Free The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard Page A

sweated around knobs and switches. There were smudges of squashed insects, with adhering particles. Damp had got at the quicksilver of a long mirror on a mahogany stand. On the wall by the other bed, pinups were pinkly askew and lettered signs carried insults, facetiously obscene.
    Gloom without coolness. The mirror, unreflecting, was like the draped pelt of some desiccated leopard.
    There was a century here of obscure imperial dejection: a room of listless fevers. Of cafard, ennui, and other French diseases. The encrusted underside of glory.
    Exley, later, had no clear memory of seeing Roy Rysom for the first time — though sharply recalling that first sight of Rysom's dented tin box, its stencilled legend WAR GRAVES COMMISSION suggestive of the decomposing contents. He remembered that he was reading when Rysom came in and set the jazz belting, dragged off his boots, flopped on his bed, and began twitching to the music. Rysom's foot in its dank sock stuck out from the military blanket, toes curling and uncurling erotically to the music; his fingers convulsively beat on his chest, like hands of the dying. Peter Exley had watched men clutch themselves and die, and be covered up by regulation blankets. Men shot to bits in the desert, blown in half by land mines, festered with infected wounds: the whole scarlet mess covered by the military blanket.
    Your feets too big.
    Don't want cha cause ya feets too big.
    Mad at you, cause your feets too big.
    I hate you, cause your feets too big.
    Rysom's records were mostly jazz. Life with Rysom was suffused with noise: the mess boy calling him to the telephone 'Mistah Rai-sam, Captain Rai-sam.' Rysom yelling for cold beer, as trams rattled in the road below and the dockyard siren hooted or the gun boomed noon. Rysom said it was funny they should both be Australians, he and Exley, and on loan to the British Army. He said, 'You War Crimes lot,' and hooted like the siren. Rysom could introduce disbelief into anything, unmasking was his vocation. With suspicion he turned over Exley's Chinese and Japanese textbooks, his volumes on international law: 'A beaut racket.' Spreading a double page of Japanese characters, he uttered a stream of mad, paralaliac sounds, his comic rendering of Japanese.
    Rysom was forever doing imitations: of a language, an accent, a personality; a man.
    Rysom had dreams from which he woke shouting: dreams, like Exley's own, of men dismembered and sheets of flame. Each, in the night, now fought alone the war that neither could survive.
    On his cot at the barracks Exley now realised how much of his soldiering had been spent flat on his back, waiting for war. War had provided a semblance of purpose, reinforced by danger. Danger had been switched off like a stage light, leaving the drab scenery. And there they were at the barracks, he and Rysom, two years into peace and bored to death by it. Each must scratch around now for some kind of compromise and call it destiny.
    On his first mornings in the colony, Exley set out early. The short walk to his office led past the cricket ground, the club, the blotched statue of Queen and Empress restored to its pedestal: a decorous few hundred yards where Europeans were walking to their work in the trading companies and government offices — the sun-dried men, sometimes accompanied by pale seemly wife or daughter in starched flowers or well-pressed pleats. At that hour, too, the tourists were coming ashore from the President Lines, headed for tablecloths, carved ivory, and cloudy jade. A surge of early purpose seemed to be leading to something more than the chronic anticlimax of nightfall.
    The harbour was an old photograph, a resumption: grey ships of war, shabby freighters, and the stout passenger ships with banded funnels. And the swarming sampans and lighters, the junks with tan sails boned like fans and the tan-coloured bony man at the stern working the yuloh; the greater junks, like galleons; and the coastal steamers off the