The Narrow Road to the Deep North(128)

Thereafter he took great pleasure in wind, in the sound of rain. He marvelled at the feeling of dawn on a hot day. He exalted in the smiles of strangers. He worked at habits and friendship, seeing in them the only alternative to what he felt the alternative was. He cultivated a flock of vivid green, blue and red rosella parrots that came to his yard for the food and water he laid out for them. Then came the wrens and the bullying honeyeaters, the gossiping firetails and the occasional scarlet robin, the bright blue wrens with their dun-coloured harems, the shimmering cranky fantail, the cuckoo shrikes and silvereyes and chirruping pardalotes. He would sometimes sit on a bench seat on his verandah for hours watching the birds feed, bathe, rest, preen and play. And in the mystery of their flight and beauty, in their inexplicable arrivals and departures, he felt he saw his life.

After he died at the old-age home, falling off the top of a flight of stairs from where he was feeding birds, Jodie found her father’s bugle in his wardrobe. It was old and filthy and badly dented. Instead of a proper cord there was a knotted piece of red rag. She sold it in a garage sale.

Sometimes his laugh would come back to her at an unexpected moment—in a supermarket aisle as she looked for dishwashing powder, as she browsed a celebrity magazine in a dentist’s waiting room. At such times she would remember him unable to smack her, hand trembling above her, and hear him saying—

That’s all I know. That’s about all anyone needs to know.

And her once more asking, What does that music mean?

And the world around her, the supermarket aisle and its shelves, the dentist’s waiting room and its tub chairs, the garage sale and her father’s bric-a-brac on two trestle tables in front of her and a voice saying, You take five for it? And, as she passed it over, the battered bugle trembling with no answer.

Rightio, she thought she heard it say, as a stranger took hold of it. Or was it her? Rightio.





15



DORRIGO EVANS WAS driving through an intersection in Parramatta at three in the morning—a place and a time subsequently never publicly explained, along with the small matter of an alcohol reading—when he first found himself flying, being suddenly thrown into the air, never to return to earth. A carload of drunken kids fleeing the police in a stolen Subaru Impreza had crashed a red light and run straight into Dorrigo Evans’ ageing Bentley, totalling both vehicles, killing two of them and critically injuring one of Australia’s greatest war heroes, who had hurtled through his car’s windscreen.

He was three days in dying, and in that time possessed of the most extraordinary dreams of his life. Light was flooding a church hall in which he sat with Amy. Blinding, beautiful light, and him toddling back and forth, in and out of its transcendent oblivion and into the arms of women. He was flying and he was smelling Amy’s naked back and he was soaring ever higher. Whilst around him the nation prepared itself to mourn while simultaneously debating the decline of youth, contrasting the noble heroics of one generation with the vile and murderous criminality of another, he was stunned to realise that his life was only just beginning, and in a faraway teak jungle that had long since been cleared, in a country called Siam that no longer existed, a man who no longer lived had finally fallen asleep.





16



DORRIGO EVANS AWOKE from a terrible dream of death. He realised he was so exhausted that he had momentarily nodded off while the parade was assembling. It was almost midnight. He turned back to the seven hundred men assembled in front of him, and explained that it was his task to pick one hundred men to march to another camp one hundred miles deeper into the jungle of Siam. They would be leaving immediately after the morning parade. The men were counted and then counted again, and somehow the numbers didn’t tally. More men staggered in from the Line, confusing matters further. Sergeants sought to explain who was there and who wasn’t and why they weren’t. There was some heated discussion between Fukuhara—immaculately uniformed, even at this late hour—and the guards, one of the Australian sergeants was slapped around, and after some confusion the counting began again.

Major Nakamura had come to him an hour earlier with Fukuhara and given him the order that one hundred men were to be selected to march to a camp near Three Pagoda Pass.

None of these men should be asked to do any more, argued Dorrigo Evans. There is not one prisoner in this camp capable of such a march.

Major Nakamura insisted that a hundred were to be found.

Unless you change your treatment of prisoners they will all die, said Dorrigo Evans.

Major Nakamura indicated that he would choose if the Australian colonel would not.