‘Nah,’ Vic said. ‘Thought I’d go out an’ take a look at what we were supposed to be fighting for.’
Digger looked up enquiringly.
‘We might as well ’ave let the bastards have it,’ he said, ‘if you want my opinion.’ He laughed, tipped his head back, opened his throat and poured down the rest of his beer.
‘He’s been on the booze,’ Digger thought. ‘Or he’s off-colour somehow. Crook.’ He felt the pull on him to say something now, as if, for all Vic’s offhandedness, what was really being appealed to was an arrangement between them that was still in operation, because there was no way it could not be. Digger was shaken. He had thought, back here, that he might be finished with all that, that this place was to be all beginnings. But once bitten there was no shying away. The medicos had told them that.
‘What about you?’ Vic was asking. ‘How they treatin’ ya?’
‘Oh, good,’ Digger said, and swallowed. ‘Pretty good.’
He could barely speak. Suddenly he had seen what it was in Vic that touched him, and it was something he did not want to touch.
They had been prisoners of the Japs up there; anyway, he had been; so were Ern and Doug and the rest. It was one of those things that just happened to you, if you were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place. But that wasn’t how Vic saw it. The Japs for him were only part of it, so it hadn’t ended for him. It was still going on. ‘What’s more,’ Digger thought, ‘he wants to drag me into it.’ He had even kept the look of a prisoner. And deliberately too, or so Digger thought.
It was a sickness he did not want to get too close to. Maybe you could pick it up just by seeing it in someone, someone you were too close to; or just by realising it could exist.
‘Thought I’d try the big smoke again,’ Vic was telling him. ‘Give it another shot.’
He looked up. There was only one thing Digger could say. ‘Got a place?’ he asked, and looked quickly away.
‘Yair,’ Vic said after a moment, and Digger could feel the tension break between them. ‘Yair, I’m all right that way. Thanks, mate.’
They sat for a time in silence, Digger all emotion, Vic calmer now. They talked. Digger’s mind began to wander. He kept falling through holes in the conversation that were no bigger than single words sometimes, but the distance he fell was hundreds of miles. He began to sweat. All that brutalisation up there had left a weakness in him, a part of his mind that was open on one side to absolute darkness, and the stench that came from that direction was so powerful at times that he gagged on it, not daring to turn his head, even in the clearest sunshine, for fear of having to face again the tattered columns of them, big-boned, filthy, with their muddy eyes and outsized hands and feet.
They went out into the street together, stopped at a pie stall and sat down side by side in the gutter to down a pie.
Digger barely tasted his. Vic offered to finish it. When they parted on the footpath outside the club he was still shaking, and he knew for certain now. It was the malaria. A return bout.
It hit him harder than he expected. He was carried back, not just months, but three or four thousand miles, to a place of jungle heat and wetness that had nothing to do with geography — he knew about geography — but was a condition his body had surrendered to once and could never now be free of. With the physical symptoms came all the troop of events and visions and ghosts he had thought he might be rid of back here. He had thought she might rid him of them, but no power on earth could do that.
He was one again among others and could barely make himself out among them, they were all so tattered and thin. They closed in on him, stifling his breath, and when he tried shifting in the ranks to get a glimpse of her, of her sunlit figure through the press, they were too many; thin as they were, mere bones some of them, as if they had just hauled themselves upright out of the mud, they stood between him and even the smallest chink of sunlight, holding their hands up like begging bowls with nothing in them, and each one in a whisper saying the syllables of their own name over and over, as if only in that way could it be kept in mind, in their own mind or anyone’s. Anyone’s.
Digger tried, against the great hissing sound they made, to speak his own name, but his mouth was dry and he had no breath. He tried to think it, but his head now was filled with their names, and he had given his word, officially, and was afraid in his weakened state that he might forget one of them, let it slip. How could he ever face the man, knowing he had let go of him so that he was no longer present and accounted for?
But his own name was safe enough. It was buried somewhere. He would dig it up again later.
He had to survive. If he didn’t, how could they, since so many of them were now just names anyway, with no existence save as syllables in someone else’s head? In his head.
His mind went back to that swarm of tiddlers in the river. He felt the touch of the stream, then the tiddlers striking and striking in fury as they tore at his flesh; but with a touch, though it was all selfishness and savagery on one side, that on the other was the gentlest healing. It could also be like that.
His eyes clapped open. The voices now were roaring up from the street. There must be a huge mob down there, all shouting their names and holding their faces up like empty bowls.
A face tilted towards him. Hands brought a coolness to his brow. She was here. No, it was a man’s hands. Vic’s. The whispering rose in a great shuddering wave and he was swept under again, and he battled with it, half-drowning in scald.
He blinked, opened his eyes again, this time on silence, then lapsed a moment, rolling back months into wet heat; then blinked himself back again into the room.
‘So. You’ve decided to come back to the living.’
It was Frank McGowan. He was looking up over a newspaper, with glasses halfway down his nose. He lay the paper aside and took them off.
‘How you feeling?’
‘I’m all right,’ Digger said weakly. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Playing nurse. Any complaints?’
‘Was that you?’ Digger asked.
‘Yair. You want to try an’ eat something?’
He got up off the cane-bottomed chair and busied himself for a bit at the gas ring with a little saucepan and a tin of soup. He was in shirt-sleeves and braces.
He brought a bowl and spoon and sat on the edge of the bed, preparing to feed Digger with the spoon, but Digger put his hand up. He put the spoon back in the bowl.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Not too long. You’ve been sick for three days.’
He opened his mouth and let McGowan feed him warm pea soup.
‘I suppose I’ve been saying things,’ he said after a moment.
‘Not much. Here, you should try and get a bit more of this down you.’
‘How did you know?’ Digger asked. ‘That I was crook. The room and that.’
‘Oh, I’m a cop, remember?’ He met Digger’s eyes with his own and there was a flash of humour in them.
‘I should be at work — it must be nearly six.’
McGowan took the bowl away. ‘It is,’ he said. ‘Six in the morning. Anyway,’ he added, ‘you’re out of a job.’ He was fussing about at the gas ring. He turned and faced Digger.
‘The club was raided,’ he explained. ‘Wednesday night. Stroke a’ luck, really — f’you. Being crook when it occurred.’ He seemed pleased with himself.