Mick in the cool of John’s shadow is persistent. ‘Guys here go to the army, too, Miss?’
‘Look, it’s what the landlords say,’ the woman says. ‘You Rhodie boys can’t be trusted. You’re drunk and crazy night and day. I’m not pointing fingers but still…I’ve seen you turn up in your dusty cars here on Main Street after two days on the road, rolling out blind-drunk like silly puppies, the driver included. Zimbabwe Ruins, the same as the words on your t-shirts. The landlords think you’re mad as gnats. They think you’ll rip their properties apart.’
John jerks his head in the direction of the door and Mick begins to shift on his seat. He reads John’s face like John reads his. They are Rhodesian Special Forces brothers. They have spent every day together, every hour, from basic training on. Every night they slept side by side on their backs under the stars between the rocks, their FN rifles strapped to their fronts.
‘Thank you, Mrs Villiers,’ says John, shifting forwards also, getting up. ‘You’ve been a great help.’
‘My thanks to you, boys,’ Mrs Villiers rises from her chair to shake their hands. ‘Privately, of course, I can say how much we’ve admired all you did. The sacrifice you Rhodesians made, keeping the darkness back on behalf of us all. But that’s privately. Here in the real world, well, you’ll have to try to get on as best you can.’
‘Sure, Miss, we will, you can bet on that.’
‘Do what the other ex-Zim guys are doing, is my advice. Sign into the student dorm for a few weeks, go two to a room. Be good, put your Rhodie t-shirts away. Before long no-one will be able to tell you’re not just us.’
The letting-agency door sucks closed behind the two and the February heat strikes them full in the face.
Not the Mozambique hills heat, John thinks, plucking at his shirt, not that heat that hits like a mallet, but the other heat that rose from the valleys, damp, soaking. There was a bit of breeze over the hills.
‘Did I hear right?’ he turns to Mick. ‘Did she say we’ll turn into South Africans before long?’
Mick begins to laugh and drags him out of sight of the letting agency.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Zimbabwe Ruins,’ Mick reads off John’s shirt. ‘I hadn’t twigged. She was reading the fuckin’ words on your chest.’
II
The girl approaches from behind Mick—a tall reedy girl in tight faded jeans, a head taller than John and as thin as a skeleton. The two boys are still laughing.
‘Hello,’ she says. ‘My name’s Patty. You must be Rhodesians. I like Rhodesians.’
‘Then we’ll like you,’ says Mick, always quickest with the girls.
‘Which is more than we can say about some people round here, Patty,’ John adds.
‘Meaning…?’ Patty says, and hands round her pack of Stuyvesants. The boys help themselves.
Within moments their story is out—their arrival yesterday from up north, the twelve-hour drive in convoy through their empty, war-scarred land, and then the twenty-four further hours from Beit Bridge. And now they are sleeping in their car with nowhere to stay, no place at the inn, Mick explains, literally, not even at the university, though they’ve enrolled. Everywhere is full up.
In the blink of an eye Patty makes her offer, ‘Come stay at my house.’ Her dad’s her landlord, she explains, the owner of her small one-bedroom bungalow, and he lives a thousand miles away. There’s a sofa in the passageway, and the passageway is wide. They can take it in turns on the floor. There’s even a girl, a maid, Iris. She does the cleaning, cooking, everything. And Patty’s car is parked right here. Look, no obligations, come take a look.
‘How can we repay you, Patty?’ John gets into her passenger seat. Already he knows he will take up her offer. He hears Mick slide into the back.
Patty gives John a skew look and stubs her cigarette out on the pavement with the heel of her sandal.
‘In any case, let’s introduce ourselves,’ she says, closing the car door. ‘This is what you need to know about me. I smoke like a factory, meaning all the time, so you are forewarned. I like to eat chewing gum. I swallow chewing gum when I’ve finished chewing it. I don’t study much, but I do play music, piano—I’m here to do music. I’m a dunce at theory. Most of the time you won’t even see me, I practise all day in my department. My dad offered to buy an upright for the house but I said no. I like playing the grand pianos in the department. Now, how about you two? Was your war bad?’
John thinks of his Mom’s upright on the farm, the lid stuck closed with damp and lack of use. He remembers his parents saying goodbye—just three days ago, was it? He sees them waving tight-lipped from the verandah, dropping him into the future for the second time in four months like a penny into a well. He says nothing for a bit.
‘Our war was just six weeks long, Patty,’ Mick is saying. ‘We were the lucky ones. What can happen in just six weeks?’
III
John doesn’t sleep at all that first night at Patty’s, in Patty’s bed. Whenever he is inside her Patty makes small cries, like a tiny trapped creature, sometimes even when he is not moving.
‘You OK, Patty?’ he asks once or twice. For a while she goes quiet, then resumes her cries.
They begin the evening on the concrete steps under the washing line in Patty’s sandy backyard with a box of red wine. ‘To housemates,’ they cry out fiercely, clunking their glass mugs. They move on to a bottle of red in the kitchen, though by then Mick is asleep. They drag him onto the sofa in the passageway and return to the kitchen.
‘You hungry, John?’ Patty sways in front of her near-empty fridge, holding on to the door. ‘Iris usually prepares food for me and leaves it here, but she’s been away. Sick child or something.’
John reaches in behind her, lifts out the eggs from the bracket and scrambles them on the gas cooker. Patty eats noisily and fast.
‘Come,’ she looks at him thoughtfully and licks her wine-stained lips, ‘tonight you can come share my bed. After your long drive south the floor isn’t fair.’
She stands beside her bed and peels off her clothes without ceremony. He is surprised at her givingness as well as her thinness, the boniness of her buttocks as he pulls her towards him.
‘Do you eat anything besides eggs and chewing-gum?’ he asks.
‘No, Blue Eyes John’, she says, sliding down beside him. ‘Did you know you have the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen?’ She pulls herself on top of him, ‘Bluer than my dad’s. It’s the kind of blue eyes that show up blank in the old black-and-white photos. You know, photos of the colonial days, lion hunts and that.’
‘I don’t want to think about my blue eyes,’ John kisses her.
‘I don’t either,’ says Patty. ‘They’re a weird blue. In the photos the men’s eyes look washed out with acid.’
‘Blue eyes gave us away in the bush. In the war. When we had black camouflage on.’
‘I love it that you were in the war,’ Patty kisses him back.
Later he lies wide awake staring up at the ceiling. He sees the endless road they’ve just driven zipping open the darkness, the thin ribbon of laterite and red earth running on and on to the horizon. Out on the passageway sofa Mick snores in his familiar, halting way. Patty’s damp hair on his cheek smells of egg.
At last, around six, John gives up the attempt to sleep. He slides quietly out of Patty’s bed and takes a shower. Then he walks in to campus to begin his university life.
‘John, John, stop, stop,’ Patty calls the second night, shaking him. ‘Stop shouting. You’re making such a noise. Look, the bed’s soaked. I’m going to have to change the sheets. Roll over now, help me do this.’
IV
A week since they first met Patty in the street, Mick gives notice. He tells John as soon as they get in from campus.
‘Look, bra, I want out,’ he says, standing beside the sofa in the passage-way. ‘You’re an item, you and Patty, and I’m a third. I’ve met some second-year Rhodies with a house, all mad and drunk—t
hat’s where I’m going.’
Panic crashes through John and he can’t think to say a word. He shakes his head at Mick’s offered smokes.
‘So, what d’ya reckon?’ Mick lights up. ‘You can come and join me any time, you know. We can share a room. I’m used to your noise, aren’t I, and maybe Patty isn’t?’
Patty, John thinks, and can’t for a second bring her face into his memory, only those small mouse sounds she makes in bed—that and the tapping of her fingers, her thin fingers always tap-tapping surfaces, silently playing regardless of what else she’s doing, her eyes inward—he sees them now—listening to some score in her head.
He watches Mick stuff his things into his khaki-green army bag and wants to reach out, pin his arms down, stop him. He and Mick—how many nights apart since they first met on patrol? Maybe just one or two, nothing to speak of—that stormy weekend back in early December, the time Mick went home for his grandad’s funeral, just those two days.
And then Patty, a girl he barely knows, and her mouse noises, on and on like a hinge in need of oil till he wishes he was anywhere but there sleeping with her.
‘John, man, you should write it down,’ Mick drops his voice. Iris the maid is whacking her broom against the skirting in the kitchen. ‘My Psychology lecturer said yesterday. It’s a way of getting rid of things, writing them down. You write stuff anyway. Write it down, the things you shout.’
‘I don’t know what I shout, Mick. I wake up and my throat is hoarse. But I don’t know what I’ve been saying.’
‘There are words, John—Go, or maybe No. Get Patty to tell you, hey, and then write the things down.’
‘She wakes me up all the time, middle of the night, Mick, but I don’t know what I’ve said. And then I lie there staring and can’t back to sleep, and suddenly I’m petrified about everything, every little sound. Look, man, I’ll say it straight, I’m gonna miss you. I wish you weren’t going. But I get it.’
V
Patty’s household is out of clean sheets. It is laundry day and Iris has hung Patty’s damp and soiled sheets on the line—all the sheets Patty has each night this past week dragged off the bed and stuffed under the basin in the bathroom because the laundry basket is overflowing.
‘Iris!’ Patty shouts. ‘You haven’t washed the sheets, you’ve only hung them.’
Iris doesn’t respond or, anyway, John getting dressed in the bedroom can’t hear her. But he imagines her making that sucking sound through her side teeth he picks up when he walks past her sometimes, like a clicking sound in her language, but hissing, disgusted. Ssss.
‘Put them in the bath, soak them,’ Patty shouts again, ‘I don’t care. They must come clean.’
That sound from Iris, this time he really does hear it.
‘But I pay you, Iris,’ Patty lowers her voice to plead, ‘and I say you must wash the sheets. Wash wash wash, you know, with hands.’ John hears her pummel one fist with the other. ‘I don’t care what you say, but you can’t say no. You must do your job.’
The sash window latch, thank God, is already open. John slides the lower frame noiselessly upwards and lets his body drop down from the ledge into the street.
VI
In the cool sound-proof room in the music department Patty plays the baby grand piano. She plays Debussy, Poulenc, the C sharp minor concerto, and when she’s properly warmed up, Chopin, fluid music she can play without ever seeming to stop, her fingers moving over the keys like ripples in a river, on and on, so that her thoughts can’t catch up, can’t move fast enough, her thoughts about John’s night-time cries of No or Go or maybe Gook. Listen, she wants to tell him as she plays, this music that runs faster than fear, faster than panic, listen how it sweeps us onwards, drags us with it, its ripples covering over the dark shapes that rise up from below, dimly disturbing the current.
VII
Noon. John is fast asleep in Patty’s bed, naked, the soiled sheets bunched around his body. Iris comes in with her broom, at first banging a little, thinking herself alone, and then suddenly tiptoeing. Her nose wrinkles at the terrible smell.
‘Ai,’ she makes a sibilant noise through her side teeth, ‘Sies tog, jou arme ding.’
Then she puts her broom down. She sits on the bed and puts her hand over his hand where it lies on the pillow.
He nuzzles his face towards her hand, butting his nose like a baby.
‘Ai,’ she says again, ‘Ai, ai,’ watching him closely. His eyelids flutter. She puts his hand down, takes her broom, and backs silently out of the room.
VIII
It is laundry day again. Iris pounds Patty’s clothes on the washboard in the kitchen. In the bathroom the sheets lie in piles, a load under the basin, another load in the bath. Patty filled the bath with water before she went out. As if a bride in white satin has fallen back and immersed herself, glistening, in the water.
But in spite of Patty’s insistence, Iris will not wash the sheets. She won’t even talk about it. She will hang out the sheets for the wind and the rain to scald—see, she’s hanging them out right now—but she will not wash them. Patty knows that she, Iris, always does her job and that this is extra. More than extra. Patty knows that she will do everything else. She will cook macaroni cheeses to put fat on Patty’s bones like her father wants. She will wash all the clothes including his and iron them too. She will leave her sick child with her sister and clean the house top to bottom and sweep the yard. But she will not wash the sheets, she will not. Sies tog. She will not.
Bang, slap, slap. John lies reading on Patty’s bed and hears Iris pounding his clothes on Patty’s washboard.
Later he goes down to the Manchester store on Main Street to buy Patty a set of new sheets. The sheets last one night. The next day he strips the bed and gathers up all the soiled sheets in the house. He takes them to the laundromat. It’s no bother, he says. He’ll make sure to do this every other day.
‘But it’s miles away,’ Patty grumbles.
‘In a car no more than a stone’s throw.’
‘I pay Iris to keep the place clean.’
‘It’s no trouble at all.’
Iris says nothing one way or another.
IX
John sets up an old school desk in Patty’s backyard under the shade of next door’s loquat tree. He pulled the desk off a pile of builder’s rubbish. At his desk he opens his exercise book and begins to copy out in longhand the books open in front of him.
Copying, he has found, is the best way of learning. He has stopped going to lectures now. In fact, he has stopped going in to campus, except for once a week. Somehow he can’t concentrate on what the lecturers are saying. He imbibes great books instead by writing down everything in them, from the very first word onwards, page after page. He sees himself looking out at the world athwart these books as if they were a broken kraal wall, a sandbag rampart.
On Mondays, on his weekly university visit, he goes to the library. Each time he takes out two of the books listed on the photostat course list he was sent at demob camp back in December, when they heard the war was over and they would be coming to university after all. He works down the list in alphabetical order. If he likes a book, which is to say, if copying down the sentences for about a page or two suits him, he presses on.
So far he has copied pages of Hemingway and he has copied Orwell. He can’t believe Orwell in Spain saw all these things he describes, the street-by-street combat, the treachery and the violence, and then produced these clean, clear sentences. He envies Orwell his sentences. The best way of reducing this envy is to write his words down and somehow possess them.
From the kitchen window Iris watches him. When he catches her eye and smiles, she does not smile back.
X
Patty is the finale act in her department’s end-of-term concert. She needs a good portrait photograph for the programme, she tells her friends. She sets up the shot in the Botanical Gardens in front of a bed of aloes. She wears a white Indian dress with lacy sleeves and gol
d-thread tassels along the hem. Iris has specially ironed the sleeves. Patty’s hair is back-combed and stands out from her head in a halo. She hands John her Leica and puts on a pair of Jackie O sunglasses. Mick stands by with his own small Kodak instamatic.
‘You can lose the Polaroids, Patty, and the aloes,’ says Mick. ‘The sunglasses are too shiny and the plants are too spiky. You’re the shiny, spiky, amazing thing people should be looking at in the photo.’
‘I like the aloes,’ says John, ‘They make a good textured background. My photo was close up. I think it was good.’
‘And I like the sunglasses, Mick,’ Patty says. ‘They give me John’s blank look.’
‘Glasses or no glasses,’ says Mick. ‘Let’s just shift the angle and try that shrubbery as a background. It’s green and beautiful, like when Patty plays.’
Patty stands in front of the shrubbery and throws back her glistening hair. Her thin arms are stretched above her head and the wind lifts up her lacy sleeves. She is so lovely that John forgets to take his picture.
‘Just as well I brought a second camera,’ says Mick. ‘For my photo though, Patty, you lose the glasses.’
XI
The first time John is with Iris, he knows this. There isn’t enough of him and still he is pouring himself into her, he is pouring everything he has. He is flowing into her till he is nothing but a husk, so wispy, so light, that she can gather herself around him, she can hold him as near and close as he has been to anyone, ever.
This close in, he can remember things, vague things. He can remember four in the morning, on patrol, and the white sheet lightning fading into the valleys, and then the running, everyone running—running, shooting, stumbling, running.
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