‘Digger?’
He was being hauled up, away from the light. When his eyes opened it was dark. The hospital hut was all shadows of men moving against the light outside.
‘What are you doing?’ he complained, feeling Vic’s arm hooked under his own and hauling him up. He was light enough, but was surprised just the same that Vic could manage it. ‘I can’t walk.’
Vic ignored this. He had him up and hanging. Digger could hear Vic panting and could smell his breath. He began to drag him out under the overlap of the attap roof into starlight. Other men, ghostlike, were wandering about out here but took no notice of them.
‘Where are we goin’?’ he asked when they had crossed the open space in front of the huts and entered a thicket.
Vic was grunting. He did not reply. ‘This is the hard bit now,’ he said at last, after they had come some way into the thickening forest. ‘Hang on, eh Dig? Digger? Dig?’
They were at the edge of a muddy bank that sloped steeply to a glint of water where blackness swirled. Digger looked out across the wide expanse of it. The river.
‘Listen,’ Vic was telling him. ‘I’m gunna put you down on your backside, right? You gotta slide. It’ll hurt, Dig, I know that. I’m sorry. But it’s the only way. You ready now?’
He had no power to resist. He felt himself settled with his legs over the edge of the bank, then he was sliding. His bones wrenched. They would break, they must; he was waiting to hear what he had heard often enough in the hospital hut, the unspeakable sound of a legbone snapping, crack! where some bloke turned in the dark. But there was only a shock of pain that he blacked out on, and he was in thick mud. It was oozing all round him. It was in his mouth and eyes, stinking. But he did not have enough weight for it to take him down. No pack, no boots, and there was no meat on him. So in his own case gravity did not function. He floated on top of it, floundering, and the mud was grey-black river-slime with roots in it.
‘Digger? Are you OK, Dig?’
That was that Vic again. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Digger thought, ‘doesn’ ’e know any other name? Why doesn’ ’e torment some other bastard?’
‘All right,’ Vic said, ‘all right, we can rest a bit, no hurry, Dig. You have a rest.’
Vic lay with his face in the mud. It stank, he thought, like an old slate-rag at school. He was sweating. ‘No, there’s no hurry,’ he thought.
He was light-headed. That was the pain. But more than that it was the revulsion he felt that part of him stank worse even than this river-slime, and had the stink of a dead body. He was carrying the beginnings of a dead body along with his live one.
There was no hurry, but he couldn’t wait just the same. Another moment of this death touch on him and he’d go crazy now that the cure was so near. But Digger couldn’t move again. Not just yet.
‘I can wait,’ he told himself. ‘There’s no hurry. The fishes’ll wait. If I can just get my ear out of the mud’ (he lifted his head) ‘I’ll be able to hear them.’ The tiddlers, he meant, in their shoals at the edge of the river; swishing their tails, waving their gills to breathe, and smelling them: flesh. He reached out and touched the edge of the water. Very gently it tripped over his fingers. It was going somewhere. It would clean them, even if it was itself thick with mud.
‘Digger?’
He pulled himself up, put his face close to Digger, who was all mud, and, as if he could by sheer willpower breathe life into him, said, ‘Listen, mate, I’m gunna get you up again, right? Digger? Dig?’
Digger rolled his head a little. There were stars, big ones, very close, and so bright that it hurt. They were heavy, he knew that. Tons and tons of gas and luminous minerals burning, rolling, travelling fast but managing to stay up. The weight of them, that light balancing act, was an encouragement.
‘Right? Now,’ the voice said, ‘this is it. Right, mate? I’m gunna get you up. Upsadaisy! Right?’
Vic was astonished. Digger was just skin and bone but the weight of him was enormous. It must be the mud he was coated in. No, he thought, it’s something else. It’s the weight of death, heavy as lead in him. So heavy maybe I can’t do it. He struggled and the sweat began to stream faster on him.
‘That’s good, that was good, Digger. We’re there now. We’ve made it.’ He stood still, supporting Digger who also supported him. He could hear the mad activity there on the surface of the water, where the stars touched it and you could see them beginning to swarm.
‘Don’t worry, fishies,’ he said, in a voice he recognised as his own from when he was maybe three years old, ‘we’re coming. Only a little while now.’
‘Now,’ the voice said, and half-supporting, half-dragging him where he hung under the stars (what was supporting them?), led him forward.
It was a river. Digger saw the gleaming surface of it, coal-black and churning. ‘What is this?’ he thought. ‘What does he think he’s doing? This won’t help.’ The word that had come into his head — it was a word he had never used as far as he could recall — was baptism. But all Vic did was lead him a little way in: one pace, another. He felt the warmth of it rising to just below his knees. It was alive. He could feel the life of it.
‘What is it?’ he asked, childlike. ‘What’s happening?’
‘It’s the fishes,’ Vic said. ‘Don’t worry, they won’t hurt.’
‘What?’
‘Shh, don’t scare ’em, you’ll scare ’em. They’re only tiddlers. They won’t hurt.’
Vic too was in a kind of wonder at it. The idea of it had sickened him at first, just the idea: of being fed off by greedy mouths. But in fact it was soothing. The stars high up, so still; and underwater there, in what seemed like silence but wouldn’t be, close up, the jaws fighting for their share of the feast. And all you felt from up here, from this distance, was a pleasant contact. The touch of their savagery was soft.
‘It tickles,’ Digger said foolishly.
‘Yair, they’re just tiddlers,’ Vic told him, and he was laughing now. It was so weird, and he had such a sense of the good they were doing him. ‘It’ll be over in a minute.’
It would be over when they drew blood.
Digger understood at last, but thought it must be a dream. He could hear the fish in a bright wave swarming at the edge of the bank where they stood offering themselves.
There was a smell these last days that had got right into his head. He knew what it was. It was the news of his own corruption, the smell, still as yet a little way off, of his own death. It had sickened him. Now, slowly, he felt the smell recede. All the stink and ooze of it was being taken back into the world, away from him, into the mouths of the living and turned back into life there. He felt the bump bump of gristle as the small fry darted in and their snouts bounced off bone. They were feeding off him, savagely, greedily tearing at the flesh, and what they were giving him back was cleanness.
When he came back into himself and looked about he was standing knee deep in oily water, stars overhead, so close he could hear them grinding, and he could hear the tiny jaws of the fishes grinding too, as starlight touched their backs and they swarmed and fought and churned the blackness to a frenzy round his shins.
‘Did any of that happen?’ he asked Vic later, when they lay exhausted in the dark.
‘Yes, it happened, an’ it’ll save us. I told you it would. It works.’