Days Like Today

by Rachel Ingalls

They stood like that, sharing the cigarette until it was finished. He let her have the end. She stuck a toothpick through the last of it. When there was almost nothing left, she squeezed off the fire, stepped on it and saved the few unburned strands to be collected with others and made into a fresh cigarette.

  That was their conversation, their apology and explanation.

  Neither of them mentioned the beating. They showed each other no sign that they wanted to hold on to the memory of violence nor to the knowledge that everything had taken place in front of their children. The kids would find out about marriage soon enough, just as they were discovering everything else; not that every marriage was the same. In this one, he knew, the day when he allowed his wife to get away with striking him in the face, whether she did it in public or in private, was the day when she’d make up her mind to replace him with a different husband. She had vigorous ideas about what a man should do and be. Some things she wouldn’t stand for at all. At other times she’d pretty much ask to be kept in her place. Sometimes what she wanted from him was to know what he expected from her. He still thought that they’d be all right as long as he trusted his instincts and they didn’t talk about any of it.

  Where on earth had she managed to find a cigarette? From one of the aid workers, of course. But what did she have to offer in exchange? Nothing, while he was there. A promise – that was all she’d have to bargain with: a look in the eye, which she could deny afterwards. Unless she didn’t want to.

  He admired her quickness of wit, her suspiciousness and cynicism. Before the fighting started she was so different that he could hardly remember what she’d been like. He could only recall a vague picture of the way she’d looked: fresh, eager, delicately slender. But he’d been different, too. He had no idea what he’d been like – a nice, decent young man, probably. Now he was like everyone else – like a ragged, mean-looking cur that snuffles around the garbage piles at the back of a village.

  *

  They waited for the aid workers to bring supplies and another consignment of orphans – perhaps a batch of them hardly old enough to feed themselves: children who had to be closely supervised. Maybe there would be even more than in the first distribution.

  The term ‘aid worker’ was relatively new. They used to be called charity workers. People no longer knew what the word charity meant. They didn’t know the meaning of love or pity or how similar or different they were; they saw no strict divisions between compassion, condescension and contempt. The weak went under. If you didn’t want it to happen to you, it was to your advantage to make it happen to somebody else. That would give you a better chance.

  Sometimes at night he thought he could hear the howling of dogs. If real, and not simply a thing he imagined while he was waiting for sleep, the sound would be like the first howling he’d heard, and probably coming from the quarry. Abandoned mines and quarries were good places to keep prisoners or to bury them. You could fit a lot of people into a mine: put them in, station armed guards on the heights and blow up the entrance. And even more could be thrown into a disused quarry, although usually the intention there would be to free them at some stage because they’d remain visible.

  Nobody talked about the quarry and everybody knew. It had a long history. Since his return, the only time he’d heard it mentioned openly by anyone except his wife was when a stranger had laughed about it, saying in a whisper, ‘The divorce court where you don’t need to bother with lawyers.’

  *

  When he was a child, life was orderly. Parents were strict; indoors they told their children: Don’t keep rushing everywhere. Don’t jump around like that. Why are you laughing in that silly way? Be quiet. Outside the house they said: You’re making a spectacle of yourself. Everybody’s looking at you. Stop showing off.

  The teachers at school were also fairly uncompromising. They specialized in verbal castigation. Some of his friends preferred that. They knew how to defend themselves against it. He would rather have been strapped on the hands or whipped. That happened too, but none of it was too bad.

  He had two close friends who followed or led him into escapades that ranged from the hilarious to the terrifying. Because they were such a small group, and because they never did anything really bad, they had no worries about betrayal from within. His brothers and sisters didn’t know what he was up to and anyway they had secrets of their own that could be used against them if they told on him. So at the age when he was ready for adventure and adulthood, he and his two friends were climbing out of their houses at night and heading for the one place in the neighborhood where there were no rules: the abandoned quarry beyond the far side of town.

  Once, when still a boy, he’d been persuaded to spend a night there on his own. It was almost like the more usual dare to stay overnight in a haunted house, except that there was a big difference between fear of unknown other worlds and fear of unknown genuine trouble. At the time so many stories were in circulation about the place and what went on in it that the quarry exerted an attraction nicely balanced between dread and longing. They all knew, even as children, that it was where people went to meet each other unobserved, to plan robberies, to hand over stolen goods, to see men and women who were disapproved of and ‘to do it’. It was the latter activity that had become irresistibly fascinating to their imaginations. They wanted information. A prize had been selected: a ticket to something they also wanted desperately. He remembered that part only vaguely.

  He and his two friends turned up at their usual meeting place and began the long walk to the quarry. In those days there were several sets of stairs leading down to the bottom, where by daylight the ground looked like a riverbed in time of drought: gravelly, full of dried bushes, sand and patches of mud and water. The place was huge, with divisions of landscape like the ones you might see in a large park gone back to the wild: the narrow offshoot like a tree-lined canyon, the uneven ravine bulged with sloping rock faces that were tilted and stepped like the overlapping waves of a sideways-moving sea; the clearings surrounded by scrubby undergrowth, the big open plains.

  By luck they had chosen a cloudy night when the moon was full enough to allow some vision but not bright enough to make hiding impossible – just the sort of time and weather everyone wanted. And the ground was dry. His friends left him at a set of stairs covered by shadow. He’d agreed to meet them at dawn in the abandoned farm shack they used as a clubhouse.

  He started down the steps, remembering as he moved not to trust the rotting handrails nor to look for complete safety in the stone below and by his side. Where the walls and stairs were worn, they could be slippery, glassily polished; and the stone had a method – peculiar to itself and treacherous – of retaining or breathing out moisture.

  While he was undergoing his ordeal, his friends indulged in a midnight feast at their clubhouse. He expected that they’d be asleep when he got out but, because he’d promised, he did what they’d arranged: at three in the morning he climbed up the quarry stairs again and took the long walk back.

  The others hadn’t slept; they’d finished up the food and after that, all night long, they’d been telling stories. They wanted to hear everything. Without proof, naturally, they wouldn’t hand over the prize.

  He tried to tell them. As he talked, he grew less shocked, although there were some descriptions he didn’t even attempt, nor could he convey the absolute terror he’d felt – not just at the idea of being caught, but at the sight of what was happening in front of him. He’d witnessed all sorts of activity, much of which he didn’t even identify as sexual. He had looked on at gambling, knife fights, nakedness: men, women and children. There had been hundreds of people down there. Some groups had been peacefully eating and drinking around a fire – large parties, some of whose members would go off together into the straggly bushes and then drift back to the crowd. There had also been smaller gatherings where whatever went on was being forced on one or more people by others. No one interfered in any of the quarrels, which were loud. Yel
ling and screaming was ignored by the rest. Most people were drinking. As he talked about his adventure, it came to him that some of the bodies he’d stepped over and fallen against in an effort to remain hidden hadn’t been dead but simply drunk, or asleep, or both.

  His friends didn’t believe half of what he told them. But since there was no question that he’d been down in the quarry and had seen quite a lot of what they imagined must be going on there anyway, they let him have the prize, whatever it was.

  *

  The days were warmer, but the real spring wouldn’t come for over a month at the soonest and probably later than that. You could smell it in the air and feel it in the ground; that meant nothing. They could still have storms and weeks of freezing rain afterwards. Nevertheless, Peg-leg decided that the moment had come for him to move on. He announced his departure early one morning and said good-bye the same afternoon.

  All at once it seemed as if a period of disappointment had begun. He refused to imagine that they might be heading for a stretch of bad luck: after what they’d gone through already, that would be ridiculous, although the thought of it was always near.

  Until the aid workers brought new refugees and food-ration credits, they’d be living right at the edge. Without the extra bread, everyone felt nervous. Despite what they’d hoarded, most of their provisions were near exhaustion. Once the weather changed, transportation and travel in general would be easier. It was possible that that was what the authorities were waiting for.

  Good weather was also needed for planting and putting the house in order. All he’d really been able to do before the cold months was to make the place watertight and as warm as possible: to block the holes and board up the windows. A coat of fresh paint, whitewash and new windows would make the house look more normal again, less like a half-derelict construction behind which a family was barricaded.

  If you’d approached the district at night, it would have been like coming to a place that had the reputation of being haunted. All the houses still standing were like his, and some much worse.

  That was the prize, he remembered: for spending a night in the quarry – the reward was a ticket to a traveling fair. And he’d gone to the show they all called the Haunted House, which was actually named the House of Horrors. It was a collection of optical illusions and things that jumped out at you while you rode in the open car of a miniature train. The train carried a full load: children, parents, lovers, all laughing and shrieking. When you heard them calling out around the bend, you knew that there was something you should be prepared for. He’d whooped and cheered with the rest. He’d loved it. At no time was he so frightened as when he’d had to sit still and watch and be silent down in the quarry.

  His first experience of women had also taken place in the quarry. He was interested in two girls at school and another who worked in a bakery. He used to have daydreams about going out with them and about how much they’d let him do. His two friends were similarly plagued by futile dreaming. They were still trading lies and secrets when an older girl asked him if he’d like to come out on a picnic. He’d almost said no, not understanding that she’d used a code phrase. She’d been nice and hadn’t laughed at him. ‘At night,’ she’d explained. ‘You know. In the quarry. Have a couple of beers and cook some sausages over a fire.’ Then she’d smiled, seeing that he’d understood. He’d said yes. And that was the beginning: going back to the place of terror to become an initiate, learning to feel at ease and to belong to the crowd of people who went there.

  It didn’t change the way he thought about the two other girls at school and the one at the bakery. But after a while it began to influence the way they thought about him. Only after he’d acquired the reputation of taking a girl to the quarry did he become someone to whom younger girls felt they could entrust themselves, while their parents were sure that they could not.

  He was still in his teens when the quarry was declared out of bounds. First of all, several women were found murdered. Two were pregnant girls. Suspicion naturally fell on the man or men who might have fathered the unborn children. While investigations were still going on – and one man was already under arrest – more deaths occurred. The combination of methods used – strangling and knifing – suggested that more than one man was behind the crimes. The arrested suspect argued that despite his acquaintance with the dead girl he was supposed to have murdered, he hadn’t seen her in some time and wasn’t it likely that she’d been out at the quarry to meet another man who was the real father – or many men, who would pay cash for sexual intercourse, as a lot of people there did?

  More bodies were discovered, including those of two young boys. The arrested man was released. No one ever found out who was responsible for any of the deaths.

  After the killing of women and boys came the big fights between men. Family, religion, race and former nationality all helped to give the participants an incentive, as did the occasional winning or losing of some regional sports team at an important competition. Or the cause might simply have been the need to get into a fight.

  As soon as the first men were killed and others badly injured, the friends and families came out in force. More men died; some of the women formed a protest group and went out to try to stop the fighting. They were beaten up by both sides. Three of them were hauled off to the far end of the quarry and raped. After that, the police stepped in. They entered with guns against a mob that knew the lie of the land better than they did and, greatly outnumbering them, took their weapons and beat them to a pulp.

  The next stage was closure. The army took charge. Soldiers went down into the quarry, scoured every corner of it for human remains, broke and blasted the steps, railings and footholds from the rock face and removed the ladders. They used so much dynamite that no entrances remained, only a sheer drop from every point. The bad feeling they left behind quickly transferred itself back to the original sources of conflict. People thought, and said, that – as far as they were concerned – enemies didn’t live in foreign countries: they lived right down the road and on the other side of town.

  When the war began, there was plenty of hatred to call on. And once things were rolling, the few who had been neutral were sucked into the action. They became part of it. And then they hated, too.

  *

  They had three weeks of colds in the house. His theory was that the aid workers had brought sickness when they’d come to take the orphans away. One night the children got into a fight about something. There was screaming, shouting and crying – a general outpouring of misery and complaint that overwhelmed them all, including him and his wife. Afterwards he was tired to death. He woke up in the middle of the night and got out of bed. His wife turned over, murmuring, ‘What’s wrong?’

  He said, ‘I need some air.’ He moved to the window and pulled the cloth aside. A wild, ghostly pallor flooded down from a full moon high in the sky. His hook was on the sill, where he left it every night before going to bed. The light touched it, making it gleam. She hated the hook. It wasn’t that she was afraid of having him hurt her without meaning to if he rolled over in bed or flung out an arm in sleep. She just hated it anyway.

  He felt his way downstairs and stepped out into the night. Everything was caught up in the moon’s estranging glamor. He walked into the old orchard and roamed through the twisted alleyways. Long ago there had been a stone fountain near the center of the place, at least he thought he remembered something of the kind from his childhood, when the trees had belonged to a neighboring farm.

  He couldn’t find the fountain, nor any trace of stone or pipeline. He stopped walking. It seemed to him that everything was gone. The wonderful light threw a momentary allure over the dreary muddle of ruined landscape and buildings. But there was nothing worth looking at in daylight. Beauty had gone from the world and from their lives. The long delay of spring, the vanishing of the hope they had been given earlier in the year, made their poverty worse than before. What was left to offer a child like the one who had ki
ssed his hand? When he thought of that sweet, inept gesture, he wanted to weep. But no tears came from him. That was gone, too.

  If only they could get through the war – that was what he used to think: if only they could get through it, everything would be all right. But it was beginning to seem to him that nothing would ever be right again.

  *

  He kept going to work every morning, as usual. The days were empty, companionless.

  Every crumb was counted as they waited for the next hand-out.

  The aid workers didn’t come back for another two weeks. When they did, they brought bedding, socks, mittens and food. A soldier who was traveling with them handed over a secret package of coffee, which he and his wife saved as if it were the gold of the fairy tales. Genuine gold was worth hardly anything any more and money was just paper. But coffee could get you out of trouble or buy you a favor. Sometimes coffee could even buy medicine. Cigarettes were also valuable, but not nearly so precious. All the soldiers still had cigarettes and matches. Coffee – even dried out, even ancient – was exquisite luxury.

  The next morning their refugee arrived – only one: an old woman whose name and age they were never told because no one knew anything about her. She was simply being preserved as an example of the aid workers’ goodness and proof that they were acting according to humanitarian principles. They’d given her a number.

  She was carried into the house and placed in the center of the only decent downstairs bed they still had.

  ‘Not there,’ his wife objected. ‘I know these old people. Their bladders work day and night. Put her over there. We’ll rearrange things as soon as we can.’

  The woman was shifted to a corner of the room where three of the children had been hanging around, full of curiosity about the aid people. As the workers lowered their burden to the floor, a stream of urine gushed from her; a steamy, stale odor filled the room. The children became hysterical, holding their noses and making sounds that imitated farts. One of the men who had helped to carry her muttered, ‘Christ, not again.’