Spirit House by Mark Dapin

Author:Mark Dapin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760140533
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2015-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

BONDI

SUNDAY 29 APRIL 1990

At two o’clock the next morning, the screaming started. Jimmy was running for cover, jumping into ditches, returning fire. I felt like I was inside his dream. I could see the jungle where he fought; I was frightened with him as he pushed away creepers and leaped over vines. I wondered if he was going to die as he called out for Mei-Li in the night.

He woke me early with eggs for breakfast. They looked up from my plate like tigers’ eyes.

‘They’re good,’ said Jimmy. ‘Eat. We’re moving out this morning.’

‘Out where?’ I asked.

‘Out of the camp,’ he said. ‘The furphy is we’re heading to Siam, but if you believed every bloody furphy we’ve been told, we’d’ve been home a dozen times by now. Have you packed your kit?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not a soldier.’

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘If you don’t get a bloody move on, we’ll get left behind.’

I stared at him hard. He looked back and laughed.

‘Gotcha!’ he said.

I’d forgotten Jimmy was a joker, a clown, the grandad who was always trying to tickle me, to pick my pocket, take my watch.

He showed me a new sketch, of a building like a golden church, and ran a blunt fingertip up the rise of the spire.

‘The first time I saw a spirit house was outside a coffin maker’s workshop in Ban Pong,’ said Jimmy. ‘We fell out of the train and into a stinking boong camp there, with rats and lice and hairy centipedes. A bloke got bitten and he died. Another bloke just died. The guards let us wander around the town, begging for food. The coffin-maker gave us bowls of congee and cups of cold tea. The next night we marched along the railway line to Kanchanaburi. It was all right to start with. These things always are. You play the “at least” game. “At least I’m not in a rice truck any more” or “At least I’m outside.”

‘We were tramping in the dark because it was too hot to move during the day. I marched with Townsville Jack. Katz was next to us, but he wasn’t really marching, just walking. That bloke couldn’t look military if you stuffed him into a shell and fired him out of a cannon. Behind us was Myer, the sad little joker.

‘Kanchanaburi was the base camp for the railway, a small town alongside a river. We marched in but we didn’t stay. We pushed on in a cloud of sick men’s farts, but we were weak and hungry and throwing away gear because everything started to weigh more as we went on, and in the end it was like we had giants on our shoulders. The soles of my boots came away from the uppers and I walked in socks on stones and through streams, and my blisters burst and my feet were shredded, grated.

‘The Nips drove us along with sticks, beating us across the haunches like we were cattle. They cracked Townsville Jack around the neck, back

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.