Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

  Agnes Street

  That summer I found a job in a fast-paced restaurant in World’s End. I was back to washing dishes and filling in as a waiter whenever someone was ill. I was hoping to meet up with Mr. Nkoma, the piano player and fabulist, but there was no one I knew. The staff were mostly quick-witted waitresses—North Londoners and girls from the country—and I could not take my eyes off them, because of how they talked back to bosses, how they laughed, how they insisted they were enjoying themselves even though the work was hard. They had a higher status than those of us in the kitchen, so we were barely worth talking to. That did not matter. I could watch and learn about them from a distance. I worked there, shy at the centre of the busy pauseless restaurant, and their speed of argument and laughter kept me entertained. They’d walk past carrying three trays, proposition you, and walk off during your stammer. They rolled up their sleeves to show you their stringy muscles. They were forward then suddenly distant. A girl, a green ribbon holding back her hair, came across me in a corner during my lunch break and asked if she could “borrow” the small piece of ham out of my sandwich. I did not know what to say. I must have handed it to her silently. I asked what her name was and she looked shocked at my forwardness, ran back and organized a group of three or four waitresses to circle me and sing about the dangers of desire. I was about to enter a borderless terrain between adolescence and adulthood.

  When a few weeks later I had my clothes off in the company of that girl on a worn carpet of an empty house, I found the pathway towards her invisible. What I knew of passion was still an abstract thing, layered with hurdles and rules I did not yet know. What was just and what was unjustified? She lay beside me and there was no submission. Was she as nervous as I was? Besides, the real drama of the episode was not about us but the situation, which had involved illegally entering a house on Agnes Street with keys she had borrowed from her brother, who worked for an estate agency. There was a “For Sale” sign outside; inside there was no furniture, just carpeting. It was nightfall and I could interpret her responses only with the help of a streetlight or from a series of single matches held above a section of carpet that we checked later for bloodstains, as if there might have been a murder there. It did not feel like romance. Romance was the energy and sparkle of Olive Lawrence, it was the incandescent sexual fury of The Darter’s spurned Russian whose beauty was increased by her heightened suspicion of him.

  * * *

  —

  Another evening in midsummer. We have a cold bath in the house on Agnes Street. There’s no towel to dry ourselves, not even a curtain we can rub ourselves against. She pulls back her dark blond hair, then shakes her head, and her hair loosens into an aura.

  “Everyone else, they’re probably having cocktails now,” she says.

  We dry ourselves by walking through the empty rooms. This is the most intimate we have been since entering the house around six o’clock. There’s no longer the plot of sex or focused desire, just ourselves naked as well as invisible to each other in the dark. I catch, because of the swerve of a car light, a smile from her in recognition of this. A small awareness between us.

  “Watch,” she says, and does a handstand into the dark.

  “Didn’t see it. Do it again.” And this once seemingly unfriendly girl somersaults towards me, saying, “Catch my feet this time.” Then, “Thank you,” as I slowly lower her down.

  She sits on the floor. “I wish we could open a window. Run in the street.”

  “I don’t even know what street we’re on anymore.”

  “It’s Agnes Street. The garden! Come—”

  In the hall downstairs she pushes me to move faster, and I turn, grab her hand. We are wrestling against the staircase, each unable to see the other. She leans forward, bites my neck, and pulls away from an embrace. “Come on!” she says. “Here!” Banging into a wall. It’s as if neither of us thinks of anything except to escape this closeness, and it is only closeness that will help us escape. We are on the floor kissing whatever we reach. Her hands beating my shoulders as we fuck. It isn’t lovemaking.

  “Don’t. Don’t let go.”

  “No!”

  Escaping her tightening arm I hit my head on something, a wall, bannister, then come down hard onto her chest, suddenly aware of her smallness. Somewhere here we lose consciousness of each other, simply discovering the joy in the sport of it. Some people never find it, or don’t find it again. Then we are asleep in the dark.

  “Hello. Where are we?” she says.

  I roll onto my back, taking her with me, so she’s on top. She opens my lips with her tiny hands.

  “Og Hagness Steef,” I say.

  “What’s your name again?” She laughs.

  “Nathaniel.”

  “Oh, posh! Love you, Nathaniel.”

  We can barely dress ourselves. We hold hands as if we might lose each other as we go slowly through the darkness to the front door.

  * * *

  —

  The Moth was often away, but his absence, like his presence, rarely mattered. My sister and I were by now foraging for ourselves, becoming self-sufficient, Rachel disappearing into the evenings. She said nothing about where she went, just as I was silent about my life on Agnes Street. For both of us school now felt like an irrelevancy. In my conversations with other boys, who should have been the friends I’d have normally attached myself to, I never admitted to what was occurring at home. That existed in one pocket while my school life remained in the other. In youth we are not so much embarrassed by the reality of our situation as fearful others might discover and judge it.

  One evening Rachel and I took off to a seven o’clock screening of a film, and sat in the front row of the Gaumont. At some point the hero’s plane plunged towards the earth, with his foot caught among the controls so he couldn’t get free. Tense music filled the theatre, along with the scream of the plane’s engine. Caught up in the moment, I was unaware of what was happening around me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I looked over to my right. Between the voice that had said “What’s wrong?” and me sat Rachel, shuddering, a moan, a cow-like noise coming out of her that I knew was going to get louder. She was shaking from side to side. I opened her shoulder bag, got out the wooden ruler to put between her teeth, but it was too late. I needed to use my fingers to pry her mouth open, and she was biting down with her thin little teeth. I slapped her and in the midst of her gasp jammed in the wooden ruler and pulled her down to the floor. Above us the plane crashed into the earth.

  Rachel’s unmoored eyes were looking at me to gain security, for the safe way out of where she was. The man was bending over her too.

  “Who is she?”

  “My sister. It’s a seizure. She needs food.”

  He had his ice cream in his hand and gave it to me. I took it and pressed it onto her lips. Her head pulled back, then realizing what it was took it in greedily. The two of us crouched in the dark on that filthy carpet of the Gaumont. I tried lifting her to get her out of there, but she had taken on dead weight, so I lay down on the floor and hugged her to me the way The Darter had done. She looked, in the light that fell from the screen, as if she were still witnessing something terrible. As of course she was, for whenever such episodes occurred, she would later describe to me calmly what she had seen. The voices on the screen filled the theatre, continued the plot, and we stayed there on that floor for ten minutes with my coat over her to make her feel secure. There are medications now to swerve a body away from this sort of collision, but there weren’t any then. None that we knew of, anyway.

  We slipped out through a side exit and walked beyond the dark curtain towards the lit world. I got her into a Lyons Corner House. She had barely any energy. I made her eat something. She drank milk. Then we walked home. She did not speak about what had happened, as if by now it was immaterial, some deadly shore she had r
ecently passed. It would always be the next day when she needed to discuss it—not about the embarrassment or chaos in her, but with a wish to try to define the thrill building towards what was going to happen before everything dismantled. Then she could not remember any further, the brain by then unconcerned with remembering. But I knew there had been a brief time at the Gaumont when, seeing the pilot struggling to escape, she herself, half thrilled, had moved alongside him.

  If I do not speak of my sister in this story so much, it is because we have separate memories. Each of us witnessed clues about the other we did not pursue. Her secret lipstick, a boy on a motorcycle once, her crawling home late giddy with laughter, or how she’d become surprisingly fond of talking with The Moth. I suppose she must have found a confessor in him, but I held on to my secrets, kept my distance. In any case, Rachel’s version of our time at Ruvigny Gardens, though it might nestle with mine in certain ways, would be spoken of in a different tone, with an emphasis on different things. It turned out we would be close only during that early period when we shared a double life. But now, these years later, there is a separateness towards the other, and we fend for ourselves.

  * * *

  —

  On the carpet there is food wrapped in brown butcher paper—cheese and bread, slices of ham, a bottle of cider—all stolen from the restaurant we work in. We are in another room, another house without furniture, the walls blank. Thunder fills this unlived-in building. According to her brother’s schedule this one will take a while to sell, so we have become used to camping here at the end of a day when his customers are unlikely to turn up.

  “Can we open a window?”

  “No, we’ll forget it.”

  She is strict about her brother’s rules. He even needed to check me out, looking me up and down, saying I looked a bit too young. A strange audition. Max was his name.

  We fuck where the dining room must have been. My fingers touch the dent of impressions where table legs once rested on the carpet. We would have been under the table, there would normally have been a meal over us. I say this as I look up, seeing nothing in the dark.

  “You’re a strange one, aren’t you? Only you’d ever think that right now.”

  The storm abandons itself over us, shattering the soup tureens, throwing spoons onto the floor. A back wall damaged by a bomb has still not been rebuilt, and the dry thunder enters loudly, searching out our nakedness. We lie defenceless, without furniture, without even an alibi for what we are doing there, where all we have is butcher paper for a plate, and an old dog bowl for water. “I had a dream I was fucking you on the weekend,” she says, “and there was something in the room, near us.” I am not used to talking about sex. But Agnes—she calls herself that now—does, charmingly. It’s natural to her. What is the best way to give her an orgasm, where specifically to touch her, how soft, how hard. “Here, let me show you. Give me your hand….” My mute response half mocked by her, her smiling at my shyness. “Boy, you have many, many more years to get used to this, to keep becoming. There’s abundance here.” A pause, then, “You know…you could teach me about you.”

  By now we like each other as much as we desire each other. She talks about her sexual past. “I had this cocktail dress I borrowed for a date. I got drunk—it was the first time. I woke up in a room and no one was there. And no dress. I walked to the Tube and got home in just a raincoat.” A pause as she waits for me to say something. “Anything like that happen to you? You can tell me in French if you want. Would that be easier?”

  “I failed French,” I lie.

  “Bet ya didn’t.”

  * * *

  —

  Along with the wildness of her talk I loved her voice, the thickets and rhymes of it, a sea change after the way the boys at my school talked. But something else made Agnes different from others. The Agnes I knew during that summer was not the Agnes she would be later. Even then I knew it. Was that future woman I imagined aligned with her wishfulness for herself? Just as she may have believed in something further in me? It was different with everyone else I knew at that time in my life. During that era teenagers were locked into what we thought we already were and therefore would always be. It was an English habit, the disease of the time.

  The night of that first storm of summer—both of us holding each other frantically within it—I found a gift in my trouser pocket when I eventually got home. Unfolding a section of the crumpled brown butcher paper that had been our plate, I came on a charcoal drawing of the two of us on our backs, hand in hand, and above us the great unseen storm—black clouds, lightning bolts, a dangerous heaven. She loved to draw. Somewhere in the paths of my life I lost that drawing, though I had meant to save it. I still remember what it looked like, and now and then I have searched for a version, hoping to find an echo of that early sketch in some gallery. But I have never found such a thing. For so long I knew nothing more of her than “Agnes Street,” where the first house we entered together had been. During our illegal days and nights in various skeletal homes she insisted with a defensive humour on taking that as a nom de plume for herself. “Nom de Plume,” she pronounced it grandly. “You know what that means, right?”

  We slipped out of the house. We had to be at work early. There was a man pacing up and down by the bus stop, watching us as we approached him, who then turned to look at the house, as if curious about why we had come out of it. He boarded the bus as well, and sat behind us. Was this just coincidence? Was he a wartime ghost from the building we had invaded? We felt guilt, not fear. Agnes was worried about her brother’s job. But as we got up to leave, he got up too and followed us. The bus stopped. We stood at the exit. As the bus started and began moving faster, Agnes leapt off, staggered, then waved at me. I waved and turned back past the man, and later, at some point in central London, I jumped off and he couldn’t catch me.

  The Mussel Boat

  Our first day on the Thames, Rachel and I and The Darter travelled west until we were almost free of the city. I’d need a good river map now to show you the places we passed or paused at, whose names I learned by heart during those weeks, along with the charts of tidal information, the intricate causeways, old tollhouses, draw-docks we entered and left, building sites and gathering places we learned to recognize from the boat—Ship Lane, Bulls Alley, Mortlake, the Harrods Depository, several power stations, along with the twenty or so named and unnamed canals that had been cut a century or two earlier like spokes fingering north from the Thames. I used to lie in bed repeating all the declensions of the river in order to memorize and so remember them. I still do. They sounded like the names of kings of England, and they became more thrilling to me than football teams or mathematics tables. Sometimes we travelled east beyond Woolwich and Barking, and even in the darkness knew our location by just the sound of the river or the pull of the tide. Beyond Barking there was Caspian Wharf, Erith Reach, the Tilbury Cut, Lower Hope Reach, Blyth Sands, the Isle of Grain, the estuary, and then the sea.

  There were further hidden locations along the Thames where we paused to meet seagoing vessels that unloaded their surprising cargo, then walked the several animals that had hesitatingly disembarked, all of them attached to one long rope. In this way they defecated and relieved themselves after their four- or five-hour journey from Calais, before we coaxed them onto our mussel boat for another brief journey, to be collected later by people we saw only briefly, whose names we never knew.

  Our involvement with these river activities had begun the afternoon The Darter overheard us talking about the approaching weekend. Casually, speaking as if Rachel and I were not in the room, he asked The Moth if we might happen to be free to help him out with something or other.

  “Day work or night work?”

  “Probably both.”

  “And is it safe?”

  This was said sotto voce by The Moth as if we should not be hearing it.

  “Abs
olutely safe,” The Darter answered loudly, looking towards the two of us, offering a false smile and suggesting complete security with an offhand wave. The question of legality never surfaced.

  The Moth murmured, “You can swim, can’t you?” And we nodded. The Darter threw in, “They like dogs, don’t they?” And this time it was The Moth who nodded, having no idea whether we did.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s resplendent,” The Darter claimed that first weekend, one hand on the wheel, the other attempting to remove a sandwich from his pocket. He did not appear fully focused on the steering of the barge. A cold wind scalloped the water, gusting and shuddering against us from all sides. I supposed we were safe with him. I knew nothing about boats, but I immediately loved the landless smells, the oil on the water, brine, fumes sputtering out of the stern, and I came to love the thousand and one sounds of the river around us, that let us be silent as if in a suddenly thoughtful universe within this rushing world. It was resplendent. We almost grazed the arch of a bridge, The Darter leaning his body away at the last minute as if that would make the boat follow him. Then a near collision with a quartet of rowers who were left buffeting in our wash. We heard their yells and witnessed The Darter’s wave towards them as if it were fate, not anyone’s fault. That afternoon we would pick up twenty greyhounds from a silent barge near the Church Ferry Stairs and deliver them in silence to another location downriver. We had not been aware of the existence of such moveable cargo, did not know of the strict laws countering the illegal importing of animals into Britain. But The Darter appeared to know everything.