rin Tin Tin Camp, Whalemeat Camp. One, however, was called Cholera Camp.
The work was killing. So was the heat. So, once they started, were the rains.
Back where they came from they had belonged, even the slowest country boy among them, to a world of machines. Learning to drive was the second goal of manhood — the first for some. Fooling about under trucks and cars, tinkering with motorbikes and boat engines, rigging up crystal sets — all this had become second nature to them, a form of dream-work in which they recognised (or their hands did) an extension of their own brains. It had created between them and the machines they cared for a kind of communion that was different from the one they shared with cattle and horses, but not significantly so. For most of them machines were as essential to the world they moved in as rocks or trees. Tractors, combine harvesters, steamrollers, cranes — even the tamest pen-pusher among them had dawdled at a street corner to look over the wire in front of a building site to see the big steamhammers at work driving piles. It had changed their vision of themselves. Once you have learned certain skills, and taken them into yourself, you are a new species. There’s no way back.