by Paul Sussman
Precisely what looks crossed their faces as they made their respective discoveries I have no idea. Perhaps they rubbed their high pale foreheads in bewilderment, or shook their heads from side to side, or muttered to themselves. Perhaps, on the other hand, they displayed not the least sign of emotion at all. Any suggestion on my part would be pure conjecture. Only when they emerged clutching their twin’s bear, each at precisely the same moment, and began to make their way carefully back to the barrack the way they had come, was I able to see precisely what was going on, for I had taken up a grandstand position at the window by the hut door, thereby affording myself a perfect view of the scene.
Clive saw Matthew first. He was creeping past the front of D Hut, holding the remains of Flumdy, when he happened to glance to his left. Even in the darkness of the April night the figure scampering past the barrack opposite was unmistakeable. His pale skin and luminous hair stuck out like white paper on black card. What’s more, he appeared to be holding something in his hand. Something distinctly teddy-like.
Clive stopped dead. As he did so, alerted by heaven’s knows what inner sense, Matthew did the same. Shrinking into the shadows, he turned slowly to his right and fixed his eyes on his snow-haired sibling 100 feet away. A searchlight beam passed just in front of his feet, at exactly the same moment as another beam passed just before the feet of Clive. The whole scene was like a mirror image, with Clive and the barrack behind him simply a reflection of Matthew and the barrack behind him. They stood thus, staring at each other, without moving, for I do not know how long. Then, at precisely the same moment, as though their actions were part of a choreographed dance, each walked purposely forward towards the centre of the area between the barrack blocks. Searchlight beams wheeled above and around them, but somehow failed to pick them out.
They came to a halt, face to face, almost toe to toe. A searchlight flashed just to their left, another just to their right and, in their momentary illumination I caught the expression on the twins’ parchment-white, red-eyed faces. It was more than I could possibly have hoped for: total, utter, complete and unconcealed hatred. I don’t believe I have ever before, or since, seen two people look at each other with such absolute mutual loathing. I’d done it! I felt an overwhelming sense of achievement.
What happened next, however, came as a complete surprise. I had assumed that, having confronted each other, the twins would merely exchange bitter words, snatch back their respective bears and stalk back to the barracks in high dudgeon. What I had not expected, however, was that, having stood in the centre of the compound for several minutes staring at each other venomously, they would, without a word of warning, without, indeed, any sound whatsoever, suddenly drop their teddies and launch themselves at each other’s throats.
That, however, was precisely what they did. Acting in perfect unison, each threw aside his respective bear and flung his hands around the neck of his brother, feet scrabbling on the ground as each struggled to remain upright. Clive appeared to have a slightly better grip, and he shook his arms furiously, making Matthew’s head bounce back and forth as though it were made of straw. This went on for some while, and, from the bulging of his eyes, it looked as if Matthew was about to pass out when, suddenly, the latter brought his right knee smartly upwards into his brother’s groin, causing the latter to lose his grip and collapse to his knees. Matthew then raised his arm and smashed his clenched fist down on to Clive’s head, pitching him face forward into the dirt.
They remained still for a moment, panting, before Matthew lifted his foot ready to kick his once beloved sibling in the face. Clive, however, was wise to the move, rolling aside at the last minute, grabbing his brother’s heel and twisting him round on to the ground, where he booted him in the face with his own foot. There was a crunching sound and, as a searchlight beam flew overhead, I saw blood streaming from Matthew’s nose.
They floundered about on the floor for a while, still in complete silence, rolling over and over each other so that I was unable to make out which was which. Then one of them – Clive, I presumed, since his nose was unbloodied – struggled to his feet and set off at a run towards the southern perimeter fence, with his brother in hot pursuit. There was a cry from one of the watchtowers, and the beams from two searchlights rushed together to illuminate the twins. A siren went off, and there was a brief burst of gunfire.
‘What the dickens is going on?’ came a voice beside me. It was Colonel Dishby, who, like the rest of the barracks, had been woken by the commotion outside.
‘It’s the twins, sir.’
‘What are they doing? Not escaping, are they? Burrows didn’t say diddly-squat about a break-out tonight.’
‘It looks like they’re fighting, sir.’
‘Fighting! Fighting! Not in this camp they’re not! Come with me.’
And with that he charged out of the hut and limped off after the twins. I went with him, as did most of the other members of our barracks.
‘Hold your fire!’ cried the colonel to the guards. ‘Holden Sie deine fire!’
The twins were by this point almost up to the southern perimeter. As he approached the fence, intending to do heaven knows what once he got there, Clive was tackled from behind by his broken-nosed brother, both men once again tumbling to the ground, where they rolled around scratching and pummelling each other. The searchlights were now trained full on them, forming a pool of light in which they punched and struggled like a pair of circus clowns. From the left a guard came running, shouting something in German, and another from the right. Colonel Dishby waved his arms and cried ‘Shooten Sie nicht!’
Oblivious to the cries of the guards, Matthew somehow broke free of Clive’s grip, clambered to his feet and launched a vicious kick into his brother’s ribs. Even from fifty feet away we could hear the crack of bone. Clive scrabbled backwards on the ground, propelling himself with his feet, breaking through the warning wire that was staked out 10 feet from the fence and continuing until his head was just a yard or so away from the latter’s electric bars. The guards stopped, shouted again, and then, raising their rifles into the air, fired a shot over the combatants’ heads.
The brothers, however, ignored the sound. With an ear-piercing scream of ‘Thief!’, Matthew ran at the prostrate Clive and tried to stamp on his neck. The latter, however, somehow managed to avoid the blow and, squirming to one side, gripped his attacker’s foot and, with a grunt, pitched him face forwards on to the electrified wires of the fence. There were no sparks, no flashes, no explosions; just a very loud buzzing sound as Matthew bucked and jerked, head snapping back and forth, arms and legs flapping, before he eventually came to rest in a kneeling position, propped against the fence as though in prayer. His face had turned black; smoke was emitting from his ears and, in a sudden, dramatic encore to his demise, his hair burst into flame.
‘Shocking,’ muttered Colonel Dishby. ‘Absolutely damned shocking.’
Clive, in the meanwhile, whilst his brother smoked and trembled behind him, had clambered to his feet and was standing facing us, breathing heavily and nursing his ribs.
‘Don’t you see?’ he cried. ‘He stole Beppo. Don’t you understand? Matthew stole my Beppo!’
He turned a little to the side and reached out his hand towards one of the camp guards. It was, presumably, a gesture of submission, but the guard misinterpreted the action and, thinking Clive was threatening him, lifted his rifle to his shoulder and shot him plum between his shimmering red eyes. He stood perfectly still for a moment, a trickle of blood running down his nose, and then fell backwards to the ground, dead. In the ensuing silence, Colonel Dishby was heard to mutter:
‘Totally damned pasha-washa the pair of ’em. Knew it from the moment they arrived. Totally damned pasha-washa!’
We stood watching as the guards removed the twins’ bodies – momentarily switching off the electric fence so as to retrieve Matthew’s charred remains – and then as a group wandered slowly back across the compound. As we passed the point wh
ere the twins had first confronted each other, the colonel pointed at something lying on the ground.
‘What on earth’s that, Phoenix?’ he inquired.
‘It looks like teddy bears, sir.’
‘Teddy bears! Well pick ’em up quick. Can’t have the Jerries thinking we’ve gone softie. And better organize a cribbage competition for tomorrow night. Take the men’s minds off things. Put the word around, there’s a good man.’
And with that we stuffed our hands in our pockets and returned to bed.
As it happened, Colonel Dishby’s cribbage competition never materialized, for the following day we were liberated.
For some months now, despite an almost total news embargo, we had known that things weren’t going well for the Germans. New prisoners had informed us of the D-Day landings the previous June, and the removal of the more experienced camp guards, to be replaced by old men and teenage boys, suggested an ever more urgent need for fighting troops on the German front line. Over the past two weeks all the files from the camp office had been loaded into trucks and driven away, and a number of Allied planes had been spotted flying overhead. The sound of shelling could be heard far away in the south and west.
The morning after the albino twins died we woke to discover our captors had fled. We wandered from our huts and broke into a spontaneous round of applause. Then we played cricket for the rest of the day until, late in the afternoon, an advanced unit of the Durham Light Infantry arrived in front of the camp gates. Colonel Dishby took the salute of the officer in charge, we let out three cheers, and that was that. We were free.
Or rather, that was almost that, because amidst the euphoria of liberation there came a surprise that even I had not expected. I was sitting on the guardroom steps, gazing at The Pill and thinking of all the extraordinary times we’d been through together, when an ambulance drove in through the gates and pulled up just in front of me. It was driven by a large man wearing a Red Cross armband. I, however, had eyes only for the nurse sitting beside him. I would have recognized her anywhere. She looked more beautiful than ever.
‘Emily!’ I cried, rushing over and taking her in my arms. ‘Emily! Can it really be you?’
‘I hope so, Raphael!’ she laughed. ‘Because if it’s not you’re hugging a total stranger!’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m a nurse, you silly. Can’t you see by the uniform?’
‘Of course I can see you’re a nurse. I’m not blind. It’s just amazing that you should happen to be nursing right here, right now. Just in time to meet me.’
‘I suppose it is,’ she conceded. ‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’
‘How can you be so calm, Emily? It’s a miracle! God, it’s good to see you.’ I hugged her again, and kissed her cheek, and then promptly burst into tears.
‘I’m so happy,’ I cried. ‘I’m so happy to see you.’
Emily dabbed at my eyes with the sleeve of her uniform.
‘And I’m happy to see you, Raphael. Now come on, stop crying and help me unload my things from the van. I’ve got some chocolate if you’d like it.’
And so I helped Emily unload her van and set up a makeshift hospital in the old camp office. Soon, however, more nurses arrived in another truck and I was no longer needed, so I took three of the chocolate bars Emily had mentioned and wandered out of the camp gates and across to the edge of the forest – the forest that had for so long foiled Major Burrows and his tunnel-digging operations. I sat down under a tree and ate my chocolate, whistling to myself and worrying that, now I was free, perhaps I might be sent back to active duty. I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke it was dark, and cold, and Emily was sitting beside me.
‘I’ve got something for you, Raphael,’ she said, handing me an official-looking document.
‘What is it?’
‘A pass.’
‘A pass?’
‘Yes. It will get you home quicker. Otherwise it might take you weeks. It’s chaos everywhere.’
I scrutinized the document in the light of a match.
‘How on earth did you get hold of something like this?’ I inquired incredulously. ‘It’s signed by Montgomery.’
‘Oh, it wasn’t that difficult. I’ve got a few contacts. I thought it might come in useful. You leave tonight.’
‘Tonight!’
‘Yes, in about ten minutes. There’s a truck going back down the line. You’d better get your things.’
‘But I don’t want to go. I want to stay here with you. I haven’t seen you for five years. I’ve got so much to tell you.’
Emily sighed. ‘Oh Raphael, you need to get away from here as soon as possible. You’ve been through so much.’
She placed her hand lightly on my forehead and tilted her head to one side, her pale forehead crinkling into a frown. ‘You seem a little . . . disturbed.’
‘I’m absolutely fine, Emily! I want to talk now! I want to make the most of you.’
‘Don’t be troublesome, Raphael,’ she murmured softly, and then stood up, smoothing down the folds of her nurse’s pinafore. ‘It’s all arranged. Now go and get your things. I’ve got work to do.’
‘But Emily—’
‘No arguing,’ she said, putting her finger to my lips. ‘We’ll catch up with each other again. Don’t we always? Now come on, I’ve got sick people to attend to.’
And so, with a resigned sigh, I trudged back to the compound and collected my things from the hut. I didn’t have very much, just The Photo, which I unpinned from the wall beside my bed, The Pill, a few odds and ends of clothing, and the sheet music to ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’, which had been written out for me by the captain in the Canadian Marines who’d taught me to play the piano. These I shovelled into an old kit-bag before bidding farewell to my fellow inmates and clambering into the back of a large, rumbling Bedford truck.
‘Chip, chip, Phoenix,’ called Colonel Dishby as I pulled away through the gates. ‘We gave it some gumption, eh!’
‘Goodbye, Raphael!’ called Emily, waving a stethoscope. ‘Goodbye. I’ll see you soon.’
‘Soon’, as it transpired, was actually 24 years. Few people have quite the same capacity for understatement as dear, darling Emily.
Which is how I killed the albino twins. Within a week I was back in England, and within two months was ensconced in an entirely new life in the service of Lord Slaggsby.
I shall end this particular room with a brief word about Private Lemon, the fatalistic ginger-head whom I had met on the train from Liverpool the day I joined the army. I had presumed him killed with the rest of my unit in our dugout on the banks of the River Scarpe, the night I was captured.
‘Sir! Sir! Help me, sir!’ he had cried, before his voice was lost in a barrage of gunfire.
Unbeknown to me, however, he had somehow managed to escape the German onslaught, scampering away into the night and eventually joining those other troops evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk. Over the next four years he was to fight in North Africa, Italy, the Far East and Europe, winning a kaleidoscope of gallantry medals before eventually being shot saving a colleague’s life during the airdrop on Arnhem, an action for which he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. There is a plaque to his memory on the wall of the church in the village where he grew up. It is a small village, in the far north of England. You might, perhaps, have heard of it. It is, you see, called Tripally.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MY BACK STILL feels funny. I must have banged it harder than I thought yesterday evening. It doesn’t actually hurt – it just tingles, as though there were lots of ants running around beneath the skin. For some reason I can’t shake the thought that my body’s full of maggots. Spending an entire night down in the cellar probably didn’t do it much good either. The atmosphere’s very damp down there. Unhealthy. Like a dungeon.
Now, however, I’m out of the cellar and on my way up the left-hand wall of the castle stairway. Beneath me, a rippling sea of words and letters fills
the downstairs rooms and foyer as though they’ve been flooded. It looks, though I say it myself, absolutely bloody spectacular.
I’m still getting by on next to no sleep, and my body, too, is feeling younger by the hour. In the middle of the night I removed my candles because, even in the murk of the cellar, with only a flickering 40 watt bulb for illumination, I suddenly discovered I could see perfectly well without them. It’s as if, in recording the events of my life, I’m somehow transferring the years from my own person on to the walls of my home. Unburdening myself. I really am feeling remarkably vigorous.
And a good thing, too, because the cellar, with its damp, stale air and legions of creepy-crawlies, has proved by far the most difficult writing space I’ve yet encountered. In places, the note’s progress was brought almost to a standstill, and whilst I’m still well on course to get it all done before I top myself, I experienced for the first time a sense of frustration and disillusionment with the whole thing.
‘What the hell are you doing this for?’ I thought. ‘Why are you punishing yourself like this?’
The main problem, amongst many, was that the cellar walls aren’t flat. Whereas all the other rooms in the castle have been neatly plastered and painted, the cellar was, by all appearances, hewn out of the solid rock, like a catacomb. Its whitewashed walls, as a result, bulge and ripple and twist, making them hellishly difficult to write over. In addition, they are also, in places, extremely damp, with pearl-sized beads of moisture oozing from the rock like a chalky sweat. My felt-tip pen was useless in such conditions, its ink refusing to adhere where there was the least hint of wet, so that rather than filling the entire wall I had to scurry from dry patch to dry patch, as though negotiating my way across a particularly treacherous bog. Where I had initially assumed I would have to increase the size of my writing, I was in fact, with so much wall space unusable, forced do quite the opposite, reducing the size of my letters so as to fit them all in, cramming them together like shipwrecked sailors into overloaded life rafts. Even then I still didn’t have quite enough space to say everything I wanted to, and having filled every available inch of the cellar walls and written my way back up to the foyer, I was forced to conclude the albino twins episode on the lower reaches of the castle stairway. Bang goes my dream of confining each murder to a single room.