by Tanya Moir
Alone in an AFPU darkroom he begins to go through his war.
At Today, Clive’s friend Jemima is impressed. She offers Will an assignment.
‘Bread and butter stuff, I’m afraid. Not really your thing,’ she says. ‘But see how you go. There’s a lot of this work going.’
So Will finds himself in front of the Empire in Leicester Square, fighting a sea of elbows one row back from the red carpet. A gleaming blonde gets out of a gleaming car and flashes stutter like tracer fire. Will doesn’t recognise her face, but she has on a £500 dress and a starlet’s smile, and the photographers are calling her name, and he knows she’s what he’s here for.
Will’s nervous, and out of practice. He hasn’t taken a shot since VE Day. He’s boxed in, his position bad.
His quarry makes her way down the carpet slowly, looking everywhere but into his lens. At her elbow is a little round man in a monkey suit who could only be the director. This time Will does recognise the face, and the last time he saw it was in a revue bar in what was left of Antwerp.
‘Lieutenant Miles!’ he yells. ‘Over here, sir!’
The director turns in surprise, and his star turns too, and at last Will can press the shutter.
‘Biggs!’ says the former Lieutenant Miles. ‘Good Lord, is that you?’
But Will doesn’t really hear him. His ears have filled up with blackness. There’s a terrible smell in Leicester Square, above the stale beer and cigarettes and pigeons. An abattoir smell, of burst guts and blood and shit, of the dead and rotting. He feels sick, a great grey rising wave he hasn’t felt since his D-Day ride across the Channel, and he thinks he might vomit right there, down the backs of his fellow pressmen, all over the sticky cobbles of Leicester Square.
There’s a pretty woman in front of his lens, in a red sequinned dress, on a glittering London night, on the arm of good old Jonty Miles. Before the shutter opens, Will can see these things. When it closes, he knows they are still there. But in the middle, somehow, they vanish. There are other images stuck there, in that moment of exposure, acid-etched behind the Contax’s shutter. For one-sixtieth of a second, he is back among the Technicolor dead. He sees Eddie’s shattered head. He sees Survivor Girl. Her perfume lingers.
Jonty Miles reaches into the crowd to shake Will’s hand. ‘I’ll get you into the after party,’ he says into Will’s ear. ‘We’ve taken a suite at the Savoy. Meet me afterwards, at the back door, and I’ll take you down.’
Will nods. Jonty Miles’ hand might be the only thing holding him up, and he really hopes he doesn’t throw up now, on Jonty’s black silk dinner jacket.
When Jonty moves on, Will fights his way out of the crowd, half-blind, to a park bench under the trees. He’s cold. He folds his arms across his chest, stuffs his hands in his armpits, tries to stop the shaking. A West End Thursday night fills in around him. There’s a genuine scent of piss in the air, and a man in a demob suit on the next door bench gives him a nod, and passes him a bottle.
Will takes a swig of God knows what from the brown paper bag, and it tastes like darkroom fluid, but he nods back in thanks, and he’s starting to feel better. He wants to get up and go, but he doesn’t know where. In the end he just starts walking. Down Haymarket, and Pall Mall. Past the Savoy, to the river. He acquires a bottle of his own, and watches the trains cross, and the lights on the water, for a long time.
The next morning, he wakes late. He takes the Contax out of his bag, and the camera body is cold in his hands, and he starts to smell something rotten — gas, maybe — and he doesn’t want to turn around, and see what is behind him. He’s careful winding off the film, like a sapper prodding for S-mines. The clock ticks. Nothing happens.
He takes the Tube to Chancery Lane, walks down to Fleet Street and delivers his one exposure to Today. He calls Jemima later to apologise. A jammed film, he says.
The shot is good. They run it with Will’s credit.
He tries again. He walks the streets of Camden with an empty camera. He frames dirty buildings, rubble, rusting locks. Children throwing stones. The smell of rotting meat moves with him. He vomits in alleyways and restaurant bins, in weeds beside the thick-watered canal. The zombies rush his aperture. Lice crawl up his spine. He makes himself complete the hour.
The next day he tries for another.
The dead stick to his skin. He takes to scrubbing his hands with carbolic and the landlady’s laundry brush, and his knuckles split and bleed. He checks his bedroll for lice every night, and again at three most mornings.
Today calls with another assignment. Will says he’s booked.
He tries Wimbledon with the Rolleiflex, but the dead are there, too, thick as leaves beneath the birch trees. On Haldwyn Street, he finds himself wondering how his mother looked when they dug her out of the rubble. He almost runs back to South Wimbledon station, but he can’t outpace the corpses. They’re in the tunnels now. Faces flickering on dark glass. In the stuffy, too-warm air, the smell of them is ripe, and he has no choice but to breathe it in.
Back in Camden, he can still taste it on his tongue. Blackmarket whisky, he finds, will wash it away, if he is careful. Just enough to weigh down the lid on the box of the dead. Not enough to smash it open.
When Clive’s telephone rings the following week, Will doesn’t answer.
He thinks about re-enlisting.
He gets a Christmas card from Maura McCormack. She’s seen his picture of Camille Durot in Today. There’s a whiff of Belsen about the envelope. But he keeps it, sets it up on the mantelpiece, because it’s the first thing he’s seen in London that is real.
He can’t imagine the camp as she describes it. A sort of continental Butlins, with games, a cinema and a nightclub. The old huts burned, with much fanfare, to the ground. Now they exist only in Will’s head. He feels responsible for them. How do you burn that down?
His demob leave is nearly up. The Surreys are fully subscribed, and the Hardings are asking questions. He takes the one job he’s entitled to, his old one, as darkroom technician for the South London Examiner — a good job, six years ago, for an aspiring photojournalist of twenty-two. For a war correspondent of twenty-eight, it isn’t much, but they’re required to give it to him. In the offices over Tooting Broadway, few of his former colleagues remain. The telephonists remember him, though. They look up from their knitting and give him a smile.
On a damp day in February, in a registry office smelling of floor polish and sausage rolls, Will marries Sarah Harding.
He wakes, hungover, in a Brighton hotel, bemused to find himself with a wife and an erection. They make a decent enough show of things, that weekend. They dance, and eat fish and chips on the pier. They talk about the weather. They make no plans.
In November, Will is surprised again, amid more floor polish, and forms. The maternity ward, this time. Unprepared, despite the accumulation of nappies and bootees, despite the long slow swell of Sarah’s belly, to be someone’s father. Realising, there in the waiting room with his cheap cigar unlit, that he does not want a child.
In the incubator room, a nurse holds mottled Maggie Biggs up to the glass. Will stares at her. This wrinkled kernel of reflexes and need, with all its terrible potential. And he feels something. A kind of hopelessness. A weight. A fear. Let’s call it love, why don’t we.
THREE
Look! Here she is again, at last — my squirmy mother. Usurping, as she always would, somebody else’s story. Shall I allow her in now? She has, after all, already had her own part, and this is supposed to be Will, not Maggie. But I don’t really have much choice. Despite my best efforts, I always found her hard to ignore, and it’s safe to assume that Will can’t manage it either.
For the first year or two of her life, my mother is actually right — it is all about her. How she is, and the things she needs, and what she might grow into. She gives them something to say to each other, Sarah and Will, in the hour a day when they’re both awake, those awkward moments they cross over.
On
e of the first things Maggie Biggs needs, of course, is a home, which comes in the form of a garden flat in Colliers Wood. She won’t remember much about it. (Depressing daisy wallpaper. The smell of fox in the garden, and the Hardings’ tobaccoey old sofa, with its frayed piping, into which she sinks her baby teeth.) Certainly not Will Biggs, who is mostly shut up in the big bay-windowed bedroom, with the second-hand curtains drawn against the daylight and the street.
Will no longer works in the Examiner’s darkroom. He’s a typesetter now, a real trade, with a union wage plus overtime, and no expectation of ambition. He works a lot of nights, and the shiftwork suits him. He feels safer sleeping during the day, alone. The flat is often quiet. The upstairs neighbour is usually out at work, and Sarah, the good wife, takes the baby up to her mother’s every day.
In the evenings, he eats his supper and leaves for work while Sarah puts Maggie down. He slips out quietly, against the flow of men coming home up the street, away from all that caring. Often he stops in for a pint on the way, with a few of the boys from his shift. They’re all ex-servicemen, of course. They know the codes of conversation. They tell funny war stories, in which no one gets hurt, at least not badly. An endless one-upmanship of complaints about food and officers and the worst place to sleep and the longest time they went without changing their underpants. The other men like Will. He’s got a lot of good stories about the top brass. And besides, they know they can always count on him to cover another night shift.
Maggie does remember the next house, off Mitcham Lane. It’s a brand-new semi-detached, three-up two-down, not far from Tooting Common. She and Sarah love the place. It has two different wallpapers in every room, and swans on the cafe-curtains.
Will is ‘Daddy’, now, and sometimes he’s up when she gets home from school, and if she promises to be a good girl for her mother while he’s at work, he’ll help her do her homework. They sit at the table together. It’s a new red Formica one, with matching vinyl chairs. Daddy’s head of the night shift, and really quite important.
What Maggie remembers best, of course, is that Saturday morning in January 1954, when Daddy comes home in the dark, cold and wet, and doesn’t go straight to bed but sits down with them at the table and shows them the display ad he’s made in today’s paper. It has a big ship pointing down, and a shiny sun, and something they all mistake for a palm tree. Maggie’s seven now, and before she’s sent off to play in her room, she can read the name of that Commonwealth country so troubling to spell — NEW ZEALAND.
When she comes back down for lunch, Daddy’s still up and looking quite pleased, and she’s glad, because he’s been in a really funny mood for days, ever since the men from the council came and planted the birch trees down their street.
Forty-two years, twenty thousand kilometres later, here we are holding Will Biggs’ luggage. His box of the dead, the one thing he could never leave behind. What do we do with it, Maggie and I?
It’s a contentious issue. Maggie wants to publish his work. If it was up to me, I’d burn it. Send the proofs up in smoke, like the huts and William Biggs. Give back what the camera took, set the souls of the undead free. I have no doubt that, had my grandfather’s last morning gone to plan, they’d be ash already.
(Ah, the cleansing power of flame. What’s more empowering than watching the past disappear? If he’d burned them fifty years ago, it might have done Will the world of good. It’s not just the Hardings who like a good blaze.)
But not all pasts, inconvenient Maggie asserts, are allowed to be forgotten. Some need to be kept at your shoulder, so close you can see the whites of their eyes, what’s reflected there. They’re mirrors that don’t distort, these pasts, and we should check ourselves before we go anywhere, make sure our slips aren’t showing.
Of course, I don’t have to listen to her. I moved out of Bradbury Street ten years ago, and I can do what I like. William’s photographs are in my BMW now, and if I choose to take them back to Otatara and stuff them into my schist fireplace there’s not a lot my mother can do about it.
Then again, maybe William knew what he was doing. Release these celluloid ghosts and who knows where they might get to. These gases, too, might sink. Get into your nose and throat, stick to the hairs in your lungs, spread their accusations and threats through your blood and bones. Then what do you burn?
It’s a long drive back to Invercargill. Somewhere around Twizel — the horrors of the Pukaki Dam behind us — Maggie opens her eyes, and we agree that William’s work belongs behind glass. Conservation glass, to keep the past in and the present out. The kind that doesn’t reflect, and no one can fall through.
By Omarama, I have been put in charge — again — of choosing a museum. (In due course, I will pick the Imperial War, send that box all the way back to the scruffy streets of South London where it belongs. Where Will’s war can be displayed, or not, as the contract states, alongside everyone else’s. No donor recognition, thank you — there’s nothing charitable about this.)
It’s late by the time I get home, but still I feel the need to change the sheets and have a shower. The dead are sticky. Something’s making me itch — decay or lice or a black wool shirt, it’s hard to say — and I’d take a spray of DDT any day if that would get it off my skin.
Greg’s out — it’s indoor cricket night. I pick up the socks on the floor, the week’s worth of striped shirts he’s pulled off without unbuttoning and piled beside the clothes basket.
Don’t make me do this, I think. I didn’t sign up for this. I don’t want to be anyone’s mother.
The itching gets worse. And here it is, my jackbooted rage. A fury that surely should not stem from laundry. These small abdications of underpants and thought and self-regulation.
But if he walked in right now — asked me if I knew where his jacket was, or his keys or his shoes or his wallet — there’s really no telling what I might do. Rant or slap. Boil-wash his favourite jeans, cut his brakes or drop cyanide into his coffee. It’s never been a Harding strength, the drawing of lines.
Through three hundred square metres of silence, I can hear a southerly coming up, roaring through the golf course pines, buffeting down the chimney. I go back downstairs, light the fire and pour myself a whisky.
William was right, it helps.
‘Still up?’ says Greg when he walks in and flicks the overhead lights on. Full strength. He never uses the dimmers. ‘Everything go off okay up there?’
I look at him, robust and pink-cheeked and triumphant, and take a leaf out of my grandfather’s book. ‘Fine,’ I say.
‘Good.’ He leans down and kisses me, quickly, eyeing the bottle as he does so. ‘What’s that you’ve got in the box?’
‘Just some old stuff of Grandpa’s.’
‘Oh.’ Greg clicks his tongue, nods sympathetically, studies the Berber loop-pile. A moment later, he says, ‘You don’t mind if I go to bed, do you? I’ve got a seven-thirty meeting.’
I find I don’t mind at all. I wait for a while, just to make sure he’s not coming back. Then I get up, turn off the lights, put some more wood on the fire, sit back down and pour myself another glass. A swirl of peat-bog and charred oak. It’s older than I am, this whisky, another gift from the dead to sting my tongue.
I drink, and read Nurse Maura’s letters. They contain no regret. Just a snapshot, in a dirty envelope sent ten years ago from a refugee camp in Rwanda, of her with her husband and baby granddaughter against the sweep of Dublin Bay.
When I’ve finished, I feed the letters into the fire. Slowly, one by one.
Janine
ONE
It would be easy to think, sitting here in this steamy northern summer, so soft and palmy and blue, that I’ve come a long way from Otatara. Almost as far as I can, before I run out of road, out of earth and country. But really, I’m not so sure.
Some days, I think it’s come with me, a tin-can chain trailing all the way up SH1, jangling with every move I make. I should be grateful, I suppose, for the clank and
scrape — for the reminder.
After all, I learned a lot in Otatara. For instance, I never understood, until I came to live in that hard-earned house, how a marriage could end in murder. That urge to destroy. It seemed to me, as a single girl, so unnecessary. Why kill someone, when you could just get a divorce? I thought you’d have to be crazy. A psycho looking for kicks. Mad or bad — or both, probably — long before a gold band ever hit your finger.
I’m not saying I was wrong — how could I, with my blood?
Just that maybe there’s more to it.
Because the trouble with walking away is that you leave so much of yourself behind. Bits of you cling to a marriage. Dead skin cells on the sheets, hair on the bathroom floor. A record of exactly what you’re made of. Proof, you might say, of who was there, and what was done. It’s not the sort of thing you want in the wrong hands.
And bits of marriage get stuck to you, too. You can’t escape by shutting the door. Walk out, and you’ll take evidence with you, under your fingernails, spatters and stains that you can’t even see in daylight. But they can still give you away. You don’t get away clean. Not unless you wipe the whole thing. Send the house up in flames. Consign your shed self to non-existence. Then, maybe, you can forget. I was never. I did not.
Did I say, earlier, that Greg loved me? That was a lie, I think. I’m pretty sure it was. (He always. He never. He didn’t.) Greg just wanted to marry someone. Get it over and done with, the messy part, cut straight to the pipe and slippers, to food in the fridge and never running out of clean socks. Some men are like that. It’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
Which in my case was a pub in an alley off Liverpool Street on a Friday night in 1989. (The sort of place with bull’s-eye glass and old market signs and sawdust on the floor. A whiff of Dickens and last night’s sick. Very London, until the barman opened his mouth and those Kiwi vowels spilled out, until he poured my glass of dry white wine right up to the brim and served it to me with a Southland rrr.) Some time around Christmas, if I recall.