by Greg James
This repeated dressing-down would have maddened some men but not Tom. He was glad of it, found some humour in it as Bell never varied his words and he had caught sight of a slight smile on his superior’s lips each time he turned away.
After grooming, exercising Old Duty was Tom’s next task of the day. Out into the sand hills of the desert he led the horse until they were lost from sight amidst the shifting yellow-white folds of the landscape. Over a rise, Tom would stop for a while, taking in the air and the view; ragged oasis islands could be seen in the silica sea, and beyond them, the city of Cairo herself, arising from the dry white ocean, gorgeous and rambling. Tom tore the peel from an orange with his teeth, gnawing on its cool, sweet flesh until his senses were satisfied and his horse fully exercised, then he returned to camp.
The screams were unbearable at times; sweet sellers, begging children, fortune tellers, curio collectors, silk traders.
“This way, Kiwi.”
“Chocolate, two piastres please.”
“New Zealand, very good and nice. Please money.”
“Donkey, sir?”
“Good camel. Very good. Better than horse, sir. Much better.”
Tom shouldered his way through the throng, ignoring them, leading Old Duty, patting and stroking the animal’s nose as it rumbled disquiet in its throat. Old Duty didn’t like too much fuss. A hand snatched at Tom’s wrist, the grip of its fingers was unfriendly, brusque yet familiar. Anger flashing in his eyes, Tom glared down at the offender. Twin opals of gristle glared back at him, over a nose eaten away to a charred hook, which was set above teeth without lips to hide them, a skin encrusted with barnacles and dried sputum thinly covered the skull.
“Lieutenant Bell?”
A wet stream of black flies crawled out from its skeletal mouth as it spoke, “All hail the Grey Dawn!”
Tom tore his arm free.
And then he was looking, fiercely, into the eyes of a small frightened child.
“Cuh-cuh-cigarrete, New Zealand?”
Tom led the horse back to his line for water and a good feed.
Chapter Five
Tom tried closing his eyes, to catch a little sleep before reveille was sounded.
Reveille?
Dreaming again, he thought, ever since Dilys died, more and more dreams every night, getting worse each time, becoming nightmares. He looked around himself, at his bedroom. His bed, and there, Dilys’s empty bed. He still washed the sheets and made it fresh for her every day. His glass of water sitting by the indigo glow of the digital clock, he read the display slowly. It was three in the morning.
“Plaisirs d’amour ne dure qu’un jour, chagrins d’amour dure toute la vie.”
The words, the memory, overcame his thoughts of Dilys. The memory of someone he had not thought about in years.
Bea - she had been the best thing that ever happened to him, so he thought back then, so long ago. Petite, wasp-waisted, with her bright, Egyptian eyes and her voice, in song, an angel’s. She had been singing that night, to celebrate his turning twenty-one, he remembered the solitary white rose woven into her golden hair. Beautiful. So very beautiful. He had a moment then, that night, a déjà vu, of what was to come whilst listening to her enunciating the words of the delicate chanson his father was picking out on the piano.
“Plaisirs d’amour ne dure qu’un jour, chagrins d’amour dure toute la vie.”
Tom knew he was romanticising; that’s what people do when their heart has been hurt, they try to give a tragic lustre to the memory, add a dramatic gesture here, a parting soliloquy there, script a command performance based upon a footnote to history – the truth is a very different matter, never pretty.
The recital over, Tom and Bea were left alone in the dining room above the pub. Family and guests moved on downstairs. Tom remembered feeling giddy, too much drink for his age stewing in his stomach, making his brain ache with effervescence. He took Bea’s hand, looked her in the eye and blurted it out. Three very stupid words.
“I love you.”
Bea snatched her hand away, taking a step back from him, her eyes frightened then tears were running down her face.
“No, Tom.”
“I do. I mean it. Why’re you crying?”
He wanted to go to her and stop the tears but he could feel her body saying no; she was rigid yet shaking, turning her head from side to side in slow, mechanical sweeps, strands of her hair falling across her reddening face. She flicked them away.
“You can’t love me, Tom.”
“Why? Why not?”
“Because you are a brother to me.”
Tom swallowed hard, the booziness purged from his system by endorphins, he blinked wetness away from his eyes.
“You already love someone else,” he said. “Do we, do I know him?”
He grabbed her arm, squeezing too hard, wanting to wring the truth out. Careful not to cry out loud, to not disturb those in the lounge, she nodded, “Yes, you do. You know him.”
“Is he married?”
Her silence was her answer, her confession.
“It’s him, isn’t it?”
“Who?”
The question was functional, a necessary part of the conversation, they both knew that.
“You love my father.”
His four words froze the world in place for a time, for both of them.
“Yes,” Bea whispered.
And her one word shattered his heart into pieces. He let her go.
His father, James Potter, was a difficult man with aristocratic affectations, trained as a bass baritone and pianist since he was a child, the apple of his mother’s eye, who scrimped and saved so that her favourite could have his lessons, but he never succeeded. He never managed to make it out of the working class home he was born into and the disappointment left its wounds, which became septic and rotten. He married, had children, lost out on opportunities that went instead to London’s bachelor elite. Then bitterness became distance, and he performed his functions as a father and husband but he never lived them, felt them, not once.
He began to teach piano and song to affluent debutantes; young women in need of a decorative skill or two to show off at their coming-out parties. He taught them simple things, nothing fancy, knowing that if they had been serious about musical training, they would have gone to a more well-appointed teacher than he. It was a charity to him on their part and he knew it – another wound made.
That was how Beatrice Piers came into the lives of the Potter family. She was different to his other pupils, not a debutante; she had been raised well by her father, without a mother, and she came for lessons as a serious pupil and did not treat James as a servile charity case.
At first, he admired her for her dedication, her diligence and her ambition. She wanted to be a professional, to perform at Covent Garden. She had a pleasant contralto voice but it lacked individual character, without which she could not hope to succeed. He knew that but this did not stop James from continuing to give her lessons.
Bea became one of the family at the Potter home. She taught Tom how to drive in her father’s car and how to horse-ride, and whenever she went away to her own home, across what seemed to Tom to be a great divide, a piece of the young man went with her, a piece he never got back. Tom didn’t want to know the details of what happened between her and his father, he could work enough of it out for himself.
Bea blanched as she saw Tom swaying, drunk with alcohol and anger, making then unmaking his fists.
“Blood’s not thicker than water, it’s thinner than fucking piss!”
Bea’s hands were on his, easing them out of their tension. Tom realised his hands were hurting, the bones in them aching for violence.
“I’m sorry, Tom. I didn’t know how you felt. I didn’t want this to happen.”
“Too late.”
“You’re going to tell your mother, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“What do we do then?”
*
James stared up at his son. He was seated at the piano, reminding himself how to play Rolling Down to Old Mohee. Bea would be along for a lesson soon, he had been expecting the afternoon to be a pleasant one.
“New Zealand. Bea’s given me the money.”
James felt a flush gathering in his face, Tom saw the fleshy corners of his father’s mouth twitch, a sudden tick of rage, the old man’s cheeks becoming raw with colour.
“I know about you and her,” Tom said.
The words were spoken calmly, not shouted, making James’s rage curdle quickly into something else; a sick and beaten fear, his face fell in on itself. “You don’t. You can’t.”
“I do know. She told me last night and I will tell Mum, unless you let Bea pay for me to go abroad.”
James nodded, giving speechless assent.
Tom turned to go.
“Tom.”
Tom paused, not turning back around, waiting.
“You haven’t told her. Your mother. Not a word?”
“No.”
The next word felt clammy and unwholesome on James’s tongue, he didn’t want to let it go, “Why?”
“Because you’re my father.”
James blinked.
“Thank you. Thank you, son.”
A stupid thing to say, but it was the first sincere thing he had said in years.
Tom walked away; all the way to another land.
Aotearoa - that was one of the names the Maui people knew it by, they believed that they were descended from a divine ancestor delivered to the island by benevolent ocean spirits. The legends said that the ancestor was cast out and later denied by his own parents, which made Tom like the idea of living there all the more. He felt a sense of kinship to the place.
It was as Tom expected it to be.
Long white clouds overhead. The grey skin of its mountains veined with snow. There was a farm waiting for him. Bea had forwarded a loan to pay for a piece of prime sheep-grazing land, with flat expanses and rolling hills that would be perfect for the animals to exercise and graze upon. Tom threw himself into the task of readying the small farm, torn inside, hating his father, loving Bea, hurting for his mother, it was punishing work on the land without farmhands but Tom did not want it any other way.
The long days of physical labour purged him, distracting him from feeding his poisoned feelings. He cleared the land where necessary, fixed the fences, patched up the skeletal barn and brought in new young stock. Tom wore away his baby fat and moonshine tan, his body became lean, and in his spare time he practiced his riding skills until he was a competent horseman. He taught himself how to shoot, and soon enough, the ex-patriate farmer was a crack-shot knocking old tin cans flying every time, every one of them a poor substitute for his father's skull.
The farm came together. Wool prices were good and material happiness seemed to be within Tom’s grasp but there were other kinds of happiness that were beyond him.
There were days when he sat alone on the beach, looking out to sea and memories came bubbling up for no reason. His mother at his bedside when he was little, the bedroom was cold, old and dirty, but his heart was warm with love for her as she told him a story; every night she told him a story and then she sang him to sleep with the same old rhyme.
Frere Jacques, frere Jacques,
Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?
Sonnez les matines! Sonnez les matines!
Din, dan, don. Din, dan, don.
He loved his mother because she could sing, he had loved Bea too, in a different way, for the same talent. Tom wiped tears from his eyes. The wind ran along by, not saying a word, creating light dusty tentacles to dance and writhe about him, pale dissipating arms. The beach was beautifully bare, echoing empty as the waves came and went, went and came. It was a place untainted by the presence of people or laughter, shadows did not lengthen here, they only deepened cracks in stones and left sand-whispered messages from the dead and the drowned. He did love the sea, listening to the sound of it made his nerves untangle, his breathing became less urgent, nearer to a thing called peace.
Tom picked up a shining black pebble, stood and tossed it out. It darted across the scummy surface of the waves. Inhaling the bittersweet salt air, he watched its fleeting illusion of flight come to an end, watched it fall, sink below, consumed by the restless, relentless chaos of the black-skinned sea. He crouched, picked up another black pebble, admired its obsidian shimmer, turning it back and forth between his fingers. He saw the minute, white hairline traceries running through its form; more entropy, more chaos, more decay, more death. He threw it out. This one did not dance and skip across the waves. It fell suddenly, without warning.
It sank without a trace.
Chapter Six
Nightmares came and went. Whispering black-faced ghosts walked abroad inside his head, flickering films of him walking through the streets of London. Head down, in the dark, people parting as a sea before him, away from this man haggard, hollow-eyed, heading home, to the street where his parents lived; more cracked, more weather-beaten than it once was. Everything here was so many more years older, more worn-away, his footsteps on the stones echo in his head with the resonance of a pall-bearer’s passage through a tomb.
The door opens.
Light is spilling out.
Bea stands there, as silken and soft as ever she was, her hair shining as it fell in tapers over her slender shoulders, her beautiful eyes open so wide, in horror, as she speaks.
“You're here after all this time, all those deaths.”
She steps forward, stumbles, falls into his arms and they hold each other so tight, his voice is broken, can’t form words, tears are choking him, a croak escapes from his throat. Her eyes are shut as she buries her face in his shoulder and sobs until his shirt is wet. His eyes are open, Tom knows the sound she is making, the cadence of it, there is no joy or relief in it. His eyes are open and Tom sees the shadow of the man standing there, further back, behind the door. Eyes white, trembling, fearing the blood-dressed warrior before him, the warrior that was once his son.
Mother is dead and he still lives.
Tom returns his gaze with one of the purest hatred, then he pushes Bea away, shoving her roughly back into the light. He shuts the door without waiting for them to do it, fleeing back onto the street, he feels the unwanted caresses of the dead on the skin of his soul, alone on the streets of London, he screams and he cries out.
And then, all of the lights go out, leaving him, as ever, in the dark.
*
It was on his honeymoon with Dilys, long after the war, that they met the clairvoyant. The barnacles and stringy clumps of seaweed clinging to the wood-iron pilings of the old pier unnerved him, reminding him of certain things, logic telling him there was nothing to be scared of, but his gut went on tightening up nevertheless as they came to the booth standing by the pier entrance. Behind him, the town of Sevengraves-On-Sea seemed become a weight, a presence in itself, driving him through the fluttering, striped flaps.
She looked no different to any other fortune teller, sitting in the dark, tinged by red-and-gold stripes, dressed up in faux-Eastern finery, except for her eyes. Her eyes were those of a tiger, burning bright, buried in shadow.
The reading was not a good one.
Usually, couples heard what they wanted to hear; that they would have a good future together, bear children, have a happy, loving home, be content in all things. But Tom was told that he had paid a high price to be alive, and that it was a price he would continue to pay until his dying day, making the sum total of his life one of overwhelming suffering and pain rather than of joy, and that if he was not careful, the agonies he bore would stay on in the world after his passing. Dilys snapped at her, angrily clasping at the small silver cross on her necklace. She swore at the clairvoyant, the only time Tom ever heard her do so, her cheeks flushing, her eyes wet.
“You spiteful, evil bitch! That’s something that could be said
about any man who served in that bloody awful war. They can’t help it, what they bear and they bear it for us, for all of us, you’ve no right to say nothing about it, no, none, no right at all!”
She called the clairvoyant a devil, a slag and a witch as well before storming out. Tom did not follow her. He sat by the clairvoyant’s table with a sad smile on his face, she met his eyes with hers and he was reminded of a poem by William Blake.
“Tyger, tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night. What immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
The clairvoyant smiled. “Thank you, Thomas Potter. You are most kind.”
“You know me?”
“We all know you.”
“All?”
“All those who can see, those who know, who understand what lies below us; the Gravelands, the Grey, the Vetala.”
Tom suppressed a shudder at her words.
“We are sorry for your loss. You knew, in your heart, what you were doing and we should not pity you but, still, it is a great burden of pain to bear. I wonder at how you are able to do so after all these years. To have seen so much, to know what is coming for all of us, for this earth, and still remain alive.”
“Old dogs may not learn new tricks but we get by, in our own way, we get by.”
He made his way out of the tent, out into a past time, a past place where the sun was bright, baking skin that was young and tight over un-aged muscles.
Chapter Seven
The sun grew hot, winds grew fierce, flies swarmed, and bodies became sticky and damp. Tom loitered in the horse lines, bored, swiping flies from the muzzle and eyes of Old Duty.
“Potter, TEN’SHUN!”
Lieutenant Bell’s command snapped him from his dull daze, his limbs responding as trained, he turned, faced and saluted his superior.
“Potter, Colonel Bentley is wanted at once at HQ. He went over to the palm grove in the company of Major Fletcher. I want you to saddle up Old Duty here and fetch him back.”