The Great World Read online

  ‘I see you’ve been in the papers again,’ Digger would say, and Vic, though he was pleased Digger had seen it – he was still hungry for admiration, he could never have enough of it – would make a face. ‘Oh, the papers,’ he’d say. ‘You can’t take any notice of the papers.’ And to make up a little for the gap between them, he began to tell Digger stories, frank, light-hearted ones, of his activities out there among the cannibals, laying it on pretty thick at times and delighting in Digger’s expressions of disbelief, of disapproval too, often enough, and playing when he could for sympathy.

  ‘Well, I’m glad it’s you and not me,’ Digger would tell him, letting them both off the hook. ‘I dunno how you stand it. I couldn’t do it. Not for quids.’

  Digger in fact was being disingenuous. He knew Vic. You could trust him with your life. On the other hand, you couldn’t trust him with tuppence. He had been surprised at first that some fellow he knew, and knew well, should be getting on in the world. But he saw after a time that this was naive. The very qualities he knew in Vic, both sides, took another form out there and were just what was needed. That told you something about the world, and Digger, in his own way, took note of it, but he didn’t let on to Vic what he had seen.

  ‘I stand it,’ Vic would say, ‘because I’ve got to. I’ve got no option.’ What he meant was that change, risk, action, were essential to him.

  He was inclined to look about, when he came up here, and ask how Digger stood it. It was a world, up here, that had no need of you. Everything you looked at or touched, the long strips of bark that peeled back to show glossy colours, the squiggles on a trunk that were little lives, birdcalls that came out of the scrub, ker-whip, ker-whip – all these gave you the same message. Come on in if you like, but you might as well not for all the difference it will make.

  It could be a comfort, that, for an hour or two. It took you out of yourself. But any more and he felt ghostly.

  What he needed was things that told him he was here. Lucky for him the world was full of them.

  But three weeks ago he had changed all this. He had come to Digger and asked a favour of him.

  For a day or two after the idea first struck him he had held back. Not because he was afraid Digger would refuse him. He knew he wouldn’t. But because by asking it he was disturbing a balance that had existed between them, sometimes shakily, for more than forty years. He hesitated. Then, just as he knew he would, he went ahead and did it just the same.

  ‘Listen, mate,’ he had begun, a little shy now that he had come to the point, ‘you know I wouldn’t involve you in anything that wasn’t strictly above board. But the fact is, Digger, I’ve got a favour to ask you. I wouldn’t if there was anyone else.’

  ‘What is it?’ Digger said straight out. He was surprised. They didn’t ask favours of one another. He wondered what it could be that was not covered already by the friendship between them.

  The note of distress in his voice unnerved Vic, but he was in now and what he had said was true: there was no one else. Quickly he laid the thing out, sticking to the plainest terms. Digger heard him through.

  ‘But what use would I be?’ he said at last. ‘I don’t know anything about shares.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to. You wouldn’t even know it was happening. All we’d be using, Digger,’ and he paused a moment before he could get it out, ‘is your name.’ He went on quickly to cover the embarrassment of it. Digger was looking more and more uneasy. He was actually wringing his hands.

  ‘You see, we need someone who isn’t known, who couldn’t be traced – or not easily. It’s a matter of timing – to get it all done before it turns up in the records. Oh, there’s nothing illegal to it. It’s a bit clever, that’s all. You know what these business fellers are like. You see, the law says I can only buy one and a half per cent of the shares every six months, even if it is my company. It’s a silly law, but there you are, it’s the law. So I need someone else to do it. I put up the money – well, not money exactly, collateral, you know what that is, other companies that I can borrow against. All you would have to do is sign a few papers. Albert, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Digger said bleakly, ‘Albert.’ The unfamiliarity of it was at this moment a relief.

  ‘You see, mate, someone’s after me, I don’t know who. It could be anyone. Alex, even. All I know is, they’ve started to move. So what I’ve got to do is get in before them. Get the cash together, wait for the right moment, then before the others can do it, zap! we go in and make a bid for the whole show. Or as much of it, anyway, as will give me the whip hand.’

  He was sweating. The boldness and danger of it excited him, but there were things too that he needed to keep back. It might scare Digger if he knew the scale of what he had in mind. For instance, the sums that would be involved.

  ‘The thing is, to get it all over and done with in the shortest possible time. Forty days, that’s the maximum. So you see, Digger, it won’t be for long.’ He could see how pinched Digger looked. He was sorry for that. ‘I’m up against it,’ he said simply. ‘I wouldn’t ask if I had the option. You’re the only one.’

  Digger worked his Adam’s apple. The trouble was, he had no point from which he could judge all this, no knowledge, no experience, and there was no one he could ask. Was there an element of madness in it that anyone who knew about these things would see straight off?

  ‘I’m not imagining things,’ Vic said in an aggrieved tone, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking. I know it sounds dramatic. Paranoia, is that what you’re thinking? Honestly, Digger, this is the way these things are done. It may seem mad to you, but don’t you think I know what I’m doing? This is a game I play every day of the week. Believe me, I’m good at it.’

  So Digger had been drawn in, and in the weeks that followed several prime targets, companies, that is, that were vulnerable to take-over, began to pass through his hands, all as Vic had promised, with no trouble on his part; without his even knowing for the most part what had occurred. It was a phantom existence he was living out there.

  The companies – Morton Holdings, Cathedral Steel and Concrete, J. & R. Randall were the largest, but there were smaller ones as well – consisted of warehouses in three states, factories, offices with desks and filing cabinets and typewriters and computers, cafeterias, fleets of vans, stacks of cardboard boxes or steel girders; but all Digger saw were papers. And even the papers, it seemed, were just promises, negotiable items of trust, no more to be associated with actual notes or coins than the name Albert Keen was with the man who was signing for him.

  Digger was astonished by what was revealed to him, the glimpse he got behind the scenes into a world he had thought till now was unshakeably solid.

  ‘But I told you it was a game,’ Vic told him. ‘Didn’t you believe me?’

  The magic for him lay in the very thing that Digger found so unsettling, the extent to which the structure he was erecting, for all its being underwritten out there by so much that was real and touchable, was a secret one, visible only to himself, Digger, his advisers and a few collaborators who were in the know. But it was solid enough. ‘There’s banks in this, Digger,’ he would whisper, when he saw that Digger had doubts, and he would name them. But Digger, instead of being consoled, was terrified. Men drew their wages, their families put clothes on their backs and bread into their mouths, bought TV sets and video recorders; buildings went up; produce was shifted; a whole society breathed and ate and slept – but the basis of it all was no more than air, no more than promises, trust.

  Vic laughed. ‘But what else could it be?’ he asked, as if Digger were a child. And Digger was scared by that, too. By common agreement they fell into the habit of talking as little as possible of all this, and then only in the lightest terms.

  ‘Agh,’ he said now, hauling his tackle in, ‘this is a mug’s game. Let’s see if Jenny’s got a cuppa tea,’ and he made to move, but Vic stopped him.

  ‘Not yet, eh? Let’s wait a bit. It’s early enough.
’

  Digger was surprised but made no objection. He stowed his line, leaned back, and they settled and sat in silence. There was nothing unusual in it – they could spend long periods just sitting; but he was uneasy just the same. It was the third time in a week that Vic had just turned up like this.

  ‘I’m on tenterhooks,’ he had confessed the first time, ‘about this bit of business we’ve got on. This last bit. You don’t mind, do you?’ He was worried about the market. ‘I want t’ get all this finalised,’ he said, ‘a bit sooner than we thought. The market’s too high. In fact that’s good for us, it’s what we need. Only I don’t trust it.’

  But they had none of that sort of talk today. It was something else.

  Vic, his boots set down carefully in the dirt, his back hard against a she-oak, felt the silence swell; out over the swarming river, but back too into the clearing where the store was and beyond into the trackless scrub. But the real expansion was in him. Sitting quietly now with his head back, he saw from outside him, above and at a distance, these two old blokes sitting at ease beside a river, and it seemed miraculous to him that one of them, against all the odds, should be himself. Miraculous, too – there was no other word for it – that this breath should be here for him to catch hold of, and that this moment, just after four on an autumn afternoon in 1987, should have been waiting up ahead for them to reach it; like the leaves here that threw shadows on his hands, and had also been growing slowly towards it, and having arrived now, were turning over with a sound that was just perceptible if you listened, a little shush and scratch against the stillness.

  ‘Listen, Digger,’ and Digger was disturbed for the second time by something new in his voice, ‘do you remember a cove called Anson?’

  Digger sucked his cheeks in and looked out at the river. After a little he said: ‘Anson, yes. John Archibald.’

  Vic let out a long breath. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’d be him,’ though in fact he had never till now heard these other names. He could not have explained, even to Digger, the ease he felt at having them spoken.

  He was a jackaroo from up Singleton way, twenty, maybe twenty-one or -two. Claimed to have played half-back for one of the state teams but was almost certainly lying. ‘What year was that, mate?’ one of the others had challenged. Vic remembered the lie.

  One day early on, sitting in the sun in just their shorts, they had played a game of draughts. They were seated on either side of an upturned drum, he couldn’t remember where, but the heat was intense and the sunlight blinding. Changi. Or it might have been earlier, on the ship going up.

  Blue eyes. Hair bleached to unruly straw. Rough, very cocky, and dead sure when they sat down that he would win.

  ‘Only I was surer,’ Vic thought, and could feel even at this distance the little spurt of triumph, the joy in his own good fortune and skill, as the move came up and he took it, ‘Ha, I’ve got ya!’

  The look of utter astonishment on Anson’s face – that too had been such a pleasure to him. The feller couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t hide his irritation either. He had been so certain he would win.

  They were in different mobs and had nothing to do with one another after that, even when they found themselves in the same camp up on the line. Then one day, in a period when they were working sixteen hours at a stretch and were half dead on their feet, in a trance most of them, so sick and brutalised they hardly knew where they were, he had been sitting over his bit of midday rice, and in glancing up for some reason – no reason, in fact – had seen Anson squatting just yards away at the side of the track.

  There was no modesty among them, they were past all that; but he looked away, and then, after a moment, looked back again, just as Anson, with a worried frown half-turned to glance behind him (they all did that) and inspect what he had done. Vic saw it too, and their eyes met.

  They were mostly indifferent to one another by now, too preoccupied with their own terrors to care how the next man felt. But they all knew what a white turd signified. Cholera. It was a sentence of death.

  He meant nothing to him, that fellow; but he had thought he would never forget his look – or the stab of panic he felt in his own bowels – as that bit of intelligence passed between them.

  He had forgotten it, of course, in time. As he had forgotten so many other things. Till just this week it had come back to him as if no time at all had gone by, just seconds. The man, moving back into himself, got to his feet and stood there, his fingers working clumsily to adjust his shorts.

  The man, the man – but what was he called? It seemed shameful to Vic that he could not remember, though in fact they had only spoken the once. He worried his way through the alphabet, finding other names that he had also forgotten, but not that one. Then he took his mind off it and it was there.

  What he had been struck by, after that first glance of panicky recognition, was the mildness with which Anson stood watching his own fingers deal with his shorts; with the ordinary but quite tricky business of hooking them up so they wouldn’t fall. He had felt a kind of awe at the futility of it, as if a cold hand had been laid on him, too. He was amazed (but there was horror in it too) at the distance Anson had come since their draughts game. There was no truculence in him, none at all. With a kind of dumb patience he stood tying the rag-ends together, then turned and moved away.

  But what he thought now was something different: that it had taken him forty years to accept the hard facts of existence, whereas that fellow Anson had got there in just months.

  Digger sat quiet.

  Anson. He came early on the list. After Amos, Reginald James. He could have gone on if Vic had required it. To Aspie, Ball, Barclay, Baynes, Beeston . . .

  There were nine more after that. Then Curran.

  4

  GREAT EVENTS DO not always cast a shadow before them. In Malaya in 1941 the Japanese Imperial Army arrived on rickety bikes. It didn’t look like the first part of a triumph or a moment from history.

  You saw them pedalling up the track between the rubber trees, rifles slung across their backs, glasses ablaze, rubber boots and leggings working up and down. Very spindly, the bikes looked. The riders sweated in their heavy gear. You took aim, squeezed gently, and the whole enterprise went haywire, the rider waving his arms about as if he believed there was something up there, the hem of a garment or the big toe of one of his ancestors, that he could grab hold of to hoist himself aloft. He scrabbled for it. Meanwhile the wheels went spinning, gravity insisted, and rider and machine slewed off into the ditch. It was comic.

  But their own men died and they pulled back. Big guns lifted, rained down shells. The heat and the noise grew terrific. The narrow streets of Chinatown hurled themselves skyward. Walls ripped, flew upward and came down again as lumps of plaster and dust. Locals, Chinese mostly, ran this way and that in the oily darkness with cashboxes or rolled carpets or children in their arms, or chickens or sewing-machines or little screaming piglets. Or they trotted by with half a household on their shoulders, all the chair legs pointing upward, and fell down with fire running along their backs and the load smashed and scattered, or got up and hobbled on again among the armoured cars and the field ambulances and the walking wounded that were streaming in over the causeway to the island fortress.

  That was Sunday. On the Sunday night, fellows who had been fighting hard the day before in rubber plantations on the island, or hand-to-hand on factory sites, Digger among them, were at ease at last, preparing themselves for the next stage of proceedings by darning their socks, rolling them neatly, and pushing them down the side of their packs. When all was shipshape, they counted their coins, cleaned their fingernails, and jabbing into a tin of condensed milk, sucked comfort from a metal tit.

  All around, at campfires and in places off in the dark, trading had started up again: a packet of cigarette papers and two frenchies for a fountain-pen; an ounce of tobacco for a tin of the best gramophone needles, steel, with a record of Paderewski’s Minuet in G thrown in.

>   It was as if the whole division had been constituted and shipped north for no other purpose than to ensure the movement, from one continent to another, of a million articles of no great worth or use that might otherwise have sat gathering dust in a country store, or mouldering away in a suitcase under a bed. An underground economy unknown to statistics, it was in progress at every instant here, between fights, between mouthfuls of coconut milk or bully beef, through fences, across the space between bunks. It went on even at the borehole, while the two men were engaged on that other unofficial business of easing their bowels.

  Transactions. Deals. They took up so much energy, engendered so much feeling, you might have thought they were the one true essential of a fighting man’s life, of tenacious, disorderly civilian life inside the official military one, exposing in pocket form the real motives of all this international activity, compared with which all talk of freedom and honour and patriotic pride and the saving of civilisation was the merest mind-fogging gibberish.

  It was a hot night thick with cloud and the pall of rubber godowns that were blazing along the docks. Firelit shadows were in play as men went about the tasks of settling and making camp. The voices in the stillness were of fellows stirring pots, playing mah-jong or blackjack, or swapping lazy obscenities.

  Others, newcomers mostly but some old hands as well, were still talking about the big fight they would be in, tomorrow or the day after, that would finish the little buggers off.

  Such talk was bullshit. Those who had really done any fighting – Digger, for instance, and Mac and Doug – would have nothing to do with it. The heaviness that hung over the island was not just weather, or smoke from the storehouse of the Empire going up in flames. The rumour was (it was only a whisper as yet, men were afraid to let it out) that the commanders were already negotiating.

  By eleven o’clock it was official. In a meeting with the Japanese commander, General Yamashita, the commander of the Allied Forces, General Percival, had signed an unconditional surrender, to be effective from 10 p.m. Japanese time.