‘Roll me another one, there’s a good girl.’
2
Tom straightened up to ease the burning pain in his back. He looked around him. Night was falling in the jungle. The red sun was slipping slowly beneath the ragged horizon. Kerosene lamps had been lit so work on the railway cutting could continue by their flickering light. All around him, living skeletons laboured, hacking away at the rock with pickaxes, hammering spikes into the granite, clearing rubble into bamboo baskets and passing them down the long chain of waiting men to the edge of the cutting, to be tipped over the precipice.
The light from the lamps and the rapidly setting sun glinted on their sweating bodies. The men were barefoot and almost naked, wearing only ragged shorts or tattered loin cloths, and were so thin that their eyes bulged out from hollow cheeks, their ribs clearly visible beneath the skin. The scene was one of constant movement as men swung sledgehammers above their heads in a rhythmic action and brought them down on the thick metal spikes. The air rang with the continuous sound of chipping and tapping, metal upon metal, metal upon rock.
A sharp prod between his shoulder blades made him lurch forward, and he nearly fell to the ground. He turned to see the Korean guard they had nicknamed ‘Fat-so’ standing behind him, wielding a bamboo cane.
‘Speedo, Speedo,’ squawked the Korean, sweat standing out in droplets on his brow.
The man leaned forward and prodded him again, harder. Tom took a deep breath and raised the heavy sledgehammer above his head, bringing it down hard on the head of the spike. Pain ripped across his shoulders and down his arms and spine, from the motion he had been repeating for over twelve hours now. He winced, blinking away sweat. His eyes met Harry’s solemn stare.
‘Not long now, lad. Nearly the end of the shift. Don’t let ‘em grind you down,’ Harry said, crouched on the ground, holding the spike in position.
‘Speedo, Speedo!’ yelled the guard again, suspicious. He brought the cane down again, this time on Harry’s shoulders, leaving another livid stripe alongside the others he’d inflicted that day.
A shout went up at the end of the cutting, where the track emerged onto a rocky ledge. Tom looked round to see that a prisoner had collapsed on the ground, and was being beaten by a guard. His heart lurched with shock when he saw it was his friend Archie. He had gone down with malaria the day before but had been dragged out from the hospital hut to join the work party that morning, despite the protests of the doctors.
The guard lashed Archie’s body with a length of wire again and again, yelling furiously in Japanese. The rest of the men had stopped work and were watching, mute, helpless. It was a familiar scene. Tom looked around. Where the hell were the officers? They should be intervening to stop this. They were probably further down the cutting. With each blow Tom felt his anger boiling. His fists clenched with rage, and he tried to restrain himself. But after a few minutes he could no longer bear to watch in silence. He threw his hammer aside and ran over to the guard. Seizing the man’s wrist, he stopped him before he could inflict another blow.
‘Stop it, you bastard! He’s sick,’ Tom had his fist tight around the guard’s wrist.
The guard turned. He was bald, skinny, his eyes narrow with contempt. He dropped the wire whip and pushed Tom backwards. Tom stumbled and fell sprawling on the ground. Sharp stones dug into his back. The guard began kicking him in the ribs, and searing pain ripped through him at every blow. The guard then turned away to focus his attention again on Archie, who was crawling away, squirming towards the edge of the track on his belly. Fat-so had joined in now. He aimed a kick between Archie’s legs. Archie stopped moving and lay still in the rubble. The Korean seized one of his hands and dragged him to the edge. He heaved Archie over the top where the waste was tipped, giving him a final contemptuous kick as he slid down.
‘You work, work!’ screamed the Korean turning back to Tom, pointing to where Harry was still crouching with the spike. Tom dragged himself to his feet, picked up the hammer and swung it above his head. Pain tore through his ribcage, but he bit his lips and stayed silent. He wasn’t going to show them how much it hurt.
‘You don’t learn, mate,’ Harry said. ‘You got off light that time. It only makes things worse in the long run. Haven’t you learnt anything about how they operate?’
‘What about Archie?’ Tom muttered through his teeth.
Harry shrugged. ‘We’ll carry him back to camp and see what the docs can do.’
As he worked on, trying to ignore his pain, Tom kept his eyes fixed on the edge of the precipice, willing Archie to appear. But there was no sign of him.
After another hour or so a small party of Japanese engineers appeared at the end of the cutting. One of the guards blew a whistle and work stopped immediately. Tom and the others stood watching, leaning wearily on their tools, as the engineers strutted around the site, inspecting the day’s progress, conferring intensely, gesticulating, pointing. The air grew thick with anticipation; it was not unknown for engineers to pronounce that progress was insufficient and that more work must be done before the prisoners were released and could trek back to camp. But tonight one of the group nodded sharply to the guards, and the prisoners were allowed to form a column and march out of the cutting to begin the three-mile long trek through the jungle back to the camp.
Before the guards could prod them into line with the others, Tom and Harry rushed to the
