The Narrow Road to the Deep North(78)

Just fish? Squizzy asks.

Yeah, Darky says, just fish. Poor bloody things, locked up in that glass box looking out.

Poke your tongue out, Darky, Squizzy says.

After the matinee at the Avalon, Darky goes on rambling. Always, Nikitaris’s fish shop. Two couta—chips—battered scallops—buttered bread.

First they demand everyone on death’s door work, Squizzy says, then they send this poor bastard back. Get your tongue out, Darky.

And Darky kept going on about how Edie loved that. A flick then a feed of fish.

And then? I wanted to ask, Shugs said. But he’s going on about how he can’t stop thinking about all those fish swimming about in Nikitaris’s tank. How it’s not natural. How they’re POWs too. How when he gets back he’s going to Nikitaris’s fish shop. How he’s gonna scoop all them fish up and take ’em down to the docks and set them free. I don’t care what old Nikitaris thinks, says Darky. I’ll buy ’em, I’ll rob the fucking joint, I’ll do whatever and get those fish out and put them back in the sea where they belong.

Squizzy tells him not to get so excited, how he’s got every disease going and he’s going into the hospital for as long as it takes, and after he gets out neither the fish nor his missus will be safe.

Darky was swaying like a grass stalk, Shugs said. It was hard to know what he was thinking or even if he knew where he was. Maybe he was imagining him and Edie there for a feed after an evening at the Avalon, Shugs said, maybe he was laughing at the fish in the tank. Maybe he doesn’t really notice them at all, maybe he is just looking at Edie’s breasts, maybe Edie is telling him to stop looking at the fish and pay more attention to her. Or maybe not. Maybe she is saying, What are you looking at? and Darky goes all shy and looks at the fish, thinking maybe he is one of the fish swimming in the tank, maybe he is a naked prisoner of war in the jungle with his arm around me, as Squizzy Taylor tells me to take him up to the hospital.

Have them dose him up on whatever quinine they can scrounge, he says, and some emetine for the dysentery. He turns to me with his big gangster eyes looking at me and he says under his breath, There is no quinine, there is no emetine, there is next to no food. But at least he can rest.

And then, Shugs said, you won’t believe me, but Darky starts laughing and it was like he wasn’t with us here in the middle of the bloody jungle but had headed back to Nikitaris’s fish shop before the war. No quinine, he says, no emetine. Two couta, a dozen battered scallops and some buttered bread. Squizzy says, What’d he say? And I say, Two couta, a dozen battered scallops and some buttered fucken bread. Sir.

And Squizzy starts laughing, Shugs said. And me too. And Darky laughs. Couldn’t stop laughing. Two couta, Darky says, a dozen battered scallops and some buttered bread. Just holding on to each other, in the middle of that fucking mud, laughing our heads off. I don’t have a clue what pork roulade tastes like. But hot, salty, greasy battered fish? No bugger forgets that.





17



AS HE CAME close to the ulcer hut, Dorrigo was enveloped by the stench of rotting flesh. The stink of foul meat was so bad that Jimmy Bigelow—who accompanied Evans on his rounds outside of the cholera compound to help as an orderly nurse—would on occasion have to leave, go outside and vomit.

Once they were inside the ulcer hut, the stench grew stronger. Dorrigo Evans brought a hand to his nose, then quickly took it away, considering it one further affront to men who had already suffered too much. He headed down an aisle that ran between two bamboo platforms, which were full of his ulcer patients. The stench was now different, once more growing stronger and also sharper, so foully pungent that Dorrigo’s eyes were watering. Rows of naked men lay like stick insects dying after some strange swarming, so many cicada husks rising and falling on the woven bamboo, lying not parallel but at strange angles to one another, dulled bug eyes wide and vacant, chicken carcass chests rising and falling the only outward sign of life. Occasionally he felt he did see something in their eyes but they were terrible things—envy or a terrifying fatalism, or a dizzying terror into which they were falling ever deeper. It was hard to look, harder not to. Many were oblivious and most paid no attention; some were silent; some were delirious, their heads rolled side to side; some mumbled and muttered; some groaned incessantly as pain coursed through them as rain through bamboo.

Dorrigo Evans made his way between the platforms, as chatty as if it were a country pub on a Saturday afternoon and he was meeting old mates, but his good spirits fled and he felt his stomach cramp when he saw two orderlies carry Jack Rainbow in. One orderly was holding some filthy rags, trying to staunch the blood that was seeping out of the little stump that was all that was left of Jack Rainbow’s right leg. Dorrigo Evans had operated on him twice before, the first time amputating the leg below the knee when the ulcer there had eaten through to his shin and anklebone. The second time gangrene had set in around the stump and he had had to amputate high up the thigh. And that had been three weeks ago, and here he was again. The orderlies placed him on a bamboo table used for patients when their ulcers were cleaned out with sharpened spoons. Dorrigo Evans came across to inspect the leg.