by Michael Pye
Someone had cut all the gold eyes from their tails.
As he went back through the corridors he sensed their cool, damp outdoor smell, no longer safe and enclosed from the world, not smelling of burning coal and hot air as they once did at Christmas.
He asked his father for fruit from the garden. They picked apples together, the delicate skinned James Grieve with a sunrise of pink and gray on their skins. His father added some bread, a piece of cheese, and made sure Peter carried his papers.
He stood at the door for a while, watching his son go away. “Listen,” he said. Peter stopped at the gate. “Listen, you live with it,” he said. “You can live with it.”
“It’s not that.”
“I missed you,” his father said.
But Peter had already started walking, and he walked until he came to London again.
He tried to make a garden of his own. There were these great tears in the fabric of cities, where bombs had cracked up walls and houses and factories. He tried to fill one. He pulled at old brick to pile it out of the way, pushed aside beams that were fallen, found a pick and levered up the broken concrete of an old floor. He dislodged flourishes of herb Robert, the tight succulent whorls of saxifrage, and wires of pink convolvulus. He worked under fountains of lanky buddleia that were wonderfully alive with butterflies.
“There might be bombs,” a boy said. “You know there might be bombs. My mum won’t let me play here.”
He hadn’t thought of that. He only wanted to repair reality, to make it whole again, to make it blossom as his father used to do.
“You’d like my mum,” the boy said.
“Could she lend me a spade? And a pick?”
From the chaos of tumbled spars and ragged brick he made a space marked out with stones. The iron cut into his hands, rusted and bloodied them. The brick he heaved into high, loose cairns, muscles tearing with the unfamiliar motion. He felt very strong until he had finished.
Then he tried to clean the earth, first pulling the weeds, then burning what was left, the smoke rising thinly between the gutted walls. He dug and dug again, turning over earth that had been tamped down ever since this great warehouse was first built. It was poor stuff, clay gone to powder. The more he opened it up to the light and air, the more it crumbled away. He knew already it would be far too alkaline for growth.
He would not give up. He needed water, manure, seeds.
He dug the ashes from burning into the ground. He couldn’t find wasted stuff that would rot down; nobody was wasting anything. One night, he got into the backyards of houses where someone was keeping rabbits, seven of them, and he stole the dung. One of the does bit him, and the scar stayed with him, just under the thumb of his left hand.
In the seed shop, he ordered a half-pint of peas, a half-pint of runner beans. An old, cross man fussed with the little drawers of the seed cabinet and measured out ounces of carrot and cabbage seed. He kept an old seed catalogue on the counter, from 1937, with seed growers on the cover who looked just like Peter’s father, and with luscious words for the flowers on which nobody now wasted space. It served to guarantee a future when he could again sell lovely, impractical things.
He scavenged the other bomb sites for seeds of fireweed, willow herb, so he could deliberately plant in lines and beds what would seed itself in time on any open space. He found lupins already gone to seed in a hot season, and planted them, too. He made a nursery out of a few wood planks, some jars for jam and for Marmite, some cans cut in half. He bought a tomato from a shop that wanted to give our boys a treat, cut it open, and dried it in the sun, under a handkerchief to keep the birds away; then he planted the seeds.
The warehouse had long ago been abandoned as a dangerous shell, nothing more, so the water was not connected. In places it looked as though the pipes had been ripped down for their copper, but perhaps that was damage the bombs did; it was hard to tell. At least the walls shaded the ground just enough to protect it from a vicious, browning summer.
He washed at the public bathhouse. He slept by the garden. Dogs came fooling around, and he chased them off.
It took a couple of weeks to bring back a kind of order to the space between the broken walls, and he worked as privately as he could, leaving boards in place at the old warehouse windows and slipping between them when he had to leave. He worked stripped to the waist, shirt bleaching over rocks in the hot sun.
He was being watched.
It wasn’t the boy. He hardly noticed the boy, although he would be sad not to have the company. He thought at first it might be the Authorities, his father’s compendium word for policemen, soldiers, taxmen, bureaucrats, the supervising classes. But there was just a shadow flickering where the boards were down on a high doorway.
He turned quickly.
The boy was there. He said, very earnestly: “This is my mum. You’ll like my mum.”
Her name was Grace, and she stepped out of the doorway like a kid on a stage. She was a short, pretty, soft-spoken woman, dark but with a bit of the flirt and the big, warm manners that he reckoned should properly be blonde.
He said: “I’m going to need water.”
“I can see. Take some from my house,” Grace said. “I’ve got buckets.” He hesitated, and she said: “It’s too far away for a hose. I’m sure it is.”
“You live round here?”
“Of course we do.” The boy was very sure of what he was doing.
“I like a garden,” Grace said.
She gave him lunch every day. She wanted company, and she wanted to be grateful to someone that the war was all over, and she wanted a man who would take the place of the one who was so weak he left her to go and be a dutiful citizen and got himself killed. She lent him this other man’s shirts and trousers from before the war, and his skinny, prisoner’s body walked about inside them.
He carried buckets, back and forth. She watched him go, arms straining. She never asked anything in particular, why he was sleeping rough, why he was making the garden, why he was there, and why he was available.
She stood by the sink with her sleeves rolled up to the muscles of her arms, and her blouse slightly open on the soft folds of her breasts, she looked at him and she panicked. She pulled down her sleeves, buttoned her shirt. She said: “You’re very young.”
“I’m as young as you.”
She put her hands in the soapy water and she flicked the suds at him. Then she said: “I’m sorry,” as though she might scare him away. She wondered if he liked women, if he was okay. He didn’t understand why she should be worrying and he went up and held her. She relaxed entirely, soft as a cat, molded on him.
He still wasn’t sure. He didn’t know these rules. He had a sense, walking west from the prison camp into the sun, of all the feeling that had been pent up for the war years and now was out free. He sensed all that fury in Grace, and it burnt him, but at the same time she was depending on him, holding him. His body wanted her, but his mind went cold; maybe she wanted just whatever he was growing, and, more to the point, the double rations that ex-prisoners could draw for six months: more cheese, more butter for the boy, the smell of bacon in the house again. Then he couldn’t manage to be suspicious anymore.
They fucked in the afternoon, while the boy was out playing. She liked the energy he had, the gratitude; he loved the eiderdown softness of her body and the juicy, muscular need at the heart of it.
After that, she made him come in discreetly because of the neighbors. They mustn’t know about the man she’d got, the strange man who did not sleep in the house. It was as though she understood that they had a license for a time, but at any moment it might be revoked.
He had not settled. He wouldn’t concede that this consistent desire, the fact that the world made sense in her bed and that he felt whole there, had a meaning. He didn’t have a history of conquests to compare.
“You play cricket,” her boy said.
“I play cricket.”
“You’re a bowler. You bowl fast.”
/> “I can bowl fast.”
The kid seemed to take his presence for granted, as though he’d been the one to supply some gap in the house, to provision the place with a man.
Grace said one afternoon: “I don’t know where you sleep. Don’t you ever want to sleep with someone?”
“I like being alone. You couldn’t be alone in the camp.”
“Did you ever sleep with a woman? I mean, sleep?”
He didn’t say anything.
“It isn’t a promise,” she said. “It’s just keeping warm.”
He might have moved in. He thought about it.
But one morning he went to the garden from washing at the bathhouse and he found the stones had been scattered.
He started walking again.
He truly loved walking. Each mile was a purpose in itself; he didn’t need to imagine anything longer or grander. The camps had tightened him up like a screw, and now he was using his body again, feeling the blood come back to limbs which had a healthy sense of looseness.
And he was still in uniform, with a shirt from Grace so he could change clothes. He didn’t need to explain anything, because everyone thought he must be on his way home. People were kind, perhaps a little alarmed. The uniform made him anonymous, too: one man in a million men all walking and driving and riding home.
He was vanishing. His father, he found out later, sat at home more afraid than he ever had been during the war. Then, he trusted a whole official machine to care for his son, but now he did not know if his son was to be trusted. He conjured up memories of trench war, mustard gas, exploded souls, and he wondered if his son had broken.
But his son was on a beach, trying to stay in the warm, salty moment. He thought of his garden, though, brown now with the summer, no rain and no watering. He thought of his father, how he should have let himself be welcomed home. He ran into the cold, gentle chop of the water, he washed himself, and he came out and lay on the shingle in the sun.
He could always cross the sea, he thought. There had to be a way.
He walked into Dover trying to look like the kind of man who carried the right papers. He was tired, scruffy, but so was everyone: the moment for parades was gone. He was a little dazed, so it seemed, uncertain of the way down to the marine station. Maybe people thought he’d been drinking, but they were in a forgiving mood for the moment.
To cross, he’d got to understand what was happening very precisely: which regiments, going where. He would not quite look right, but maybe he would not be checked. He walked down to the Dover marine station, Western Dock, to the platforms full of the smell of steam and heavy uniforms worn in summer and the occasional bonfire cigarette, and, just once, the sharp smell of coffee.
He saw the roof was broken up, the glass gone in jagged patches. He saw mobs bustling about, or just standing, waiting as though they had been waiting for hours, even days. All the precision of a railway, timetables and platforms and destinations, seemed suspended, overrun by men in khaki.
Down below the platforms was the dock itself, where three ships lay. One was open at the back to swallow a train. Two were smaller, as though they had come from smaller crossings. All of them had been stripped down, the comforts taken away, and all of them were painted gray to slip about in the careful anonymity of wartime.
He wanted to cross the Channel. But he could cross only as part of an army, on the terms and in the conditions made for wartime.
He wondered about sandbars. They couldn’t have dredged the Channel, not during wartime. He wondered about mines, because the crossing must have been protected by both sides against both sides. There could be wrecks. He found himself edgy, worrying at the incurious stares of the waiting men, wondering when the marine police would notice that he was not properly attached to a group, wondering where he should go. He would need to report to someone. He knew that was the proper military way.
He clutched his stomach. He did feel a griping pain, but he was also scamming. He had to get off these platforms, get away from the ships, get away; he needed to organize himself. He thought he was going to throw up, wondering what the penalty might be for a soldier going the wrong way, disrupting orders he did not even know.
He did something right for once. He turned back.
He jumped down from the bus, as though he’d got the daily habit of coming home there, pushed past the little front garden that was all concrete and dandelions, and he knocked at Grace’s door.
“Oh,” Grace said. And then: “Oh. Good.”
After he’d washed, and she’d given him dinner, he said: “I don’t want to sleep on the bomb site anymore.”
“I went to look at your garden. I tried watering it. Only I didn’t know which plants to pull up and which to leave.”
“I’ve only been gone a few days.”
“I thought if you came back—it seemed a pity to waste it all. All that work.”
He said: “Can I stay here?”
She started to put her fingers through his hair as though he was another child, but she stopped herself. The boy was watching, and he seemed tired, pale, anxious.
“Come on,” she said.
Up in the bedroom, they were shadows in the great mirror of the wardrobe door. She’d lain back on the sheen of the eiderdown, feeling more naked than she ever had before. He was like a dog among the hollows and crevices of her body. She was sure for a moment; he was lost for a moment; and it came to the same thing, two bodies managing to charm each other. They settled into the horsehair mattress afterward as though they’d leave prints there for all time.
Outside the house, it wasn’t so easy. She took out the ration coupons at the butcher’s and he said something sarcastic about her needing steak, he supposed, and threw her some bits of boiling beef. She took him down to the pub and sat feeling very alone and conspicuous when he went off to order the drinks. One of the neighbors said: “Done very well for herself, she thinks. He’s not from around here.” “Talks nice,” said another one, venomously.
He told her, bit by bit, where he used to live, what he used to do, how he got called up for a war and never quite entered it because he was a prisoner almost before he could fire a gun. She told him she was married, that he was killed, that sometimes at night she dreamed he’d come back in a rage, but she knew he never would.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“You just know things like that.”
That night he lay awake, expecting to defend her against this stranger who would certainly come back.
She got up to check on the boy, who was tossing and turning and sweating under a sheet, whose breath came awkwardly as though he was forgetting sometimes to breathe, who cleared his throat like an old smoker. She came back and settled down beside Peter and said nothing at all. She was still not sure how much of a burden she could share with such a young man.
Since the pub was not friendly, and they didn’t talk to people much at the café, they formed a closed circle of two, absorbed in each other so deeply that they didn’t even have a private language that any outsider could hear. They didn’t need the reminders of touch and graze because they knew that they owned each other.
The beans and the peas in the garden needed stakes. He didn’t know where to get them. Grace opened the padlock on the boxy wood shed at the end of the garden and showed the old bamboos her husband used. Some were rotten, some were broken, and they smelled of damp, but there were enough to stake the peas.
He was working in the garden when he knew that something was wrong.
He threw the bamboos down crisscross on the ground. He went through the door and forgot to put the boards back. He ran down the street, knocked against a spinster, a vicar, a coalman on his way, skidded into the front garden, and realized he still did not have a key. He liked to ask to come in, usually, but this time he knew he had no time at all.
He knocked on the front door, on the wood, then on the frosted glass. He rang the doorbell. He ran around the side, through the second paint
ed gate, and to the back door. He hammered on the green painted wood. He’d take a pick to the wood if he had one.
He shared Grace’s terrified mood; it was his mood. In the minute he had to stand there, waiting for the door to open, he tried to start a story to explain his terror, but all he had was this instinct to be here and to save her.
The door opened suddenly. Grace said: “It’s the boy.”
He ran into the front parlor. It was a room like a waxworks, everything shining vaguely, an orange carpet, three chairs, and a table covered in a lace cloth. On this bright afternoon, the light cut into the floating dust from the old coal fire, and there was still the faint damp smell of smoke from the chimney. He noticed all this as though for the first time; he had not spent much time in the parlor.
The boy was on the floor, hiding his face. He made ratcheting sounds, as though he had gears in his lungs. He heard Clarke, and he looked up, his face blue and pinched.
“It just came on,” Grace said. “He doesn’t say anything.”
The boy couldn’t speak; that was clear. He couldn’t cut the words out of his breathing.
“Get an ambulance,” Peter said. He didn’t know what else to do, except to get the boy out of the house, where there was nothing they could do for him. “Does anyone have a phone?”
“The woman next door. But she doesn’t talk to me.”
“She’ll have to talk to you.”
The boy couldn’t stay still. He was trying to duck away from whatever was strangling him. His face ran with sweat that made the blue tinge in his lips, in the fine skin around his eyes, seem like a paint of some kind. But it wasn’t on the surface anymore; it suffused the skin, poisoned it.
Grace went next door. The woman wouldn’t answer for a moment. Grace shouted through the letterbox that she had to use the phone.
The woman crashed about in her kitchen, rattling bottles in a garbage pail so as not to hear. Grace shouted: “It’s my boy. He’s bloody dying.”
The woman opened the door. “You should have thought of that,” she said.
Grace could see the phone.
“There’s a public phone two streets away.”