When he next awoke, his stomach was a fist. It was still dark. His mouth tasted of soap, and a terrible gripping pain contorted his shrivelled belly. He sat up, half-groaning, half-gasping with the effort, grabbed a kerosene tin he kept full of water at the base of his sleeping spot, and began walking barefoot through the dark and mud and rain towards the benjo, as the Japanese insisted the camp latrine be known.
Some distance from the tents, the benjo was a trench twenty yards long and two and a half yards deep, over which the men precariously squatted on slimy bamboo planking to relieve themselves. The bobbing excrement below was covered with writhing maggots—like desiccated coconut on lamingtons, as Chum Fahey said. It was a vile horror. When the prisoners competed in devising ways of doing in their most hated guard, they joked of one day drowning the Goanna in the benjo. Even for them, a more terrible death was hard to conceive.
The tiger fires which the Japanese had ordered to be kept burning all night had long ago been swamped and killed by the incessant rain. The world was dark, with the monsoon clouds blocking much of the light of the stars and moon; the jungle soaked up most of what else was left. Darky Gardiner made his way in short awkward hops as he clasped his stomach with his free hand, trying not to wrench his guts with any large or abrupt movement into giving way too early. Half-doubled up, he made his way by vague black outlines through the shanty camp of rickety bamboo shelters. From within came the groans and snores and sudden gasps of other POWs, which may have been from pain or grief or memory or dying. Or all of these. And washing every sound of exhaustion and anguish and hope into the mud was the inexorable drone of the torrential rain.
By now fully awake from the pain that gripped his abdomen, and panting with the intense effort of walking without shitting himself, Darky was still some way from the benjo when he slid off the greasy shoulder of the path and into its muddy centre, up to his ankles in filthy mud. He momentarily panicked. His sudden, frantic effort to get back up on firmer ground excited his bowels. He felt an abrupt loss of extreme tension and, with a relieving rush, realised he was shitting himself in the middle of the camp’s main path.
A terrible exhaustion overwhelmed him, his arse burnt like fire, his head swam wildly, and he just wanted to lie down in the mud and shit and sleep forever. But he fought this feeling because his stomach was again tightening like a garrotte, and once more he felt a stinking gravy exploding out. He was panting now with the effort; having emptied himself completely, his bowels felt immediately full again.
He gave himself over to his body, strained once more and hated himself that he had done this, that he could not even make it to the benjo, that he had spread his filth where other men would walk in the morning. He thought of the Big Fella’s injunctions to observe strict hygiene, how they all now saw cleanliness—in so far as it was possible—as essential to their survival. And though there was nothing he could do about it, he still felt ashamed and defeated.
There was no way of separating his shitty stream from the deep mud, that endless and ceaseless muddy, shitty world. It was already being ploughed by the rain and transformed into something else, an inescapable and deadly decay that was everything and everybody and returning them all to the jungle. Next time, he told himself, no matter what, he would make it to that fucking awful shitter. Finally there was an unsatisfactory motion that he knew would have produced nothing more than some mucous with an oily blood-streak striping it.
Finished, dizzy from the effort, Darky slowly drew himself back up to a fully erect posture, staggered a few short steps off the path, and with the water in his kero tin began washing himself as best he could. His buttocks felt little more than ropes. He spent some time cleaning his anus, which, in its strange prominence amidst his wasted flesh, left him with him a deep sense of disgust. He was suddenly chilled, and his thighs and calves shivered wildly as he washed them down. He stifled a scream with a strange gulp as he splashed water over the tropical ulcer the size of a teacup on his leg, and consoled himself that keeping this wound clean was a good thing. It had to be kept clean. His mind felt not right—the malaria, he guessed—his senses at once too sharp and too blurred. But this much remained vivid and strong within him, this much he knew: it was easy to give up. Which was, to Darky’s mind, however fevered, not just a bad thing, but the very worst thing. The path to survival was to never give up on the small things. Giving up was not getting to the benjo. Next time, he vowed, he would get there, no matter how hard it was.
His feet, lost in the mud, were condemned to exist in filth, and so, cleaned as much as was possible, he walked back through the shit and slush to his tent and his place on the bamboo platform. He crawled back under his filthy and foul-smelling blanket, dragging his shitty feet up with him. His last thought before a bedraggled exhaustion carried him off to sleep was how he was again hungry.
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