Rabbit Hendricks, in turn, had been given two duck eggs by the camp’s Japanese commander in return for sketching some postcard pictures of him and some of his cronies—presumably to send back to lovers and families in Japan. While the Japanese occasionally made use of Rabbit’s talents in this way, they would most likely kill him if they saw the sketches and watercolours he had made of the daily life of the camp—the hideous labour, the beatings, the torture—and for this reason Rabbit Hendricks kept them carefully hidden. But his work was at an end. The evening before, finishing their shift on the Line, Rabbit had been gripped by a horrific cramp and had to relieve himself immediately. Before he had even stood up, Chum Fahey, who was working near him, was staring. Rabbit Hendricks turned. Beneath him, he saw that his bowels had written his fate in a puddle of rice-water coloured shit. The POWs had come to fear this more than the Japanese since the cholera had broken out nine days earlier.
Chum Fahey and two others had helped Darky carry Rabbit back on a crudely improvised stretcher up and down the Dolly—a jungle track that connected the Line with their camp three and a half miles away—a painfully slow task that was not quickened by a search in the dark for Rabbit’s dentures, lost in a violent bout of retching. With difficulty they made their way through the night jungle—their only guides home muddy ruts and the distant groans of the sick POWs who were ahead of them—finally arriving back at camp a little before midnight covered in mud and watery vomit. Rabbit Hendricks, along with his watercolour set, his sketchbook and his secret drawings, had then disappeared into the cholera compound where ever more were sent and from where only a handful returned. And all that remained of him was the blackened duck egg, the shell of which Darky Gardiner now adroitly peeled off in just three pieces.
The rain fell once more with a great heave, and the movement made a fresh, damp breeze that blew for a moment through the pitiful shelter that served as their barracks, washing away the stench of shit and decay that was all the men who slept up and down the hut on two long bamboo platforms. Darky felt the breeze as a form of hope, and he tried to tell himself that this was another good thing. But the rain began dripping on his face again, and when he tried to roll over, Tiny was still there, and, when he again shoved him, Tiny remained immovable, snoring, dead to the world.
Can you just bloody well shove over, Tiny?
Fuck the fuck up, Darky, yelled someone down the platform.
There was nothing Darky could do with Tiny. He stank too. The rain came back strong, and what with his feverish head and the noise it was sometimes hard to know what was inside his head and what was outside. He was thinking of when he first met Tiny, a bull of a man, who had stripped down and strutted around in his magnificent body flexing, rearing, crowing. Like a rooster rooting on a Sunday morning, Chum Fahey had said.
Even on the starvation rations they were given, Tiny’s loss of weight seemed only to emphasise the magnificence of his body. It seemed to hone rather than waste his physique. Tiny’s body had triumphed over everything: the malaria, the dysentery, the pellagra and the beri-beri. None of the diseases that laid low and began killing the other men seemed to affect him, as though his magnificence was in itself a form of immunity. Somehow the camps had not reduced him, nor the Japanese broken him.
Tiny’s job was to make holes in the rock by slowly pounding a steel bar into the face with his sledgehammer until the hole was the required depth. When there were enough holes, a Japanese engineer filled them with explosive and blew that section. Darky was Tiny’s offsider, holding the steel bar, giving it a quarter-turn after each blow to help it drill down. Tiny worked with energy uncharacteristic of any other prisoner and prided himself on finishing his work quota before anyone else. It was his triumph over his Japanese captors.
Show them little yellow bastards what a white man is, he would say.
He didn’t seem to notice that the Japanese then demanded everyone else do the same.
That fucking Tarzan will do for us all, said Sheephead Morton.
If Tiny set a new record for the work—as he seemed regularly intent on—the Japanese engineers would make that the new daily quota, and others less strong would suffer while working to fulfil it.
For fucking fuck’s sake, tell him, Sheephead Morton said to Darky.
Tell him what?
Ee-fucking-nough. Nough.
Nough nough or just nough?
Fuck off.
Cobber, Darky said later to Tiny, you might want to back off.
Tiny smiled.
Just a bit. Not every bloke can work at your rate, Darky said.
Tiny was a devout gospel-haller. With an eerie smile, he said, The Lord gave us this body to work with, to rejoice in.
Well, there’s another bugger you don’t hear from much these days. But we’ll all be seeing Him soon enough if you don’t back off. Because otherwise you’ll be the death of everyone, Tiny.
The Lord will see us right. That’s the way I look at it.