Vic had started off with quite a hoard. Small things mostly, that all went into a single pocket of his shorts, where he could turn them over; not idly, but letting his mind go with them. His fingertips knew every one.
But over the months he had traded some for a fag-end or a bit of something he needed urgently and didn’t have; or for things, once or twice, that had taken his fancy in a childish way though there was no point to them. Other things, infuriatingly, had gone lost. Stolen maybe — he had his suspicions; about some things and some men. Or they had fallen through a hole in his shorts that he had found too late. In the end he had only one thing left: two and a half yards of white cotton thread tied in a loop. He had that in the left-hand pocket of his shorts, quite safe, and was keeping it, come what may.
He could have traded it a dozen times and had refused. A length of thread like that would come in handy sooner or later, it was bound to. He’d need it to keep his shorts together, or for some other reason, and if he didn’t have it then, where would he be? Besides, he liked the feel of it. Hours he spent just rubbing his thumb and forefinger over it. He got teased for that: ‘Watcha doin’, Vic? Playin’ pocket billiards?’ Finally he hung on to it just for itself, whether it was useful or not. Because it was the last thing he possessed.
It had been white at first. Now it was a brownish colour. What worried him was that it might go astray. He kept checking every five minutes or so to see that it was still there. He took precautions. If he lost it he would be done for.
10
‘COOLIES,’ THE MAN behind him whispered, and Digger had time to take a quick look. Just a glance, because one of the Koreans was close, who would knock you down as soon as look at you.
They were working at night now, a real speedo. Bamboo fires were blazing all down the lines. They reddened the walls of the cutting and threw weird shadows. Other, more substantial shadows stopped, shovelled, staggered under basketloads of rubble in a din of bellowing and raucous shouts and blows as the guards ranged up and down. There was a haze of dust that the fires turned to hanging flame. Their bodies in it were alight with sweat, but high up, where it thinned out in the dark, the air was bruise-coloured, a sick yellow, then black.
Through the sweat in his eyes, and the hanging dust, Digger saw them on the track: Indians, Tamils probably, half-naked in lap-laps (like us, he thought) and carrying little bundles of next to nothing, a water bottle, sometimes a stove or lamp. For nearly an hour they passed, and every two or three minutes, stretching upright and keeping an eye out for the guard, he dragged his wrists across the sweat of his brow and got a quick look.
Here and there among them were families, women with babies on their hip, but they were men mostly, and mostly young men, though a few of them were old.
He had seen them working along the railroads up country and in road gangs in the towns, camping just off the pavement in orange tents or stretched out on a bedroll in the dirt. Now they were here. They had changed masters, that’s all. Another empire to build.
He thought of the look on that fellow’s face who had told him once, ‘They wanna make coolies of us’: the savage indignation of it, at the violation of all that was natural in the world, their unquestionable superiority as white men; but there was also the age-old fear in it of falling back and becoming serfs again.
Whatever indignities that fellow’s people might have suffered — mine too, Digger thought — at the hands of bosses or schoolteachers or bank managers or ladies, all those who had the power to humiliate or deny, there was always this last shred of dignity to chew on: I’m not a coolie, I can choose. Whatever you could be deprived of, by bad luck or injustice or the rough contrariety of things, there was this one last thing that could not be taken. That’s what they had believed. Only they knew differently now. It could be taken just like that. Easy.
That fellow would be here somewhere, in one of the other camps up or down the line; if he hadn’t been clubbed or kicked to death by one of the Koreans, or fallen on one of the murderous night marches that had brought them here from the rail-head at the Thai border, or succumbed to beriberi or dysentery, or to cerebral malaria, or died of blood poisoning or gangrene from an ulcer; or, like so many of the youngest among them, simply from exhaustion and despair. Wearing a lap-lap and filthy shorts, barefoot, covered in sores, he would be stooping to take the basket on his back, pouring with sweat and chewing on the bitterness of it.
‘This,’ Digger said to no one in particular, to the part of himself that stood apart a little and observed from a distance still, ‘is what happened to us in the world. Maybe it wasn’t meant to. It was meant for those others, those coolies. It happened to them too, and now it’s happened to us. So what do you make of that?’
It was part of an argument he had been having, for weeks now, with Doug; except that it seldom got put into more than a few words. They were too exhausted to argue. But the words went on arguing in their heads, and some of it got across; they got the drift of it. It was an argument, really, that Mac ought to have been making. He would have done it better. Digger was doing it for him, the best he could.
There were fellows now who had begun to take a religious view — that was understandable, Digger could see that — and one of them, astonishingly, after he came through the beriberi, was Doug.
They could hardly believe it at first. They thought he was putting it on and making a mock. But he was dead serious. In the horror of what was happening to them, some teaching had come back to him out of his hellfire youth. Some grim Presbyterian view that had been opened up in his head in the days before he asserted himself and said ‘Stuff it’ and refused to go to church — half-heard on hot Sunday mornings while he was gazing out a window, his mind a slingshot loosing itself after a sparrow, or his own dick, hard as iron, working its way up a girl’s thigh — struck him now, ten years later, as an incontrovertible truth. ‘Look about you, lad, and mock if you can. Isn’t this what they were trying to make you see? Isn’t it?’
‘Isn’t it what?’ Digger wanted to know. ‘Hell? Is that what you think it is?’
He thought of his father and those Sundays when they had been out on the line. Hell was just a name people had for the worst thing they could think of, the worst thing that could ever happen to them. Well, it happens, that’s all. Nobody deserves what they get. You better believe that, son, because every other sort of belief is madness. We don’t deserve this. Nobody does. We haven’t done anything that bad, even the worst of us, even you, Douggy, you old bastard! But it’s what we’ve got. Thailand is just a place. Some people spend their whole lives here. It’s normal. These coolies, for instance. For them it’s normal, it’s all they’ll ever have — not for any sin they’ve committed. It rains a lot, that’s all. The jungle’s as thick as a wall. Things rot. Flies breed maggots in everything. Us too, if we get a bit of a nick. We weren’t meant to be here, but we are. Eight hours a day and time off for smokos — that’s one sort of justice, a pretty rough one; but it’s not for everyone, and it’s not for us now either, maybe ever again. Oh, it’s unfair all right. But who ever said it would be fair? And who can you complain to, anyhow?
‘I’m not complaining,’ Doug said.
‘But you should be,’ Digger told him fiercely. He hated to see Doug, of all people, so meek.