The uniform’s awkward on me. Too big. My wounded shoulder sings. The man’s face after I hit him. Pale, innocent. Gentle, closed eyes. Limbs heavy as sandbags as I stripped him. Exhausting, being in my head. Thoughts run off like rabbits. I’m sure I could think once.
In pretending to sleep, one lays oneself wide open to the real thing. Soon, I am suspended on the edge of a crevasse where all things are about to be known and my whole being is formed of meaning…
…when the world shudders and jars like a blow to the head. Some broad unknown thing whistles past, slaps something else. We rattle; we are dice shaken in a cup. There are shrieks and cracks. My heart tittups, a startled colt. Unseen machinery squeals, ha ha ha, like nasty laughter. The illusion that we’re on solid ground is rudely, terribly, interrupted; the carriage is a wooden box designed to stave in and crush our flesh. The ragged ends of timber and shards of glass will pierce us; burning metal will twist into evil curves and pen us in as we burn.
Abruptly, everything stills, and sound is neatly sliced off. A light scent of burnt oil. In the silence, the carriage glides to a halt.
We have left the rain and come out into the light. The compartment is drenched in sunshine. The air is animated with shining spirals of dust. The chips and scratches on the wood panel are as raw as scars. Each shiny patch on the yellow-and-red moquette upholstery is thrown into relief.
My jacket is on the floor. Delicately, the girls withdraw their legs from it, as if it were dirty. I put it back on the rack. Actually, it is quite dirty. Again, I check that the letter’s in my pocket. His writing. So strange to see it, after all these years. I must let it all go now… Anyhow, this is good-bye. I had never thought of such a thing as a good-bye between us.
The girls shield their eyes and murmur. They’re stilled, gentled by the light. Their lips are dry, skin pale and fragile in the glare. Each thought moves through their faces; they’re transparent in the sun. Dangerous clarity. I put my hat on.
We have stopped by the sea. Behind the glass, tall grass waves, golden, dead. It almost tickles the dirty panes. Through stiff sedge and nodding mare’s tail can be seen a thin rim of beach like a broken biscuit. I swallow, sea grit mingling uneasily with sweet crumbs in the imagination of my tongue; everything is in disorder. The sharp dun crescent gives way to wet olive sand beyond, a blinding sheen, a net of glassy pools. The sun falls upon the bay, is hurled back in serried points of light. The sea is cast across the skyline, beaten steel. A gull bawls, high, distant. The world is dangerous. But it is also beautiful. I had forgotten.
We wait. I practice a normal face. I can tell it’s not very good. The girls look at me over their hands. Peeps and chirps of laughter. One wears a dress of dark blue, the color the sea should be, the color it is in pictures but isn’t, at least not out there. She’s all shades of fawn and cream like an old photograph. The yellow-haired one has the face of a lascivious Roman emperor. Her wide blue eyes sit in her face like two miniatures painted on ivory. The girl in blue is whispering. “And he takes her up to his lodgings and nurses her better, and dresses her up, in these silks, see, in foreign dress. She’s quite smart and nice for the first time ever. And she says, Why are you so nice to me, chinky? It’s the first time anyone’s been nice to her.”
A curlew walks across the narrow bar of sand, raising each slow leg like an ancient thing. It does not deign to notice the train, silent and stopped. Through the walls come other voices from other compartments, occasionally intelligible. Is he still! a woman calls hilariously through a low conversation, and then there’s laughter. Everyone seems all right.
“Oh, she’s fifteen, I daresay,” says the girl in blue.
“You oughtn’t go to these smutty things,” says the yellow helmet.
“Smutty yourself. So she stays with him, and they get keen on each other all right, but when he goes out one day, her dad comes and finds her in his lodgings and murders her because she’s been with a yellow man.”
The curlew halts in the middle of the landscape, gazes sternly at the sea.
“The chinky comes back and sees her dead. So he dresses himself up in silky clothes too—”
“Lordy.”
“—and murders himself with a knife. It was ever so good.”
“Waste of nice Chinese silk.”
“You’ve no soul.”
“Have a fag. Calm you down.”
“Cheek. Well, I will. Ta.”
The girls smoke. The one in blue is just beginning to show: a soft curve to her below the sash of her dress. She touches the curve now and again, not knowing she does it.
She sees me looking. She nudges her friend, and they retreat primly into silence, hands concertinaed together in their laps.
I wish they would go on talking. Such relief not to think. I lean my face against the glass, which is burning with cold. The curlew is gone. The sea dazzles. My shoulder aches.
The train lurches forward with a grunt and a clatter. My nose gets a pretty good bang on the window. The girls make small sounds of appreciation. As we gain speed, the track turns inland, and the sea leaves us, shuffling and then staggering past the dirty glass panes and out of sight. The sudden twilight of the carriage is shot with arcs and bolts of pink and yellow and gray, endless waves breaking. My heavy eyes. Burn it, whispers someone in my ear. Burn it.
• • •
I am myself, but not myself. I am unbounded, limitless. This is how the dreams go.
I’m at Rawblood, in my old room. I’ve wished myself here many times. But things are not as they should be. The wood paneling is draped with dark-red velvet. An old shaving set stands at the basin. A comical nightdress of antique design lies across the unmade bed. The folds of the sheets still hold warmth. The scent of someone else’s sleep lies heavy in the air. The ghost of a big, musty body.
I go to the window and pull at the catches to bring the fresh breeze in, to take the tainted air away. They won’t give. My fingers slip on them like mercury.
On the hill below, a man comes into view. He walks as though he owns the land, the sky. Officious little movements. His hat brim covers his eyes in shadow. A dented but serviceable homburg. His suit is brown, quaint, worn. Shining boots. The cold gleam of a watch chain as it swings from his pocket. Clean-shaven, except for his mustache; face open and serious. Strange eyes. Green.
He should not be here.
He strokes his mustache gently. He kicks at a stone. It bounds from him, exuberant. He dallies with it, passes it from foot to foot, strolling to and fro on the sward. He stands, breathes, smiles as if there’s sunlight, turns his face upward, questing, removes his hat.
As he sees me, I stop breathing. We are suspended, arrested, caught each in the other’s eye. I hiss, and my lips nearly kiss the glass. He shakes his fist as if in answer, comes down the slope toward me, toward the house.
I go quickly down the stairs. Hands are damp and squeaking on banisters, handles, wood, as I run.
A small, resolute shape speeds high above in the empty hall. The swallow circles, swoops. Wings like daggers telling the shape of air. It carves up the hall, soft rushes of sound.
Through the window in the far blue, white clouds hang still. No one is there. The sunlit rise is empty, a long, green curve. He’s gone, which is not possible.
My hands itch for action.
The catch yields stiffly, and the window swings outward, slow and graceful. The swallow dives past, its passage on my cheek like a detonation. Gone into the blue, vanished. I stare at the place in the sky where it was. I breathe. The air is full of warmth.
He’s gone. I’ll find him in the night. I’ll go into him like sickness.
• • •
Burn it, whispers someone in my ear. Burn it. I’m awake, shaking. Nausea rises. The first time it happened, I woke screaming. She’s sending me her dreams.
Through the train window,
it’s a cold dusk. We’re in a maze of little tracks and tiny stations. The girls are gone. Instead, there’s a little boy with bloody green knees in the corner opposite, bouncing on the seat and singing, and a woman with cherries in her hat. She regards me with disapproval. Beside her, a thin woman in black eats peppermints from a paper bag. The lamps throw out buzzing amber light. The darkened window shows us back ourselves, yellow and monstrous against infinite space. On the seat next to me is a newspaper, left by some stealthy, unseen traveler. Smell of acrid wet print.
The disapproving woman puts her hand on the boy’s back and shushes. Her teeth are large and brown, her legs planted wide in stout shoes. She sits encased in swathes of worn gray serge. Two of her buttons are broken. The boy bounces. She closes her heavy-lidded eyes. The hand stays on the boy’s back like a passenger.
“I had a little bird,” he singsongs. “Its name was Enza. I opened the window, and in flew Enza!”
“Stop that.” A large, maroon voice.
“In flew Enza!” He widens his eyes at her, full of joy.
I slept awkwardly. My shoulder aches like memory. I pick up the paper with my good arm and read about tobacco… Women and girls, having put on men’s clothes, are adopting men’s habits in the matter of smoking. Quite.
The boy takes four marbles from his pocket and shakes them, lips pursed. The gunfire of the marbles goes click click click.
“If you put ’em away,” says the woman, opening her eyes, “you shall have an apple.”
“Psssshhhhsss,” he says. “We are exploded.” He rattles the marbles at me. “You’re dead.”
“You’ll have to eat the core and the pips, mind,” says the woman. “Can’t be wandering all over finding you bins.”
He gnaws the apple like a squirrel, clenching it to his face with dirty hands, peering over it with profound concern.
We’re in a maze of little tracks and tiny stations now, and tired people shuffle on and off.
A sudden give in my shoulder, a feeling of dangerous looseness. A slick brown patch has appeared on the sleeve of my shirt. Blood.
In the lavatory, there are varnished pine boards on the wall (Betty Tasker is a hore), some pink soap, an overhead lamp hanging a little too low, casting a surgical light over the whole affair. What there isn’t is anything to tie this up with. The loose feeling becomes a pulse, and it’s no good; I’m covered in blood. It stinks.
I take the shirt off. In the dirty cracked mirror that hangs over the basin, someone regards me. Shorn head, pale skin.
Looking at one’s own shoulder is nigh on impossible. A broad smudge of tacky gore. Blood runs down the arm in little rivulets, pooling in the creased places around the elbow. New wet threads busily cover the drying rusty patches. I am mapped with blood.
The light stutters. There’s a tick tick, the one bulbs make before they blow. Oh, please. Not now. I am flickering; the mirror shows my blood, arm, gooseflesh, gaunt face, slippery skin, delivers them weird and partial in spasms as if I am electrified. The light is gone. Black.
The dark is hot. This should be respite—I have been bone-cold all day—but no. It’s hot like breath. I stand. Often, I have found, being motionless will bring one out of crisis. The blood tickles on, down my arm. It feels like a finger. In fact, it feels so much, so very much like a finger… I recoil, hit the wall, swallowed in pain. All the while, fingertips that should not be there stroke up and down, and cold breath, very light, on my face. Blood, but there’s another scent that I know, by God, I know all too well. I open my mouth to call out and—here’s the thing—a finger reaches into my mouth and strokes it, lightly. It’s a pretty ordinary finger. The snag of a hangnail. There’s a callus on the inside of the knuckle like a writing callus. At certain points, the smoothness of metal brushes me: a ring. The finger strokes the insides of my cheeks and my tongue and the backs of my teeth. Someone breathes, breathes gently in my ear, and more fingers stroke themselves slowly across my soft palate, brushing the back of my tongue, moving toward the uvula and into my throat, and when I can’t breathe anymore, I go down.
• • •
Light, muttering to itself and flickering. I’m splayed across the whole tiny room. One of my feet, sort of debonair, in the sink. A pool of blood on the gritty floor. The wound’s properly burst. Like a little mouth.
By very slow degrees, I stand. The light steadies. In the mirror, I am wet, bloody, really unappealing. Don’t want to think about how long I lay there, with the wound pressed against that floor. Can almost feel contamination climbing gaily into the cut like a day out. It hurts, really. That’s the main thing. Could think straight if it didn’t hurt so. I rinse what I can. Doesn’t look good.
The train beats on like a drum. Cherries and peppermints look up for an instant when I reenter and then away. What’s it like, to be them? They must have friends and families and lives and eat supper and so on. My family is dead. I had a friend, but he let me go. Perhaps he’s dead too now.
I peel apart the pages of the newspaper, soft under my fingers like damp, inscribed skin. Only an hour or so to go. Breathe.
At Tiverton, the door opens. A shiver goes through the compartment; we’re ruffled like a cage of soft brown hens. I keep my head down. Boots enter; I can smell him. Pipe tobacco and hair oil. His uniform: metal polish, sailcloth, and soap. Now I’m in trouble (I think I’m a corporal, but I’m just not sure).
“Cigarette.”
He offers the box only to me; I have to take one. I nod. He nods. It won’t be the end of it. This is something I’ve already learned: the relentless “we” of war will not allow us to part as strangers.
We smoke. I can smell my blood.
The woman with the peppermints says something to him about the weather. I feel him shift in the seat beside me. When he speaks, it is so exciting that I am betrayed for an instant into looking. A flash of collar and jaw and windburned neck.
“Somehow, a whole year’s homesickness seems to catch up with me at once,” he says. “Makes me feel like jumping in a lake.”
The cherries and the peppermint laugh. They feel for him. I think.
“I’ve never met an American before,” says one.
There comes the shift of him on the seat. “Better than sunny France though,” he says to me, friendly. “Isn’t it? Sunny France indeed!”
Bleeding in a stolen uniform was terrible. Bleeding and sweating profusely in a stolen uniform is much worse. Stings to buggery. Can he smell it? I give what I hope is a knowing smile, no teeth. His neck, in my peripheral vision, is prickly.
“France is just a whole lot sunnier than Germany, you see. That’s all it is, I reckon.”
I nod, training my eyes on the paper. If I don’t chuck now, it could be all right. This is important to remember. The smell… Perhaps it’s a comparative matter. Perhaps there’s been so much blood for him that my little shoulder nick doesn’t even touch the sides, as it were.
He says, “It isn’t the things that happen that scare you. It’s the things that might.”
There’s a curious thrum in the seat. He’s shaking. I take the half-smoked cigarette from my mouth and give it to him, keeping my head down.
He can smell the blood all right. He might not know it, but he can. Time rolls back in that peculiar way it has of late, and for a moment, it’s another boy who’s warm at my side.
I know then. I will go to see if he’s alive. I hope I remember the way. I hope he hasn’t forgotten me.
Must keep it simple.
The woman in black produces another paper bag. Lemon drops. She offers the bag to him. Small white shapes. He says no with a palm. It’s all up for me; an astringent scent of lemon comes off them, joins the cigarettes. It’s not going to be all right. I’m finished. Heat stings my throat. The tide rises.
“Hey,” the soldier says. “You’re bleeding.” He leans in and looks at me with
level eyes, and I see myself in them: thin, dripping, hunted. The train is slowing, easing into stillness. A dented tin sign. It’s a stop too early, but I’m off. Doors, knees, shuffles, apologies. I go, fast.
Solid ground. Voices like horns call for urgent things; whistles hurtle thinly through the night. I’d thought it was cold on the train, but I was a fool. This is cold that freezes your lungs. I move crabwise across the platform toward the footbridge. The dark has a humming, violent texture through which shapes move too suddenly.
Two guards unpack a crate; long, slim oblongs of wood. Stack the coffins on the platform, gently. They puff white breath into the air. The conductor collects the coffin tickets, face solemn. Corpses, pauper fare. Two shillings and sixpence.
“All right, mate?” says a guard to the conductor. He’s bulging out of his uniform. He has large, field-mouse eyes and a thick column of a neck. He is solid enough to spare concern. “It’s all a bit much now and then, isn’t it?”
The conductor nods, weary.
“I was at Ypres,” the guard says. “The second one. Lost two toes. Two toes! Bloody hell. Lucky. Still, shook for months. Still. Lucky.” The conductor nods and makes to go. “Two toes,” the guard says again and sticks his hands in his pockets. He whistles into the night. He wants something from the exchange that can’t be given. Some hope, some assurance of the meaning of things. His eyes are suddenly on me. He calls, “All right, bombardier?” Bombardier, then, not a corporal.
The white lattice of the footbridge, the very height of it, its temerity in simply existing. A tricky moment on the way down, where gravity nearly takes me with it. Then there’s a nice dark corner by a shed where I’m safe with some weeds and a bit of gravel. Alone. The relief. I make myself as small as possible and vomit, empty myself onto the ground.
Eventually, the whole thing’s finished. Doubled over, I breathe. I feel light enough to float away.
I scratch gravel over the mess I’ve made. The uniform. I’d rather get rid of it, but I need it. There are miles between me and Rawblood. I am keen to end it. And she goads me on. Bile rises; confusion rises. Keep it simple. Remember what to do. I touch his letter in my pocket like a talisman. Burn it, Papa whispers like a secret.
The Girl from Rawblood Page 26