‘My God,’ Clem said with a savagery he had never shown them before, ‘I thought a chook was about the most brainless object in the universe, but compared with some of you blokes a chook is Einstein.’
‘That your last word on relativity, is it Clem?’ Doug put in. He was trying to turn the thing into a joke, but Clem’s look was murderous.
‘A half-witted six-year-old knows more than you,’ he told Ern. ‘You brainless article!’
Ern was too confused to be indignant. He couldn’t believe that Clem Carwardine, who was such a nice bloke, could turn on him, and so savagely. Older than the rest of them, and very well spoken, he had never acted superior. He was looking at them now with such utter contempt and fury that they felt embarrassed for him; but there was a kind of puzzlement in his look too, as if he was as surprised as they were at what had just come out of his mouth. The puzzlement increased, then, without another word, he jerked his head back, shot his feet out and keeled over backwards.
He was dead. Cardiac malaria. Just like that. It seemed wicked to Digger, who liked the man, that his last moments should be so uncharacteristic, and that it was this they would remember of him. Ernie was especially upset. He kept harking back to it as if there was something in the event that he had failed to grasp and for which he was to blame.
The body could do that too.
They had never given them much thought, these rough and ready bodies of theirs. You got that drummed into you early: not to look at it, not to touch. A half-dozen schooners got down fast before closing time, and if it was too fast you puked. A run at football on Saturday arvo. A bit of love-making, easy exercise. Nothing fancy or too passionate. Nothing out of the ordinary. If you got a scratch you dobbed a drop of Solyptol on it if you were particular and waited for the scab to form. Warts maybe, whitlows. Chilblains in winter if it was cold enough. Measles, mumps, chickenpox. That was about the limit of it. The body went its own way. It was serviceable. You could forget it was there.
Up here the body ruled. You watched it night and day, you got obsessed with it as you saw the flesh fall away and the ribs and the big knuckle-joints come through.
They wouldn’t have believed, if anyone had told them, how fast it could go, the meat they carried, all that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had shoved into their mouths to build the big frames they had brought up here and the muscle to stock them with. They needn’t have bothered, those black pudding and porridge eaters, those kids tucking into the dripping, spreading it thick and wiping a crust round the bowl. It could fall away overnight under the right circumstances, till you looked like someone who had never, in all of time going back and back, known more than the few mouthfuls of pap they were getting now, that were as thin as slime and went right through you, and when you squatted, ran down as slime.
They had had no idea that the equality they claimed and thought they had already achieved would be like this. For each man the same scoopful of thin gruel morning and night.
The big blokes were the first to go, and took hardest the indignity their bodies heaped upon them of needing more than their fair share and of being the weaker for it. They went quickly, some of them. It was pathetic. They hadn’t known (and might have expected, in the normal way of things, never to have brought home to them), how much of what they were was dependent only on the meat.
It was all you had, all they had left you. You kept feeding it and it kept falling away. Up here only the tools you carried, the picks and shovels, had the power to keep their true weight in the world. Just getting a fist around them, feeling the solidity of wood and steel, was a guarantee of something, as in straggling lines you picked your way towards the beginning of a path, stepping gingerly, always on the lookout, however hardened your feet had got, for a hidden stump or thorn, since the merest scratch could cost you a leg if the flesh broke and an ulcer formed. An ulcer could cover half a man’s leg, eating it away till there was more bone to be seen than flesh. The doctors would use a hot spoon then to jelly it out. If you were lucky you kept the leg. If you were less lucky you lost it. Being unlucky meant it lost you.
You got to be an expert at last on the tricks it could play, this body that was so crude and filthy a thing but was also precious and had to be handled now with so much delicacy. You watched for the smallest change in it, fixing your attention on every square inch of yourself, even the skin under your balls, and what normal man among them had ever done that? It had an imagination of its own, and fellows who had none at all, or not of that sort, looked on astonished at the horrors it could produce, stared in amazement as the first brown patch appeared, then spread, and they began to go black.
Digger remembered a joke that Slinger had made. ‘Maybe yer a blackfeller, Digger, on the inside.’
He saw fellows now turn inside out. He saw the skin of a man’s face grow thick as elephant hide. He saw thin boys blow up till they were the size of the fat lady, though no one would have paid to look at them — there was no market for it, not up here. They got so big at last that they couldn’t move, even to turn on their pallets. Two of their mates would have to roll them; but gently, like a two-hundred-pound drum full of some dangerous fluid. Their balls would be the size of footballs, their dick eight inches round; but no one laughed, it wasn’t a joke. Only the skull with its familiar features stayed normal; but they were pin-headed now and the eyes in the tiny head were lost in terror at the dimension of what was happening all round them — ankles thick as tree-trunks, feet like balloons, but heavy, weights they couldn’t even think to lift.
‘If they keep on feedin’ us this rice our eyes’ll go slanty.’
Digger had laughed at the man who told him that — or might have done if he hadn’t seen the fury in the fellow’s eyes. He had felt superior to that sort of dirt ignorance.
But what was happening now made slanty eyes the mildest of changes. Their bodies had gone berserk and were dragging them back to a time before they had organised themselves into human form and come in from chaos.
There were occasions now when he thought Mac might have drawn the best bet after all. He was scared of these thoughts, which came without his will. They were dangerous. If you gave in to the least bit of despair the body would be onto it; it was on the watch for that sort of thing every minute, and you had to watch it. They watched one another. He would catch Doug’s eye on him, or Vic’s, or one of the others, and think, God, what is it? What can he see? Has it started?
When it did start, in Doug’s case, they pretended not to notice, not to see, either, the terror he was in, because he had discovered it even sooner of course, felt the little worry of it growing, beginning to swell.
They rolled him like a drum when the time came and carried him out on work-parties to make up the numbers as the Nips demanded. It was, all the time, a question of numbers. The Nips were fanatical about it.
‘Watch it, fellers,’ he joked as they lay him beside the track, ‘I spill easy.’
He lay there all day, patient and uncomplaining, every now and then shouting across to them just to keep himself in the swing of things and one of their number — the living. Then at nightfall they carried him back.
It was the jokes, Digger thought later, that kept Doug going. That little bit of health in him, a stubborn refusal to give in to the sheer weight of things, a belief in lightness. He emerged again out of the huge bulk of himself in the old form, rangy, tough, and more certain than ever now that he could survive whatever they put up to him.
Vic too felt he had passed through the monstrous stage and emerged in something like his old form; but in his case it was mental. The work was what saved him, or so he felt. Even the weight of a basket full of rubble cutting into the rawness of your shoulder could be a reminder that the body was still with you, still in the same line of gravity as stones.