‘How old were you when you learnt this?’ Celia asks.
‘16. No age. 21. I watch it as it comes to life. I’m not repeating anything. There is no repetition.’
Celia looks back at Harry and Harry says nothing. I can’t look at his eyes, not the full force of them. I wait. Wait until I am forced to look. By his voice or hand, he will have me glance and I will see something. I will see a face, a look not prepared to give in to my voice. He is so close and I can’t look – I fear how far those eyes have travelled in the last minutes. How many miles they have traversed, how many mountains and plains and heat-locked bands of air that take the breath from our mouths and bake everything till it is hard. I fear how little he knows of me, how little he will believe in the future.
‘And I spoke to them, you know. I spoke at them for days until –’
‘They started to talk back,’ Harry says.
‘They started to talk back,’ I say. ‘No syllables. Syllable-free sentences. Perhaps they were singing, perhaps they were just saying things I didn’t, couldn’t understand. After all, they’d been to war and I’ve never been to war.’
28
We are without time, we are beyond such a thing. At Malo-Les-Bain, Opperman, Watson and Osborne finish an hour-and-a-half off the front. I come in near the rear. We are below the line now, we crossed back over no-man’s-land and into the Republic somewhere west of Lille. I said nothing, though in the morning Hubert made the comment that someone might say something. Of course, I have said enough already. I have stopped describing the lot of my speech, the rest remains back in the Citroën outside of Charleville. I went on, I went on and on. And though they knew, they didn’t stop me.
My brother lay in that mine for days, a whole week, though whether that is six or seven or five or eight days, it does not matter. He lay there with his two companions until he went quite mad, I believe. Until a reconnaissance party found him half-starved, mumbling in complete disconnect. But I don’t know that, nobody has told me that. It is merely the imaginings of a teenager who watched from the doorframe as Flight Lieutenant Thomas walked in the hall and held my sister as she dreamed. Of the hundreds of hours he has spoken, not one of them has measured those days in the mine. All its illumination: it’s my making.
And I hear Celia’s voice. Her voice undressing, unveiling the county, the city, the village and street of her rearing, and my body in panic, reconciling the effort it took to become another, the bickering it takes to undo the mimicry. The bareness of her voice. The skin of it unkissed awaiting the mouth of another. The mouth of another to say it all back to her. I become slow trying to understand this. Rickety, a relic. Everywhere men pass by me.
I walk alone, meandering here, looking for a building, a clutch of buildings in fact. A jumble of houses my cousin wrote of back before she was the woman I now know. I haven’t seen her since we quit talking. I stepped from the car and went quietly into the hotel where for an hour I slept and dreamt of her, the her before she came to be my cousin. My cousin who taught in schools, who travelled here and there. I’ve known for some days. That Celia and Alice, that these names matched the same person. Not everything I say, not everything I know I know. But I know one thing. In the moments after I quit talking, there was no hint of judgement. No distance other than the need I felt to escape her presence.
I changed into civilian clothes some hours ago and trekked out here at the water’s edge. Nervous, the calm culled by the seeping memory of who I had become. The violent nature of becoming another for an hour, for two. I struggle to recall the sound of my voice in those moments I spoke as the Citroën rumbled.
The beach is full, the wonder of shouting families and naked bodies, amorous boys with arms about each other and eyes on the shape of women, the curved tanned breasts and slight mounded bellies. I walk but feel, as I have before, as if I am being followed. Eyes on my back; the tremor rush of cocaine also makes one weary of any looks which lurk near. Sparrows on the wire suspended between lamp posts; they wait for crowds to leave before descending on the sand to nip all the remains from the grains.
I have walked so many cities, so many miles and looked at broken buildings and the brimming wonder of architectures and structures made by men of genius and close understanding of the way we feel awe and I start again, looking. Though nothing will have the grandiosity of the standing stones, the menhirs of Carnac, nothing will give effect like their formation, standing, staring back at 5,000 years of unbroached past. A collection of buildings facing the sea; Alice described these during a time before this race, before I began to know the hurt, the shape agony makes on all men who chase it, before she came out of the echoes outside the abbey to make contact. A clutch of houses and the way their angles complicate their presence before the sea. She’d written many of the things I have seen so far and I still feel the urge to see more, despite the uncertainty I feel about her and the fictions we have made in each other’s presence.
I find myself pecked by my own falderal, all this nonsense out of hand. It’s a colour: blue for the sad notes I hear in the boys’ talk 20 metres away, and red for the teeth of bickering men behind me. I walk and squint at the failing sun. I am on the coast of France and I walk her beaches.
And these western beaches, I half-expect my brother to be standing at a lamp post, leaning, smoking, expecting an answer to why I decided to be him. But there is no one but me and my imaginings, the buildings and the idea that if you look long enough you will see the architect and all he asked for.
Last night I spoke to Louvière. I told him about that night by the river in 1921. How we argued and threw rough punches. I told him about Thomas, things of Thomas. I explained how after that bleak anniversary in Fox, how he started talking of war. How he began to work hard. How he drank, how on weekends he went around the rugby grounds, how he had a few friends and they would watch games together, that he rarely got too drunk, and no longer fought. How he had people to the house where Katherine would cook. How he laughed in a broad tone, his short body shaking. That’s what I told Louvière. How he talked of his time in Cairo, in France, of Paris. He would decant the hours flying over the battlefields with his camera and his barely stable aircraft. The struggles they had to keep flying, the whistle of bullets as they sought to make contact with the fuselage, wings, engine, or the flyers themselves. The panic of gliding above treetops when the engine cut out and coughed and returned to life, the curious effect of air pressure on his ears and how he found himself easily short of breath once certain heights were attained. How he spoke about his transfer to the coastal region of Belgium, the day when his engine was lit up by tracer and he flew through the evening like a tarred and bright arrow.
That was where it stopped. That is where he is alone. I explained this to Louvière. My brother, I told him, he never spoke about killing. No one did, not to me. No one spoke about the fact of shooting a man in the head, the lungs, of blood and air finding portals where there should have been muscle and artery. That was the place of imagination for me, the horror of bedtime wonder. I explained his brute instinct to hurt, to fight and bully. But, I said out loud, I swear I said out loud, all I needed have done was recall him standing in the hall with Marya, because that was the closest he came to killing anyone. She was the only one. He’d never had to tell his friends about killing with a gun; he’d never fired such a thing with real intent. All he shot were images of France and Belgium, of troop formation and trench, of artillery and camouflage, of the hidden things men in huts with focused lights and magnifying glasses glared into, collecting the dots into images that indicated the focus of the enemy’s desire.
Stony silences, I told Louvière, weeks like weeds growing across months and then years. These were what I wanted, what I expected. I coarsely needed this: a sign of remedial breakdown, of damage to his self, an involuntary admission of the fact he’d been at war and brought this silence home with him. The shame and guilt of watching somebody die, I needed someone else to take the blame. That
was my admission. I believed all Thomas had a right to was silence and the ache of silence filled with Marya and things of Marya.
Louvière looked at me, he looked at me and glared until his eyes started to speak. ‘The walker? Sleepwalker?’
‘My sister.’
‘She die in her sleep?’
I shrugged. ‘She was beside me, beside me in the car breathing till she wasn’t. Till she wasn’t breathing. It had lost control on the road back across the country down from the mountain. I hit a fence. It wasn’t much. Just a fence. Palings went in the air. I’d taken her into the hills. She was half well and wanted to get out of bed and see the hills.’
He was quiet for a long time and I began to wonder if I was truly awake and just staring at the hollow in space where I believed him to be. But then he started again.
‘There’s always life, and there’s always people. So we think of people. People who have gone. And when they go,’ he said, ‘when people go, if they are taken or something intervenes, things. Erm, important things, they set off, no? They vanish. Someone, a lover, a mistress, your teenage love against whom comparisons of any other love are what? Not valid? Yes. A wife, a friend who shares things. Things no lover could. When they gone, when this happen the invisible things of love, they are lost. No? We know this. This obvious. But what is it? What is it? The sound of their voice? The, erm, up and down. Le cadence. Cadence of voice, their breathing, the way sentence begins and end. The lightness of skin. The laugh. All. The way they kiss the back of your hand because that is what they do. The balance of idea. It becomes the vanishing. We know this, yes? But it is memory. Memory is the thing lost. Shared memory, the memory that is only there between two people, only exist between two people, the memory that is unable to operate without both people. Merely the vapour of a spent morning, that is what is lost and that is the deepest hurt. Memory made by two minds, by the sound of their speech, by the way they react to words, light, music, how they dance together, how they are drunk together, how their bodies move when it’s hot and they need each other. Memory that goes; this is the longest, deepest pain.’
I thought I could see him at the end of the bed, his mouth twitching. The angle of his nose, his bald head, the shape of his chin: a silhouette of my making. No light interferes, no noise back from the street. The real of a dream; bluer than blue, blacker than black, stiller than slate at the bottom of the ocean under all the silt. He made a noise as if waking in his sleep, his throat caught on his breathing.
‘And, you know,’ he went on, ‘when they gone, these memories, they no longer. I believe this to be fact. There is no recourse, mmm? No recourse, but to a silent mind.’
I waited until it became apparent he had finished, till it seemed he was done. But I wasn’t sure, so I didn’t talk back. What would’ve been the point of talking back to a ghost, especially to the ghost of someone quite alive several thousand miles away in his own bed? I waited, the two of us poised. The night stalled as if waiting for something to shake it. Then he leaned forward, he smiled. I waited for my apparitish friend to say one more thing. But he didn’t because it was morning. Light was in the room. It intruded, a stranger pushing its way through a dark street. I kept staring at the space where the Algerian had sat and thought of the things I should have said. How I should have made a protest that my desires were all askew, misinterpreted, wronged. That someone needed to do something. But by then I was awake and he was gone.
Now the sun is edging towards the end of the day, it must be after nine in the evening. The white sand is beginning to glow, a long shadow from a deckchair looks like the art they peddle in Paris. The people a ruin in heat and sun. I keep moving, never sure where I am apart from the coast nearby. And here a river, a band of soak heading into the channel the road bends around, and I follow it so briefly I am heading inland once more before a bridge allows me to cross. I stop halfway, I linger looking down into the water, the run of it, the way it has no choice in its direction; it must head downwards – always and forever. I walk on.
On the far side of the bridge the town seems to continue but a sign tells me otherwise. Dunkerque it says and I know her hotel is near. I walk until the buildings become less sparse and I am on a boulevard of sorts. Clear in front of me is a memorial, a plinth and column and a statue with an angel on top. When I am near I see written ‘Monument de la Victoire de 1793’. I stand and admire its size for some minutes before moving on. 1793. These monuments mark the country all over. A year of horror and the slaying of kings and court. How long does it take for a city, a town, a hamlet, or even a family to transform ungodly acts into the righteous?
I stand in the circle outside the hotel. The sun leans on me and I have to sit before heading to her room. The weight of dreams and the way they rest with you throughout the day. I read the sign. Hôtel Aigle Bleu. She’s here for the final days, the second to last night before we head for the end. God, the day is heavy. The sun, the weight of the sun and the light and this evening and all memories that I have let come and weigh upon me. The crest above the blue awning, an innocent-looking bird set in chrome tips its shadow on the ground and I feel it fall on me. I do sit. I sit briefly before a porter comes and lifts me by my elbow.
The man speaks and I just shrug as I have learnt to do. I look at the brass buttons on his jacket, the way they glint and lend clout to his presence, as if he is the one in control here, the only one. He starts to speak once more and tugs at me and I am once again standing in the full glare of the sun.
‘Sit in your piss,’ I say and smile and shake his hand.
‘Give up,’ he says and I look past his shoulder. Two men exiting the hotel in a saunter.
‘No, no,’ I say. ‘Quite happy.’ I watch one of the men and slowly feel I recognise him. He does a little jog towards the car waiting for them. It is the nameless man seen time and again. For a month these men have been following on. Driving in Discuter’s wake. A half-dozen of them dulled by the enterprise of their slow drive in pursuit of ragged men.
The porter starts to speak but I hear another voice, a woman’s voice, the voice of my cousin and I am being hailed in French and I turn. I wink at the porter and walk towards her. She is standing in the entrance with her hair sprung at the side and I suspect immediately she has been sleeping through the evening. Her clothes don’t sit straight. And I realise as I open my mouth that I don’t have her name. My mouth is empty, a small cavern at the edge of thought. All the little things I recall about her, all the dust and bites of old story and mystery do not explain to me her name. She is so small now and I reach for her.
‘Today is Friday,’ I say from the bed where I sit.
‘Wednesday,’ she says, standing at the window. ‘It was Wednesday. His wife was with him. His wife had his hands against her chest, watching him breathe, watching him breathe and the panting and the way it becomes rapid towards the end. And then she felt it stop. Jesus. So fast then his wife felt it stop.’ She points at me, at where my legs rest at the end of the bed. ‘Have you ever been in a room when someone dies?’
I nod.
‘Every day something dies,’ she says. ‘At the end of every sentence something dies. Say something; something dies. But the way their bodies start to speed up. Faster, racing, every pant shallower and shallower. You blink. Shut your eyes. Each time you open them they are closer to matter, to hard matter. To calcium and carbon. Closer than they have been before. All day,’ she says, ‘all today’s hours I have been on that mattress. I’ve been watching him over and over. Staring out the window, staring anywhere, watching him. Over and again. The two of them, him and his wife. Find a way to ask them to stop. That’s what I kept saying to myself. Find a way to ask, ask it.’
For a while she remains at the window which is open to let in the wind from the sea. The salty airs and the thought of coastlines and ocean and escape and distance they bring with them. None of it is enough to rid the room of the heavy smell of a man’s cologne that was apparent the moment I entered
the room. I suspect he was the one who delivered the news, the man from the car who broke it over Celia’s heart like a vase and messed her hair just so.
‘In bed. In his bed,’ she says. ‘Died in his bed. Christ, those weeks, those days, all that hiding. I imagine you know: Belgium is a small place. A little country, more border than beach. But it’s nothing if not huge when you are trying to escape it. You’re blinded by no sleep and shaking and you’re trying to escape. Do you know the tremor, the body tremor that runs through everything? The way we hid ourselves in mud and hid between bodies. Listen. We found a pile of dead in a culvert and pulled them over us as the Germans came through hunting for anyone they thought was out of place and could put to the end of their bayonets. Rotted clothes and flesh on the turn. The empty eyes staring right at us. How many smells remain with us? How many hours did we stay awake? He took me with him across those fields, from farmhouse to farmhouse, shadow to shadow. We saw limbs hanging from trees where artillery had hit. The rest of their bodies, God knows. A horse with its guts blown out still making saliva as it waited for death. Death. Everywhere. François took my hand and ran me through fields. There were days when there was nothing. Clear summer days, the gentle rise of smoke from a chimney as bread was baked. Lord, we became bad thieves. We were shot at by anyone and everyone. Nothing hit. And now, now he’s dead from a stupid cycle. Lying in bed with his wife who never saw the faces I saw: all other expressions gone, all gone except terror. The gape of terror. Jesus, what an expression.’
The Invisible Mile Page 24