I am not Alwyn, he wished to say at the reception, and I am entirely bogus. But he instead lied and spoke of a love that had survived seven years of a separation, a mythical amount of time worthy of Ulysses and his men. And though the only classical hero he really resembled was the ram—much laughter—Ella truly was his Penelope, and he was glad to have finally arrived at his Ithaca—much applause.
For the rest of his life he would yield to circumstance and expectation, coming to call these strange weights duty. The guiltier he felt about his marriage, about his failure first as a husband and later as a father, the more desperately he tried to do only what was good in his public life. And what was good, what was duty, what was ever that most convenient escape that was conveniently inescapable, was what other people expected. What was bad and wicked was himself, he thought the first time he slept with someone other than his wife, her best friend, Joan Newstead, a woman with mesmerising damp lips and a sly smile, a month after his honeymoon. It was at a shack in Sorrento in the mid-afternoon when everyone else had conveniently gone everywhere else.
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world . . .
he whispered to her after, running a finger up and down the mosquito net before turning back to her, dropping his head and catching her dark nipple with the edge of his lower lip as he continued reciting Tennyson with soft breaths on her breast:
. . . whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
That evening there was a barbeque because the meat, left to hang in a Coolgardie safe, was beginning to spoil in the heat, and although meat rationing had only just ended, they still felt bad that good meat might be wasted. Perhaps he drank too much, perhaps he didn’t drink enough, he thought after, but his head spun, his stomach was full of nails. He felt bloated and taut with something large and wrong and hidden that came between him and Ella, Ella from whom he henceforth wanted to have nothing hidden, while Joan Newstead was now jealous of the attention Dorrigo was paying to her best friend, his wife. What was he doing? he wondered. Did he hope to be found out?
The porterhouse steak was grilled over a ferociously hot bed of redgum coals, but when he cut into it the meat was still not right and for a moment he was back there, heading across the camp towards the second part of his daily rounds on that day in the middle of the monsoon and the Speedo. As he came close to the ulcer hut, Dorrigo was enveloped by the stench of rotting flesh. And he remembered how the stink of foul meat was so bad that Jimmy Bigelow would on occasion have to go outside to vomit.
8
AFTER BEING CONVICTED, Choi Sang-min was transferred to Changi’s P Hall in which all the condemned men lived together as equals, Japanese and Koreans and Formosans. He was given a dirt-brown uniform marked with the English letters ‘CD’. The letters, he was told, signified that he was convicted to die. Choi Sang-min noticed that every CD there desperately tried to fill in his days with some sort of activity, and every man seemed to be neither depressed nor overly concerned by what the future might hold. And he himself felt something lift from him, as surely as something else was slowly enshrouding him, as though some lifelong feeling of fear and inferiority had evaporated. None of those things any longer meant anything. And that was because it was now his turn to be killed.
Each morning they were turned out of their cells, made to wash, and began another day of occupied nothingness. They sat shirtless in the baking gallery at the centre of the cells, playing go or shogi or rereading one of the few books or magazines available, or just sitting alone. Every few weeks an Indian captain, with silver spectacles behind which his glistening tadpole eyes swam slowly back and forth, would arrive with a notice of execution. The prisoners would wait silently, frozen with dread, wondering who was to die, every man intensely relieved when it was not himself but the man next to him.
On the third such visit, Choi Sang-min realised he was going to die, but not because his own feelings told him so, for at that moment his feelings seemed not to exist. Nor did he know it from the piece of paper he was handed. He held that piece of paper, but he could not connect himself and his life with what he was told that piece of paper said.
He looked up and around P Hall. It was paper—nothing—and he was a man. A man, Choi Sang-min reasoned, was something. A man, Choi Sang-min wished to say, was full of so many things, so many changes. A man, good or bad, was magnificent. It was not possible that this thing that was nothing and would never change could mean the end of everything that moved and changed within him—the good, the bad, the magnificent.
Yet it did.
And it was from the terrible relief the other men showed, relief that he felt like a burning flame, that he finally understood he was to be executed the following morning.