by Mark Dapin
‘I wish she’d just leave me alone,’ I said. ‘She’s not my mum.’
‘If you saw her more often, she’d be more relaxed,’ said Dad. ‘Think about it, anyway.’
He dropped me back at school in the yellow Camry. I made him let me out in a side street, so the fat kids wouldn’t see the car.
*
Jimmy had half-built the new spirit house by the time I got home. It followed exactly the original shape of my grandmother’s two-bedroom weatherboard cottage.
‘I thought Townsville Jack could share with Bluey,’ Jimmy told her, ‘and Bathurst Billy could bunk with Moishe.’
Grandma shook her head and went back inside.
‘Pass me the mallet,’ said Jimmy, and he started to talk.
‘The commandant asked Duffy to officially hand over Townsville Jack to IJA discipline, and Duffy marched him, still handcuffed, across the piece of mud the Japs called a parade ground. Duffy bowed to the Jap and passed Townsville Jack to the enemy. Before he left him, he squeezed his arm, like he was on his side.
‘We all thought they’d beat Townsville Jack in the guard house, but the gunso decided to take him to the worksite. They made a little ceremony out of it, a bit of a yasumi. They picked ten Koreans and had them stomping around like sumo, slapping their sticks in their hands, working themselves into a rage.
‘I wanted to do something to help, but there was nothing, nothing. I threw down my pick and ran up to him, tried to pass him a hibiscus cigarette, but his hands were locked behind his back by Duffy’s cuffs. He couldn’t take the cigarette and he couldn’t protect his big beautiful head. They ordered him down on his knees. When he didn’t move, the gunso kicked him in the arse and sent him sprawling.
‘The guards lunged at him. They dissolved into a scrum, and then a mob. It was like a riot aimed at one man. And all of them bashed him around the head. All of them.
‘When Townsville Jack collapsed, they re-formed into two lines, a gauntlet, and the gunso picked him up and threw him in. Our blokes were vomiting. Some of them were crying. Townsville Jack was silent, but his eyes were screaming, his knees were trembling. He tried to run, but the guards tripped him and kicked him and set on him when he was down, laughing like imbeciles. They were fighting each other to get to him, to land another stick on his skull.
‘After the third run, Townsville Jack was bleeding from his ears, nose, mouth, eyes, and everyone was calling for the guards to stop. Duffy was shouting, “For God’s sake, he’s had enough!”, but they didn’t let up.
‘It took three of them to pull the big man to his feet for the fourth round, and straightaway he dropped face-down into the dirt. So they stamped on him and thwacked him and pounded him and bashed him, like they were trying to crush him to a powder, as if they were grinding rice.
‘One bloke hit the back of Townsville Jack’s head so hard that he broke his club, and he wandered off, giggling, to find another.’
Jimmy couldn’t speak any more.
I brought him a bottle of beer from the kitchen. He popped off the cap on the base of the spirit house.
‘Nobody slept that night,’ said Jimmy. ‘The men stayed awake talking about making a noose out of vine, marching to the officers’ quarters, dragging out Duffy and hanging the bastard. They were going to get Evans, too, and the whole Vigilance Committee, give them a proper, military-style send-off and dump them in one big bush grave. The angriest of them wanted to rise up against the Japs too, and die fighting at last. Even Myer had the madness in his eyes. He sat at the end of his palliasse, weaving a rope.
‘Duffy called tenko early. The men lined up with sharpened stakes hidden in their jap-happies. I had a cane, and I held it in my hand, like a guard. Duffy’s cheeks were grey and his eyes were red, but he stood straight and tall as he walked up to each of us in turn and read our tight faces. My hand twitched at my stick. Duffy stopped and examined me like a doctor looking at a patient. When I didn’t swing the cane, he moved on.
‘When he had accounted for every man, Duffy announced that the morning would be a yasumi, given by the Japs to allow us time to prepare for a concert party, the first they’d ever let us hold in the camp. As we were dismissed, some men booed, but ten minutes later they were sewing frocks from blankets and making breasts out of coconut shells.
‘The work was light for a couple of days, and the men composed songs about Duffy and Evans, setting the lyrics to music-hall tunes. They called them traitors, fascists and worse.
‘I didn’t go to the show, but the other blokes told me I’d missed a good night. They’d sung and danced and dressed up as sheilas for the chuis, accused them of collaboration and cowardice, and even made it rhyme. The chuis had laughed at all the jokes and applauded at the end.
‘“What a bunch of fools they are,” said Blue Alf, but nobody talked about justice again.
‘Later on the Japs ordered us to make a trench like a moat halfway around the camp,’ said Jimmy, ‘and the furphy was we were digging our own graves. As soon as the Allies set foot in Singapore, the Japs were going to massacre all the POWs. It took a long, long time to finish that hole. Not many blokes gave it their best effort. At night, me and Katz sneaked out and filled it back in.
‘There was no canary in Camp Duffy, but we got the griff from Thai traders. The Japs were on the retreat everywhere, they said. There wasn’t long to go. We just needed to hold out another few weeks, maybe a couple of months.
‘I knew I was going to survive. Everyone who lived through it knew they’d be the ones to make it, but I suppose the ones that died thought they would too. If you knew you were going to be slowly starved and tortured to death over three stinking years, you’d just neck yourself, wouldn’t you? So you’ve got to pretend you’re special.
‘Townsville Jack knew he was going to survive. He had a destiny. He was going to change the world, reorder it to suit Townsville Jack. But first he was going to root every sheila in Victoria, starting with Bluey’s sister in Warracknabeal. Katz made a picture of her for him and I pinned it to the ceiling over his bunk, but Townsville Jack didn’t open his eyes. He never saw her there.
‘Evans put me on a working party, doing nothing, just wasting another breath of life. I came back early with a live frog in my jap-happy. I was going to push it into Townsville Jack’s hands and see if the feel of it woke him up. Then I was going to eat it. I thought I had it clutched tight, but the little bastard wriggled away. You can’t do anything with frogs, really. They’re a mug’s game, if ever there was one.
‘There was a furphy going around that the Allies had developed a doomsday bomb. If you dropped just one of them from a plane, it could wipe out a whole city. And they’d done it to Japs, they’d kicked a town into touch, burned everyone.
‘Then one day we stopped bowing to the guards and they released our Red Cross parcels. They gave up their guns but still stood sentry with sticks like the ones they’d used on Townsville Jack.
‘Eventually the guards disappeared into the jungle, but they were rounded up again by big white Queenslanders. They couldn’t believe we were part of the 8th Division. They thought anyone who wasn’t in Changi must be dead. They fed us bully beef and beer and we were as sick as dogs. They brought medical supplies and we gave Townsville Jack a shot of morphine, and he slept with a smile.
‘I sat by Townsville Jack’s side, like I’d done so many times, feeding him, nursing him, changing his dressings, wiping his arse, telling him the stories the Queenslanders had told me, about the ways the world had changed. I said how a mob of the boys had got into a few of the guards and given them a bit of a bashing, but nothing too clever. In the end, they didn’t so much want to get revenge on them as just forget them.
‘Sometimes Townsville Jack made a noise, and I thought he might understand me, but his jaw was broken in four places and they’d driven his teeth into his tongue.
‘“We’ve made it,” I said to Townsville Jack, but I knew he hadn’t.
‘I felt cro
ok about myself after that, so I went for a smoko, bludged a drink off a Queenslander, then came back to the hut.
‘I told Townsville Jack I’d heard Dopey and Sprout had been killed in a landslide on the line, but he had no last words.
‘He lived his life like every one of his words was his last.’
*
‘I try to understand what happened,’ said Jimmy, ‘but some blokes are just dogs. They’re bloody mongrels and that’s all there is to it. There was no reason to kill Townsville Jack, no reason to batter Bluey, no reason to take my mates away from me.
‘If it’s wasn’t for Townsville Jack, I wouldn’t be around now. The strongest and best man died, David. The cleverest and most cunning men died. But me and Myer and Katz survived, the last of the Mohicans.
‘With Townsville Jack gone, I got the melancholia again. I buried him then took his bunk. I lay where he used to lie, and tried to die like he did. For two days. I didn’t eat or drink. I spoke to Myer, but Katz tells me Myer had already gone back to Changi. I listened to Evans tell me he was sorry, and Duffy explain that things hadn’t happened the way I thought they’d happened, but it was all a dream. They had both shipped out.
‘Diamond Tom broke into the orderly room and stole the evidence from Townsville Jack’s trial. We burned the betting slip and the IOU in the Japs’ incense burner, and left the bones of the frog under the bunk where Townsville Jack had stored his stable. Katz slashed his portrait of Duffy to pieces and burned the scraps.
‘Me and Katz were the last to leave Camp Duffy. We travelled to Singapore the slow way, by truck, by boat and then by jeep. The driver was a good fella, but he could see how we’d been treated and he couldn’t understand why we weren’t looking for revenge.
‘“What could we do for revenge?” Katz asked him. “Strip the guards of everything, inject them with cholera and beri-beri and tie them up outside in the rain, naked in their own shit? We could find every man’s best mate, who’d saved his life over and over again, and starve and torture him to death, or we could just turn our backs on the bastards and walk away. Because if we broke one Jap’s nose or even his neck, that would be like saying that’s all Townsville Jack was worth, or Bluey or Bathurst Billy.”’
I couldn’t understand. It didn’t seem right. If it were me, I’d have shot them all.
‘It’s like the Jews and the Germans,’ said Jimmy. ‘What could we ever possibly do to pay them back? After the war, there were Jewish partisans who wanted to poison the German water supply. They might’ve murdered hundreds of thousands of them, but six million? How could they ever kill six million Germans?
‘When I think about how I spent those years of my life – three years of my twenties without women – I tell myself we might not’ve fought back but we never collaborated either. We sabotaged the bastards and their railway every chance we got. We laid weak beams, hid termites in the timber, siphoned and stole and stalled, but you know what? It made no bloody difference at all. They got their railway finished, and finished on time, and it was a damn good railway and it ran supplies to their troops in Burma until they lost the fighting, and then it carried their retreating men home. What could be worse than that? We died so our enemies might live. That’s the way I think sometimes. Other times I’m just glad to be alive, that I lived to see my children and my grandchildren, that you’ve got my face – you poor buggers – and my name. Because there’s so many that didn’t have that.
‘At the end of the war MacArthur made every last bastard of the IJA into a POW,’ said Jimmy. ‘So you’d think they’d riot behind the barbed wire, wouldn’t you, and fight the Yanks to their deaths? Or at least cut their own guts out, like they expected us to do. There were five and a half million Japs in the IJA at the end of the war, and you know how many committed harakiri? A few hundred, mostly officers. More of our blokes necked themselves on the bloody line, when you count the fellas who just gave up. Not only did the Japs jack in the war, they jacked in the whole idea of fighting – scrapped their army, navy, air force, the bloody lot.
‘But I don’t hate the Japs and Koreans, not even the bastards who killed Townsville Jack. Some of them were mongrels, some of them weren’t, but they were all soldiers in an army, and they were following orders just like us. There’s only one fella I hate, and that’s Lieutenant Colonel William Randall Duffy, the Nazi cunt. If I met him now, I’d fucking kill him with my bare hands, even though I know he’s already dead.’
Jimmy closed his strong old cabinet-maker’s fingers around a soft ghostly throat and squeezed.
‘The jeep took us to Changi,’ he said, ‘and when me and Katz knew we didn’t have to keep going, we just collapsed. Our bodies shut down. I was laid up in hospital for two weeks before I had the strength to ask a coolie to take me to the new headquarters of the All Chinese Union of Rickshaw Men. He told me there was no union any more. He’d been there, this fella, on the fringes of it. He knew them all, and what had happened to them, but he’d kept his head down and run from the shooting. He wasn’t proud of it but he had children to feed, and sometimes that counts for more than anything.
‘He told me Chinese Frank and the rest of the union had been interned by the British when we went up to Malaya. Chinese Frank offered his men to fight alongside the army, but the authorities didn’t trust them. They didn’t want a commo dog snapping at their arse while the Japs were biting at their head.
‘But every man’s got his own reasons to go to war, and in the end it doesn’t matter a damn providing he’s trying to kill the same blokes as you, and the Poms finally realised the commos would make the best fighters against the Japs because they had the most to lose. They weren’t going to survive any occupation. When the Nips had almost reached the Straits, they gave Chinese Frank and the others a bit of training in sabotage and guerrilla warfare, and sent them off to defend the undefendable. They let them have arms – at last – and uniforms, and the commos called themselves the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, almost as long a name as the All Chinese Union of Rickshaw Men.
‘By the time the guerrillas were released into the city, it was running with streams of fire; burning oil had been carried by the river into the quays. There were men cooked in their sampans, corpses clogging the drains like they’d been turned to shit before they died.
‘Chinese Frank and the rickshaw men fought the Japs in the streets. Long after we’d surrendered, they were sniping from the roofs of shophouses and throwing homemade bombs from trees. There were only a few hundred of them, and tens of thousands of us, and they watched us from windows and bushes as we paraded into Changi and thought, What the hell are they doing?
‘The first thing the Japs did was screen the Chinese for commos and collaborators. They rounded up the men, took them to the Happy World amusement park, left them for three days without food, surrounded by troops, and marched them past hooded traitors – maybe they were police, maybe they were criminals – who denounced them. Some of them were tortured. Most of the MPAJA were in the jungles by then, but Chinese Frank got caught behind the lines, and he was taken down to Changi Beach, shot, bayoneted and drowned.
‘So it was true that we’d saved Singapore from a Nanking,’ said Jimmy, ‘because in Nanking they killed everyone. In Singapore they only murdered the best. When we surrendered we saved the lives of the cowards and the collaborators, the Japhappys and the boongs, and made sure our allies were tortured to death.
‘The rickshaw man said he couldn’t help me with Chinese Frank, but he could take me to see Mei-Li, who was running a noodle shop with Lim. I didn’t know . . . I couldn’t . . . My hands started to shake. I couldn’t speak, there was all this . . . a feeling in my mouth, I . . . I knew it wasn’t . . . I could hardly believe she was still alive, but I was terrified of what she would think of me. I was ashamed of my body, with all its scars and sores. I was as thin as noodles. I just couldn’t get fat again. And I couldn’t control my bladder, couldn’t sleep in the dark. I shook with the shits, woke
up vomiting in the morning. I didn’t want anyone who knew me to see me. I didn’t think anyone who knew me would want me.
‘And it wasn’t just my body, it was my brain. I couldn’t make sense of what had happened, couldn’t learn the lesson, couldn’t force it to be worth something. It seemed to me that in the camps I’d stopped being a man. I’d let other people do whatever they wanted to me. I’d stood by while they murdered my friends. I’d bowed to their murderers. I’d called them “sir”. I’d let my soul be raped. Not just by the Japs, but by the army too. I’d surrendered the minute I’d put on a uniform.
‘I thought Mei-Li would hate me, because Chinese Frank had fought and died. So I didn’t go and see her that day. I went back to my hospital bed, full of new kind of pain. Two days later I had my new uniform cleaned, and the nurses bathed me, and I greased back my hair and polished my boots, and I got another rickshaw man to take me to the noodle stand. All the rickshaw men knew the place, and I realised right away it had nothing to do with their noodles. I was surprised to see they even sold noodles.
‘I saw Mei-Li wearing a long, dark smock, with her hair tied back. She looked older and more beautiful, like the years had given her the strength they’d taken away from me. My heart, David, my heart, it . . . it . . .
‘I walked up to her slowly. She saw my uniform and turned away.
‘“It’s me,” I said. “The Australian soldier.”
‘My eyes, David, I was crying . . .
‘She looked back at me and asked, “Which Australian soldier?”
‘She could speak English now. I held out my hand. She stepped back.
‘“No,” she said. “There are Chinese watching.”
‘She didn’t used to care about that in the war. My knees trembled and gave way. I had to sit on the pavement beside her. Mei-Li gave me a bowl of noodles and charged me for them.
‘“Can you use chopsticks?” she asked.
‘I could barely use a knife and fork any more. I talked up at her while she served her customers.