The truth was he didn’t want it to, that’s what Digger thought. He’s a difficult cuss. You never knew which way he was going to jump — he didn’t himself half the time.
They began to draw apart now that they no longer needed one another. Digger shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, if that’s what he wants.’
Vic kept away from Doug too, and from all their former mates; turned sulky, drew into himself.
‘He’s a bastard. I knew that all along,’ Digger told himself, but was hurt just the same. He owed a lot to this fellow. His life, maybe. Certainly a leg. These were things that Digger could not easily forget. There were times, up there, when they might have known all there was to know about one another, things you’d never find out about a man, never have to, in the ordinary run of things. It meant something, that. But back here, at the edge of normality, these were matters that could not be alluded to.
‘He’s ashamed of all that,’ Digger thought. ‘It’s something he doesn’t want to know about.’
What surprised him was that Vic seemed closer to breaking down now than in any of their worst moments in Thailand.
It was time that troubled Vic. The opening up of a line into the future would take him back now into the life he left four years ago.
So long as he had been able to hold a view of things in which time was just moments, then days, each one destroying itself in the next; so long, that is, as it was a process without sequence, he could face himself and hang on. Living was vertical. You stood up new in each moment of it, and if you were strong, and luck was with you, you got from one moment to the next. It was all moments and leaps. But now he had to take on again the notion of a self that was continuous, that belonged to the past and was to have a life again in the future. That’s what scared him — the need to carry forward into the ordinariness that was coming a view of time, and of your whole life in it, that he had had to suppress in himself simply to stay alive.
He was twenty-two, just turned. Years, he would have, if the vision that had come to him, back there, was a true one, and his body told him it was.
He had done better than some others. Digger had lost all his teeth. He was gummy. Doug had lost an arm. He himself looked whole but felt that he had lost everything.
He had had no word from the Warrenders for more than two years. They had written often in the early days, Pa had anyway, and there was always an added word or two from the girls or Ma, but they had had no mail at all in Thailand, and he had got nothing in the hand-outs since they got to Malaya.
In his years with the Warrenders he had never spoken of the life he had known before he came to them, of his parents and all that world up the coast. He had buried that, kept it to himself.
Of course Pa had got a glimpse of it. But then Pa, amazingly, had known his father, though he couldn’t imagine what he had known. Pa, understanding by instinct how he might feel about it, and in accordance with his own manly principles, had never alluded to it. So he had kept all that to himself, hoarding it up in the most secret part of him as a thing he would not speak of or let anyone see.
He would not speak of this either, once it was over; since it was pretty certain now that it soon would be. He would push it deep down into himself, face it on his own, and deny, if asked, that he had ever been here: ‘No, mate — not me.’
That’s how it would be for him, and how it had to be. Strange? Is that strange? It’s the way I am.
Maybe he wouldn’t go back at all, that’s what he had begun to think. He was too changed. He didn’t want them to see (them least of all) what had been done to him, and he knew only too well what that was because he could see it in others. It would kill him if he had to see himself through their eyes. Lucille’s for instance.
He had (he couldn’t help it) a kind of contempt for what he had become that was the last resort of his wounded pride. The mere sight of other men sickened him. Their necks all vein and gristle, the tottering walk they had, like old blokes you saw going home just on closing time with a bottle of cheap plonk in a brown-paper bag; the silly, hopeful chatter they went in for, the rumours, the schemes — chicken farms were what they were all for running when they got back; most of all the smell they carried, which wasn’t just sweat or shit or green vomit but of what four years of slavery had done to them, sickness of the spirit. It marked you forever, that. There was no way you could get rid of it.
But as the time got closer and the rumours wilder and maybe nearer the mark, old needs and desires began to reappear for no other reason than that they might be capable again of fulfilment; he was racked. And with them, quite unsought, came visions, so real at times that his whole body would be filled with such sensual warmth and yearning, raw need, happiness, and sudden choking emptiness, that he thought he might pass out. Was that what it was to be like?
The visions appeared of their own accord, and in no particular sequence: a stockinged foot, a hairpin, the unbuttoned strap of a suspender. They were the ingredients of spells, his body practising its own form of witchcraft, or they were the symptoms of madness — that’s what he thought. But their power was overwhelming. His blood raced and burned, he hardly dared close his eyes. And they came as well when his eyes were open. His mind, or his body, was an infinite storehouse of such vision, of acts and objects he had pushed down into the dark and which were reappearing now to claim connection. Was this madness or some deep healing process? Either way it was a torment to him.
One image especially kept coming back and back, a kind of waking dream. It was of the house at Strathfield, the hallway just inside the front door, with its high white ceiling and pavement of blue, white and brown terracotta tiles.
A radiance as of the westering sun filled it — but that, his reason told him, was impossible: the house faced south. Still, there it was and there he was.
As the light settled out and his heart, which appeared to be the real source of it, slowed at last to normal pace, and since it had been free-floating, came to rest again under his ribs, he saw that Lucille was there, just turning on the second step.
Something had caught her attention. She was looking towards him with a little line of puzzlement between her brows, as if she knew someone was there but was too dazzled by the unaccustomed light to see who it was. He knew he could not call out to her. But his heart was beating so loud he thought she might hear that.
After a moment, still puzzled, she turned and went on up and he was left standing, but quietly now and full of contentment, as if some sort of assurance had been given him.
None had, of course, and with the part of him that was rational and clear-headed he knew it, so what was he doing?
Still, the image, or the dream, or whatever it was, stayed warm in him and kept coming back.
15
VIC, FRESHLY WASHED and combed, in clean shirt, clean shorts and a new pair of boots, a bit light-headed just with the knowledge that he could go anywhere he pleased, down this alley or that, was out walking in the freed city. They were all out somewhere, rushing here and there like kids in a fairground, not knowing what to try first.
He had come out alone and was in a part of the town he did not know, along a foul canal. He didn’t know anywhere in Singapore, not really. He had never had a chance to.
It was a low place, all peeling walls, coal smoke from kerosene tins, and footpaths filthy with squashed fruit and dog-turds and cinders and bloody-looking spit. He had wandered down here looking for he didn’t know what. Nothing. Anything. It wasn’t any place he had intended to be.