by Brian Castro
There was also another thing.
Those letters from Emma. A month or so before, I had been receiving them from a place called Smithton, in Tasmania. They were full of admiration at first, but she soon began to admonish me for not taking action against injustice. A coward at the best of times, I could nevertheless be roused. After a few bottles, a vigilante against self-righteousness. Masquerading as myself, I had made the mistake of assuming my readers would at least subscribe to one tiny part of the idea that work and author were separate. Yet now I discovered that I’d been pushed back to a literalness, to what Voltaire meant when he wrote: I raise the quill, therefore I am responsible. The challenge disturbed me. I wrote back, explaining that I would never do the things I wrote about, but I certainly did contemplate them. Was I therefore guilty?
Emma struck at the very paradox of my existence. In denouncing fraudulence, how could I not act? She began to demand, in a more strident tone, that I do the same for her… make a double-entry in the accounts, balance the books. I had a suspicion this was Ainslie in disguise.
I pored over an atlas. I had written, very fleetingly, since I had never been there, about Tasmania (I don’t believe I even mentioned the name), in one of my earlier novels. I put all this down to coincidence and monomania. Other writers I spoke to said that they received hundreds of such fan letters. Lucky them. Nevertheless, something nagged at me and so I made the long journey down to Devon.
At about noon, Ainslie’s father appeared, stomping down the grand staircase dressed for golf in checked plus fours, waistcoat and tie under his tweeds and wearing a cap with a sort of bunny’s tail on the top.
Hello boy, he said, one of Ainslie’s friends are we?
I knew he wouldn’t recognise me… he was drunk at the wedding and never saw us since, but I took exception to his disregard for my age.
I’m her ex, I said.
And he did not miss a beat but summoned up two gins, blustering with his silver hair among the golf bags in the corner, his face ruddy with the morning’s snorts. There was a frozen sea between us, but we were joined by the need for commerce.
I have a proposition for you, he grunted.
He asked if I played golf. I answered in the negative, courtesy preventing me from disclosing contempt for that loathsome and parvenu game.
Never mind old boy, it’s like smacking a delicious bottom till you get to the green and then putting the ball into a hairy hole. The fewer strokes the better. It’s all masochism, what?
It must have been impotence or frigidity that I tried to imagine, so presently I thought of Freud, then of Ainslie.
Don’t know, old boy, her father said, when I asked about his daughter. Goes off, you know, on jaunts, sometimes for years at a time. You know anything about her politics?
No.
Me neither. But ever since she was a child she exhibited a common side. Mind you, that’s not always bad. In the field chaps like that often got you out of a scrape; you’d never expect it of the rank and file.
He handed me a package.
Well, you’re a smart chap. You need time to think over this. I’ll be in touch.
Then he was gone. The butler offered to call a taxi.
A few weeks later, Byron Johnson took his mother for a holiday.
But right now he’s on the train, having left her in Wales. He’s on the train careening through the dark towards London, looking at his watch, watching lorries bogged in snowdrifts on the motorways, thinking of his mother asleep before the coal fire when he’d kissed her cold cheek farewell. The firelight of reflection; all else a frozen sea.
At Waterloo station, unnerved by the human wave sweeping past, he decided against going to the publisher’s party. They could launch the book without him, and then it’ll be something of a five-minute wake before they’d drink and be relieved he wasn’t there.
He flipped through some credit cards, his only links with Ainslie, and watched the departure boards, the flipping signs as he flipped his plastic cards, attempting a docking with a missing woman in a deep-blue night, the gulf between them a matter of degrees before miscalculation and eternity… flip-click, the boat train to Paris… flip-click, Zeebruge… flip-click, Brussels. Outer space. He was hypnotised by the names of his father’s war pressing down upon him, the collective weight of corpses.
10
Ypres. No cry of joy there. The familiar horrors descend periodically and I feel the approach of a fit. Have to tread carefully along a straight line, tell the story, no deviations; one inch out here and there and the seizure would take… an electrical storm in the brain, a permanent digression, and wham! A smell of sulphur.
Moments like these I used to go in search of a health club. I remember that there were none in Ypres. Don’t know how it came about really, the first time I visited in my youth, one of those dirty weekends when some of us decided to spend a few quid on Parisiennes and I decided I had heard a higher calling, all the more fool me, and shipped to Belgium instead with my bicycle. I needed to sweat, to lift heavy weights, grind the muscles, form scar tissue, exorcise the demon. I needed to prepare my body, knew that one day I would need to call on it, would need it to define my being, correct and re-shape time. One day I would find myself in penal servitude. May as well have been ready. Not a single gymnasium in Ypres. Just when I was beginning to feel doomed, I found a school, and as it was a weekend, it happened to be empty. The cleaning woman (wearing a long blue apron, frumpy dress hitched around her thick calves which were covered, I could see, with a dubious rash), thought I was staff, and smiled and said, Yes, of course I could use the weights and the bars and the vaulting horse, and would I like a coffee before I began? I declined and she watched me through my paces, lasciviously, I thought, until I saw this inane smile on her face, her eyes staring at the roof, and then I realised she was partially blind and was enjoying the sounds I made, the wheezes and grunts and the heavy breathing and then presently she started making them too, copying me as she mopped and brushed and waxed the wooden boards and in this duet of discipline, in this fugal floor exercise, in this counterpoint of counterweights we were united by a subtle mockery of our respective missions: work made you free. It had more irony to come. But there you are: I had never been a self-deprecating liberal limited by short-sightedness. Those of us who took steps were stolid working men. She would have seen everything in her youth: this school used as a medical station for mutilated men; in the distance the crump of shells and the smell of mustard gas, the amputated arms and legs she tossed into barrels and wheeled the trolleys to the gaping ditch.
I cycled through the fields of Flanders then and took my little map of where the great battles had taken place, finding myself suddenly in a pasture with black-faced sheep grazing and I was staring at a sign which said: Plaine d’Amour and the thought of the thousands of bodies lying beneath suddenly burst my eardrums, sounds of them crawling through the earthworks and calling to me, their mouths filled with worms and water and mud, their shouts forming exploding shells, great starbursts of fire and dirt.
I cycled at full tilt, the monstrous sounds of Armentieres, Messines, Wytschaete, Hollebeke, Gheluwelt, Zonnebeke, Passchendaele and Poelcappelle issuing from my throat, and finally at the cemetery at Hooge I could no more and fell to the ground and I heard the gurgle and slump of a million bodies being sucked into the bowels of Flanders, not one corner of a foreign field exempt from putrid flesh oozing through the soil, oh, the ancestral stench of it, when all of a sudden I noticed someone was standing quite near, asking if I was all right… a girl with a flower in her hand and a whimsical smile on her lips and I greeted her, she who was pale and thin… of such scenes are novels made… but no, truth and more truth it had embarrassment and fear and suspicion and all the attendant horrors of real meetings… for a brief moment I relished her foreignness but then realised, quite quickly I thought, how I might have presented, you know, the froth around my mouth not quite apparent as I was lying at an angle and was able to use my
shoulder to conceal it and the rictus of my jaw which once had charm, a slight sardonic drift, proleptic and convenient, in the event of any occasion which could profitably be turned into irony… the turn cost me, I can tell you, but I summoned immense courage and extended my humanity, a poor prosthetic French and lo! exclamation being the better part of dullness: when attempting to be interesting, always express surprise… lo! she turned out to be French and not Belgian, though with these language struggles of theirs you never know how offensive you can be. She wore a light dress of purple silk and though the weather was leavening… other things too, were rising to the surface… and though it was Easter or Pâques, which is really Passover, she did not remind me of a covered statue like those shrouded eminences I’d found in cathedrals, but her dress caught the wind and passed over her body in waves and as it was misty she shivered beside me as I gave her a lift back to Ypres on my solid black bicycle which was made in Shanghai and which sustained not the slightest dent or warp when I landed so heavily on the battlefield.
We had coffee by a cathedral, possibly rebuilt, possibly new in cathedral terms, totally unauthentic, a simulacrum of the original which was erected in the thirteenth century, planned like a cross and terminating in a semicircular choir, the central portal surrounded by a polygonal rose-window, and above, a high gable enclosed by turrets, a circulating gallery forming a passageway right around the building. All gone now, that which projected the light of the Supreme Architect who is now dead, pounded into dust and mud by 16? inch guns, seared with asphyxiating gas and laced with enfilading fire. Targeted finally, the mean point of impact discovered, there was the final destruction of time, the killing of the Mother. Guilt. I was always guilty leaving my mother, guilty of writing because she hated it, guilty of social mobility… and that destruction of all the Notre-Dames relieved me of it. It wasn’t hatred, but relief from the burden of her centralisation, from the melancholy of her prison, from the penury of her time… relief from the Mother that was Britain.
I told the girl all this in a French full of cavities as we talked over our café lacuna… yes, bottomless cups, cratered cakes, crumbling lace, everything reminded one of bombs… she of her limited life and I of my even more limited one and I found that she was a student at the university, but she lived with a family which wasn’t her own because it was common to be boarded out when one was a student, and in a stammering and stuttering we turned the topics this way and that in our hands and wondered about them, when presently it began to drizzle and grow cold, so we walked about a bit and visited the cathedral. We stood before a statue of the Virgin with Child and a warm feeling came over me, that same warm feeling they told us at school would come over us not when we peed in our beds but when we thought we had a calling to the faith, which was not to be mistaken for a true calling; and all this gave me cause to reflect that religion was relief, a deliverance from what we cannot understand, and as we stood there, before the Virgin with Child, an old man, possibly a veteran of that war to end all wars, suddenly shouted, screamed, PUTAIN! PUTAIN! his eyes fixed on the statue so I didn’t know whether he meant the girl beside me or the Virgin and I didn’t know whether to take offence and boot him up the behind, crutches and all or to have a philosophical discussion about hell. Then presently he walked away, spitting on the floor, yes, as he turned, spat on the marbled floor, his eyes glazing over us, his spittle frothing as I ushered the girl out, her face marmoreal as if this happened regularly, and we walked the streets and I was feeling strange, not knowing what was blasphemy and what wasn’t, and was resolved, for one moment, to witness just once in my life, a cathedral destroyed again.
We talked soon enough and grew repetitious, but repetition forced some friction upon our bodies and we were afire before too long and we rode to a wood she knew which was not far away, she on the crossbar, sitting sideways on my jacket which kept rubbing against the front wheel developing a sizeable hole, my one and only jacket acting as a mudflap, then in the wood another chivalrous stupidity, I laid it on a dry spot and discovered, too late, sheep pellets squashed into the lining, the dry spot a little raised where I made a bed with my jacket as we began proceedings, during which she appeared extremely sad, but it was a casual sadness, or perhaps an indifference, no puffing and preening for effect; so I dared and didn’t dare, uncertain of her experience and knowing mine was of a standard practice until finally she inserted me and it wasn’t until a long time after that I noticed there were tears on her cheeks, warm then cold, and I, being naïve, asked her if it was that bad but she shook her head and said that for a very long time she had been unable to cry. Well, I didn’t know what to make of this, causing a girl to cry, for it wasn’t, as far as I understood, a case of virginity lost, so I folded my jacket, pretended to be busy in order to give myself time to think, for at seventeen these things were a little deep for me, when she suddenly got up, smoothed her purple dress, took me by the hand and told me we’d been lying atop a burial site. Yes, Pleine d’Amour, they simply threw the bodies into holes and covered them over, and I was a little annoyed with her then, and shouted: Why didn’t you say something? And then I said it was indulgence of the worst kind, that callous nostalgia and pointless blasphemy, in the same way as before that war’s end they were already producing postcards of the battlefields on the verso of which the army circled whatever was appropriate:
Your husband/father/son/brother was:
a) killed
b) missing in action
has sustained
c) serious injuries
d) slight injuries
e) a wound
f) a mental condition
In 1919 the Michelin tyre company ran tours. In wicker baskets strapped on the top of the buses were champagne bottles wrapped in wet towels. All over the muddy countryside women were looking for their missing husbands. They ran to the buses, thinking the army had returned them.
Indulgent? Crying? The girl looked at me with eyes ablaze. Was that not what you were doing when you met me?
No, I said. They were tears of rage; rage against all motherlands who sent us out to asylums, morgues, to these fields of evil. It was necessary loss, this expenditure of the common soldier. I raved and ranted, said those vile tears of mine never broke but ran deeply in unknown caverns, repositories for all the ritual evils for which families stand: the nobility of destruction. One should deserve it.
This was childish and melodramatic stuff. In the end she shook her head gravely and her face hardened. She did this, she said, to pay for her board… no, not what we had just done, but she took touring parties to the great battlefields and sometimes she planted things, a bullet here and there, a canteen, a rusted bayonet. Tourists paid handsomely. But what we had just done, she said… the significance of what we had just done you will never understand. Then she got on my bike and rode away and I never saw her again and felt dumb and angry because I had to walk ten miles back.
That was something from my past. I carry the incident around like a worry bead and I feel a great weight pressing down… the discomfiture of a pea under twenty blankets. I take the Tube for Heathrow. I have a terrible fear of flying. Suppose this weight pulls me southward, down, gravity-driven, into the ocean? I have consulted doctors about this. They peer into my heart and knead their cigars. Don’t grouch about it, they say. Gravity is good in the humanities business… a sedentary life… you can’t expect anything more than haemorrhoids.
But suppose this feeling drowns me before I get the chance to point out the man at the end of the carriage, the tall one hanging onto the safety strap with one arm, the fellow I’ve seen coming and going, in and out of Ainslie’s apartment? He has a box slung from a harness around his shoulder; a box wrapped in a cloth of red, black and yellow colours. I’m sure it’s the same fellow… a one-armed man. I move forward, but the train stops and he, wearing a black leather jacket and corduroy trousers, he with a day’s growth of beard on a chiselled face, temple veins throbbing energetically beneath a mop of stra
w-coloured hair, disappears into the crowd of black-jacketed Bovver Boys hanging around the escalator. I follow but there are more of them upstairs, smoking beneath the No Smoking sign, and I feel vaguely foolish and insane, following strangers who may or may not be my ex-wife’s lovers, (yes, love is war: acquisition and propriety) and soon I was seeing him everywhere, a football fan with a flag under his arm, moving through the crowds on a mission for club and country.
11
1801. Thomas McGann. Or McGahern. Or McGahan. Difficult to know how to pronounce it, especially round about the turn of the nineteenth century. McGunn, o’course. Four feet nine inches, fair complexion, straw coloured hair, aged fifteen. Two years in Middlesex gaol. Transported 1799. Eight years for indecent exposure during Royal procession. Bared his bum at mad George as the carriage clattered past. But the thing about McGann… he had this other side: self-promotion. Aye, let me tell you about meself. If you please. The authorities took notice. Polite but not wheedling. He served five years in Port Jackson, New South Wales, and was freed by servitude when he was indentured to a settler family in the Hawkesbury district. Borin’. Wha’ d’you do ten thousand miles from home and no hope of ever returnin'? You watch the crows fly one way in the mornin’ and then you watch them fly t’other in the evenin'. Thus began a dull life sweltering in the summers tending tomatoes and cabbages, planting barley and turnip, half of which was eaten by insects, carrying water from the river in wine barrels, walking the vegetable rows in moronic suckling; irrigating, pruning, slapping at flies and mosquitoes in the sticky air of the plains. Boring. Mechanically, McGann daydreamed. His Irish and Scots ancestry had carefully bred obedience and anarchy. Always had a greater purpose. Inserted it when they drew breath. But this multiculturalism, this sense of not belonging, gave him an advantage: In a new country, the future was his. Thought a lot ‘bout Bonaparte. My hero, sorta. He was not concerned with what had already occurred. He wasn’t interested in revenge, or how it would otherwise have been, his life in Liverpool, his mother’s face appearing in the crowd, jeering, swatting at his head when she became desperate and drunk, but nowhere to be seen when the soldiers appeared and led him away. ‘Ere we go ‘ere we go ‘ere we go!