Where the stalls ran out, business had overflowed onto the ground beyond, and as Mick pushed through, we wound our way behind him until he stopped, claiming a small space by the roadside as our own. Hardly had we time to put down our piles of blankets before people were upon us, clamouring for the price and then inevitably, with clicking tongues and shaking heads, were keen to buy only after the obligatory round, and more, of haggling. Our lack of common language proved no barrier, a series of nods and gestures being adequate to our purpose and, where they failed, we squatted on the floor with prospective clients and wrote figures in the dust.
We had sold out within the hour and, waving away the requests for more, enlivened by success, we headed back towards the camp.
Dodging the listless and incurious patrol, we made it back to our accommodation block in time for lunch. It seemed that our absence had gone unnoticed by the guards, if not by Billy Rawlins who, I noticed, nudged Butler as we entered and, smirking knowingly, inclined his head in our direction. We joined the queue for rice and began to dream of nightfall and the opening of the railway station’s restaurant, which Jed had reckoned was the best place to splurge our morning’s takings.
Dusk found us sneaking back across the broken fence and spurred on by constant, clawing hunger, made all the more desperate by the prospect of a feast, we hurried back into the town. We fell onto the food scarcely before the waiter had time to place the plates upon the table. Chicken, warm and smoky, fell off the bone, soaking up the richness of its creamy sauce, which made it softer, lusciously more tender. The burnished casing of the large, salted pommes frites hid a snowy white interior which, deliciously dense and floury, melted away across my riven tongue while the steaming beans, fat and split and green, came bathed in buttery luxury. The wine was red and rough, burning down the length of my chapped and shrivelled throat but was all the more satisfying for it, while the tarte aux pommes, glistening with sugared glossiness, stung sharp its sweet asperity. I have never, before or since, tasted food more glorious.
But as our stomachs filled and the speed with which we ate gradually began to slow, I became more and more conscious that Big Sam, sitting across from me, kept stopping and looking over. Several times, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him swallow and then glance across as if to engage with me, as if on the verge of speaking and then, taking in another mouthful, deferring the moment, unsure of how best he might begin. When I looked back up at him, he quickly looked away.
Since I had stood up by Joe the night that Moses had thrown himself into the water, Big Sam and I had barely exchanged a word. In his renunciation of Joe’s friendship, he had also revoked mine. He had never said anything to me about it and he never did speak to Joe again, but I got the impression from him after Joe had died that somehow he was sorry. He had, I knew, come silently down the beach with Fraser to help carry Joe’s body back up from the sea. As the rawness of his anger at Mac had turned to justified disgust, he had perhaps realised the truth in Joe’s assertion that Mac’s murder would have resulted in his own. And now, with his health slowly returning and his rational mind restored, Big Sam had recognised that Joe indeed had been his friend and had, as Joe had argued, been trying only to protect him.
After the fifth or sixth time I caught him looking, I put down my spoon and stared directly across at him. ‘Sam, what? What is your problem?’
‘Eh?’ said Mick, starting up and spraying my plate and half the tablecloth with flecks of apple pastry.
‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’ Big Sam shook his head then and lowering his large, heavy lids, shifted uncomfortably in his chair. I shrugged and made to pick up my spoon again, but he suddenly folded his arms and leant forward, resting his elbows on the table.
‘It’s just that I was thinking…’ he began slowly, staring at a fixed point on the cloth just in front of him. ‘I was just thinking that Joe wouldn’t half have enjoyed this, Cub. Wouldn’t he, eh? The whole damn thing.’ He looked up at me then, and as I nodded, fighting down the sudden pain that clamped around my chest, I saw the guilty sorrow in the darkness of his eyes. ‘I would have liked to have seen him here with us, Cub. That’s all,’ he added quietly.
As he finished speaking, the outlines of his features slowly began to merge and dim and, blinking quickly, I had to look away.
‘Bloody ’ell – get down!’ Mick suddenly lurched sideways in his seat, bending low and making a grab at the menu from the middle of the table, flicking it upright in front of his face in an inane attempt to hide. ‘Jesus, we’re fucking for it now!’
In reflex, we all flinched down without yet knowing why, but as we looked at Mick to track the cause of his wide-eyed alarm, we saw that the Commandant and his wife, accompanied by another couple, had just come in and were being shown to the corner of the room to take their table.
‘He has seen us?’ Tomas hissed at me, sliding so low down in his seat that his shoulders became almost level with the table. He scarcely dared to turn his head to look, for fear of drawing attention to himself with the movement, and the five of us sat motionless for what felt like several minutes, hardly daring to breathe while our minds scrabbled wildly for the best exit strategy.
‘He must have bloody seen us. Can’t bloody miss us in these friggin’ clothes,’ breathed Jed. It was true. The restaurant was hardly full and though our table was almost at the other side of the room from the one at which the Commandant’s party were now seated, it was central. I risked a recce over the top of the menu that I had snatched up to shield my face and saw the Commandant deep in conversation with one of his companions, but just as he had finished speaking, his eyes swept up and across the room, catching mine for just a sliver of a second. I darted down behind my barricade.
‘Seen us,’ I said. ‘Fuck it.’
‘Wanna run for it?’ Big Sam, whose body was still not one that could be missed nor easily mistaken, half rose in readiness.
‘Too late.’ I let the menu flop down before me on to the table, steeling myself for the Commandant’s approach but as I looked again towards his table, I found, to my surprise, that he had not moved. He was drinking wine and listening attentively to the woman on his right.
‘Let’s get outta here.’ Still crouching and keeping my head down low, I glanced at Mick who had ducked off his seat and was more or less underneath the table. ‘Let’s just leave the money here.’
‘What? All of it?’
‘Yes, bloody all of it,’ Jed snapped. ‘Let’s go! That way.’ He nodded at the double doors leading to the kitchens but which, unlike the restaurant’s entrance, were in the opposite direction to the Commandant’s table. Without daring to look behind, we scuttled from our seats and, hearts pounding, scrambled for their cover.
Still pulsing with adrenalin and wondering what exactly we might have got away with, though for the first time in many months, adequately fed, we snuck silently back into the camp and were still lying wide awake on our beds when the lights snapped on at midnight and the Commandant, with the weasel and one other officer, marched in. Making a beeline for the foot of Captain Edwards’ bed, the Commandant strode purposefully down the room and stopping abruptly, called his name. Only a few white tufts of hair were visible from beneath the blanket at first, but when called again, the skipper’s sleepy face appeared, wincing and disorientated by the sudden light.
‘Captain Edwards,’ the Commandant began evenly, but loud enough for the whole room to hear. ‘I have just seen five of your men sitting in a restaurant in the town. I would recognise each one of them.’ He paused deliberately and looked around the room. ‘You will report with them to my office in the morning before breakfast. We will decide together then, on the consequence.’ He waited for Captain Edwards to nod his hesitant agreement and then turned on his heel. ‘Good night.’
As soon as the door had closed behind them, Billy’s voice rang out across the darkness, laced with smug and eager satisfaction. ‘It was Mick. Sam was with him. Tomas and Cubby Clarke. Thievin’ bastards
. Saw them coming in this morning. With some other bloke. Knew that they were up to something but if I’d’ve known they were takin’ blankets off my bed, I’d’ve bloody had them for it then.’
I heard the skipper heave a sigh as, turning his back on Billy’s malice, he tried again to settle down to sleep. ‘I know full well who it was, thank you, Billy,’ he said forbearingly. ‘Just wish they’d had the bloody sense not to get caught.’
The following morning, we shuffled into the Commandant’s office behind the skipper without Jed. The captain had asked us once for his name and, greeted by downcast eyes and silence, had shaken his head indulgently and muttered, ‘Perhaps he’ll even see some merit in it.’
I brought up the rear, fixing my eyes firmly on the dusty toecaps of the size fourteen boots that the weasel had rooted out for me. They were too big and my feet slid about inside them but they did not hurt. I was surprised into looking up though, by the friendliness in the Commandant’s voice when he asked if I would shut the door behind me. He was standing behind his desk, with his face half-turned towards the open window and in the reflected light cast by the bright morning sun, his grey eyes shone.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ he began courteously. ‘I hope that you ate well last night?’
We shuffled no reply but as I looked up at him and his eye caught mine, I saw his huge moustache begin to twitch slightly, as if to suppress the inconvenience of a smile.
‘I did. Very good, the food at that restaurant. You could not have chosen any better. You also could not have chosen a more perfect moment for your break-out.’ Clearly enjoying the confusion that must have registered on our faces, he threw up his arms and smiling broadly, came around the side of his desk, to extend his hand to Captain Edwards. The skipper, not knowing quite what else to do, took it and looked up in bewilderment at the delight exuding from the Commandant’s face.
‘Well, my friend, it appears that the Allies have landed in North Africa!’ He pumped the captain’s hand up and down excitedly, shaking the skipper’s fragile, little frame almost off the floor. ‘Governor General Boisson has finally gone over to your side. All of French West Africa has. Do you understand me? You and I, we are no longer really enemies.’ He turned enthusiastically towards the rest of us, ‘You saw me out last night with friends. We went out to celebrate!’
‘Then we’re going home!’ Mick, incredulous, looked joyfully at me and then back at the Commandant for confirmation. ‘You’re releasing us?’
But the smile on the Commandant’s face faded slightly. ‘Ah, no, not yet,’ he cleared his throat. ‘No, not quite yet, I am afraid. At the moment, it is still rumour. Wait, wait! But it is true,’ he added hastily, keen to allay our evident disappointment. ‘And I must await my orders. But in the meantime, I do not see why you should be kept so much as prisoners.’
He went back around to the other side of his desk and taking a piece of paper and a pencil from the top right-hand drawer, he sat down. Again, wetting the pencil with his tongue, he took it to the top of the paper and looked up at us expectantly, ‘What can I do then, to make your stay here more agreeable?’
By the time we left his office half an hour later, he had agreed that all prisoners should be granted passes to allow them into town on a rota basis and that instead of feeding us in the evening, he would provide us with a small allowance, that we might buy our own meat and vegetables from the marketplace and have Big Sam prepare them for us. Guards would no longer accompany prisoners around the camp and the pointless, exhausting hours spent standing out under the devastating desert sun, pretending to try to clear away ubiquitous and unconquerable scrub, were at an end.
True to his word, the Commandant saw to it that these privileges were implemented immediately, and they went some way to alleviating both the monotony and our misery. Though still weak and desperately underweight, the access to a more varied diet meant that the long and laborious road to physical recovery could at least begin.
But it was January before he was finally able to release us. The British Consul General had just returned to Dakar and it was he who apparently arranged for our transferral by train and then by ferry on to Freetown. The trip away from Timbuktu, though as uncomfortable and protracted as the journey up, proved far less onerous. The locals, eager now to embrace us as their allies, could scarcely have been more solicitous, pressing food and drink upon us at each station and hailing us with joyful solidarity as we passed through. Besides, we were girded by the knowledge that it was over and we were going home.
In Freetown, we were allocated berths on the Johan van Olden Barneveldt, which was there on the quayside awaiting our arrival and, clenching my fingers around the guiding ropes on either side of her gangway, I reached her deck and did not once look back.
There was an icy wind the day we docked in Barrow-in-Furness, and though it was not raining, a bleak, dispiriting dankness clothed the town in grey.
Fraser stopped me in the companionway outside my cabin and offered me his hand. I took it and we regarded one another silently for the few moments it took to shake and then, as I made to pull my hand away, he held me back.
‘You were brave,’ he said quietly. ‘Hold on to that.’ He spoke so softly that I wondered, after he had left me, if I had really heard him say anything at all.
By the time I had made it to the top of the gangplank, Billy was already on the quay. Shouldering his scant possessions in a kit bag filched from somewhere on the Barneveldt, he ducked his head down onto his chest as he turned into the wind, vainly seeking to protect his bony body from its bitter edge.
‘Hey, Billy… Billy!’ Butler, who had come up behind me, suddenly eager, pushed past and, stopping on the threshold of the doorway, shouted down. But the wind whipped away his cries and Billy, striding by below, did not seem to hear.
‘Billy! Hey… Rawlins!’ Butler bellowed.
Billy finally looked up and turning one shoulder in against the gale, he put up a hand to shield his face and nodded up his answer.
‘Friday. The Old Roan?’ Butler yelled.
Billy, looking slightly irritated, nodded a couple of times more emphatically and, turning back abruptly into the wind, began to walk away.
My legs were shaking slightly and at the bottom of the gangway, I had to stop for a moment to summon strength. Squalls, icy and intermittent, swirled up the dockside’s rubbish and bit into my bones. I had been given a lightweight jacket by one of the Barneveldt’s sympathetic crew and I drew it more tightly around my body, but my knees, still exposed, and my sockless feet seemed to seize at the wind’s assault.
I shivered and dipping my head, started to make my way across the quay.
‘Cub, wait!’ It was Jack. I stopped and turned to find him jogging towards me, one hand held up to delay my leaving.
He caught me up and stood breathlessly before me for a moment, his eyes bright and watery, and I waited. ‘I wanted to say thank you. You helped me…’ he looked down for a second, at the mottled blotches on the concrete, which merging now, glistened with a thin, fine sheen of moisture. ‘A couple of times, you helped me… when I needed it.’
Without warning, I felt a lump rise up at the back of my throat and I fought to hold it down, swallowing with pain. Water sprang up at the corners of my eyes and pooled, disconcertingly close to falling, along my lower lids. It was a particularly biting wind. What, had it been Joe and I who were parting now, would I have tried to say to him? Confident in the knowledge that his friendship had been one that would have lasted out my lifetime, it was not the arrangement of our prospective lives and each other’s role within them that would have troubled me. It was how, at this juncture, at the end of so horrific a journey, would I ever even have begun to thank him. For his protection, for his friendship, for his unfailing belief in the goodness of my heart and for never once allowing me to give it up. By being who he was, he had soldered up the raw material of my soul and had shown me how to be the man I had become. And I had never even thanked him.
‘I thought perhaps I’d be seein’ you around? Mebbe we could get together, have a drink or somethin’?’ Jack said blithely, stamping his feet and rubbing his hands together rapidly in an attempt to get up some warmth.
I looked into his face and read an eagerness to make it right, to lose in the creation of new memories, the old; to take the chance to recreate ourselves as civilised and reasonable men in each other’s minds. Had he been Joe, there would have been no need.
‘I don’t think so, Jack,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘There are some things that are better left behind and this, I think, is one of them.’ The quiet resolution in my voice surprised us both. He looked startled, even slightly offended, as if by refusing such a friendly invitation, I had contravened some unwritten law of polite and social practice, a law that had been summarily reinstated as soon as we had set foot back on our native soil.
‘I’m sorry. The memory’s hard enough.’ I tried to smile. ‘Goodbye Jack,’ I said, as I offered him my hand.
I turned low to spin away from him, my head down against the wind, eager to be gone, but as I did so, I jostled into a woman who stood alone on the quayside a couple of yards behind me. I had not noticed her before. That she made no attempt to move as I swung around, gave me, in that split second, a strong impression of her vague, corporeal inattention. Her mind, like mine, was somewhere else.
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