The air clears a little to show Swann mouthing some oath, then thickens again. The rider rolling onto his back as a series of dry geysers spouts at his side. Such a simple thing to raise himself up, present himself as a target, bring the thing quickly to its finish . . .
He turns his head to see Coates emerge from beneath the Quad, his face and forearms thick with powder. The Canadian stands in a whorl of sand to pull open the vehicle’s cab door, and drags out a swathe of pale fabric. He holds up the material with both hands.
Another wave of pain engulfs the rider’s breast, the shock of it causing him to retch. Still he remains conscious, the agony once more receding. The camp a blur now, the image of a fluttering red cross insistent. Coates at once formless and refigured, swimming upward but never surfacing. He thinks Swann is no longer firing the Bren, and that the plane has ceased its attack, but he is somewhere between those worlds within and outside of himself, certain of nothing. He dares to take a deeper breath and shifts his head a fraction, seeking to move it from the pooling bile beneath. He hears the plane’s exhaust note deepen and increase in volume. And still Coates persists with his banner. Clever, he thinks, to signal the camp as a medical station. Quite desperate.
Coates holds his ground. It seems almost an unfairness when the plane’s cannon barks into life at the last, kicking up a series of flumes around him as he drops the banner and lunges to his right. The rider thinks he sees something separate from the Canadian’s face and spin away into the sand. How sad, he muses: that the spit hawker has lost his mouths.
The plane returns once more, a crescendo of rent metal rising. Someone is sobbing, blubbering. It’s all beyond him now. You did really well, they might have said, had he been sympathetically attended. To hold on as long as you did.
Though in truth, if he had known surrender to be so easy, he might never have endured the struggle.
8
It is the sense of movement that rouses him. Draughts stirred by those passing close by, the career of shadow and light. Then the sound of voices raised in dispute, as though echoes of some distant commotion.
He opens his eyes to find himself beneath the canvas of a fetid arbour, a cloud of flies settled about him, their legs and mouths probing every inch of exposed skin. Too great an exertion to swat them away, his limbs no longer his own. He can smell stale vomit on his chest, taste it between his teeth. He turns his head to see he has a neighbour propped upright on a bunk several feet distant, the fellow’s head and neck parcelled in gauze, a length of slick tubing drooping from his throat, the flies gathered to him in such numbers that his head appears daubed with a living tar. Some funerary pavilion, where the dead and almost dead are laid in readiness, the organs to be removed, the body desiccated and enswathed to go before the sternest of judges. He-whose-Eyes-are-in-Flames, The Breaker of Bones, The Eater of Entrails, He-who-does-not-allow-Survivors.
A face looms close. We’ll be leaving soon. You should try and stay awake.
He-who-brooks-no-Dissension, The Purveyor of Mistruths.
Try and stay awake. He closes his eyes again, preferring sleep.
Cairo! That tumbledown Babylon, palace of effluvial airs, rank with the swill of a thousand cuisines. Mother of the World, as the Sassanids would have it. He is caught up in the old pandemonium, the squeal of tramlines, the fanfare of horns from taxis, buses, trucks, horse-drawn gharries vying for street inches with bullock-carts, touts, pedlars, beggars, loafers, bootblacks, dragomans. Hotel reservation, effendi? Diamond bracelets, effendi – only the finest! Bath mats of Nile reeds, amulets from the tombs of the Pharaohs (MADE IN BIRMINGHAM). One night of bliss, brave soldier-pasha! One night of heaven with my radiant and virginal sister.
He pauses before the Cinema Metro, its hoarding promoting . Ens Robert Taylor redeemed in the eyes of his fellow navy fliers, having saved the skin of Sqn Cdr Walter Pidgeon. You’re a born hellcat, pal, and we’re gonna hang on to you!
He has boot polish splashed onto his shins and a coronal of flaming poinsettias thrust under his nose. He acquires his own jester draped in bead necklaces – hands laced with strings of glass spittle – who clears his path with a jig. Pearls of the Nile, effendi. Glory of the Sultans!
He wanders on, leaving the wider avenues for a hive of flat-roofed dens, humble caves of stucco, malqaf wind scoops infusing their cores with the cooler breezes, the air between them heavy with the stink of raw effluence, tobacco smoke, burnt rice. He passes fellaheen reposed on palm leaves, children squabbling over dried camel dung. Somewhere in this tawdry theatre are the gates to himself, a great temple of proof lying just beyond his reach. That much he is sure of. That much he remembers. But the metropolis is overwhelming, engulfing, rising up in its noise, heat and dust, leeching vitality, infusing torpor.
Only from the rooftops is there a sense of rapture, of divination. The Blue and White Niles conjoined to a single aortic, pulsing though the Sudan, through Luxor, Aswan, rushing continental floodwaters to the Delta. The great Moqattam cliff, rising like a portcullis over the City of the Dead, unfurling its sun-flayed land eastward out to the Red Sea, to Bible lands. It is all relinquished earth, the will of some great tellurian force.
His search for himself, he realises, could be ageless.
‘Damned lucky.’ Mawdsley pushes against his shoulders, forcing him back onto his haversack pillow, flies glued to the mucilage of his neck. ‘That’s what you are.’ The MO gazes at him with blood-threaded eyes. ‘We all thought you’d had it. I mean properly had it.’
Obliged to stillness, the rider surveys the tent, recognising it as the same occupied by he and Lucchi, its interior now stripped to an austere ward.
‘How’s your breathing?’ asks the MO. ‘Any pain?’
You always ask that.
The rider looks again to his fellow patient. ‘Coates?’
‘He was hit in the face. His jaw’s gone. Left ear, too. Bone fragments in one eye. It’s not savable. Look, we’re going to be pulling out soon. I’ll come and get you when we’re ready.’ He rises and moves to the tent’s entrance. ‘You’ll need to watch him, make sure his head stays upright. Listen for any sounds of choking. There might be teeth fragments.’ He pauses. ‘He doesn’t know.’
He exits the tent, leaving the rider anxious and unsettled. Too easy now for his accomplices to slip away, abandoning him and Coates to a certain end. Exhaustion, creeping infection, starvation. Execution perhaps, if the enemy deigns to visit.
Coates looks to him and makes a feeble gesture, two fingers held aloft then brought close to his bandaged face. A smoke. A cigarette, for God’s sake. The rider looks at the linen about the Canadian’s head, that sudden cliff where the wrap should follow the contour of a chin. He levers himself gently from his bunk and wades across on his knees, the skin surrounding the spit hawker’s uncovered eye pruning as he repeats his signal.
The rider shakes his head. ‘Doctor’s orders.’
Coates uses his right hand to simulate the act of writing, prompting the rider to look to the postbag at the foot of his bunk, the writing implements scattered nearby. He passes an envelope and pen over and affects patience while Coates grapples with them.
‘They won’t. They won’t do that, I promise. I’ll go and see Brinkhurst now.’
He moves from Coates’ side to shuffle his way to the entrance of the tent, then pushes out into the sunlight, the sight of a levelled camp surprising him. The other tents struck, the washing line and clothes removed, the fuel-burning oven dismantled, the cookhouse demolished, its stores depleted.
Brinkhurst looks up from his seat on a nearby ammo crate. ‘That a good idea? Dragging yourself around like that?’
The rider leans back on his haunches, catching his breath as Brinkhurst directs his attention to the far side of the camp, where Swann is rummaging in the junk pit, his forearms black with oil as he lifts then discards axles, carburettors, broken tools, empty cans. Brinkhurst points towards the rusted amphitheatre, now shot through by cannon fir
e. ‘Rommel’s cleared off.’
The rider takes his eyes from Swann. ‘Coates needs a hospital.’
‘Mawdsley tells me the wound will fester within a day.’
‘We could leave him for the Germans.’
‘The Germans, yes. If they come. But if they do, don’t you think he’d give up everything he knows about us? For the promise of help? I know I would.’ He pulls off his cap and uses it to bat at flies. ‘We’ll be moving out soon, so gather whatever you need. Don’t worry about Coates, Mawdsley will see to him.’
Swann hurls a broken shovel into the pit. He strides back into the centre of the camp and proceeds to lift the sheet of corrugated tin from the oven trench and flip it over. Brinkhurst shades his eyes. ‘Swann, for God’s sake. Why don’t you try burning him out? Use the dirty petrol. Mawdsley can help.’ He signals to the MO, who seems uncommonly agitated, his eyes repeatedly scanning the grounds of the dismantled camp as though unable to take any register of it. He walks to a pile of jerrycans and picks one out marked with a black X.
The rider watches him, fascinated. ‘Is Mawdsley all right?’
‘It’s the Benzedrine. He’ll calm down shortly.’
‘He’s a doper?’
‘Hardly the worst of vices. Your friend Swann is a far greater liability. Not that it stopped you from running to him, did it? To make your little alliance.’
The rider is dumbfounded. ‘I didn’t . . .’
Brinkhurst offers him a look of charity. ‘We really shan’t get along if you try to put things over on me. It’s not a gentleman’s way at all. Don’t you agree?’
Chastened, the rider defers. Brinkhurst the gamesman, casually shuffling the truth. A lesson not easily forgotten. He watches as Swann directs Mawdsley to the remains of the cookhouse, the MO using his lighter to ignite the petrol.
Brinkhurst rises. ‘Thank heaven. We’ll be leaving in five minutes. Make sure you’re ready.’ He heads off towards the Fordson.
The rider looks on as Swann and Mawdsley continue at their ritual, the bounds of the camp now demarked by pillars of flame. He turns away to re-enter the tent, where he finds an increasingly discomfited Coates, the Canadian now more alert to his injury, his hands busy around the hole in his throat.
The rider goes to his side. ‘We’re making for Cairo. There’ll be aid stations. A hospital.’
Coates looks at him and blinks, then grips his shoulder. An ordainment, more or less.
The leaving preparations are concluded in an atmosphere of fragile calm, the last remaining tent struck by Brinkhurst and Lucchi, the rider and Coates assisted by Mawdsley to a den of blankets in the cargo bed of the truck. Coates is administered a further ampoule of morphine and is equipped with a grease pencil and sheet of tin cut from a petrol can as his means of communication. No one – under the circumstances – thinking the stench of fuel a penalty. Swann loads the last of the provisions aboard the truck before making the usual mechanical checks: balloon-tyre pressures, oil, amperage reading, fuel-tank seals, coolant level. On discovering a holed radiator for the Fordson, he reports the finding with an expletive then proceeds to break open two eggs and crush them into the coolant reservoir, warning that the boiled whites will dam the breach only so long. Of the truck’s overladen bed – the rider, Lucchi and Coates now installed beneath the canopy bows – he makes only the comment ‘too fucken heavy’, slapping his palm against the hardwood boards to underscore it.
A short conference brings proceedings to a close, Brinkhurst laying out maps across the engine panels of the truck for him and Swann to study. The lance corporal sets a brass sun compass for a northwesterly bearing and affixes the device to the dash of the Fordson. He slides into the truck’s driving seat while Brinkhurst takes his place beside Mawdsley at the wheel of the Quad, both men firing up the engines.
The rider grabs for the side as the Fordson lurches forward, the slumped Coates against his shoulder, Swann’s face leant from the cab window as they motor from the camp. Still scouring, thinks the rider, for that skitter of legs, the familiar tail ratcheted into a question mark. Is that the best you can do?
Cowards!
Two
9
They journey through the morning, maintaining good pace where the going is not too soft, wary of sending up any signal of their travel. Past the downed plane, its fuselage lodged like some ossified longbone into the crust. Then beneath a sequence of rubblestone spires, each higher than its neighbour, the colonnade opening onto a field of volcanic clinker, black boulders piled as though to serve some ancient cannonry. All the while navigating with caution the thinly crusted salt pits that pretend at solid earth. Every half-hour Swann pulls the truck to a stop and takes a fresh magnetic compass bearing from a northwesterly landmark, then re-orients the vehicle towards it before adjusting the direction needle of the sun compass. Each time the entire procedure executed without remark. On the fourth stop Brinkhurst climbs from the Quad and studies through binoculars the ground ahead, referring to his map for confirmation. They’re nearing the first of a number of desert trails, he explains. Al Tariq al Abd, Al Tariq Anwar, Al Tariq Bir al Hakeim. Rough desert trackways, most of them old trading routes, their sand and gravel compacted by the passing of merchant trains, the barefoot marches of slaves. And now channels for the transportation of troops and armour across open desert. The trail they are approaching appears empty but they’ll need to remain vigilant for any sign of hostile forces. Or just as calamitously, their own.
Brinkhurst steps back into the Quad and starts the engine, leading both vehicles off at slow speed. Their leaving distantly observed by a pair of long-eared desert foxes from the top of a ridge, each party regarding the other with incredulity. What are you about? Who put you here? These and other nightbound creatures thrown from their habits by evenings made bright by flares and tracer, by days blackened with oil smoke. What a feat, marvels the rider, to come into this vastness and confuse nature.
A little nearer the trail they see that the ground has been littered with the vestiges of an army in transit. Shell casings, empty ration tins, a length of tank track, an oil drum set as a waypost. A domed shape they take to be a solitary cairn is revealed at closer range to be a man folded over his stomach, white with dust and long dead. The rider doesn’t recognise the uniform – French? But why no burial? Perhaps he had wandered here on his own having made his escape from battle, then succumbed while awaiting traffic, one of his fingers pointed west as though to indicate his preferred direction of travel.
The trail still clear, Swann and Brinkhurst gun the vehicles, the truck bouncing violently over the lip of a crater before crossing its flat surface. The rider moves once more to prevent Coates toppling, the Canadian awake now that the morphine has exhausted its potency. He lifts his tin message board to scribble:
The rider hauls himself to his knees and leans forward to beat on the fabric of the truck’s cab. ‘Swann! We need to stop!’
The lance corporal continues to drive at speed, following the Quad’s tyre tracks as both vehicles bounce and jolt over a rugged floor. Only when they have driven far enough to put the cover of a limestone hillock behind them does he snake the vehicle to a halt and step in fury from his seat. ‘Are you fucken stupid?’ and, ‘Don’t ever do that again unless you see a fucken mine!’
The rider sees Brinkhurst and Mawdsley hurrying from the parked Quad. ‘We have to get the bandages off. He’s going to be sick.’
Mawdsley unlatches and drops the truck’s tailgate. He clambers into the cargo bed and begins quickly unwrapping Coates’ face and neck, the task only just completed before the Canadian leans forward to retch, a glimpse of his jawless mouth enough to turn the rider’s stomach. He pushes himself from the cargo bed to alight upon the shale then stumbles a little way from the truck, his bruised muscles stiffened, his skin tightened where the abrasions have begun to scab. He rubs his bare legs where the muscle is most stubborn, and notices a bleached chevron of skin. A burn mark or scald, seemingly
older than other wounds. He runs his fingers over its glassed surface, hoping to tease out the story of it. The artefact, perhaps, of some defining episode. He should ask Mawdsley about it. Mawdsley will set him straight.
Brinkhurst announces their imminent departure, and the rider remounts the cargo bed to take his place beside a freshly bandaged Coates, the Canadian now equipped with an additional throat tube by which to receive fluids. After a brief consult of their maps Brinkhurst and Swann resume their drivers’ positions in the vehicles, and within minutes they are under way again.
The rider watches Coates totter against the boards, death surely now mantled about him. Yet in his dulled gaze there is still the hope of escape. Some miracle that might see him vault from the truck to hit the sand sprinting, leaping dunes and wadis, the lint on his face unbinding as he runs, the bone and tissue beneath bonded by action of the breeze. Until at last he might arrive at the sea cliffs fully restored, and from there force his way against the tide, out to anchored battle cruisers whose sailors might net him in and set him to his voyage home, returning him finally to his house and to the arms of his wife – exactly as in the photograph – who might throw herself about his neck and weep with gladness and ask of him: ‘How, my love, did you ever make such a return?’
To which he might reply: it was what was owed to us.
The spit hawker lays his hand over the rider’s, his fingers flecked with bile.
The rider squeezes his arm. Try to hold on.
They journey onward, the sun risen now to its noon height, pulling up shadows like drawbridges, rendering the sun compass useless. They drive across an acreage of red serir dotted with gazelle bones. Then over a wide scapula of limestone, erupted here and there into solid vortices, as though a vestigial geography had in one instant been pulled skyward then denied. They skirt the husks of long-exhausted volcanoes and their fields of pumice to emerge onto a gypsum crust, its tablets and plinths upended and see-sawed in the manner of a fissured floe. Until they come presently to an immense platform of sand and shale over which are strewn a number of derelict fighting vehicles, each so brutally razed that a great scarp of fire might have slid across the desert, rapacious of all before it.
The Letter Bearer Page 6