Lottie watches the girl, hands tucked into her elbows, knuckles tight.
‘Who?’ says Frank.
‘That’s the biter,’ Lottie says.
The white girl stares inside herself.
‘Her head,’ Frank says.
‘She doesn’t bite anymore,’ says Lottie. ‘Supper.’
The next day Frank watches. Behind the fence, Julia runs. Her feet hammer the earth. She blows like a racehorse and runs, drawn by the invisible, desirable thing. The hot day wears on.
As the afternoon sinks into evening, the girl is suddenly there behind the wire, a white pillar on the summer green. Frank wheels himself close to the fence. The lines of her face are deep, intent. Ripples pass over soft, closed lids. Something urgent passes within. She’s smaller than expected.
‘All right,’ Frank says to her. It’s as good as talking to salt.
He puts two fingers through the chain-link.
The white lids shiver. They part. Her eyes are black scrawls on white. As the girl leans in, Frank knows with delicious certainty that she’ll have his fingers off. He feels, as if it has already happened, the clamp of her teeth, her mouth closing like a trap on him. He doesn’t move.
Slowly, she rests her cheek against the wire, against his hand, like an exhausted child.
Frank turns his face to the sun and they stay like that for a time.
In the hot days that follow, Frank makes for the fence and sits by it. Sometimes she comes, and sometimes she doesn’t. Frank feels she recognises him, that there’s friendliness between them, somehow. Her eyes are rarely opened. She does not acknowledge him after that first time.
‘I never see her come or go,’ he tells Lottie.
‘Well,’ Lottie says, ‘she walks and falls like the rest of us, I assure you.’
The prosthesis is stiff and smells richly of leather. It makes Frank think of harness rooms and shining hide, horses’ eyes and the scent of the blacksmith. Longing curls up deep in his midriff, sudden and brutal. He is surprised. It is a long time since he has thought of home, of anything but the present moment. The long room grows slippery, won’t stay still. The metal and leather are ungainly, hopeless in his hands.
‘It’s the strap,’ says Lottie. ‘It’s like so.’ Her hands are cool, light. They move on him, birds walking on sand. ‘It’s awkward. You’ll grow accustomed.’
As they rise the floor skids and bucks. The leather is tight about his knee, his shin, binding him like steel. He wonders if it should be that tight, but only for a moment because then he is walking, with Lottie under his shoulder, grim and solid.
‘It’s like being on the sea,’ Frank says. He is exhilarated. The windows, the walls, everything sways at an unexpected level. He is man-height once more.
Lottie hums. ‘Is it?’ she says.
‘I don’t know,’ Frank says to the top of her head. His smile is painful like a crack in the ground. ‘Better.’
The sun falls through the beech tree, dapples the ground. Bark against Frank’s back, warm with the late day. Lottie sits at his feet, eyes on the daisies in her hands. She works steadily, piercing the juicy stalks with the pin. The white and yellow heads hang lightly from one another, impaled. Her white cap nestles in the grass. Without it her head is small and beautiful like a nut. Lottie throws her eyes up at him, then down. Frank feels her attention, her alertness on him like an embrace.
‘My brother went to sea,’ Lottie says at last. ‘He was killed, sounds so silly doesn’t it, when everyone was killed, so many. It was well before all this. He drowned off the coast of Gibraltar. In ’06.’
Frank says nothing. Sometimes the story is sufficient unto itself. Sometimes silence is what’s called for.
‘Stan,’ she says. ‘He brought me oranges from Seville. You see when Stan came back, the first time, I thought he was my dad. Because that’s who I had been waiting for. My dad. Not a brother. I was four. Met him at the gate.’
She talks, and Frank leans against the tree. Her words fall around them in the warm air. It’s a short story in some ways. In others it’s still going on. Lottie is ashamed, and loving, and puzzled by turns. The words she doesn’t say are there too, running through like ribbons. Her smooth brown hair looks warm in the sun, warm like the tree at his back. It seems to Frank then that it’s all part of the same thing: the sun, the tree, her hair, her voice.
When she has told him what she needed to tell, they are quiet for a time. At last, quite naturally, he lays a hand on the shining wing of her hair. She smiles. ‘Families,’ she says. She holds her hands high. The daisy chain forms a ragged O against the sky.
Frank feels she has given him something. He’d like to give it back. He tells her about his mother. The aching blue of her eyes, her coal-black hair shot with grey, like veins through ore. Her name, lilting and foreign. Chloe. She tied knots in her handkerchief to remind herself of things. When her mind went she kept the habit, though she no longer knew what the knots were for. When she died her drawers were full of lengths of knotted linen. Blue, red, white, yellow. Silk, cotton. A long record, a litany of undone tasks.
She had been in service when it happened, in a bad, lonely place with a name like murdered flesh. She ran away. She had the child. Frank’s hidden brother.
Afterwards she went to London. She met Dad. He and his little boy, Stephen. He was grieving his dead wife. They married, and Frank was born. The four of them made a family.
Dad would plait straw men for Frank and Stephen, both his sons. The warm light of the stable, the red, large hands moving with intricate precision, the shape of a person slowly emerging from twists of disparate strands.
Stephen, his half-brother. Frank loved him with a younger brother’s passion. The tooth Stephen lost in a fight about a girl in a pub, long before the war. It made him more handsome, not less. Stephen, who, being older, always remembered to tell Frank about the things he had learned through four years’ advantage (about girls, mainly, that was that).
They made a family but the ghost was always in their midst. The other, hidden brother, never seen, not spoken of. Somewhere, a strange boy with Chloe’s eyes, which are also Frank’s eyes; with the same coal-black hair. It’s like theft, somehow. Or like a knotted handkerchief, a thing undone.
Lottie says, ‘You ever wonder where he is?’
Sometimes in dreams Frank runs after his hidden brother, arms outstretched for capture. They dart and duck, identical faces coloured high with exertion, with pleasure. At the end Frank seizes him and they melt into one another like toffee: black hair, white limbs, blue eyes.
‘No,’ Frank says. ‘Stephen was my brother.’ Stephen, whose skull was shattered by a bullet at Cambrai. ‘Anyhow.’ The hidden brother is most likely cold in the ground. Lottie looks away. She makes a small noise. She knows. Everyone is dead.
In the distance, over the green summer lawn, through the wire, something stands white and still. Lottie looks at the girl, says, ‘D’you know why she’s like that?’
‘Well, she’s …’ Frank shies, curious and coy, from the word.
Lottie shakes her head. ‘They cut out little bits at a time. Did it too often.’
The white girl stands apart, patient, black eyes hooded. Her face is brief, a slip of paper beneath the heavily bandaged head. Something travels through Frank’s nethers, light and cold.
‘Bits of,’ says Frank.
Lottie bites her knuckle. She looks at him with sympathy and taps her head once, lightly. ‘Through the skull, or the nose. The biter. She was a handful, in the beginning. I think that’s why they went at her so many times. But it won’t be long, now. She can’t eat. She breathes and all that. But she’s gone. We don’t even use her name anymore. We don’t, when they go like that. Sounds bad, doesn’t it? But. I don’t know. It’d be like pretending they didn’t do it. Making out like she’s alive. You don’t want to know what it’s like over there. I declare, I could spit.’ Lottie rubs her glowing face with a small hand. ‘Sometimes,’ she
says, ‘I think, well, she’s all right. She doesn’t know anything about it, anymore. And there are so many things to feel awful about. D’you know, it’s me I’m sorry for. I want to dance in nightclubs. I want to eat grapes on a lido and wear proper stockings and I don’t know.’ Lottie stops abruptly and stares at Frank. ‘I’m a proper monster, I’m sure.’ She breathes fast, hands folded together as if for church. Her eyelashes are thick and lustrous in the yellow light.
He touches Lottie’s cheek. They look at one another, intent, as if examining for flaws.
‘I’ve a good mind to,’ says Frank.
‘Go on then,’ she says.
Later, when the sun is cooling on the grass, Lottie says, ‘That girl who came to see you.’
‘Madge,’ Frank says. ‘She told me it was no good.’
‘Do you mind?’
Frank is not sure. He doesn’t ask himself this sort of question. He fears he would never stop.
Lottie yawns and says, ‘What’ll you do? Now.’
After a while he says, as if practising, ‘My dad was a cabby. I know horses. I can run a motor car. I suppose there are still motor cars and horses.’
‘I suppose.’ Lottie touches his hand where it rests on her shoulder. As she does, the light goes. Pain, which visits him so rarely now, lunges through his leg. It races across his flesh with wicked appetite. It rolls into his bones and swills around.
He presses an arm into his wet eyes. The afternoon is gone as if it had never been. What he speaks aloud then he doesn’t know but he must have said something, because when he surfaces again, Lottie is saying, ‘It doesn’t matter. Everything’s broken up and in bits. All the old ways. So you can take those bits, and do what you want with them. Do you see?’
Her voice runs over him, her hands rest light and urgent on his chest. Everything about her, her scent, clings to him like perspiration. He feels everything. He wanted to give her something but it’s too much.
Frank says, ‘I shan’t be driving motor cars or riding horses, shall I.’ He puts her from him. ‘Don’t,’ he says.
‘Suit yourself,’ Lottie says. He feels her leave his side, feels the slight movement of air.
Annie brings him a pillow. She proffers it vaguely. ‘Leaving us tomorrow,’ she suggests.
‘Yes,’ Frank says. On the other side of the ward Lottie is laughing at something. Her hand covers her mouth. She’s far away, low lit. Her eyes move over him easily. They haven’t spoken since that day. Annie brings him things now and tends his new, healed flesh. Her touch is always tentative as if she can’t quite credit his existence.
‘Where will you be going, then?’ says Annie. She holds the covered bedpan with absent grace.
‘Bromley,’ Frank says. ‘To my uncle. He has a garage.’ As he speaks Annie’s eyes wander. She’s tired. Her question was a courtesy which she cannot now sustain. Or perhaps nurses just know lies when they hear them.
The golden lamps are dimmed one by one and the shuffling of men recedes into sleep. There is the usual crying out, of those whose fear catches them unawares before they settle. Every evening they are surprised. Their memories of mud and blood and bared teeth, which the day has held at bay. Frank stares at the ceiling, willing everything to be white. Where will he go, when he leaves Earlswood? He thinks of ditches and newspaper and mossy bones. The night moves on.
At length Frank sits up. He leans from the bed and takes his leg from where it rests on the cabinet. Buckles, the now familiar melding of flesh and leather. He takes his uniform from its neatly folded place in the drawer. There’s almost nothing else; everything was taken at Dieppe. He dresses with care and ceremony, slow with the buttons. He smoothes his shirt under his jacket, draws the trousers over his stiff, unfeeling leg. He looks at his few things which are left. Not much of a life.
The final thing sits cold and heavy at the back of the cabinet, wrapped in oilcloth. Frank puts it in his pocket. He makes his way between the beds, out of the ward, and down the bilious green corridor. No one is there. Shouldn’t there be someone?
The door to the garden is locked and bolted, of course, but only on the inside. No one is guarding against those who wish to get out. The night is warm, still, scented with smoke. A bonfire smoulders somewhere.
The tree spreads darker shadows across the dark. Under its branches, the grass is damp and riddled with roots, lumpy like objections. Frank tries to sit. His stiff, unreal leg skids, frightening. He leans against the trunk and shakes. Memory comes in sharp bursts, unbidden.
Frank thinks of the boy he saw caught in the propeller at Verdun. He can’t recall his name. The boy turned to Frank, grinned, showed the gap in his teeth and shouted, Look at that, thunder later I shouldn’t wonder. The sky behind him was like steel. And then his arm was gone, then half his head.
There was a man who came out of the dark, one night, to give him a cup of tea. Frank couldn’t take it for the shaking. The man took his hand in his. They stood, rifles slung over shoulders, hands clasped in the quiet dark. Until the man closed Frank’s fist about the cooling billycan and went.
Frank thinks of Stephen, who before that had been the last boy to hold Frank’s hand and give him comfort. The weight of his arm about Frank’s shoulder. His rough tobacco scent. And the other. Perhaps in the grey waste of death Frank will find both his brothers.
The sliding on Frank’s face is hot. His hands dig into themselves. Moonlight shivers through the tree. Night flowers, honeysuckle, old earth. Burning leaves. Frank thinks of all the old things in the ground, dead and long-ago buried and forgotten. He thinks of all the new things that uncurl, green and hopeful, each day. He thinks of rocky islands, where there are only birds and the sea. He imagines a great hole at the centre of the earth, which spews things out for a moment, houses and lives and string and lit windows and beer and red dresses and words from books, and then sucks them back in again like a whirlpool, like a drain. Everything, he thinks, will go back down that hole. And what’s at the bottom? There used to be reasons for things.
He takes the revolver from his pocket and opens his mouth. It tastes of oil and shot. The click is shocking, rattles his skull. Frank screws his eyes tight closed. Little lights dance against his eyelids.
The blow comes through the dark like the wing of a bird.
It glances off Frank’s brow and he staggers. It seems so unlikely and unfair that someone should be hitting him over the head that for a moment he can’t believe it. The sky and the tree and the grass revolve.
A white hand, white fluttering linen. Her teeth are yellow like the smile of the moon. Her head is free of bandages, and without them she is suddenly sharp, alive, the shape of her skull tender beneath fine new hair. The scars stand up like valley rims in the moonlight.
How did you get over, he tries to ask, get out? The girl raises her arm. He sees the raw wound where her shoulder bleeds, syrup dark on her white skin. Her face is a mask. The length of fence post shines in her hand, furry with earth where it was pulled from the ground. Her blank eyes have no centre. The eyes expand, grow and take up her face. They swell, spread into the air, take in everything until the world is made of one mad eye.
Frank has time to think a few things before the second blow falls. One of them is: not ready at all, am I. Actually. Not yet.
The eye glistens. Something whistles. Everything droops and cants, is melting pitch.
Lottie finds Frank in the garden, sprawled face down. He’s naked as a baby. His service revolver rests under his loose palm, silvered with rain.
When Lottie turns him over he wakes, spits, coughs. The hummock on his head sends out pulses of delicate purple, of black. Blood trickles down his face, a line drawn by a hot pin. He feels rotten.
He holds Lottie close. She lets him. The shape of her is fleshly. ‘Sh,’ Lottie says, her gaze wide and dark as a deer’s. ‘Thought you’d done it,’ she says. ‘Thought it was all up with you. We’ve been looking … I was beside myself. Such a commotion. The storm—’
/> ‘Storm?’ says Frank.
‘Look,’ says Lottie.
The tree above them is stripped of most of its leaves. Branches hang raw and broken. Around, the grass is littered with the debris like the aftermath of a battle. The lawn is laced with pools of rainwater, gleaming. The ground beneath Frank’s shivering body is sodden, mired.
‘And,’ says Lottie, ‘the biter—’
‘She took my clothes,’ says Frank. Rage drops over him like a hot cloth.
Lottie looks at him, careful. ‘She was gone this morning,’ she says. ‘Room locked, bed empty, windows barred. She’d vanished, like in a penny dreadful.’
Frank says, ‘I know. With my uniform. Clocked me over the head.’
‘Well,’ says Lottie, uncertain, ‘no, she’d died.’
Frank stares. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Let me …’
‘We couldn’t see her anywhere. Or see how she’d got out. Gave us all the chills. But then I looked under the bed,’ Lottie says, quickly now, ‘and she was there. With her head all bare. It was pretty bad. Her skull through her hair. All those scars.’ Lottie starts to cry. ‘Crawled under her bed, curled up like a cat and died. Perhaps she was afraid of the thunder. I think I was fond of her after all. And oh, those beds are bolted to the wall, you know, it was a business getting her out from under. And then.’ Lottie stops, draws breath. Overhead the clouds are breaking up, pierced by blue. Weak sun on her face. ‘When you weren’t in your bed either, I was that upset, I had the oddest thoughts. I thought,’ she pauses as laughter struggles out of her, high, ‘they’ve only gone and run away together. I knew she was dead. I’d seen her, dead as anything. But my first thought – both of you gone from your beds, like an elopement …’
Frank grips Lottie’s arms through the sleeves. He squints up at her, a vast blunt shape against the brightening sky. He wants to tell, to make her see the great mad eye, the yellow moon grin, the biter. He starts to say how it happened. But the words lollop and scatter before they meet his tongue. His head sings with canaries. And he isn’t sure, any longer, what has passed. There seems to have been a bargain made, somewhere, in which he’s come out best.
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