Need a hand, Gardiner?
I’m good, Rooster.
Noticing other men now heading to the morning parade, Rooster MacNeice hurried away to join a ragged procession making its way to the camp’s western edge. There, in front of a two-room bamboo-walled and attap-roofed shed on stilts that served as the Japanese engineers’ administration hut, was a quagmire that served as the parade ground. Here the morning tenko was held and here they were counted and divided into the day’s work gangs.
On arriving, Rooster MacNeice watched the others coming in from all over the camp, some limping, some held upright by mates, some being piggybacked, some crawling. He found himself next to Jimmy Bigelow, who cursed the day and God.
It’s beautiful, said Rooster MacNeice, who felt finer thoughts the only appropriate ones to voice. Finer thoughts, he had discovered, also sometimes had the effect of discouraging the company of men like those standing next to him. The prisoners tended to stick in their tent groups. At the best of times—and this was anything but that—such camaraderie didn’t do much for Rooster MacNeice, and after his humiliation earlier in the day it now meant even less. When he couldn’t evade it, he tried to break it.
It’s nature’s cathedral, Rooster MacNeice said, pointing at a grove of tall bamboos.
Jimmy Bigelow, raising his sunken eyes skywards, could see only the still-dark early morning sky and the black jags of jungle below it.
Rightio, Jimmy Bigelow said.
Look at the way they lean into each other to form those great gothic arches, Rooster MacNeice said. And behind them, the teak trees tracing those filigree lines, like glass leading.
Jimmy Bigelow stared into the gloomy treeline. He asked if Rooster meant like King Kong. His tone was unsure.
I believe there are vitamins in beauty, Rooster MacNeice said.
Jimmy Bigelow said he thought that vitamins were in vitamins.
Beauty, I said, said Rooster MacNeice.
He believed no such thing but had heard Rabbit Hendricks going on with some such nonsense. Such higher sentiments, being higher, even when stolen from others, he saw as evidence of a finer character that set him apart from the lower order and would ensure his survival.
A black raincloud came over the sky at a crazy speed. The light falling through the bamboo abruptly faded, the teak branches dissolved back into grey, a few fat beads of rain stuttered earthwards and within seconds had transformed into a roaring deluge. The jungle fell into a single oppressive thing. Heavy rushes of water tumbled out of treetops and bounced up from the ground at the side of the parade ground, as if even the earth was sick of the rain and wanted it gone. But it would not go. It was as if the rain wanted dominion over all things. It fell all the more; heavier, harder, so loud that the men gave up even yelling until the worst of it ended.
Prisoners kept arriving. There were more sick than ever. The ones who couldn’t stand sat or lay alongside a great teak log at the side of the parade ground, a site known as the Wailing Wall. Through sheets of rain Rooster MacNeice watched a digger crawling through the mud towards the parade ground. Another prisoner walked beside him, keeping him company, as though they were both heading off to the races. The man crawling seemed not to want help, and the man walking beside him seemed not to be offering any. And yet, as the torrent blurred them into one, it seemed to Rooster MacNeice that something joined them.
As they finally drew closer, he realised it was Tiny Middleton who was crawling, and that it was Darky Gardiner walking with him, as though this were the most natural thing in the world. Twice he saw Gardiner offer to support his companion, but Middleton seemed intent on making it there on his own.
And the sight of men whom he despised from the bottom of his heart, this sight of that crippled man and his friend, who might mock him but would not desert him, this sight of what even the lowest seemed to have, and which Rooster MacNeice understood he did not possess, made no sense to him and momentarily filled him with the most terrible hate. Rooster MacNeice turned back to the bamboos and tried once more to imagine them as gothic arches, his prison as a cathedral, and to fill his heart with beauty.
8
WHILE THE PRISONERS assembled in the downpour, Dorrigo Evans at their head, the Japanese waited in the administration hut until the worst of it was over, and only then came out. To Dorrigo Evans’ surprise, Nakamura was with them. copyrightly, Lieutenant Fukuhara oversaw the selection. Unlike Fukuhara, who always managed to look parade-ground perfect, Nakamura’s officer’s uniform was bedraggled and his shirt had dark mould blooms. He stopped to tie up a puttee tape trailing in the mud.
As he waited, Dorrigo Evans flexed his body as he once had on the football field, readying himself for the encounter. The prisoners counted off, a tedious process in which each man had to yell out his Japanese number. As the prisoners’ commanding officer and senior medical officer, Dorrigo Evans reported to Major Nakamura that four men had died the day before, two overnight, and that this left eight hundred and thirty-eight POWs. Of this eight hundred and thirty-eight, sixty-seven had cholera and were in the cholera compound, and another one hundred and seventy-nine were in hospital with severe illness. A further one hundred and sixty-seven were too ill for any work other than light duties. He pointed at the prisoners propped up against the log and said that there were in addition sixty-two reporting in sick this morning over there.