The Death of William Posters

by Alan Sillitoe

  Frank pushed, lifted, heaved with all his strength. He lay on his back shovelling sand from the oily stinking undergut of the lorry, with danger of it subsiding, pressing him down into suffocation and death. ‘I’ve done some rum work in my time,’ he said to the uncomprehending Moroccan working the same seam nearby, ‘shifted all sorts o’ rammel, but this lot takes the bleddy cake, mate.’

  Shelley knelt by, a half-knowing glance at the overall situation. Frank was becoming an unknown man to him: the broadening of his accent back to a deeper Midland Limey made him intimidating, a stranger, lying there at his ferocious and vital work. But the mood passed when the lorry was clear again.

  Frank lit a cigarette. While working he had forgotten the wind. Now it was back in his ears, functional at least in that it dried his sweat, stiffened the dishrags of his clothes. He saw himself in the oblong mirror of the lorry as he climbed in, conscious of his increasing strength. His short hair was grey from ash and sand, face pallid showing a wide grin with even teeth, arms apart as he heaved himself in, ready for the death-grip of whatever might get at him. But in his face and frame, subtlety was on the march, infiltrating, penetrating, ignoring his parapets, swarming into the desert of himself.

  Dawn was breaking, free-associating ink spreading into daylight: black, blue, green and red. The land was uneven to the east, but still fairly level. Shelley drove, and the lorry went like a rhinoceros in panic. They held on, wishing long life to their bones. Some rocks were hit as if the lorry would split in two, send guns flying, bullets spitting and grenades coughing over humps and hollows. Was it like this on the moon? Even the grey dust in saucers of earth looked cosmic in the spreading light. Yesterday had no connection with this.

  One case of rifles had been given out. ‘If any point of doubtful return exists on the trip,’ Shelley said, ‘this is it.’ French planes flew from airfields at Colomb Bechar, eighty miles east, and patrols operated now and again from Meridja. F L N scouts in the area would warn of any approaching danger. But nothing would be seen if all went as it normally did, quietly. The only people met would be those of the F L N waiting to come for the supplies.

  24

  ‘We stay here all day,’ Shelley said when they reached the ravine, ‘and tonight trundle fifteen dark miles east and hope to meet up with the boys coming to get the stuff.’ It was easily said, and to move your finger a few inches here and there on an empty map. The ravine was a narrow cutting in a country of many similar concealments. They covered the lorry with cloths, sand and thornbush to make it invisible from the air, and from land unless someone stumbled right into the hiding place. ‘If that happens,’ Shelley grinned, ‘he’ll never see mom or pop again.’

  Out of the twelve, six were continually deployed among clefts and boulders surrounding the ravine. Warning signals would not only bring the rest up to reinforce them, but a further system of ankle-trips set out by Shelley with great skill and patience ensured all twelve firing at once without any voice being heard – though this was elaborate precaution rather than seriously intended defence. However, Frank couldn’t see how a more skilful ambush could have been set, a perfect trap in the middle of nowhere. It was a combination of guard and ambush, a magnetized web of defence known in the Chinese manual as the ‘spider layout’. Of the two Brens, Frank manned one, and a Moroccan held the other. The rest had rifles and grenades.

  Frank was flattened beside a rock, an enfiladed view of the plain matched to the Moroccans strung around to the right whom he knew to be there but could not see. The half conscious workings of his brain were muzzled by the uncannily sharp alertness with which his eyes registered the landscape they were to watch. He felt like a boat out in this grey and beige wilderness, rocky plateau in front, ravine behind. The sun burned, his ears still filled with the sound of the engine racing as, towards the last dawn, its tyres had spun to escape the rut they’d sunk into, as his own mind and body had formerly and likewise crazed him in the thousand useless revolutions of his own spirit. The land turned a dim red, then purple, the horizon shimmering, a line beyond which the remains of a man’s soul might find final rest, or the ways and means of change that he had always deserved.

  The last time he’d held a loaded Bren was on an army range eleven years ago, and not hoping to kill anyone. To wait was theatrical, because waiting meant thought, a continual monologue of destruction and fulfilment. I’m waiting in case the French show up, when I’d give a lot for it to be the British, because they are the ones I should be doing my nut against. Each to his own, and the rest will look after itself. If Kenya was still on I’d make my way there – or somewhere else if I get safe out of this. The past wouldn’t come to him, and he didn’t know whether to be glad or not. It seemed good that it wouldn’t, that it skulked beyond some horizon he’d left behind. His grey eyes glazed the rocks and dips for signs of life. Nothing. Even William Posters blended with the landscape, ghost of the bleak steppe toting a gun, on a level of equality with those who would persecute and prosecute. He hadn’t thought of him for months, in any case – William Posters, that soul-anchor stuck in your craw, those dim jerking pictures flickering on the screen behind your eyes when closed, working bewildering renegade rebel magic on the sentimental layers of your caked heart asking for pity and understanding as he flitted, half butterfly, half oil-rag, between the changing shadows of the past. He had lost his cap, dismantled his face, outspanned his forever nebulous cause, and walked over the bottomless cliff towards which you – Frank – had been leading him, not quite without knowing it, from the days of consciousness, whenever that was.

  Bill Posters, thank God, had died at last in the ruins of Radford-Stalingrad. Frank had seen it, or pictured it as if he had: poor Bill sitting by the wall eating his bread, having given his persecutors the ten-minute slip, relaxed and rested at this small victory, smiling to himself at the peace, and at the good taste of bread, thinking so devoutly how good-looking was that gorgonzola moon above chimney pots he hadn’t noticed weren’t smoking any more. O Bill, you go off the boil for ten minutes, and the game is up! A crane starts working and smashes an ironball down against the wall he’s leaning against (men on night-work because they can’t clear this slum-land quick enough) and William Posters is crushed to death under the slabs and bricks, beams and fireplaces. Undernourished and hunted, he never stood a chance. They found him dead after digging him out, and nobody recognized him as the William Posters whose legendary name had been on so many walls for a hundred years. So he died, unidentified. He hoped he’d died, but who could tell? Such unknown great men sometimes become ghosts and haunt you long enough for it to last the rest of your life. Unless of course you had a hand in their killing. That would be treachery, but what the hell – you not only had to live but you had to survive as well.

  He spat the brandy taste out, a strange stillness, no man visible. He was alone, facing a wind hundreds of miles across. It brought no panic, didn’t frighten him. Bravery was something he’d never thought about, like so much else. Overcoming the pain of sun and thirst brought back memories that were sweetened by solitude. Three hours were three days, three months, three years, three decades. He no longer felt a new man. The old man who had gone through his tether and was about to become the new man, perhaps. That was more like it, the old man doing violence to himself and others without knowing it, but the new man knowing it, already committing violence against nature by wanting to overpower the wild stallion of nature that must be held down, gelded, hobbled, and put to use. He remembered the factory vividly, more so than the layout at home, than wife, kids, or furniture. The factory was a permanent set-up in the back rooms of his brain, the violence and rationality of machinery, its benevolence when kept full-tilt at its proper use.

  The day would drag on – that was as far as he wanted to see ahead, teeth locked like the fixed bolt of his machine-gun. A headache rolled vibrations of the parched wilderness through him, but a grid of clarity before his eyes drew in memories that his brain tried to reject b
ecause he hadn’t been able to control them, none at all except the one that had landed him here. His heart beat like a flower bomb fixed in the culvert of his own life’s iron road, waiting for some long predestined train or convoy to come along. His body lay upon the stillness, stones hot against his fingers.

  He had lived most of his life on the assumption that whatever he wanted was unattainable. That bastard, William Posters, had to die, even if Frank had to snuff it with him, leap that cliff with his ten-ton immortal shadow still gripping his back. Posters was too English for this world. He laughed to himself, could afford to out here where it only bounced back in his face. That sponge-man who’d gobbled up his life and fantasy didn’t mean a thing any more, that telly-rat and dope-peddler who hammered the nails into hands and brain to stop you moving, whispered that since something in life was unattainable you had to stop reaching for it, that it was better to rot among the slums and ruins of a played-out way of life, persecuted and prosecuted, flitting from wall to shadow whither your own demons pursued you in an ever narrowing maze with misery and failure at the middle. It was about time that crane-ball stunned him into the wickedest oblivion of all – oblivion deserved.

  Even in his own pure dreams Frank had felt something in life he might never get, though mulling now in clear daylight, there’d been no reason why he shouldn’t. He didn’t know at all what it was. Maybe it wasn’t attainable in this life (and that was that) but would form the unearned reward of lives coming after him. Perhaps that also was for the birds, for the desert hawk circling and cawing above. But if he led his life to the greatest extent of which he was capable and disregarded this premonition of dreams, then he would break beyond this horizon wall, sensed all his life, whether it was of brick or cloud or ultimately nothing at all.

  His dreams and thoughts were ancient and similar: to dissect them would be like chucking a fag into the latrines and pissing it to bits; nothing gained. All he wanted to do was fire a single shot, finish off the shite-hawk or corpse-gosling that went on circling their hideaway.

  He pressed a stone-edge onto a scorpion, and the insect’s tail, animating like an aerial gone mad, hovered and twisted for the suicide stab. It came. Frank watched it turn grey, and the tiny ants patrolling for it. In half an hour exactly it had gone, his private desert clock wherein six of them made a three-hour guard period. William Posters, his body swinging over that cliff and down through space, wouldn’t leave him alone, that snivelling muffle-capped man on the eternal run who’d never had a Bren at his shoulder, and whose fall was followed by the wide-winged bird swooping along the ravine for a quick look and to drop its napalm shit.

  A plane flew over at midday, a Mystère jet playing west and south from Colomb Bechar. Frank was edging towards his second round of guard when the hollow, continual boom of its approach rolled like a barrel along the stony earth. When the noise leapt into the sky, he flattened. Shelley had told them there would be no danger. Only the slow ones mattered, and a battle was splintering around the Monts des Ksour, north-east of Colomb, so maybe they were chewing away up there. Head down, Frank felt the sound go over, stayed a half minute before latching himself to his Bren, his fingers on it before the Moroccan took his away and slid back to the ravine.

  More sweat piled out than if he’d been walking, certainly not less than when shovelling sand from under the chassis of the stranded lorry. The sun was no longer overhead, and he waited for its decline so that they could move through the cold and more preferable night. Having controlled his body for so many hours between the sun and stones, in perfect stillness and silence, he felt that he had become harder, craftier, and more subtle as a soldier than any who might belong to a national and conscript army.

  If only the long day would fall and break its back, get killed like that finished and shared-put scorpion. He poured water on the back of his hand and licked it off. He hadn’t eaten, not even in the ravine, felt no hunger left in him. He fed on eighteen months of thought, chewed through and thrown aside like the rammel of sucked-out bones, like the oil-rag Bill Posters didn’t get a smell of. But he was dead now, like the past. Bill Posters my vanishing brother, my colossus amigo turning to stone and sinking in quicksand, the multiple dream-deaths that a hero deserves; maybe caught by swarming napalm in the final barbaric ritual of Promethean fire, or edged out by old age after a lifetime of work and wisdom. Who is to say, and who is to care? There was nothing left except the brown paper of himself filling up out of the fertile desert.

  That shite-hawk spun into twins now. An aeroplane, birds, the sun – only the sky had life. The twelve men were dead until they got up and walked, moved, or fired a shot. In the ravine Shelley had sat huddled in a shallow cave, Arab music playing low on a transistor small as his hand, saying to Frank that this was always the worst day of the trip, when he felt cut off from mankind and needed proof that the world hadn’t been obliterated. Frank smiled. He didn’t need proof. If it had been obliterated he would have felt it without any proof.

  ‘Not me,’ Shelley said. ‘I want to know when to get up and shout for joy.’ He looked thin and tense, though no one could call him worried because he was incapable of it.

  The sun was on its way down. Frank rubbed his eyes, scraped grit from the corners with his fingernail. Once in Tangier, after a night’s booze-up with Shelley on straight red plonk, black specks had jumped before his eyes all next day, as if the midges of summer had taken over the winter air. At the worst it was like walking near a dead paperfire when the wind played on it – specks of all shapes that he actually believed were there and tried to brush away. Shelley laughed that it was his liver acting up because of too much wine.

  At five o’clock he wondered if it wasn’t happening again, this time the result of rough water heaved up from village wells on the way down. The weakening sun played against him, and he tried to press the dots away, but they hovered to the west, clear cut on the horizon. He didn’t think his eyes could betray him at such a time. There were, after all, other men still on the earth. He jerked his foot, a thin piece of string reaching down into the ravine.

  The specks had vanished. Shelley was by his side. ‘You’ll see them again. They may not hit this spot. I can’t understand it. They’re coming from Morocco, but they’re bound to be French, one of their patrols sprung as a surprise. But why Morocco? There’s the rub, Frank. Look, see them again?’ The second Bren had been moved to form a more solid front, to perfect the spider. Shelley used his glasses. ‘I make six.’ Frank remembered the manual: if there are more, retreat. If there are less and you can win, attack. He wondered on the state of his gun – which had seemed all right when he’d taken it to pieces, but who could tell? ‘If they pass a good distance on either side,’ Shelley said, ‘it’s their lucky day.’

  We’re a web, Frank thought. He had said nothing while Shelley talked. Flies always come into a web, just as rats can never resist a trap, even when they can’t see it, even in the middle of a plain like this when they could easily miss it. Noiselessly, almost without movement, Shelley was somewhere else. He checked the signal string around his ankle. His breath was shallow, forceless, as if he had no lungs and his windpipe opened on the empty air of the desert, a nothing-pump of sun-stroke and gut-ache. It would take them an hour to get here. From behind them a white light flickered once. If the plane had spotted us, he thought, they’ll fan out and make a web of their own, a war of spiders. Still far off, they came in line, as if to cut across their front, in which case there’d be no contact. He steeled himself not to drink water. Gravel chafed his boots but he wouldn’t move to empty them. Shelley was back: ‘If we pull off this ambush, we retreat the way we came. There’ll be no time to spare.’

  ‘What about the lorry, the crates of stuff?’

  ‘The others will come for it during the night. They know our stopping places. We’ve done all we can.’

  ‘Or will have,’ Frank said.

  At dusk the six men came towards the high rocky flank of the ravine. Waiting: t
hey were moving towards his gun like one end of a micrometer being wound in in slow motion, to meet the other end which was him. They were drawn by thousandths of an inch, a boon speed to his precision patience. He eased in the trigger at a few hundred yards. They were ambling along as if ready for a night’s camp and a meal, two of them laughing. They were well-spaced, called for a wider, chancier arc of fire than Frank would have thought ideal for an ambush now that they were face to face, but enfilading rifles enveloped the first and last man as they stumbled under the wall of bullets. The kick at his shoulder was the joy of life.

  The gun worked: greased, set, and aimed, half a magazine blew out of its spout towards their feet. He was human in that he had acted without thought; inhuman in that he hadn’t felt terror while waiting. They were eaten up, tossed into death. It all seemed so quick and thoughtless, silent and pantomimic under the canopy of noise that was terrifying after the long wait. The day seemed to have begun only now, and it was dusk.

  One of Shelley’s Moroccans was killed stone dead. There was no dust. It was too quick for confusion, a silent horror film you couldn’t wind back, noise tacked on later when remembered. He was afraid of such first-time success. The Moroccans smashed open the air, hurling grenades as they moved over like panthers, approached firing into the bodies, taking less than no chances, as if they hadn’t had their money’s worth and wanted a full scale battle. A cold wind blew, shattering Frank’s bones. He glanced at the scattered bodies, and lit a cigarette. He felt more empty than safe, more sure of himself than sorry for them, his feet riveted.

  It was quiet before complete darkness, an anticlimax of boredom and irritation, everyone sullen, hating to speak. Shelley had collected the soldiers’ papers: ‘They’ve all got German names, except the officer. Maybe they were Alsatians. Maybe. The French are demoralized, but they’re winning. It often happens. It breeds viciousness, and lack of caution – but they’ve got too much stuff and too many men.’