Doug just looked at him, half-smiling, and it was true, Digger had hanged himself on his own argument.
But he stuck to it just the same. He had to.
It was so hard to keep your head in all this. It was a kind of madness, but there was a thread of sanity in it, there had to be; in all the twists and turns, a clear straight line into life. He was determined to hang on to it. Sometimes he could.
Later, half-asleep, he sat in the stink of himself and spooned up gruel. He had something fresh to brood over. Coming back from the embankment he had stepped on a thorn. It would fester, blow up and ulcerate. Bound to. That was enough to worry anyone.
Down on the track a new lot were passing, you could hear their feet scuffing the leaves; and a new rumour was being passed among them. ‘Cholera. They’re Tamils. They’ll be carrying cholera!’ That whisper on the track.
‘As if we didn’t have enough on our plate already,’ Digger thought bitterly, using a phrase that had lost all meaning up here.
But what really worried him, right now, was his foot. Each time he got up in the dark and trotted to the borehole (four or five times it was, in less than an hour) he could hear them, still passing. Thousands, it must be.
Cholera wasn’t just bad, it was the worst. They had seen a bit of it in one of the camps on the way up and had been eager to get out and away. As if they didn’t have –
But immediately his foot touched the ground his mind went there, to the immediate sore place where the thorn had gone in, and worried and worried.
It was a new eye, this opening in his flesh, and had its own point of view. Darkness was what it was obsessed with. It loved the dark. When he lay down and tried to sleep again he saw nothing but what it saw: the road it would take, dragging the rest of him (what was left of him) into bruise-blackness, till his whole body began to drink darkness from the hungry mouth that had opened there — mouth or eye, whichever way you saw it, both hungry for something other than the flesh, but also for the flesh.
The trouble is, he thought, they never tell you anything that’s of any real use. Even the books. Even the great ones. You have to learn it for yourself, just as it comes.
Well, he was learning all right; so were they all. Some of it their bellies were teaching them; like how little a man can live on and still drag himself from one day to the next. The history of empires, that lesson was, and what it costs to build them. Top grades he had been getting. Now it was his foot that was beginning to instruct him. God knows what lesson that would be.
It was swelling with the illuminating darkness of an ultimate wisdom. First principles. The original chemistry of things. Flashing it throb after throb to the furthest galaxies at the limits of his system. ‘This is how it starts,’ he thought, ‘this is genesis. This is the truth now, spreading fast, beginning as just a pinprick and eating its way through flesh to the very bone. Nothing abstract about this. You can see it if you want, you can scoop it out with a hot spoon. That’s real enough surely for any man.’
11
TO TOP IT all they gave them the glass-rod test and Digger was discovered, along with about eighty others, to be a cholera carrier. Sent to the isolation ward across the yard, he discovered a little deeper hell inside the larger one. It had been there all the time but he had known nothing of it. New cases were brought in each day, and in the morning, two or three of them, sometimes more, would be dead. Fellows who only hours before had been able to whisper at least, with a fleshy tongue and lips, would be mummies, their skin as dry and yellow on their bones as if they had been laid out like that for centuries. Dried-up twigs, their fingers were. Their feet were wood. You could only tell one man from another by the tag he wore.
A little away from the camp, in a jungle clearing, they had their burning-place. Each day there were new dead to be cremated, and because he was in reasonable shape, except for his ulcer, Digger did it. The wood had to be chopped the day before. The bodies were carried on rice sacks on bamboo poles.
Entering the place Digger felt a sleepiness come over him. It began the moment you stepped off the common path that the work parties used and took this one that led sharply away from it and then a hundred yards or more, in impenetrable gloom, into the forest. Only the dead came this way, except for those who carried them. To enter here you too had to become one of the dead, at least in spirit — the place demanded it. A sleepiness came over you, a torpor of the mind, though your limbs worked well enough.
You were in the antechamber here of the next world — that’s what the perpetual blue-grey gloom and the external dampness of the place told you; and the stillness, the suspension of all activity, including the fall of the ever-falling bamboo leaves.
You were at the furthest point now from where you had come from, wherever it was, and could bring no human qualities with you. The place did not recognise them, had never known them from the beginning of time. It was a primeval place of a vegetable dampness where nothing human had yet been conceived.
The air was blueish and so cold that your breath went always before you, as if spirit here had more substance man flesh.
The leaves kept up a slow drizzle, and long streamers of mist floated through just at head level. More breath.
The slowness of the blood that overcame you belonged to lizard life, reptile life. To stand upright and take on the sensations of men might be fatal here; no space had been prepared for it. You preserved yourself by letting a reptile sleepiness come over you and your spirit sink down towards the earth.
There were no ceremonies. The words would have blown back damp against your mouth.
All the more terrifying then that the dead, who after twenty-four hours were no more than the driest sticks, should suddenly, when the teak logs under them roared into flame, sigh and sit upright, start bolt upright in the midst of the flames. This recovery, and the heat that came from it, was too much. You found your limbs and hobbled away as fast as breath would take you. You fled.
12
‘LISTEN MATE,’ VIC whispered. What was he doing here? ‘I heard about something. One of the other blokes tried it and it worked on him. Can you hear me Digger? I’m gunna get you up. Sorry about this.’
The place was full of voices. In the attap roof where rain dripped continuously small lives were on the move, lizards, mice, scorpions, cockroaches — occasionally one of them fell and you would hear a man cry out in alarm and claw at himself to drive it off.
The other hospital inmates, if they could drag themselves to their feet, were never still — that’s how it seemed to Digger. They were forever trotting off to the boreholes, five or six times a night some of them, or restlessly wandering up and down between the bunks, in violent conversation with themselves.
Bugs rattled in the folds of his rags, he could hear them. They clattered against one another in the joints of the rack. Sighs, groans, a burst of shouting out of some man’s nightmare.
Get up? He would never get up, that’s what they had told him. Not on two legs anyway; one maybe. He had begun a light-headed descent towards a place of light, and had decided to go with it. He was letting his body have its own way now. That was the best thing.
‘Digger? C’mon. I’m going to get you up, right? It’ll hurt, I know. I’m sorry. But it’s our only shot. You don’t want t’ lose ya leg, do you?’
It was Vic’s voice but the tone was his mother’s. He wondered what Vic had been tuning into that allowed him to get it off so perfectly, but was not surprised. The walls between things had been breaking down for a while now.