Spirit House

by Mark Dapin

  ‘“What’re you up to, sport?” asked Townsville Jack.

  ‘“Birdwatching,” he said.

  ‘“Is that something to do with the radio?” asked Townsville Jack.

  ‘“No,” he said. “I’m an ornithologist. I write down the names of birds.”

  ‘“What’s the point of that?” asked Townsville Jack.

  ‘“Don’t you want to be free like a bird?” asked the ornithologist.

  ‘“No,” said Townsville Jack. ‘I want to be free like a man.”

  ‘The funny thing was, there were no birds around there anyway. We’d eaten them all.

  ‘The guards came back with a couple of extra men they’d dragged out of the hospital. One of them was an old soldier, crook with dysentery, hobbling on a stick.

  ‘“It’s Snowy White and the Seven Dwarfs!” said Townsville Jack.

  ‘Snowy gave us a wave.

  ‘“I’ve been waiting the whole war to say that,” said Townsville Jack.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep that night because of a new pain inside me. I thought I’d felt every bloody hurt there was, but this was something different: it was like an ache in my organs. The surgeon was in camp. He pressed my guts then told me he’d have to remove my gall bladder. Then and there. Tied to the bed with no anaesthetic. I was so frightened, David. I was terrified of the pain. The surgeon cut into me and there are some things your mind doesn’t let you remember because if you did you’d never be able to think about anything else, so I couldn’t tell you how it feels to have an organ pulled out of your body while you’re fully conscious and lashed to a bamboo frame, but even Katz couldn’t stay in the room.

  ‘I was back on the line in a few days. It doesn’t make any difference not having a gall bladder. They’re like officers. I don’t know what they’re for. But I never felt as strong again after the operation. Maybe it was my imagination, but it was like I’d started to die. And I was tired of all the pain.

  ‘Katz brought me tucker from the Dutch camp, to help me get my strength back. There were thousands of Dutch on the line, but they were like Tamils to me. I’d never given them any thought. I knew they ate cheese, talked double-dutch and needed a beer to give them a bit of dash, but that was it.

  ‘The Aussies didn’t trust them. A lot of the Dutch were boongs, Eurasians, but Katz seemed to get on with them all right and they had better cooks than our lot.

  ‘The food didn’t help me though. Katz even gave me some yak meat, but I still got weaker.

  ‘“You’ve got melancholia,” said Townsville Jack. “Don’t give up now.”

  ‘But I couldn’t see where this was going to end any more. The world had forgotten us. The best thing I could hope was the Japs would win the war and take over the world and let us out. I thought I might neck myself, but I knew there was no need. If I waited, the melancholia would kill me on its own.

  ‘And then this bloke Sprout appeared again, with his Japanese oaths and his funny sideways mouth, and he said, “I can help you, Jewboy. You can buy your way back to Changi, if you know the right people.”

  ‘I didn’t like the fella, didn’t want him hanging around while I was dying.

  ‘“Who’re the right people?” I asked.

  ‘He grinned like a schoolboy.

  ‘“Me,” said Sprout.

  ‘He was a sick joke, a big-noting skeleton with ulcers up to his neck, skiting like he was the king of the Kwai.

  ‘“So why aren’t you there now?” I asked.

  ‘“I will be,” he said, rubbing his thumb and forefinger. “I’m going to own the fucking place. I just need a bit more gelt.”

  ‘Oh, that was it.

  ‘“I don’t know you, Jimmy,” said Sprout, “but I know what you are. You people’ve always got the shekels stashed away. Am I right? I’ll bet you’ve got a pound of gold hidden up your arse.”

  ‘What an idiot.

  ‘“You’re welcome to look,” I told him. “You can pick out the nuggets.”

  ‘Sprout smiled again, six teeth short of a cemetery.

  ‘“That’s the Jewish sense of humour,” he said. “Look, Dopey’s been asked to recommend men to go back down the line.”

  ‘“Dopey?” I said. “What’s it got to do with that pervert?”

  ‘“He’s the only Jap in the guards,” said Sprout. “The rest are Koreans. You blokes don’t know bloody anything.”

  ‘I knew Sprout was matey with Dopey, and I knew Townsville Jack would kill him if he ran off with our money, and I knew it was over for me if I didn’t leave.

  ‘I asked Sprout how much he needed, then collapsed because I was too weak to talk. I sent a message to Katz, who was painting amputations in the operating theatre. He came slowly, because nobody had the energy to waste hurrying any more.

  ‘“Dopey’s going to get us all out of here,” I told him.

  ‘As I heard myself say it, I knew we were fucked.’

  *

  Jimmy found an old kitchen shelf to use as the base of his spirit house. On his bench he cut a broken cupboard door into rectangles the size of tombstones, then handed them to me to paint red, like the walls of the spirit house at the Thai Dee.

  In 1953 Jimmy had gone for a drink with Katz on Tuesday lunchtime and not returned until Thursday afternoon. When he came back home carrying a bunch of flowers for Grandma, she threw a brass Shabbes candlestick at him. It missed his head and flew out into the road, where it was crushed by a car. Jimmy had kept the other candlestick in the pair for thirty-seven years. I watched as he trimmed it down to make an incense burner.

  ‘You’ve never thrown anything out, have you?’ I asked.

  ‘I threw Myer out once,’ said Jimmy. ‘He was misbehaving with the drinks cabinet.’

  Jimmy had papered the living room in my grandmother’s house with a roll of flock wallpaper he had bought from the landlord of the Regal Hotel when he’d renovated the pub in 1964. Grandma said it made her home look like a saloon bar, but Jimmy argued it absorbed cigarette smoke and loud noise. He had saved the wallpaper offcuts in a packing case with no handles (although Jimmy stored a small collection of handles in the meat safe, none of them fitted the suitcase) and he measured them up with his folding ruler for the inside walls of the spirit house.

  ‘That’ll give them something familiar to look at,’ said Jimmy.

  I painted the outside walls using a jar of homemade emulsion that dated back to Katz’s days as a set decorator in Kings Cross, then Jimmy and I sat and had a mug of tea for smoko, and looked at what we had done.

  ‘This is like watching paint dry,’ said Jimmy.

  I carried Jimmy’s tool bag into the front yard and sat on the ground while he nailed the base of the spirit house to the poles.

  ‘Hammer,’ said Jimmy.

  I passed him his hammer.

  ‘Nails,’ said Jimmy.

  I handed up a cluster of nails.

  ‘Spirit level,’ said Jimmy.

  I laughed.

  ‘Get it?’ I said.

  ‘Get what?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘Spirit level!’

  ‘Yeah, very good,’ he said. ‘Now pass the bloody spirit level or I’ll brain you.’

  I asked Jimmy if I could have a turn with the hammer.

  ‘Be careful,’ he said, but I knew what I was doing.

  When I took hold of the handle, I imagined myself outside my body, looking on as my hand raised the tool and brought it down smack on the head of the nail, a boy watching a man. I landed square and drove it half a centimetre into the wood. That felt good to me, somehow real. As I admired myself hammering, I lost the angle, and knocked the nail a little to the left. I tried to pull it back straight, and smashed the hammerhead onto my thumb. The impact cracked my thumbnail and crunched the bone, but at first it didn’t actually hurt. This was because I had grown tough, coarse, hard. I was a carpenter – a chippie – a manual labourer doing a handjob.

  Instinctively, I stuck my thumb in my mouth and sucked it: not l
ike a crying baby, more a snake-bit survivor in the jungle, calmly draining the venom from his wound.

  ‘Let me look at that,’ said Jimmy.

  Out of my warm, wet, comfortable mouth, my thumb felt like it was clamped in the jaws of a trap. I watched blood run black under the nail. The thumb throbbed, and swelled like finger-puppet, until Jimmy bandaged it up with some gauze he had unravelled in 1974.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be after workers’ comp now,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘I could do with a bottle of Coke,’ I said bravely, ‘and we haven’t had lunch.’

  We hurried to the Club. Myer and Katz were quarrelling about great Jewish racing drivers. Solomon was drinking neat whisky.

  ‘Straight spirits?’ said Jimmy. ‘What’s up with you? Wake up feeling like a man, did you?’

  ‘Oh, I woke up feeling like a woman,’ said Solomon, leering, and traced the shape of a girl’s body in the air. ‘Like Greta Torpin – remember her? Big bloody boobs and a tochis to match.’

  ‘The wisdom of Solomon,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Don’t knock it,’ warned Solomon. ‘Look at all the money it’s made me.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning I used my brain and now I don’t have to live down there with the schwartzers and the frummers. You used your hands and where did that get you?’

  ‘My hands got up Greta Torpin’s skirt,’ Jimmy snapped, ‘and the only thing of yours that got up there was your dreams.’

  ‘Not in front of the boy,’ said Solomon. ‘All I’m saying is it might be time you moved somewhere nicer.’

  ‘I paid for that bloody house,’ said Jimmy. ‘It’s mine.’

  ‘Does that mean you have to live there forever?’

  ‘Who lives forever?’ said Jimmy. ‘Anyhow, what part of your brain does it take to run a schmatta shop on Darlinghurst Road?’

  ‘The business part,’ said Solomon. ‘The yiddisher kop, which was passed down the generations to every one of our people with the notable exception of Isaac “Jimmy” Rubens, who couldn’t keep hold of a dollar if it was nailed to his hand like Christ to the cross.’

  Solomon grabbed one of Jimmy’s hands and turned up the palm, looking for stigmata.

  ‘My son Solomon,’ said Solomon, ‘who is the lucky recipient of both his father’s commercial sense and irresistibility to women, has recently bought, with his lovely wife, a new(ish) and (reasonably) well-appointed unit near the golf club. It’s negative geared, so he doesn’t even want to make money on it. You could rent it from the boy, and let your shtibele to the schwartzers.’

  ‘They allow Jews into the golf club?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘You don’t have to play golf to live near a golf course,’ said Solomon. ‘Just be happy to think of other people enjoying themselves on the green – anti-Semites, Nazis and the like.”

  ‘Why does everyone want me to bloody move?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘It’s for your own good,’ said Solomon.

  ‘So what’s that to you?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘I’m your mate,’ said Solomon.

  ‘Name one thing you’ve ever done for me,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘In 1947,’ said Solomon, ‘I bought you a gelato.’

  The old men seemed restless. They didn’t have anything to say.

  ‘I don’t know why we come here,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘I’ve been coming here forty-five years,’ said Solomon.

  ‘It must be your shout by now,’ said Katz.

  ‘He thinks forty-five years is a long time,’ said Myer. ‘I’ve been coming here fifty years.’

  ‘You can’t count the war,’ said Solomon.

  ‘Oh?’ said Myer. ‘He has a manual. It tells him how many years he can spend in the Club. Perhaps it tells him how many times a man can sleep with his wife.’

  ‘I’ve only slept with his wife once,’ said Jimmy. ‘And that was during the war, so it doesn’t count.’

  ‘I have never slept with his wife,’ said Katz, ‘in times of peace.’

  ‘I slept with her on VJ Day,’ said Myer. ‘Pass me the manual.’

  He tugged at Solomon’s shirt, tore an imaginary book from his breast pocket, flicked through invisible pages, found a non-existent paragraph and followed it with his finger.

  ‘It’s a grey area,’ he announced.

  ‘It is now,’ said Solomon. ‘Bless her.’

  Myer wagged his finger at me.

  ‘Put that picture out of your mind now, young man,’ he said, but I had no idea what they were talking about.

  ‘I’m so hungry,’ said Solomon, ‘I could eat a whore.’

  So we all marched up to the Sunday roast buffet and served ourselves with the special, which was the same every week of the year: roast leg of lamb with rosemary. I took slices of warm meat in gravy, and a nest of powdery potatoes. Jimmy had lamb and chicken and fish and prawns and pumpkin and cabbage and carrots and cauliflower cheese and brussel sprouts, with potatoes, pasta salad and a Yorkshire pudding. He piled it on his plate like a cake, and iced it with thick brown gravy.

  ‘Now that’s what I call a baked dinner,’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t Frida feeding you?’ asked Solomon, whose plate was invisible under a mound of lamb.

  ‘She’s not there,’ I said.

  Jimmy frowned.

  ‘Has she run off with Slow Eddie Finkel?’ asked Myer. ‘They shouldn’t be hard to catch.’

  Jimmy puffed like a steam train.

  ‘She’s gone to stay with Mrs Ethelberger,’ I said.

  Jimmy squeezed his hands between his knees, waiting for the attack, but the old men were distracted by a stray thought from Myer.

  ‘I mated Slow Eddie Finkel last week,’ he said.

  ‘Your progeny will be the ugliest baby in human history,’ said Solomon.

  Solomon sucked in his lips and pulled his cheeks into line with his nose, so he looked like a sheep’s bum with eyes.

  ‘I never forget a face,’ said Jimmy, grinding a phantom cigar between his teeth, ‘but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.’

  Solomon noticed the bandage around my thumb.

  ‘If you rub your shlong any harder, it’ll come off,’ he warned.

  ‘I hit it with a hammer,’ I said.

  ‘That’d do it too,’ said Solomon.

  ‘Was it a meat hammer?’ asked Myer.

  ‘It was a claw hammer,’ I said. ‘I was banging in a nail.’

  ‘Was it your thumbnail?’ asked Myer.

  ‘Let the boy tell his story,’ said Solomon. ‘We’ve heard enough about your handjob to last until the second coming.’

  ‘He never had a second coming,’ said Katz.

  ‘So, tell us, David,’ said Myer, ‘which of the incalculable number of broken and neglected utilities in the Rubens household were you attending to when you decided instead to crush your own thumb to avoid your duties and get sent back down the line to recover?’

  ‘I was helping Jimmy make a spirit house,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that, then?’ asked Solomon. ‘A place for Old Longpockets to hide his whisky bottles?’

  ‘Drop it,’ snarled Jimmy.

  ‘Listen to him,’ said Solomon, ‘the kosher Clint Eastwood. Go ahead, punk, oy vey.’

  Katz offered everyone a drink, but Jimmy said, ‘I’m going home. I’ve had better conversations with Witnesses on the doorstep.’

  He mimed slamming a door in their faces.

  I looked proudly at my bandaged thumb, confident I would soon grow my first scar.

  *

  I pasted up the wallpaper while Jimmy cut wood for the roof.

  ‘We handed every penny we’d saved over to Sprout,’ said Jimmy, ‘and he promised Dopey would have us back down the line in a week. It turned out he couldn’t get us to Changi, but he could arrange for us to be transferred to a hospital camp. In the hospital camp, he told us, there’d be light work, dry weather and drugs. The other problem was there was only room for two bodies on the boat, s
o Katz and Myer would have to wait two weeks for the next transport. Myer was already off with the fairies, and Katz didn’t care. Two days, two weeks or two years was all the same to him. We’d done our money and he didn’t believe in anything any more.

  ‘Me and Townsville Jack were waiting on the banks when the boatman arrived in a barge that looked as old as the countryside, with an eye painted on the side to ward off evil spirits. We were naked except for our loincloths and we had nothing with us, nothing at all except Townsville Jack’s empty tote bag. Our faces were covered with beards that grew out in every direction. Our mothers wouldn’t’ve known us. You couldn’t tell we were human.

  ‘The boatman picked his way through the shallows with a pole. The barge was already loaded with sick men from even further up the line. Their bodies were stacked three deep, curled into each other. The boatman had a gold tooth, so of course we called him Flash Rat and, as usual, we couldn’t’ve been more wrong. He tried to clear a space, to gently push away the arms and legs and find us a sliver of deck to lie on. He had his son with him, a boy with a smile that made you want to live. The boy gave us water and spoke English. He said, “I think your war is nearly over.”

  ‘We asked his father’s name.

  ‘“Cha Ron,” said the boy.

  ‘“Nice to meet you, Ron,” said Townsville Jack, holding out his hand.

  ‘I remember a gentle journey upriver, watching weaverbirds nest in the trees and kingfishers swoop into the water.

  ‘“The ornithologist would’ve loved this,” said Townsville Jack, but the ornithologist was dead.

  ‘I didn’t have melancholia any more. I knew the war must’ve turned against the Japs and we were heading for a safer place.

  ‘We fell asleep and woke up a day later, to see the boatman rolling corpses over the side.

  ‘“More room,” said his son. “Less disease.”

  ‘But he had searched the bodies for identification, and he gave me everything he’d found. I memorised each man’s name and unit, for their families and for the reckoning.

  ‘The boatman fed us duck eggs and rice, and jasmine tea boiled on his motor.