DARKY GARDINER OPENED his eyes and blinked. Raindrops fell on his face. He pushed his hands into the mud but they kept sinking. He was swimming in shit. He tried to get back to his feet. It was impossible. He was swimming in ever more shit. He tried to curl up to protect himself. It did no good and he only sank back into the foul hole. If he closed his eyes he was back there being beaten. If he opened his eyes he was drowning in shit, trying to stay afloat, trying to climb out. But it was so slippery and so dark and he could not find a hold, and when he did he had no strength to climb out. His body could not help him. It answered only to the kicks and blows that twisted him wherever they wished. He had no idea how long he had been there. Sometimes he thought it seemed forever. At other times it seemed no time at all. At one point he heard his mother. He was having difficulty breathing. He felt more soft raindrops, saw bright-red oil against the brown mud, heard his mother calling again, but it was unclear what she was saying, was she calling him home or was it the sea? There was a world and there was him and the thread joining the two was stretching and stretching, he was trying to pull himself up that thread, he was desperately trying to haul himself back home to where his mother was calling. He tried calling to her but his mind was running out of his mouth in a long, long river towards the sea. He blinked again. A monkey shrieked, its teeth white. Above the ridge, the smiling moon. Nothing held and he was sinking. He heard the sea. No, he said, or thought he said. No, not the sea. No! No!
24
THEY FOUND HIM late that night. He was floating head-down in the benjo, the long, deep trench of rain-churned shit that served as the communal toilet. Somehow he had dragged himself there from the hospital, where they had carried his broken body when the beating had finally ended. It was presumed that, on squatting, he had lost his balance and toppled in. With no strength to pull himself out, he had drowned.
Always shit in the shitter, said Jimmy Bigelow, who volunteered to be lowered on a rope into the hole of shitty water to manhandle the corpse out. Rightio, he yelled to those holding the rope at the top when he was up to his thighs in the filth. Rightio!
And as he tied a second rope around the corpse, he spoke to it.
Oh, you fucking stupid bastard, Darky. Couldn’t you just have shat yourself on the bunk like every other dopey bugger? Couldn’t you just have folded their fucking blanket the right way out?
As they raised Darky Gardiner’s body, Jimmy Bigelow glimpsed it by the light of the kerosene lantern. Coated in maggots, it was something so oddly bruised, crushed, filthy, so dirty and broken, that for a moment he thought it could not be him.
They carried the body to the hospital. With a kerosene tin of water and his miner’s hands, so violent, so gentle, Sheephead Morton cleaned the filth off the blackened body and prepared it to be buried the next day.
It had been a day to die, not because it was a special day but because it wasn’t, and every day was a day to die now, and the only question that pressed on them, as to who might be next, had been answered. And the feeling of gratitude that it had been someone else gnawed in their guts, along with the hunger and the fear and the loneliness, until the question returned, refreshed, renewed, undeniable. And the only answer they could make to it was this: they had each other. For them, forever after, there could be no I or me, only we and us.
25
THE FOLLOWING MORNING Rooster MacNeice rummaged deep in his kitbag for his copy of Mein Kampf to begin the day with his ten minutes of memorisation. He had woken in the middle of the night, harrowed by just one thought—that if he had stepped forward to say it had been his idea to hide from work, Gardiner would not have died. But, he reasoned, if he had done that, perhaps he would have died instead. Or not. Or maybe both of them would have died. He told himself it was impossible to know with the Japanese. He reassured himself that Gardiner was doomed in any case, as sergeant in charge of their gang, as a sick man.
When Rooster MacNeice had stood there in the cutting the day before, as the Japanese had demanded the guilty prisoners step forward, what had been loudest in his mind was not the Japanese roaring but Gardiner’s laughter after he had been caught with his hand around the eggshell. At the moment when Rooster could have stepped forward, all he could think of was the blackened duck egg Gardiner had stolen from him, the eggshell of which he had then used to mock him. The humiliation of the previous morning at Gardiner’s hands remained with him as a more painful emotion than the later memory of Gardiner being beaten. No, Rooster MacNeice had thought, he would not help such a man. But he had not meant to kill him.