by Mark Dapin
‘They set mates on mates, so I was paired with Townsville Jack. Now, Townsville Jack was a handy little fighter. He’d worked a few six rounders at the Old Tin Shed, but he thought it was a mug’s game and he wasn’t a mug. He was only there to pocket his purse and pad out the other bloke’s record.
‘He knew every trick to sell a punch. He slapped his fist past his wet palm to make a sound like knuckles on skin. He rolled every time my hand came close, and he slashed me with his long, sharp thumbnail in the soft skin over my eye to make so much blood that even the Japs had to call off the blue.
‘We were like dancers taking turns to lead each other, or two tomatoes trying to throw the same fight. We could’ve been professional wrestlers, the big fella and me. We could’ve done anything, after the war.
‘And now I’m going to watch a yiddisher boy blue a Maori at the Other Club,’ said Jimmy, ‘without him.’
*
I was nearly fourteen years old, a man under Jewish law, but I didn’t look like a man. I had matchstick arms and spindly legs. People were always trying to feed me up. I did push-ups in my bedroom at night – ten sets of ten, then fifty crunches – but my muscles did not seem to be growing like the boys’ in the boxing gym.
When I was younger, I’d wanted to be a soldier (or an astronaut, or a Jedi knight) but I didn’t have much idea of what they did. I knew they carried guns and drove around in tanks, and fought and killed bad guys, but I imagined their lives as clean, their uniforms smart, their rifles polished. They never ran out of ammo and they never gave up. It was the bad guys who surrendered, because they were cowards and their cause was wrong. Once they were in prison where they belonged, they were treated humanely – better than they deserved – and at the end of the war they went back to their families, thankful to the Allies for sparing their lives and convinced our way of life was better than theirs.
But it was hard to be a soldier in my house because Mum would not let me play with guns. If friends brought around their toy pistols, they had to leave them on the front deck before they came inside. I wasn’t even allowed plastic knives or hand grenades, which was unfair since the boy over the road had a pedal-driven armoured car and he was Jewish too. But Mum was a pacifist – except when it came to Israel – and Dad was a pacifist about arguing with Mum, although he did let me play shooting games at Timezone when we went to see James Bond movies on George Street.
I was allowed to watch war films, though, and read war books because they were history. I knew the names and dates of campaigns, and could recognise most World War II uniforms. As I had grown a bit older I had realised war was probably horrible and I would be as useless at fighting as I was at everything else. I was happy there was no national service any more, and I wouldn’t be yelled at by a sergeant major and made to crawl on my elbows under barbed wire. I knew I’d never be able to get through an assault course, when I couldn’t finish the obstacle race at the school sports carnival.
But I had wondered what it would be like to come under fire and hear bullets whiz past my ear. I thought I would probably run away and hide, or curl up and cry, because I was Jewish and soft. I knew I would not have been able to survive what Jimmy had gone through, and I didn’t think I’d want to.
‘Would you join the army again?’ I asked him.
Jimmy wheezed, and braced himself for a cough.
‘No,’ he said. ‘And that’s why I’m telling you this, so you don’t either.’
‘What if Australia was being invaded?’ I asked.
Jimmy swallowed.
‘Nobody invades Australia,’ he said. ‘We invade other countries.’
He turned his head and spat.
‘What if the Arabs invaded Israel?’ I asked.
‘They wouldn’t need an old man,’ said Jimmy. ‘Or a young boy.’
There was blood in his spit.
‘But what if I was twenty-one,’ I asked, ‘and the Arabs invaded Israel?’
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘The war would be over in the time it took to train you up,’ he said.
‘What if nobody had joined the army,’ I said, ‘and the Japs and the Germans had won the war?’
Jimmy shook his head.
‘You’ve got to make a choice,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t mean there’s a right one. I’m not saying I wouldn’t fight, I’m saying I wouldn’t fight like that. One infantryman here or there makes no difference. One guerrilla is worth a section.’
‘You just wanted to be with that girl,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Jimmy, ‘I did.’
‘They have girls in the army now,’ I said.
‘Not like that one,’ said Jimmy.
I thought he meant they weren’t Chinese.
‘What if there weren’t any guerrillas in the war?’ I asked.
‘What if you did something useful,’ he said, ‘like go to the shed and look for my staple gun?’
‘How would that be useful?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t bloody got one,’ he said, ‘so it would keep you out of the way for ten minutes while I finished my drawing.’
*
‘As we worked on the railway, everyone around us shrank,’ said Jimmy, ruling short, careful lines across the starchy drafting paper, ‘until we were all as thin as cornstalks, with mouths as long and stiff as Little Bluey. The skin was pulled so tightly across our bones, it looked like we were always smiling. We were as happy as skulls. Townsville Jack said to me, “Are you laughing at me? Get that stupid smile off your face.” “That is my face, you silly bastard,” I said. “And what’ve you got to smile about?”’
Jimmy snorted, and coughed out a raspy laugh.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It seemed funny back then.’
‘Bluey was fading away. He lost interest in his life: get up, get beaten up, go down, bleed, starve. He copped a bad thrashing from Grumpy – even though he was the kindest natured of all the guards – for not bowing to a Jap. He bowed, of course, you’d be mad not to bow, even Townsville Jack used to bow, but he didn’t get low enough. Something must’ve upset Grumpy that morning. Maybe he found out his wife back in Seoul had run off with the kimchi man or something, but he must’ve known it was hard for a tall bloke like Bluey to get down low, when his knees were so crook from the bashings he could hardly get up again. Grumpy whaled into Bluey like Bluey’d delivered the kimchi himself. It looked like he was trying to kick bits off him.
‘Bluey’s body was twitching on the ground, like a baited cockroach, with Townsville Jack crouched next to him saying, “Stay with us, Bluey. Don’t go.” When the orderlies took him, Townsville Jack shouted, “Bluey! Hang on, mate! Hang on!”
‘Townsville Jack was shaking, his face was purple. He had to take great gulps of air to breathe. He swore and spat and scratched the dirt until his fingers bled.
‘Bluey necked himself in the night. We found him swinging from a beam. He’d had to tie his legs up behind his back so that when he swung off the side of his bunk his feet wouldn’t touch the ground. He was naked and half-skinned and for all the world he looked like a side of beef hanging from a hook.
‘We could have minced him into sausages, a dozen for every man. The Japs did it in New Guinea – they ate their own. But we cut the poor bastard down and put him in two feet of mud, because two feet was as deep as we were allowed to go.
‘I carved his memorial cross and burned his name into the bamboo. The Japs let us have a funeral. Grumpy brought flowers to the grave and lit a candle. The bugler played the Last Post, and we buried with the body a name and description of every dwarf who’d ever walloped, whacked or leathered him, and the date and place of the crime.
‘The next time I saw Bluey,’ said Jimmy, ‘he was hanging in the wardrobe at home. But Little Bluey made it back to Changi. He made it back to Warracknabeal. Victoria. They sewed him a blazer and a beret and he used to march on Anzac Day with the rest of the Warracknabeal mob. They’ve even given him
medals because Bluey’s got no children, no grandchildren, nobody to wear his ribbons on parade except a piece of fucking wood.’
Jimmy squeezed on a dowel stick until his knuckles trembled.
‘In the jungle we slept on a bamboo platform with no mattress,’ he said. ‘As we starved, our limbs grew as thin as the struts. My shoulderblades and hips sank between the bars. We were packed together like cigarettes in a box. I slept between Katz and Townsville Jack. When Katz rolled, we all rolled.
‘Rats ran across our blankets, and lice lived in our clothes. Lice and Rice. Rice and Lice. Little bloody grains of white. The cooks made our meals in a kwali, a cauldron, the way they cook in hell, with a chimney built from oil cans to funnel out the steam.
‘We had rice with a pinch of vegetable and maybe a piece of meat fat. When they served it up with maggots, we ate the maggots. The maggots ate the corpses, so what did that make us?
‘Sickness was the other killer, but I was lucky. Every time I got sick, I had a sick mate in hospital with me and a fit mate to help us out. I had tropical ulcers with Myer, dysentery with Katz, and half-a-dozen malarias with Townsville Jack.
‘Dysentery was the worst of all. It sends you to the dunny fifty times a day. You shit the heart out of your body. If you don’t get medication – and all it takes is a couple of tablets – you shit yourself to death. The Japs wouldn’t release the tablets. They never explained why.
‘I’d just come out of the hospital after a week of the worst, most horrible, most pointless bloody human degradation you could imagine. Katz had to poke my bowels back into my arse with a stick.’
There were tears in Jimmy’s eyes.
*
‘They wouldn’t give us our mail,’ said Jimmy. ‘I had one letter from the Zayde the whole war. He told me about the weather in Sydney, which was hot because it was summer.
‘I was worried about my mother.
‘“We’ll’ve been posted missing,” I said to Townsville Jack. “She won’t know if I’m dead or alive.”
‘He looked me up and down.
‘“I don’t know if you’re dead or alive,” said Townsville Jack.
‘Later we were given printed postcards that said we were prisoners and we were being treated well. We were told the Japs would make sure they got back to Australia, but mine never did.
‘When the wet season came, even the Japs stopped getting mail. You think of hell as fire, but hell is water. The rains fell like the four million soldiers in the IJA all pissing on as at once. At the same time the guards got orders from Tokyo that the railway needed to be finished quicker, so they started the speedo. During the speedo we had no dargs, we just had to work until human beings couldn’t work any more, and then keep going. We worked waist-deep in water. It was like the world after the flood. Our two-foot graves filled with water, the soil swelled, and the corpses of our dead mates popped up out of the ground. One morning I saw Bluey floating towards me, rotten and eaten, and I screamed like a woman. That picture has never left me, never.
‘Men died faster in the speedo because the work was harder, the days were longer and the rations were even shorter because floods could cut off a camp for days. The Japs went berko with the bashings, trying to beat us into building faster. Then cholera came down from cholera hill, where the coolies had all died, and it hit Quilpie first. When a bloke’s got dysentery his blood turns to water, but when a bloke’s got cholera his shit turns to milk. It drained all the moisture out of Quilpie’s body. He looked as if he was being sucked into himself. His skin dried and wrinkled like an old man’s ball bag. He looked seventy, although he can’t have been older than twenty-three. Just before they die, good men take the faces of angels, but with cholera your mouth purses up like an arsehole. Quilpie vomited up his soul and then he passed.
‘I saw a hundred other blokes go that way. We couldn’t even give them graves because burial spread cholera. Under an overhang on the cliff, we burned the bodies of our mates on a pyre, like an offering to the dancing devil, while it rained all around. Sometimes the wood was too wet to burn and the corpses just lay there, stacked like kindling one on top of the other.
‘The huts weren’t waterproof. Ours didn’t even have a roof. We had to pull a sheet of tenting across the bamboo for cover, but the tent was ripped and rotten. You can sleep naked in the rain, but when you wake it feels as though the rain has been drumming at your skin, washing it away.
‘We were all so small and weak. We had to narrow the dunny pits to stop the blokes falling into their own shit and drowning. Not that it made much difference in the monsoon, when the shit floated back to the top and chased us into the river.
‘We had bugger all by then. Nothing. It was like living before things were invented, before tools, before clothes. Oh, we had one thing. We had bloody malaria, the lot of us. The first time I got crook with it, I felt like I was dying. By the third or fourth, the fevers passed like moods. I’d be cold and stiff, then hot and shaking, trembling and vomiting. Townsville Jack would towel me down with a piece of old rag, then I’d recover for a few hours and take my turn cooling him, holding a bowl under his chin to catch his guts. We were closer than lovers. We were brothers in sickness. It was the same with Katz.
‘At first, malarias were allowed to stay in hospital until the worst of their fevers passed, but when the speedo came in we were forced out onto the line. I broke rocks to make rubble for landfill while I was lying on my back, trembling and puking, and thirsty, so thirsty . . .
‘A mosquito bite on my leg turned soft and pussy and grew into a tropical ulcer. I had ulcers all around my ankles and calves, from grazes and cuts that had stayed damp and undressed while I worked, but this one grew from a spot into a dome, and ate its way through my skin towards the bone.
‘An Australian surgeon visited the camp once every two weeks. He came up and down the line on his cart with his meat saw – because we were meat – chopping and slicing and planing men away. He was a good man, but he wasn’t a saint. He was usually tired and angry, and there wasn’t much he could do for anybody because he had to hack them up without anaesthetic then leave them to recover without drugs, so if they didn’t die from the shock of the cut, they died from neglect afterwards.
‘The guards didn’t kill too many blokes, but every death was a murder because every life could’ve been saved with medicine or food or just a few days’ rest, but the Japs literally drove us to our graves, David. They rounded us up and herded us into the mountains to die.
‘Townsville Jack carried me to the surgeon to show him my ulcer. I had to wait outside while he sawed off a man’s leg at the knee. His scream jumped inside of me. I felt myself screaming for him.
‘The surgeon saw me in the operating theatre, which was a bamboo table with a bucket. In the bucket was the last man’s fresh leg, and two others. My mind almost left me then. I didn’t want to lose my leg, David. There’d been an old fella in Bondi after the Great War – the Zayde knew him – called Peg-Leg Pete, who’d been blown up at Passchendaele. His name wasn’t even Peter – I think it was Albert – but they called him “Pete” because it went with Peg-Leg. He sat showing his stump, begging for beer outside the Tea Gardens Hotel. The thing he hadn’t got became the thing he was. We used to taunt him, David, when we were children. We used to throw stones at him. God help me, but once I stole his wooden leg and threw it into the ocean. I needed my leg, David. I needed to stay complete.
‘The surgeon said my ulcer wasn’t gangrenous, that I needed to bathe it then spoon out the infection. The medical orderlies were busy trying to save the previous man, who died. They nearly always died when you cut their leg off. Townsville Jack found some boiled water and cleaned my leg, then he got a spoon – an ordinary teaspoon – and gouged my leg. It was like being eaten alive. All the pain I’d felt until then was nothing. He dug so deep into my leg, the spoon scraped the bone.’
For a moment, Jimmy couldn’t talk any more, then he said, ‘It stank. The whole thing st
ank. The thing I remember most about Thailand is the smell of life rotting.’
He went up to pour himself another drink and I saw he was limping.
‘I did the same, eventually, for Myer,’ said Jimmy, ‘and Katz did it for Townsville Jack.’
*
Jimmy’s voice ran hoarse. He took a whisky to smooth it out, but the drink made him cough, and his glasses bounced on his nose. He spat into his handkerchief and stuffed the rag back in his pocket.
‘I’m tired of the sound of my own voice,’ he said. ‘You tell me something.’
I didn’t know anything. I’d never done anything, apart from eat cat food once.
‘I’m just a kid,’ I said.
‘But what do you think about things?’
Nobody had ever asked me.
‘I don’t like them,’ I said. ‘I wish they were back the way they used to be, with Mum and Dad still together and us all living in the same house. I wish Mum and Dad hadn’t met other people who don’t really like me. I wish they weren’t angry with each other, and you weren’t mad with Mum, and everybody could just be friends again. And I wish Daniel would come back from France.’
Jimmy nodded and adjusted his spectacles.
‘Every time I live somewhere, everyone else moves out,’ I said. ‘First Daniel went to France, then Mum went to Redfern, now Grandma’s gone to Mrs Ethelberger’s. Nobody wants to stay with me, but everyone tells me what to do.
‘Also,’ I said, ‘I wish I wasn’t Jewish. I don’t see what good it does. It just gets me picked on. And I wish my dad did something other people do, like drive buses or build houses, instead of sell glue. And I wish I could fight like your boxer and kick the shit out of people who call me names at school.’
‘What do they call you?’ asked Jimmy.
‘Little Boy Glue,’ I said. ‘Little Boy Jew, Gluebag, Sticky Fingers, Sticky Dick, Tricky Dicky, Dickhead. I’ve got so many Dick names that some kids think my real name’s Richard, but it’s just that Dicky rhymes with Sticky. If they’re trying to be friendly, they sometimes call me Rich, but that just ends up as Rich Jew, then Moneybags, then Jewbag and back to Gluebag. Nobody at school calls me David. Even the girls. I fucking hate them all.’