If we don’t go now, Bonox Baker said, we’ll be late and Christ knows what poor bastard they’ll send out to work.
For a moment Dorrigo Evans was bewildered as to where he was. Still not entirely sure, he laid the letter down next to his bed and went out into the rain.
Thinking: The world is. It just is.
7
ROOSTER MACNEICE WAS late in joining the weary mob making its way through the rain and mud of their village of the damned to the cookhouse. Save for their cock rags and AIF slouch hats, most were naked, and the less they had in the way of clothing, the more wasted and wretched their bodies, the more they seemed to wear their slouch hat with a larrikin lair, as if off out once more for a night of beer and brothels in Palestine. But they cut no dash as they once had.
The smell of wood smoke, the small sanctuary of dry, warm dust around the crude clay fireboxes, the ease of men about to be fed, the low hum of conversation, all these in most circumstances gave the cookhouse a homely, welcoming feel in an alien and unwelcoming world. But that morning the rain was pouring into the cookhouse. Several small streams fell from its attap roof, steaming as they hit the fireboxes, garnishing the rice in the wide cast-iron cooking pans with the soot they dragged down from the blackened rafters. The floor was a good two inches under water.
Rooster MacNeice, wading through, unclipped his dixie, and when his turn came held both bowls out. A small cup of a watery rice slurry that served as breakfast was slopped in one dixie and a dirty rice ball that served as lunch dropped in the other.
Moving on or what? said a voice behind him.
Rooster MacNeice straightened up. Sloshing through the water, he shuffled back out into the monsoon rain. Now his choice was either to attempt to make it back down the slippery slope with his rice water to the relative shelter of their tent, and there sit and eat his breakfast, or, as many prisoners did, stand in the rain and swallow it as quickly as possible. After all, it wasn’t food; it was survival.
He watched Darky Gardiner walk past, heading back to their sleeping hut to eat. Darky Gardiner was one of those prisoners who would make a small ceremony out of eating, as though he were setting up not for a few spoons of rancid rice but for a Sunday roast. Rooster MacNeice, on the other hand, though he tried hard not to gallop down his swill, always failed. He could see the sense of taking pleasure in holding the food for a minute or two—in just knowing that now you could eat, of enjoying the anticipation almost as much as the eating, in eating it slowly, savouring the few mouthfuls, and even multiplying them, breaking them into many dabs on the spoon, rather than the three or four mouthfuls that the ration of swill amounted to. But he could never do it himself.
And Rooster MacNeice hated the moment when, after he threw his own rice down, he looked up to see such a man as Darky Gardiner still eating, slowly and serenely, eating with food still left. At such times, Rooster MacNeice would try not to look, to ignore the jealousy that so painfully bloated his empty guts, to dismiss the anger that tore at his frantic mind. He would vow that next time he too would eat wisely, carefully, slowly; that next time he, Rooster MacNeice, would be one of those whom all those miserable skull faces, all those bony snouts and large dreamy eyes, would turn to and watch enviously, desperate for some of his swill. That next time, he would be the one with this strange dignity that made of eating swill an act of courage, defiance even.
But he could never do it.
His hunger was like a wild animal. His hunger was desperate, mad, telling him whatever food he found just get it down as soon as you can and as fast as you will; just eat, his hunger screeched—eat! eat! eat! And all the time he knew it was his hunger eating him.
He heard a cry. Looking up, Rooster MacNeice saw Darky Gardiner slipping in the mud, his rice porridge spilling everywhere. He caught Darky Gardiner’s distraught eyes for a moment longer than he wished, then, looking down, he saw where, in the brown mud, the heavy rain was already dissolving the rice swill into a glistening grey stain.
Rooster MacNeice turned away and, with his back to Darky, gobbled down the rest of his swill. It was gone in a few moments. It was nothing, he thought. A man needed ten times that amount of food for breakfast.
The filthy yellow swine are starving us all to death, he said to no one in particular.
Finished, he turned back to see Tiny Middleton—a grotesque figure so thin that his hips stood out like elephant ears—awkwardly helping Darky Gardiner to his feet. As Rooster MacNeice licked his own dixie clean, he watched as the skeleton picked up Darky Gardiner’s tin bowl, spooned half his own rice swill into it and handed it back.
Rooster MacNeice snapped his dixie shut, rice ball lunch enclosed, and clipped it to his G-string. It made no sense to him that a humiliated man would help his tormentor by sacrificing half his food. Such men, he could see, knew neither shame nor self-respect. Feeling an odd sensation of relief bordering on triumph that he hadn’t had to share his own breakfast, he walked over to the pair and put a hand on Darky Gardiner’s muddy shoulder.