Umbrella

by Will Self

  Stubbing out the cigarette after a valedictory drag the taste is flat, Busner meets the Chaplain on his way out of the ward. What? he says. That was quick. And meanly persists: Y’know, Reverend, there’re plenty more in here in need of some, ah, Christian comfort. The man is not to be guyed, nor is he apologetic: I’ll be back, he says, but right now I have to take the Salvation Army visitors round – they come up weekly to check the acute wards for missing persons, but you probably knew that, Doctor? Touché. The Chaplain’s brown eyes may be mild – but they’re insistent and unblinking, better to drown in their tepid tea than bite down on this fucking cavity full of poisonous smoke and die in my Nuremberg cell. I thought you might like to know, the Chaplain continues, that Miss Death was really quite chatty – a remarkable lady, bears no resentment or rancour, one would say saintly if it weren’t such a damn cliché. Busner resurges: Family – did she mention any? The Chaplain resumes satisfiedly: She told me of two brothers, one she thinks will have kept the, um, unusual family name – the other, Albert, she says Frenchified it – her expression – to De’Ath. Busner, appalled by this conscientious – if waspish – pastoralism, aims a jibe: In point of fact, Reverend, Death is fairly common –. Patrick, please, the Chaplain says, and motors on: Miss Death told me Stanley was reported missing in action on the Somme in 1916, so there’s probably not much point in trying to track him down, or the other brother, Albert, who, if he were alive, would be in his mid-eighties by now . . . The cavity big enough to fit the Chaplain inside, he could preach to the exposed nerve-ending, Rock of ages cleft for thee . . . however, he was a prominent civil servant, and married with at least one child. It shouldn’t be difficult to find the family and who knows – the Chaplain smiles, steeples his fingers an allusion to prayer? – they may have Christian comfort to give and welcome the opportunity to help out their poor old auntie –. – Okay, good. Thank you. Busner hopes his abruptness conveys his own spiritual inclinations: holy speed, in mens sano, shit off a shovel . . . – Okay, good. Thank you, he says again, backing away towards the day-room. — At the hastily convened press conference Mimi and Miriam are placed centre stage in drag of dull suit with clip-on sideburns – Whitcomb with them, the eggheaded Professor who wears an explosive string vest. Phallic microphones probe at their unyielding mouths as they announce the mainland bombing campaign, but the real supremo, the diabolic mastermind, sits to one side lost in a donkey jacket too large for him, his small head shrunken still more beneath that ice bag of a tweed cap. Busner knows that look, has seen that wary look, fears that look –. He had a house in the Paragon, the Chaplain calls after Busner. D’you know it – at Blackheath? Frightfully pretty – of course, that would’ve been a very long time ago – before she fell ill. Busner calls back: Okay, good. Thank you – I’ll look into it and, wrenching round at last, succeeds in unbolting himself from the Chaplain’s mild steel threads. — Every Wednesday, together with the Guardian, a comic is delivered for Mark: The Beezer. Miriam beats up a soft-boiled egg in a teacup and feeds it to the baby – the egginess is unbearable to Zack: all-in-one human and chicken ovulation . . . Chicks eatin’ eggs and this is what you get, Aaaargh! Whoopee! Cripes! P’yong! Antics the seven-year-old scans with tremendous seriousness, his eyes entrapped in just the way they were when we left the ABC . . . Ho-ho! Phew! Tum-ti-tum! LOOK AT THESE SUPER PRIZES! PEN AND PENCIL SET – TENNIS RACKET – ROLLER SKATES – CRICKET SET – RECORD TOKEN – FLYING MODEL AEROPLANE. The winner of the Star Prize – a Record Token and a 50p Postal Order – is Mark Busner, South Grove, Highgate N6, for this: Man (in psychiatrist’s office) – ‘Please help me – I think I’m a pair of curtains.’ Psychiatrist – ‘Now, now, pull yourself together!’ Shadowing the Ooh-err! bum, or Oi! bonce, there are invariably a few black strokes to provide a sense of movement – movement, and so time within which a small boy may be alarmed, happy, fearful, overjoyed? In the toasted atmosphere surrounding his eldest son’s small face there are no black strokes, beneath it there’s no inscription. Aren’t you pleased? his father asked him, but the boy only shrugged, and now Busner thinks bitterly, I am Colonel Blink the Short-Sighted Gink not to’ve grasped that there was something seriously wrong – I’m a buffoon in Barney’s Barmy Army with a hastily inked-in moustache who’s been fooled by Jerry’s equally ill-conceived disguise. Still, if I hurry I can turn the tables on them by rolling the barrel full of explosives into their camp, so: DER BOMB, DER BOMB, DER BARREL IS RIGHT BESIDE YOU! and BOOM! A sight to gladden Freddy Ayer’s hooded eyes: the block letters surrounded with a yellow flash and the tannish cedillas of flying staves. Poor, fat, badly drawn Jerry, so much for his mainland bombing campaign . . . Maurice, his homburg looking as tall as Tom Mix’s Stetson, pulls back one curtain and then the other, the cold light surges into the empty room with its lumped-up dust sheets and stacks of pre-war newspapers – the worms’ casts of the real family that hadn’t been cut in two . . . — I stood there then, Busner thinks, as I stand here now on the twelve thirty-nine from Moorgate to Welwyn Garden City, on the eighth of April 2010: despite my closest living relative having been right beside me I was still alone . . . a boy blown in half when the road was mined yet again at Le Sars had been taken down by some over-enthusiastic poilus up from the south, Michael happened to be there and heard his dying words – the usual sad guff, sweetheart, mother, sarsap-a-fucking-rilla – but also that he’d miss a concert party that evening at which – or so it had been rumoured – Miss Dorothy Ward would be singing. They went up into a curtain of drizzle some way behind Guedecourt: Michael, Stanley and five others in tankers’ uniforms that were clean enough to withstand scrutiny being fresh out of a Mark 1 tin that had ditched some way short of Le Transloy. It wasn’t so unusual for them to surface behind the reserve trenches – happened all the time, although mostly inadvertently when an unanticipated advance by one side or the other left the underground men marooned. With their German-improved Greathead shields, their powerful digging and boring machines, and their advanced Edisonian listening equipment – courtesy of the Byng boys – the troglodytes could outpace any topsiders’ tunnelling, achieving three times their velocity: chuffing through the earth as a train comes along a straight branch line, of an evening . . . Jack the Ripper stole a kipper, Jack the Ripper stole a kipper . . . the chucking back of the till sounding, beneath the ground, uncannily like the rhythm of wheels-on-bogies . . . ch-k’ ch-kunk ch-k’ ch-kunk ch-k’ –. Extensions had been dug deep into the combatants’ territories – east to intersect with the mines of the Sambre-et-Meuse Valley, west to infiltrate those of the Pas-de-Calais. With so much more coal now available, a turning circuit was under construction beneath Ypres, in anticipation of bringing rolling stock down. Surfacing behind the lines, one or two of the troglodytes might take their chances, hoping they would be seized by their former enemies and so suffer no worse fate than imprisonment. But if a man were suddenly to come amongst former comrades – well he would either to’ve assumed another man’s identity, or else explain how it was he had survived – prospered seemingly – during his prolonged absence from his unit. It was strongly rumoured that the returnees of all armies were summarily shot – but this was not what kept them in their amenable Hades, bent to their boring, a shadowy force creeping under an advance, nipping at the heels of a retreat, burrowing far down below the shell holes of the new no-man’s-land and so re-establishing their subterranean liberty. No, Stanley understood the new law of threes operating in the sod: esprit de corps, a sense of justness, and this strange dialectic: There was one group of men here, a second over there, antipathetic to them in every way – and in the middle there was this third and better part, a combination of the two no longer trammelled by rank, king-emperor, kaiser or patrie in any shape – a hotchpotch, a linguistic stew, that, should a man partake of it, soon rose unbidden to his own lips: their happy argot. Grecian love also. It was Phelps – the resplendently naked subaltern who instructed Stanley in the latest principles of political economy – who had introduced hi
m to this gentle comfort – in the dark, the holding of hands and the rasping of a bearded cheek upon its brother’s. Stanley was shocked only by his own perfunctory acceptance: This was the way you unfixed your bayonet in the eternal eventime . . . ’tho, thinking upon it, he realised what the conflict had done to him: rubbed away at all the corns of convention, so that once the abrasion of the barrage ceased to operate upon him the dead hard skin sloughed off, leaving behind pale naked forms entwined together in the bowels of the earth . . . quite natural, tubers, mandrake roots . . . Whether it be Tommy and Frontschwein, poilu and pointu, or a mountainous Senegalese twinned with a tiny Chinese coolie. Stanley wished Feydeau could have seen it – they coupled so casually, the underground men, and no one – or so it seemed – thought anything much of it at all, it was merely the promiscuous instinct for life: the only distinctions that they made between the topsiders was whether they could be saved, the sole ones amongst themselves, whether he could be loved –. Where the blazes did you spring from? says the muffled-up shape of an officer stood pissing against the oiled cotton that stretches high over the twisted ribs and spars which used to be Mametz Wood. The day is an elegant parasol tasselled with clouds, the night an umbrella with starry holes torn in its cover. Got ditched up by Le Sars two days since, Stanley says jollily, moving in closer so that the man can see the crowns on his purloined uniform and the crossed machine guns. – Oh, I say – the officer’s features are teddy bear in their woolly surroundings – you tank-wallahs’re bloody lucky to’ve come through that show, is that your whole crew? Stanley concedes that it is, concurs in their good fortune, asks of the officer if he knows where the heavy bunch are stationed. Oh no, he says, if’n I did I still wouldn’t flap my mouth . . . he picks at his mitts . . . best be gettin’ back to Division – they’ll set you arights. Down there’s Montauban, sunken lane from there goes back up the line – y’ll be happy in it . . . as etappenschwein in shit . . . Slogging along, Stan chides himself for not making the best of it: the night sky and the crescent nailed up on this – up there are moon-men holed up in its cheesy canyons, crash-landed balloonists prob’ly huntin’ ’em down with fowling pieces – the duffers! They should know their powder won’t ignite in a vacuum . . . Behind the party the Materialschlacht goes on: dips, hooter, fusees, Very lights – the whole bang-shoot topped off by Jerry’s Big Berthas firing from below the horizon. Such illuminations! Gas-jets behind frosted glass – the world’s a pub, so set up the Dewar’s! He ought to enjoy it – but he can’t, so accustomed is Stan to the embrace of Mother Earth that with each step they take towards the rear the red man saws a little further around my scalp with his rusty bayonet, and he feels the chill night air on bare bone – which is the sky dome through which thoughts trail phosphorescent . . . Shuttlecock, shuttlecock, if you don’t spin, I’ll break your bones and bury your skin . . . Released from their clayey restraint, Stan’s arms begin to twitch, his shoulders to heave – he is compelled to swivel round so he can search the sky above and to the right. — At Division there is only an encampment of huddling Amiens huts and a big marquee that must have been pitched especially for the show. Lit from within, its barber’s pole stripes wriggle to the tinkle of ragtime piano played by a cheeky chappie, who, as the troglodytes enter, pulls off his boot and runs his heel along the keys t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-t’-ting-a-ling-dring-drang-ra-drong-gong! He’s the spit of Fred D’Albert – maybe it is he? Wouldn’t you like to ride in my aer-o-plane! The stage has been knocked up from duckboards and props with mud still on them – there’s no limelight only a row of hissing Tilleys. The men sit staring at the painted backdrop of a balustrade, on it a statue of an armless Greek goddess, and behind this a great crudely rendered mass of nasturtiums and sweet peas. The men – who are a mess o’ rice puddin’ after the chinks, Hindoos and blackamoors below ground – have imposed their own hierarchy on this entertainment, with the brass at the front: a stout and red-faced colonel sits on a wicker chair dragged in from some fallow farmhouse that should be supporting a bent old back – not this fat arse, should be creaking as Vieux MacDonald washes his ivories in a glass of pear brandy – not screeching reedy as Colonel-fucking-Blink squints through the Tilleys and takes a sip from his hip flask . . . Behind the officer, falling away, tier upon tier of bull-necked RSMs and military police, stoical sergeants and crapulent corporals ranged on benches – then, cross-legged on the bare earth, are the rows of lousy cropped mops and filthy gorblimeys, smaller and smaller, pipe-puffing Old Bills and waifish little Alphies, their heads bowed, shoulders hunched, hands cupped to protect the precious embers – all the way to the back flaps, where the bantams sit, their necks wet, their eyes dully regarding the splendid show of all these khaki backs. The Tommies mutter, groan, and shuffle to make room for the troglodytes, while the awed whisper goes round, Tankers . . . Tankers . . . the heavy bunch . . . In a way, Stan thinks, it isn’t too unfair an imposture – for aren’t we tankers of a sort? Behind their steel shield they too push forward inexorably, albeit rolling under all obstacles – rather than over. In the few minutes that they all sit watching Fred D’Albert rinky-dinky-plinky-plonking, Stanley eavesdrops on a drawling lieutenant of the Greys: Eeee-nor-mously foreshortened, blighter was only identified by his cigarette case – from Asprey’s, or so I’m weliably informed . . . And picks up other tit-bits: Wilson re-elected, the Welsh Wizard in Number Ten, old Franny-Joe dead in ’is bed, Nastyputin shoved under the Russiyan ice . . . He listens, but is more absorbed in his own posture: holding still, clasping his own shaking hands – so absorbed that at first he doesn’t register the auburn bombshell who explodes on to the stage. She wears a patriotic dress: red bodice, white waist, blue skirts that froth up from the makeshift footlights to reveal lovely calves. We’re fuckin’ dead already, moans the man next to Stanley, because a woman is usually the last thing you see at the dressing station when the shit from your punctured guts has poisoned your blood. This, Stanley thinks, this is why X-rays were invented, to see through all that silk and linen, to reveal the clean white limbs and blushing cunny of Miss Dorothy Ward, who makes a low bow so we all hang on her neckline, then lets fly with a blast of soft shrapnel that caresses us all. I should love to see my best girl, Cuddling up again we soon should be, Whoa! – the men all chorus and continue: Tiddly-iddly-ighty, Hurry me home to Blighty, Blighty, is the place for me! Back and forth across the narrow stage she promenades, pushing up her derrière, flinging out her long legs, – and, despite the fug of wet wool and fag smoke, the beer-soaked breath and leering sweat, the hyacinth, the jasmine and the sharp urinous tang of her own sweet perfume falls gently on all of them – and now Stan hears the lines that came before, Jack Dunn, son of a gun, over in France today, Keeps fit doing his bit up to his eyes in clay . . . That winter had seen skin left behind on the steel hafts of mattocks and spades, – it was too cold to melt the diesel oil in the engines they had rigged up to edge their Greathead shields forward, so the trogs sat tight in the frozen ground, deep in their burrows behind layer upon layer of canvas, a Rattenkönig biding its time, sallying forth only for food or fuel . . . Each night after a fight to pass the time along, He’s got a little gramophone that plays this song . . . Come the spring some went on up to Arras, marching by night along the winding strip of no-man’s-land, and by day taking cover underground – telegraph and telephone wires had been strung between the discontinuous tunnel systems, so that everywhere they arrived they found loving arms, warm soup, a dry straw palliasse on which to lay their heads . . . Take me back to dear old Blighty! Put me on the train for London town! Take me over there, Drop me anywhere, Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham, well, I don’t care! Stanley had been sorry to bid farewell to Michael, who felt it incumbent on him to aim south, to the Hindenburg Line, not believing that Nivelle’s offensive would be any sort of coup – let alone le dernier. There’s a duty my duck, he said. Frenchie is a proud fellow, and more lads coom down to uz at Vairdoon than anywhere else along the Front – it’ll be the sam
e now: they’ve a stomach for a different fight, though! . . . Tiddly-iddly-ighty, Hurry me home to Blighty, Blighty is the place for me! — Squelching in the mud below Vimy Ridge, Stanley remembered Michael’s words. The tunnels here were deep and well secured – scores of generators had been brought down from the overrun German trenches, and some Jerry engineers had come down with them who were like the Wizard of Menlow Park when it came to knocking up pumps and other contraptions. Still, no pump could suck up this evil slurry, which churned into whirlpools that sucked in men trussed up in their greatcoats, entire field pieces, and on one momentous occasion a tank that wallowed into the tortured morass as the U-boats did beneath the seas . . . Bill Spry, started to fly, up in an aeroplane, In France, taking a chance, wish’d he was down again, Poor Bill, feeling so ill, yell’d out to Pilot Brown: Steady a bit, yer fool! We’re turning upside down! The world be turned that way, said a burly pilot officer, come down fléchette-fast, parting company from his spinning Camel two hundred feet up – or so he said – plummeting away from its twin Vickers, which went on firing lead arabesques, then slithering from the lip-into-the-cup, where the trogs had just opened an entry point. One minute I was up above, sculpting the very clouds and bein’ the very flower of chivalry – he was en route to return a dropped map case to a worthy foe – the next I’m down here in the depths with you mudlarks! Dinnae fash yersel’! cried the ex-drummer boy who first tried to restrain the aviator – then laid him out cold. From Huggins, the pilot, Stanley learned of the Petrograd rising. You lot’re bolshier than the Bolshies, he said, once they had taken him deep below and shown ’im the ropes – and he spoke of his wee terrier, Boinkum, left behind at Roclincourt. They lay there in the subterranean gallery, on their galvanised-iron platforms, looking up at the dripping earthen sky – and Huggins spoke of how Boinkum would howl when he wasn’t allowed to go up to the dogfights with his master. Fast friends they became – beneath Wancourt, Monchy and Thélus. Huggins grew fanciful, saying he could see clouds boiling in the mud and smell the wind of change in the miasmas of their tunnels and burrows. He had nightmares, waking terror-struck in the impenetrable darkness, Thousands of tire-Boches! he had seen, Thousands, thrustin’ down at us –! And of course, the world being turned that way, they were all hurled skywards and impaled on this fakir’s bed. Stan stroked Huggins’s rough curls and encircled the former pilot’s heavy chest with his wiry arms, cooing to him, Take me back to dear old Blighty! Put me on the train for London town! Take me over there, Drop me anywhere, Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham, well, I don’t care! — More than a year later they were still together, having been squeezed further north along the lubricated chute between the maddened masses – past Lens, Neuve-Chapelle and Fromelles, they arrived in time to experience the merciless bombardment of Passchendaele from below. It was around that time that the first doughboys joined them through the Messines craters, and, seeing these big western farm boys, filthy and demoralised, Stanley laid bare for them the state of affairs: The khaki cattle are on this side, see, and the field-grey ones gettin’ a taste of their own marmeladeneimer are over there. The wire separates these two breeds just as it does your livestock on the range – but that’s a bit thick, see, and one day, when the time’s right, the fences’ll be cut and all these chaps’ll mingle together, just as we do here – and then they’ll all go home. I’m . . . I’m as sure you’re like me as – damnit –! He and Huggins sang to the doughboys, I should love to see my best girl, Cuddling up again we soon should be, Whoa! Tiddly-iddly-ighty, Hurry me home to Blighty, Blighty is the place for me! In those doomdripped days they thought often of the London sewers – not as deep as the underground tunnels, right enough, but then: Not even bombs want to drop in the shit, said Stanley, who many of them had taken to calling Henry Morton, on account of his exploratory turn of mind. Greengage, a onetime sapper who had worked in them as a lad, spoke of their remarkable taint, how poking towheads down or pulling up dead dogs he would near-savour the blending of detergent and excreta, while the waters roared on through the glistening tiled culvert and over a subterranean precipice big enough to swaller a ’bus! The sewers, Greengage contended, are a place in their own right, not juss the love tunnels of rats an’ turds, but the bowels of the very metropolis, and as such necessary to the functioning of its monumental body: there could be no pretty faces promenading through Mayfair without the shitty business underneath . . . Jack Lee, ’aving his tea, says to his pal MacFayne, Look, chum, it’s apple and plum! It’s apple and plum again! Same stuff, isn’t it rough? fed up with it I am! Oh for a pot of Aunt Eliza’s raspb’ry jam! The troglodytes debated the wisdom of devoting their energies to making of their own shafts and culverts a drainage system, for the topsiders were drowning in the standing water now that the Flanders dykes and ditches had been destroyed.