You betcha, Darky, Sheephead Morton said, opening his dixie, splitting his lunch rice ball in half and putting one portion in his mouth.
And that was that. There was nothing that could be done, and soon they would have to start moving again. As he lay there, Darky Gardiner felt his tin dixie press hard into his side and was reminded how hungry he was, and how in that small tin box was a golf ball of rice that he could eat now. It was muddy from his fall, but it was food. And back in camp was his condensed milk, which he now resolved he would have that night. And that was a good thing too.
He forced himself to sit up. So many good things, really, thought Darky Gardiner. If only it wasn’t for the pain in his feet, his aching head, and that the more he thought about the possibility of food, the hungrier he felt, it would be as good as it could get, all things considered.
Next to him, he could hear Sheephead Morton swallowing. A few others followed suit. Some took just a few grains of rice from their ball; some scoffed the whole thing in a gulp.
What’s the time? Darky Gardiner asked Lizard Brancussi, who somehow had managed to keep a watch.
Seven-fifty a.m., Lizard Brancussi said.
If he ate his rice ball now, thought Darky Gardiner, he would have nothing more to eat for another twelve hours. If he kept it, he would have five hours until their short lunch break—five hours in which he could at least look forward to the prospect of food. But if he ate it now, he would have neither food nor hope.
It was as if there were two people inside him, one urging sense, caution, hope—for what is the rationing of nothing, but the act of a man who hopes to survive?—and the other declaring itself for desire and despair. For if he waited until lunch, wasn’t there then a further seven hours without food? And what difference does it make if you don’t have food for twelve hours or seven hours? What is the difference, after all, between starving and starving? And if he ate now, wouldn’t that better his chances of surviving the day, of evading the blows of the guards, of having the energy not to misstep or make a mistaken blow that could lead to a potentially life-threatening injury?
And the demon of desire was strong in Darky Gardiner now, and his hand was reaching around to grab his dixie from his G-string when Sheephead Morton pulled him to his feet. The rest got back up, and Lizard Brancussi took the sledgehammer Darky had been shouldering, not out of any spirit of compassion but because they were in this, as in so many things, a strange animal, a single organism that somehow survived together. And Darky Gardiner was at once enraged that he was being so cruelly robbed of his food and relieved he would still have his rice ball for lunch. And in this strange mood of fury and relief he began trudging along again.
Then Darky Gardiner fell for a second time.
Give me a mo, boys, he said when they went to pull him back up.
They stopped. Some of them put down their tools, some squatted, some sat.
You know, Darky said, as he lay there in the wet darkness of the jungle floor, I always think of those poor bloody fish.
What you on about now, Darky? Sheephead Morton asked.
He was on about Nikitaris’s fish shop. In Hobart. How he used to take his Edie there for a feed after they had been to the flicks on a Saturday.
Couta and chips, he told them. Flake’s good, but couta’s sweeter. There was a big tank there, full of fish swimming round. Not goldfish—real fish, mullets and cocky salmons and flatties—fish like what we were eating. And we’d watch them, Darky Gardiner said, and even then Edie thought it must be sad for them, pulled out of the sea and ending up in that bloody awful fish tank, waiting for the fryer.
He’s always on about Nikitaris’s fish shop, Lizard Brancussi said.
I never thought how that’s their prison, Darky Gardiner said. Their camp. And I feel sick now thinking about those poor bloody fish in Nikitaris’s tank.
Sheephead Morton told him he was a potato cake short of a packet.
Darky Gardiner told them to go on or the Goanna would be into them. He said he’d make his own way in his own time.
None of them moved.
Go on, cobbers, he said.
None of them moved.
He said he would just lie there a few minutes longer and think about Edie’s breasts, that they were very beautiful and he needed to spend some time alone with them.
They said they weren’t leaving him.
He said he was the NCO and to get going.
Go! he suddenly yelled. It’s a fucking order. Go!
A fucking order? Sheephead Morton asked. Or just an order?