by David Malouf
What angered her was the vanity of his assumption that he could soothe an outrage in her that he had not even understood.
She had lost the one little bit of ground she stood on that gave her a choice. It was that, and the shame of what she had let them do to her, that had beaten the spark out of her.
They were in a world in which forces were at work that took no account of ordinary lives, and as things everywhere got tougher he saw that Ma’s fears, which he had thought exaggerated at first, were real. All around them people were being swept into the gutter and could not save themselves.
Friends of the Warrenders, a family that had seemed quite safe and prosperous, were revealed overnight to have been living on nothing but show. The father, a solicitor, went to prison. The mother, and the boy and girl, moved to Melbourne.
Things were closing in. It was for Ma’s sake now, as well as Pa’s, that he set to work, but in a practical way, to save them. Pa was too high-strung and sensitive to be a businessman. ‘Well,’ Vic told himself, ‘I’m not sensitive, I can’t afford to be. Business will do fine for me. I’m not so particular.’
He had thought at first that he ought to be; that his readiness to muck in and dirty his hands with money-making was an indication that even his finest instincts might be coarse. But when he got to see things more clearly he began to ask himself what the value was of so much fineness if all it did was spoil you for action – and it was in action that he meant to prove himself.
He took a second look at his coarseness. What it amounted to was a wish to get on in the world, and a view, a hard-headed one, of what you might have to be to do it.
For one thing you had to see things the way they were. No good giving people credit for virtues they did not have. Most people were selfish. They had low motives rather than noble ones. You had to start from that. You ought to act nobly yourself (he always would), but you couldn’t expect others to.
He could live with that, he wasn’t squeamish. The times had revealed pretty clearly what sort of world they were in. Lack of fastidiousness might be an advantage when things got rough.
He kept faith with the glimpse Pa had given him that first day of ‘the changes’; he had been moved by all that, and if it was a term he had any use for he too might have called them poetic. He was not without idealism, or imagination either. But this did not prevent him from seeing these processes, in their real physical form, as what they were: natural occurrences accountable to strict chemical laws, and also, if need be, to the balance of costs.
He had been fascinated by the vat from the moment he saw it sitting there so cool and mysterious, the great rounded girth of it with its rows of darker rivets, the pipes climbing away at all angles, the activity it set up in the air around you, which throbbed with an added heat. Twenty-four hours a day it sat there, quietly humming to itself, and it wasn’t just soap it manufactured, the pure white cakes that moved up and down on conveyor belts, went out at last to be wrapped and packed by the girls in the work room, and from there, in trucks, to the department stores and chemist shops and beauty salons where it was handled by sales ladies, and came back at last in the form of the ready cash that Pa jingled in his pockets and doled out on Saturday mornings as pocket money, and which Ma used to run the house. No, it made something else as well, and they lived on that, too. It was a dynamo pouring out energy that when it crossed the yard was translated into the little actions and reactions that made up their daily lives. (Not literally, of course. He was thinking now in terms that in Pa’s mind would have been ‘poetic’.)
Standing at his bedroom window he would look across the dark of the yard and be reassured by the faint glow of it there, still humming away. He saw it in his sleep as well. Awesome and huge it looked, but comfortably familiar. The energy from it fired his dreams.
In the afternoons after school he would slip across to the factory to ‘bother’ Mr Hicks. But the manager, once he saw the seriousness of him, and that his interest was not just boyish curiosity in the nuts and bolts of things, was happy to show him all he knew. The boy was bright, that’s what he saw. And he had imagination, too. He saw things large.
‘That’s a good question,’ he told Vic once, chewing on his moustache. ‘If we knew the answer to that one, young feller, we’d be on the way to millions.’
‘Would we? Really?’
Hicks paused a moment. Vic, he saw, had taken him literally. The word millions meant something definite to him.
‘Well, millions is an exaggeration,’ he said. ‘Let’s say: to setting ourselves pretty firmly on our feet.’
But that wasn’t enough for Vic. It might do for a start. But millions! He put this bit of information, which was still a question, at the back of his mind. He’d work on it.
What Hicks had failed to see was that millions, even if you took it literally, wasn’t simply, as Vic saw it, cash. It was an evocation of scale rather than an accountable sum. In an action of that size, Vic thought, coarseness would blur into insignificance.
He still smarted over the presence of this negative quality in himself, but was determined not to deny it; to find instead a means of using it in an action that would be fine. At least his motives were fine. He would be doing it for them; anything that might accrue to himself would be sheer profit. He would be repaying his debt a thousandfold. Wasn’t that noble enough? In millions! Even Meggsie might be impressed.
He had an irritant, Vic, a grain of scepticism about his own nature that would not let him rest. He could never quite prevent himself from looking, on each occasion, for the little giveaway flicker in another’s eye that would warn him he had failed to get away with it; that for all his swagger, he had been sniffed out. It gave him a dark pleasure, that, which he could not account for. It was always the one person in any company who had not been taken in, who had not succumbed to the tricks he used to win people, that he was drawn to.
He went on trying to, of course. That was only natural. But with half of him he wanted them to resist.
What he was after was a truth that could not be mocked.
He had seen at once, when Mr Warrender first took him round to the kitchen to be introduced, that Meggsie was the one here that he would have to be on guard against.
‘Vic is it, eh?’ she had said, looking once and weighing him up. ‘Well, you just watch them boots, young feller, on my floor. I jest mopped it.’
These were her first words to him. He looked at the floor. It was lino in big black and white squares like a draughts board.
‘Oh, Vic’s all right,’ Pa assured her, but lost confidence under her glare.
He knew what she really meant because they spoke the same language.
‘Never seen a floor like that, have you, son?’ That’s what she meant. ‘Floor and boots both, I dare say. Well, the floor’s mine, I’m the boss here. As for the boots, don’t you get too big for ’em, that’s all. You may fool some people but you won’t fool me.’
It wasn’t hostile, but it was a warning. The look of amusement on her face suggested that she would be watching with interest but he could expect no quarter. She had her girls to think of. She didn’t care for boys.
He went easy with her. No good trying to get around Meggsie. She’d see through that right off. She knew the world he had come out of and she knew, because she had scrubbed them, the grime he got on the cuffs and collars of his shirts and the state of his sheets. A kind of game developed between them. It wasn’t the sort of game the Warrenders would have understood. It was a joking game, watchful on her part and contentious, but not without affection. ‘I know you, young feller, I’ve known lots a’ fellers like you. Believe me, I can read you like a book.’
So far as Meggsie was concerned, he would always be on probation. That was the nub of the thing.
Apart from Mr Warrender, to whom she was fiercely loyal, there was only one man Meggsie had any time for. This was the actor Sessue Hayakawa. Vic knew him because he had been one of his mother’s favourites too.
‘He’s a dream,’ Meggsie would tell Vic and the girls when they came bustling into the kitchen to scrape bowls.
‘I thought he was a Jap,’ Vic would say cheekily.
‘Well, ’e’s a gentleman. Which is more than can be said fer you, young feller, with them hands.’ She meant his nails weren’t clean, but he was ashamed of his big hands and hid them. ‘Yer not in the race.’
‘The Jap race,’ he said under his breath (this was for the girls), and giggled. But the girls were not amused. A year back they would have been, but only Ellie laughed now, out of loyalty, and he felt oafish.
‘He’s suaaave,’ Meggsie told them, and Vic had a vision of the sleek, cruel, broodingly attentive lover she must dream of, who stood at the furthest possible distance from what she had known in the flesh. From ‘fellers’, as she would have put it, ‘round here’.
‘Well,’ he thought, ‘yes, but she’s never had to change his sheets.’
‘What does Meggsie think of her dreamboat now?’ he wrote home after the Japs hit Pearl Harbor, still smarting, long after, from the snub he had felt and the disadvantage she had put him at in front of Lucille. But it would be four years before he got his answer.
III
1
THE EARLY DAYS at Changi were all idleness and neglect. The Japs, caught out by the suddenness of the collapse and the falling into their hands of so many thousands, had no idea as yet what to do with them. Left to their own devices, they did nothing. Even Doug, after his first picnic vision of it, fell quiet and was depressed.
To Digger it was terrible. The daily hanging about in irregular groups, the looseness, the disorder: sudden outbreaks of rebellious anger, then periods when the whole place seemed ghostly and they were struck, all of them, with the sleeping sickness.
The time they were in, like the unenclosed space of the camp, was limitless. Without boundaries it had no meaning. Young fellows who only weeks before had been full of fight and spirit, setting up races with one another, or boxing, or riding out on bicycles to the Happy World to have their fortunes told and play rough and find girls, shuffled about now like old men in a hospital yard, sucking fags, swapping rumours, feeding petty grievances. They neglected everything: let a grain of rice fall for the flies to swarm over; at the latrines were too lazy to cover their shit. Their insides went liquid. Everything they ate turned to slime.
This was despondency in its physical form, so childish and shameful that grown men wept at it. ‘I hate this,’ Digger told himself. ‘It’s worse than anything.’ It was the sun scrambling their brains. It was lack of activity. It was the shame and desperation they felt at being sold out by the higher-ups. It was the failure of the officers to impose order. It was their native slackness and refusal to accept authority – those were the theories.
But slowly, as the days went by, a kind of order began to emerge. It was rudimentary enough, a simpler version of the old one, but it grew in such fits and starts and bits and pieces that you could make nothing of it.
Makeshift shelters began to appear, flimsy affairs knocked up from whatever the men could scrounge. Cook-houses were established. Three times a day food was doled out, rice and a few vegetables with maybe a lump of fish in it, and you spent a good hour sometimes hanging about in lines. A few of the officers, who still had faith in the civilising power of education and saw in the enforced idleness and boredom of the lower ranks an opportunity that might never recur, set up a school. They had textbooks, and a blackboard and chalk. They called themselves a university and gave lectures on all sorts of things. Digger went along once and heard a talk on Ancient Rome – the monetary reforms of the emperor Diocletian. Another time it was the Soviet Union, but that occasion ended in a ding-dong battle over Stalin’s pact with Hitler, and the anger on both sides was murderous.
Mac tried to talk Digger into doing French. They sweated over a lesson or two, but learning a language would take years, even Mac saw that, and they had no idea what they would be doing next week.
‘You’d be better off learnin’ bloody Japanese,’ Doug told them. ‘On’y I don’t s’pose they’re bloody offerin’ that. Bad for morale.’
Standing in line one day, waiting for his issue of rice, Digger found himself addressed by a fellow he had never seen before. He was muttering. All Digger had done was turn his head a little to see who it was.
‘They’re all bloody thieves in this camp,’ the boy told him passionately. ‘I lost a fucken good fountain-pen. Some bastard swiped it straight outa me pack!’
Another fellow, half behind the other, half beside, gave a scornful laugh. ‘You could’a done worse,’ he said. He turned to Digger. ‘He don’t even know how to write.’
‘Yair? Well what’s that gotta do with it?’ the first boy shouted. ‘Eh? Eh?’ and he began to jab the heel of his hand into the other’s shoulder. ‘I traded that pen fer a fucken good pair a’ socks. A man oughten’a steal from ’is mates.’
Faced with this fiercely honourable proposition the other fellow shrugged and turned away.
‘Me name’s Harris,’ the boy told Digger, ‘Wally’ – as if he had seen that Digger was the one man in all this throng who might remember it for the rest of his life. He waited for Digger to respond but Digger drew away. He had nothing to do with these men. He had been late lining up, that’s all. He had his own mob. But the boy would not be put off.
‘I oughten’a be here by rights,’ he confided. ‘I’m on’y sixteen. I lied to ’em. Me mum didn’ mind.’
Standing with his dixie and spoon in hand and the hat far back on his curls, his expression was a mixture of cocky satisfaction at his own cleverness and dismay at where it had got him. He was trying to interest Digger. He was one of those fellows that no one notices and he was eager now to pick up with someone, anyone, having grasped by instinct that you could only survive here if you had mates.
‘I could’a done a good swap for that pen,’ he said, ‘it was a real goodun. Listen,’ he said, dropping his voice so that the other fellow could not hear, ‘waddaya reckon I oughta do? I don’t feel so good. I got the shits all the time, I’m crook. What can I do?’
But Digger was at the head of the line now. He took his rice and moved away. He saw the boy turn and look after him, but there were dozens of fellows like that, who once the ranks were open were helplessly adrift.
‘I don’t eat it,’ another man told him, another stranger, when he was once more in the line. ‘I don’t eat the shit.’ Digger wondered then why he was lining up for it. He was a big, heavy-shouldered fellow, blond, red-faced, pustular.
‘If they keep feedin’ us this muck, and we keep eatin’ it, our eyes’ll go slanty. Dja know that? This professor tol’ me. It’s what the bastards want! T’ make fucken coolies of us. They hate white men.’
Digger frowned. Was he crazy? He was dancing about behind Digger with his dixie all washed and ready in his hand. Half crazy with hunger, he looked.
‘On’y I don’t eat it, see? They can’t make yer, can they? They won’t get me! I’d rather bloody starve! All it does anyway is give yer the shits.’
But a moment later Digger saw him, big-eyed and wild-looking, shovelling the stuff into his mouth. Their eyes met and Digger looked quickly away.
More than ever now he clung to Mac and Doug. Only in those who were close to you was there any continuation of cleanness and sanity. But now they had Vic as well and were an uneasy foursome, unbalanced, as they never had been when they were three. Forever looking about to see what you might be thinking of him, Vic was all little burrs and catches, always uneasy with himself yet at the same time cocky, and anxious at every opportunity to put himself forward or to get the better of you. Digger couldn’t stand him.
‘Oh, Vic’s all right,’ Doug would say. ‘Take no notice of ’im.’ But the foursome began to split into unequal twos.
Digger missed Doug. He missed his lightness and good humour. He was civil enough to Vic but resented his butting in. He and Mac thought a
like on this. They thought alike on lots of things.
He was an odd bloke, Mac. When he was in the mood for it he could talk the leg off an iron pot. Not like Doug, who loved an audience and to joke and pull people in, but in a quieter, more reflective way.
He was full of stories, odd anecdotes and theories he had picked up from meetings or lectures he had attended or fellows he had heard on Sundays in the Domain; or from books, or from conversations he had had up at the Cross.
For a time he had had a flat there and known all sorts of people: radicals, poets, fellows who wrote for the Herald and Smith’s Weekly. It was an education. ‘Sydney wouldn’t be Sydney without the Cross,’ he told Digger. ‘That’s where you oughta head for when you get outa this. The Cross. No place like it.’
It seemed to Digger he had seen nothing really, for all the places he had been. Not after what you heard from other men. Mac’s tales of life round the city and on the trams, the different depots, and the runs he went on out to Bondi, Bronte, Clovelly, Watson’s Bay, the best pubs and pie shops, and Sargents, where his sister-in-law worked, which made the best cakes – all this brought Sydney to life for Digger and fed his hunger for a world of ideas and talk and action that he thought he would never get enough of, not if he lived till he was a hundred and three. He took in every detail, and each one was sharper for his having to picture it in his own head.
The walk up the long gully at Cooper Park, for instance. Could any place be greener on a nice Sunday afternoon? Mac and Iris and the boys would go for picnics there, and after an hour or so, when their meal had gone down, Mac would coach the younger boy, Jack, in the high jump.
‘I dare say he’ll be out of the juniors,’ Mac would say a bit regretfully, ‘by the time we get back. Grows like a beanpole, that kid. No stopping ’im. He’ll be five three or four by now, I reckon. You should see ’im take off – the spring he’s got!’ Digger could see it: the boy’s legs scissoring as he went over the bar, Iris seated on the grass with a chequered cloth spread out in front of her, and the scraps from their tea, with maybe a bottle of pickles. In time, out of Mac’s bits and pieces of description, and stories and instances, the whole household came into view.