“Tell me this, though, Griff,” he says, his fingers clenching and unclenching on the wheel’s stitched leather. “Whatever made you think the world would change if there was no John Arthur?”
“Who would replace you?”
He inches the car forward. The back of a bus thrums ahead of us. I SHAN’T BE LONG—MOTHER’S USING SUNLIGHT. “You tell me.”
“Jim Toller’s too young—nobody trusts him. People like Smith and Mosley are second-rate politicians. They’d be second-rate under any leader. I suppose there was Harrison, but then he was conveniently executed for treason. We’ve all been laughing at William Arkwright for years…”
“You shouldn’t underestimate Bill Arkwright. I’ve kept him close to me because he’s the one person I can least trust. You’re wrong about it all, in fact, Griff. The military, the bloody establishment. They all want rid of me. They were happy enough when they thought that they could just buy a few more cars and whores and polish some extra medals. Without John Arthur, though…” He shakes his head. He sounds tired. His voice is toneless—the famous light Yorkshire accent is almost gone. “The point is that there has to be a John Arthur. There would be no point, no purpose, in destroying him. He’s something that’s been given to me—you understand that? I want you to understand, Griff. There’s a space called John Arthur into which this world has pushed me. I have been given destiny, Griff. Really, there was no choice…”
“You could cast it aside.”
This time, his laugh becomes more bitter. “I have to carry on. Why do you think I made that speech this evening? Why do you think this country has to fight? They’re afraid, Griff. All of them are afraid…”
Outside, as we move on, the traffic has cleared. We are turning away from the bustling swirl of the river. Looking back, I glimpse the great dome Saint Paul’s over the rooftops. As celebratory searchlights begin to wheel around it, extinguishing the stars, barring the sky, it seems to glow and rise as if held aloft by clouds. Then the light flares and the vision is gone, and the roads grow narrower, uglier. Soon, we are in Whitechapel; since the days of the Ripper, since my own sad wanderings and the fights and burnings and intimidations of the twenties, and despite all the new overspill developments at Beacontree, little about the East End has ever changed.
“At least you’re still honest with me, Griff,” he says, looking over for longer than feels comfortable as the big car rushes along these cramped little streets. “So few people are…” He makes a turn and the tyres squeal and slide across the wet cobbles, then rumble to the kerb of a dead end beside a scrap of wasteground. The engine stops. He jerks on the handbrake.
“Can you manage to walk a while, Griff…?”
Clinging to my dignity, not waiting for him to come and help me, I climb slowly out. It’s cold and dark here. The ground is sticky with litter and the air has a faintly seasidey smell of coal smoke and river silt. Even where the houses begin, the dim street lamps are widely-spaced. John Arthur opens the car’s rear door and takes a hat from the back seat—an ordinary-looking trilby—then a dark overcoat, which he pulls on, raising the collar. “There,” he says, holding out his arms, pantomiming a turn in the middle of this empty road. “Who would recognise me?”
My walk is slow and laboured as we head towards the houses. John Arthur helps me by snaking his arm around my back and hooking it across my shoulders to support some of my weight, and gives me a little lift as we step over a pothole and up onto the loose beginnings of a pavement. In odd, flashing moments, he feels almost like Francis—although I thought I’d forgotten what Francis ever felt like. His breathing and the way he walks is almost the same, and his skin, beneath it all, beneath everything, still smells faintly of burnt lemon.
Something grey that is too low and quick to be a cat darts into an alley that on warmer days would be filled with washing, but there’s no one about and the only lights that show from the windows of these terraces are television grey. The morning’s drum and fife bands have long gone. The teas have been cleared, the tatters of ribbon and bunting hang limp, the paper union jacks that the children made at school lie torn in the puddles.
Soon, we’re drawing close to the sidings, the tracks and the cliff-face brick warehouses of the docks. It’s quiet here tonight, but in my head dropped iron clangs, steam rises, sacks of produce from all the Empire slump and pile as the giant cranes turn and nod in God-like approval. And there’s that sound again, that dull rumble gathering at the back of my teeth and in the void that waits to fill my skull when my brain finally evaporates. It’s in the boom of guns, the rumble of tank tracks, the drone of aircraft engines, the crash and sigh of masonry, the scream of children, the churning of great machines, the grey roar of an angry sea…
“For all those years,” I say as John Arthur helps me along the brick-cobbled street and the sky over London suddenly fractures into light. “I thought you were dead. It destroyed your parents—did you know that? Putting up a headstone years later isn’t enough…”
“Don’t try to tell me what happened, Griff—as if you know more than I do about my life.”
I blink stupidly as the fireworks roar and the shadows colour and change, suddenly close to tears.
“I loved you once…”
His face is close to mine. His arm squeezes my waist as he helps me along. “I know that too.”
We’re drawing close to humanity again. Locals who’ve wandered out from their homes to gather where there’s a view beyond the piers where the Thames glitters and the sky fizzes, churns, explodes. Mothers in slippers with scarves wrapped over their curlers are holding up their youngest for as long as their arms will last. The men have fags behind their ears and the stubble of a day off work peppering their chins. Their collars are off and many are in vests, flabby arms showing tattoos: MUM. IRIS. WEST HAM. They ohh and ahh as the sky crackles and the colours shine in gutters and ignite the myriad panes of warehouse windows. No one notices John Arthur as he and I slip between them. He’s just a slight middle-aged man helping his invalid father.
Beyond, a little away from the crowd where the river can no longer be seen, some tea chests lie heaped beside a wall where a few loose posters, grainy and grey, cling like bats. LONDON, CAPITAL OF EMPIRE. ORIENT LINE. VISIT JAMAICA. I slump down even though the air is sour here with the stink of dog excrement that pervades all such places and the wood is wet. John Arthur sits beside me. In shadow, he risks taking off his hat, and gestures towards the crowd. “They all seem so happy,” he says. “A few drinks, a bed, food, some flesh to hold, some bloody fireworks…”
“They worship you.”
“Do they? You tell me, Griff. You’re the historian. Why would anyone follow John Arthur?”
“Because you offer them certainty.” I cradle my arm, one half of me wanting to draw closer to him, the other wishing I was far, far away. “Because you tell them whom to hate and love.”
“Is that all they want from him?” He looks at me challengingly then, does this ex-lover of mine who once used to gasp as he emptied himself into me—does this John Arthur. Something chill and terrible runs down my spine. A shock that’s almost the opposite of recognition. Now, powerless as I am, I’m sure that I was right to try to kill him.
“You don’t understand what it was like,” he says. “You weren’t in the War.”
“I thought I’d lost a friend.”
“We all lost friends—do you think I didn’t? But it’s not enough, is it? After what we went through. I thought it might be enough when I first visited Dublin after the victory. And then again when word came through from Rhodesia.” He shakes his head as sulphurous plumes of red smoke drift over London. “You don’t know what the War was like, Griff. No one did who wasn’t there…”
He’s leaning forward now, eyes fixed on nowhere as the flashes of light catch and die over the planes of his face, the silver of his hair, his elbows resting on his knees as he grips the rim of his hat, turning it over.
“It was all so easy w
hen I enlisted,” he says. “There were men chatting with each other on the train as that took us down to this big park north of Birmingham. Suddenly we were all the same—bosses and labourers…
“We came just exactly as we were, Griff. Dressed in the clothes we’d arrived in at the station. We thought we’d all be given uniforms…” He chuckles. The fireworks spit and crack. “We were expecting those bloody uniforms for weeks. There were men dressed in their Sunday best doing bayonet practice with broom handles, or the overalls they’d worn at the factory. We slept in tents from the Crimea. But we were proud of what we were, Griff. We didn’t care what the rest of the world thought because we knew we were right…” He shakes his head.
“I was a rifleman, Griff. Third best shot in the training battalion when the Lee Enfields finally arrived. I even found that I wasn’t bad at boxing. Entered the competitions they organised to keep us busy, and was runner up without even trying. Perhaps that was the trick.
“We went to France in December as part of Kitchener’s First Army. The regular soldiers thought we were a joke, called us the greys because our khaki was the wrong shade. It itched like hell when it got wet—the stuff was made for horse blankets—and you could see us coming a mile off. South Staffordshires. C Company. 89th Battalion. I remember hearing the first sound of the big guns. Boom, boom. Even when it’s far off, Griff, it’s a bigger, deeper noise than you’d ever imagine. I didn’t know if it was theirs or ours, but the sound was somehow reassuring. I was a soldier at last—I was there…
“Don’t believe any of the bloody rubbish about King and Regiment and Country. We didn’t care who we were fighting. It could have been the French or the Hun or the Belgians—we hated them all. We hated them almost as much as we hated the cavalry waiting behind the lines and the staff officers and the pay corps. You fight, Griff, for the bloke who’s standing next to you. You put up with all the mud and the lice and the officers and the regimental bullshit for their sake. If you’re lucky, perhaps there’s someone back at home as well. But there was never anyone like that for me. I’m sorry, Griff—there simply wasn’t, and I ended up being grateful for that because I saw what happened to the others. The letters from your girl going on about some new bloke that got shorter and shorter and then stopped coming at all. How could we possibly tell any of you what it was like after that, Griff—you civilians? How could you ever know?”
“It must have been terrible.”
“It wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t terrible at all. I’ve never laughed more in my life, or felt more wanted, more as if I belonged. The rain. The rats. The mud. It was all like some stupid practical joke. And it was quiet a lot of the time and there were empty fields where the corn had grown wild and you could lie down in the evening and stare up at a perfect sky. Then down to the town, most us of half-drunk already, and the fat white mademoiselles spitting on their fingers and saying laver vous. Yes, Griff, I did that too. And I had friends, mates, encounters. There were places—the back of the cookhouses, other odd corners. Nobody cared. Everything was accepted as long as you kept it out of the noses of the officers and did your job. But for me love—sex—whatever you call it, just faded. Perhaps it had never been there…” He stares down, his silvered head bowed as the rockets whoosh and wheel, scrawling out the sky.
“We were sent to the Somme in June 1916. It was supposed to be the big push that would win the War, but we knew that we were just covering a cock-up that the French had made. I remember hearing the guns as we marched along this road behind the flour wagons. And for the first time, after over a year of fighting and hearing shells and being shot at, I felt afraid…
“It’s terrible, you know, Griff. Feeling afraid when you know that fear’s the only logical reaction. Nerves—they’re okay, every soldier gets nerves when something’s about to start. But fear, real fear—what we called funk—it freezes you up. It means you’re no longer working for the man next to you.
“I lay awake that last night. We knew we were going over the top in the morning. Not that they told you, but you could tell from the guns. I couldn’t sleep. Boom, boom, and the stink of the trenches. Boom, boom, boom. That great iron voice. The sergeant came around before dawn with diamonds of felt to sew into the sacking of our helmets so that the rest of the Regiment would know who we were. About twenty of us had to share one needle and thread, and my hands were so useless that I had to get someone else to do mine. I could barely breathe, but they all thought it was just Frannie’s nerves, which was alright, because they all felt nerves. They weren’t afraid. Not the way Frannie Eveleigh was. They didn’t know funk, fear. They were laughing, joking, humming some stupid tune under their breath when the captain came to tell us we were getting a chance to have a go at the Hun and how much it all mattered to the King and Lloyd George and the whole bloody country. I felt sorry for him, too. The snipers and machine gunners always went for the officers first.
“The big guns stopped, and that silence was the worst thing of all. I felt as though I was watching myself. Frozen. I didn’t know if I could go over the top, although I was sure I’d be court martialled and shot if I didn’t. But that wasn’t enough—the threat of some other kind of death a few weeks later.
“Then the guns started again. Boom, boom. The sound seemed to cover us like a blanket and then this vast final massive earth-shaking boom that was a land mine the sappers had planted under the German trenches. Then we were moved up to the front line. Thousands, thousands of us. And there was silence, just men breathing and the shuffle of our feet on the duckboards and the creak and jingle of our packs. And we stared at the last sandbags ahead of us and the ladders that had been laid against them. And we waited. It was too late for joking now. It was too late for anything. The officers checked their watches and someone blew a whistle about a mile off. Then another whistle blew closer and you could hear the sound coming towards you like a train.
“Men started to climb out of the trenches—I watched them go ahead of me. Some were yelling the way you were supposed to and some went quietly and some prayed. A lot of them just fell back and I thought they were being clumsy until I realised they’d been shot already. Guns were clattering and you could tell from the sound that they weren’t ours. The Germans were firing straight back at us as soon as we stuck our bloody heads over the top. And I just stood there. It was the worst moment of my life but I knew I couldn’t go back, so I started to climb up out of that trench. I went over into the morning with the sky suddenly big above me. My mates were already running around the pool of a big shell hole far ahead—I could just catch their voices on the wind. And Boom boom. Rat-a-tat-tat as they were cut down one by one. I was just wandering in a nightmare. I wasn’t running. I wasn’t even sure if my feet were moving…
“I don’t know when I got hit, Griff—or how long it took. It just felt as if something had pushed against me and there was this heat across my side as I slid down into this long hollow. The mud came up around my waist and I knew then that I was hit because I could see these trails of blood fanning out like roots through the algae. But I knew it wasn’t that bad. I could touch myself there and it barely hurt. I should have gone on, Griff. I should have climbed out of that ditch and gone on. But I didn’t. I just crouched there the whole day. I was shivering, weeping. Boom, boom—I could hear the shells whistling over. The bullets rattling. But I was alone with my fear, Griff. Quite alone.
“Darkness came and the flares went up and the guns still boomed and crackled, although you knew that the German snipers would aim high most of the time at night to give the rescue parties a chance. I tried to get up then, but the sides of the ditch were slippery and my left side seemed to have frozen. Then I heard voices close by and I shouted back. Men with stretchers found me and hauled me out. I was muddy and blood-sodden and I looked enough of a mess to be convincing as I was carried back to the field dressing station.
“Everything there smelled of shit and mud and iodine and dying men. The soldier on the stretcher beside me kept
trying to talk, but even when I managed to turn myself over to see more of him, I couldn’t work out what he was saying. The words he was making seemed to begin with a K and then an M, but the sound was more like something caught in his throat. His uniform was dry—there was hardly any blood on it. He didn’t even seem to be wounded. Then I moved myself up some more until I could see his other side, and that the right side of his skull had been smashed away like the top of an egg. His right eyeball was just lying there it in its socket like some anatomical drawing, his jaw was shattered and his tongue was embedded with bits of his teeth. It didn’t make any sense for him to be alive at all. I suppose that was why they’d just left him here—because they expected him to die.
“The two eyes, the good one and the bad, were staring up at me. I felt his hand flapping at mine, and I looked down and saw that he was trying to point towards a pistol he had strapped to his belt. I understood then what he’d been trying to say, which was Kill Me. Kill Me. It was the kind of favour you’d do for any mate at a time like that—and one that you’d hope someone else would have the guts to do for you. No one would have noticed a single pistol shot, not here in all this mess where the guns were still loud. But I knew that I couldn’t do it.
“I just lay back and stared up at the lantern as this soldier beside me gagged and moaned, knowing that this was funk, this was fear, that I was worthless as a soldier. I was feverish by the time I was tagged and looked at inside the treatment tent. I was given some water and a jab of morphine and quinine and carried across the fields to a big river barge just as dawn was coming. It was supposed to provide an easier journey for the casualties to the back-of-the-line hospital, but it was slow, and there were no windows down inside the hold. You could still smell the coal that they’d cleared out of the barge beneath all the other stench, and you could hear the water laughing around the sides as we pulled away from the jetty.
The Summer Isles Page 25