The Narrow Road to the Deep North(25)
My Amy, thought Dorrigo Evans when he hung up the receiver. My Amy.
8
AFTER PLAYING CARDS with the Australian officers, Major Nakamura had fallen into a deep, alcoholic slumber. In his strange dreams he was lost in a dark room and was feeling an elephant’s leg, trying to imagine what room such pillars might support. There was an immense maw of shooting tendrils and smothering leaves that formed a blindfold around his eyes, leaving him unseeing. Everywhere around him he felt life, but nowhere did it seem to him was life intelligible. All things in this room were unexpected and uncivilised—be it the endless jungle or the near-naked Australian prisoners, who, he knew, surrounded him like a troop of huge, hairy, threatening apes.
What was this room? How could he get out? The green blindfold was now wrapping around his throat, choking him. His heart was pounding. He could taste a copper spoon in his dry mouth, stale sweat larded his back in a clammy chill, his ribs itched badly and he smelt rancid even to himself. He was trembling, shuddering, when he realised he was being shaken awake.
What? Nakamura yelled.
He slept badly these days, and to be woken abruptly from sleep in the middle of the night left him confused and angry. He smelt the monsoon rain before he heard it slapping the ground outside, and threading through it the irritating voice of Lieutenant Fukuhara, who was calling his name.
What is it? Nakamura yelled again.
He opened his eyes to leaping shadows and shudders of light and began scratching himself. A wet, rubberised cape formed a black, glistening cone that rose from its base to Fukuhara’s darkened face, neat as always, even in the most difficult situations, and adorned with his cropped hair, water-beaded horn-rimmed glasses and moustache. Behind him, holding out a kerosene lantern, was Tomokawa, a soggy campaign cap and neck flaps highlighting the corporal’s daikon-like head.
Corporal Tomokawa was on sentry duty, sir, Fukuhara said, when a truck driver and a colonel of the Ninth Railway Regiment walked into camp.
Nakamura rubbed his eyes, then scratched his elbow so hard that he knocked off a scab and his elbow began to bleed. Though he could not see them, he knew he was covered in ticks. Biting ticks. The ticks were biting under his arms, his back, his ribs, crotch, everywhere. He kept scratching but the ticks just burrowed deeper. They were very small ticks. The ticks were so small they somehow got under the skin and bit away there.
Tomokawa! he yelled. Can you see them? Can you!
He held up an arm.
Tomokawa stole a glance at Fukuhara, stepped forward, raised his lantern and inspected Nakamura’s arm. He stepped back.
No, sir.
Ticks!
No, sir.
They were so small that no one else could see them. That was part of their hellish nature. He wasn’t sure how they got under his skin but suspected they laid their eggs in his pores and they incubated under the skin, to be born and grow and die there. One had to scratch them out. Siamese ticks, unknown to science.
He had had Corporal Tomokawa inspect his body before with a magnifying glass, and still the fool had said he couldn’t see them. Nakamura knew he was lying. Fukuhara said the ticks didn’t exist, that the sensation was a side-effect of the Philopon. What the hell would he know? There was so much in this jungle that no one had ever seen or experienced before. One day science would discover and name the tick, but he just had to endure them for now, like he had to endure so much else.
Colonel Kota has brought fresh orders from Railway Command Group to give you before proceeding to Three Pagoda Pass, Fukuhara continued. He is in the mess being fed. His orders are to brief you at the earliest convenience.
Nakamura waved an unsteady index finger at a small field table next to his cot.
Shabu, he muttered.
Tomokawa swung the kerosene lamp away from his commanding officer’s face and searched the sooty shadows that swept back and forth over the technical drawings, reports and work sheets that sat on the tabletop, many of them spotted with blooms of dark mould.
Fukuhara, eager, young, gannet-necked Fukuhara, whom Nakamura found increasingly oppressive in his zeal, continued on about how it was the first truck up the near impassable road in ten days, and how, with the rains, it was likely to be the last for—
Yes, yes, Nakamura said. Shabu!
The truck is bogged three kilometres away, and Colonel Kota is worried that natives might loot the truck of the supplies it carries, Lieutenant Fukuhara finished.
Shabu! Nakamura hissed. Shabu!
Tomokawa spotted the Philopon bottle on a chair next to the table. He handed it to Nakamura, who these days survived on the army-issue methamphetamine and little else. Nakamura tipped the bottle and shook it. Nothing came out. Nakamura sat on his army cot, staring at the empty bottle in his hand.