The Narrow Road to the Deep North(27)

Philopon helps me through this fever, Nakamura said, feeling suddenly awkward. It’s very good. And it stops the damn ticks biting.

Already feeling his early morning stupour magically dissolving into a renewed alertness and vigour, Nakamura stared intently at the two men until they dropped their eyes.

Philopon is anything but an opiate, Nakamura said. Only inferior races like the Chinese, Europeans and Indians are addicted to opiates.

Fukuhara agreed. Fukuhara was such a bore.

We invented Philopon, said Fukuhara.

Yes, Nakamura said.

Philopon is an expression of the Japanese spirit.

Yes, Nakamura said.

He stood up and realised he hadn’t bothered undressing for bed. Even his muddy puttees remained tightly bound around his calves, though the cross tape on one leg had come undone.

The Imperial Japanese Army gives us shabu to help with the work of the Empire, Tomokawa added.

Yes, yes, Nakamura said. He turned to Fukuhara. Take twenty prisoners back down the track and rescue the truck.

Now?

Of course, now, Nakamura said. Push it all the way to the camp, if necessary.

And after? Fukuhara asked. Do we give them the day off?

After, they go and do their day’s work on the railway, said Nakamura. You’re up, I’m up, we continue.

Nakamura’s need to scratch was fading. His cock was swelling inside his trousers. It was a pleasant feeling of strength. Fukuhara had turned to leave when Nakamura called his name.

You’re an engineer, Nakamura said. You understand that you must treat all men as machines in service of the Emperor.

Nakamura could feel the shabu sharpening his senses, giving him strength where he had felt weak, certainty where he was so often assailed by doubt. Shabu eliminated fear. It gave him a necessary distance from his actions. It kept him bright and hard.

And if the machines are seizing up, Nakamura said, if they only can be made to work with the constant application of force—well then, use that force.

The ticks, he realised, had finally stopped biting.





9



THE MAN WALKING towards him appeared as a vast outline of nothingness, a silhouette, and to that nothingness Dorrigo Evans now held out his hand in greeting.

You must be Uncle Keith.

In the full intensity of the midday sun, his bulky body blocking the light and head hidden in the bitumen shade thrown by his Akubra, he looked little more than forty and not without menace. He had the presence of a precarious telegraph pole. But nothing was what it seemed and everything looked as if glimpsed through an old window pane—bending, bowing, shuddering in the heat waves rippling the bitumen road and cement kerbing, the dust of the Warradale parade ground, the tin-tubed Nissen huts at the front of which Dorrigo Evans had been waiting.

Once in his uncle’s car, a late-model Ford Cabriolet, Dorrigo Evans could see just how big a man his Uncle Keith was, and how his face was more that of someone perhaps fifty. With him was a very small dog, a Jack Russell terrier he called Miss Beatrice, which seemed to exist to emphasise the largeness of Keith Mulvaney—his broad back, his wide thighs and great feet behind which the panting dog drooped like a dropped chamois.

It was too hot to smoke but he smoked his pipe anyway. The smoke wreathed a strange smile that Dorrigo later came to realise was fixed, determined to find the world cheery in spite of all the evidence life produced to the contrary. It all might have been intimidating were it not that Keith’s voice was slightly high-pitched and reminded Dorrigo of that of a teenage boy. And of that voice there was no more end than there was of the intolerable Adelaide heat. It became clear to Dorrigo Evans that Keith Mulvaney’s world was his own, self-contained, and that it circled three suns—his hotel, his seat as an alderman on the local council, and his wife.

As they made their way to the coast, he bemoaned the hotel trade in the manner, Dorrigo felt, that those who love what they do bemoan their passion the most. The motorists, he would say with a sighing sibilant s, had been the making and unmaking of him. The motoristsss, what with their whingeing about toilets and meals, turning up in a party of eighty one day, all expecting to be fed, while the next Sunday you might be lucky to sell tuppence ha’penny of Afghan biscuits; always whingeing, the motoristsss, to their automobile associations and royal bloody automobile clubs about the state of the bathrooms and the dirty soap. Always whining, the motoring crowd. The only thing worse are the travelling salesmen. Why, today a traveller wanted to rent a room as an office to dispense bromides and aspirins, but I suspect the sex thing going on.

The sex thing?

You know, things to do with the women’s plumbing and the births and not having babies, French letters and English freethinking pamphlets; you know the drum.