The Opened Cage

by S. C. Howe

  ‘I’d be careful of that one,’ one of the youths was saying. ‘Look at his bleedin’ face.’

  ‘He’s the one who’s been beaten up, you Jessie,’ another snorted. ‘Just shows he can’t look out for himself don’t it!’

  ‘Yeah, but he can, can’t he? I wouldn’t have the bleedin’ nerve to go round looking like that.’

  Tom smiled to himself and carried on scanning the newspaper, in the hope, in the faint hope...and there it was, under the personal messages.

  Thomas Fielder (Heathend, Worcestershire). I know what happened. Please come back. I can’t go on without you. S-F-J

  Short-for-Joss: their code. After the shift had finished, he went straight into town and the post office and sent a telegram. He just about had enough to send it, if he didn’t eat anything that evening. So back to the lodging in the Cock and Comb, and the landlady pushing food at him, a clean towel and then back into the warmth of the wash room.

  Warmth. He always craved that comfort. Huddling in the salted bath, and later under the counterpane and blankets on the bed, he found a peace and sleep came gently in its wake.

  The next few days took on a quiet regularity. Up at 6.30 a.m. and to an early opening cafe for a simple breakfast by the wharves, and then the short walk to the warehouse for work starting at 8 a.m. He moved on to packing blankets and boots. The blankets he had to refold and pack in lots of six, and the boots he had to pair up into sizes and knot the laces and then pack in wooden crates, one for each shoe size. It was repetitive, thoughtless work, and he needed just that. It did occur to him that he could be doing similar types of work at the farm, so why wasn’t he? He didn’t know and he didn’t challenge it. Joss wrote daily. Tom picked the letters up at the post office and he could tell Joss understood. He had also sent Tom’s passbook for the bank, so money was no longer short. And he didn’t have to explain himself to anyone else, so he carried on working in silence, and as the days passed, the bruises on his face and in his mind faded.

  The only day he had off was Sunday and that morning was one of sun and unusual warmth for February, so he walked out along a footpath, which initially ran through sooty walls of warehouses, and then out of the city limits and into the riverside meadows, still beige in their winter hibernation, but the sun glittered on the river. Tom remembered the walk by the Severn when he was six, chattering away to his grandfather. Fringing the river was a patch of hazels with the catkins shivering in the mild breeze. Dotted were a few early pale yellow-green primroses. Almost in spite of himself, he found that he was smiling. It was then that he decided he would walk back to the farm. The arrangement with the warehouse was on a day-to-day basis and he had left nothing in the lodgings, so he was free to go, so he went.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The first few hours of the walk were some of the best he could remember for weeks, but then he felt the sharp jolt of hunger and realised he would have to get off the riverside path and find a village or town to get food and shelter. The afternoon air became chilly, and with it came a growing sense of unease. He started the number game in his head, told himself to drop it, but, as the hunger grew and the temperature fell, a strange, overwhelming dread started to invade his mind. He wasn’t ready to go back. But if he didn’t go back the whole farming concern may collapse. You arrogant sod, Fielder, he sniped. The world doesn’t revolve about you, you know. To go back would be like walking back into a world of explanations, of sticky justifications. Why didn’t you fight harder? Think straighter? …Why did you choose that man to bring in from no man’s land? Why leave that one. Why? Why? Why? You sensed Deerman’s physical infatuation. You led him on. What did you expect? No point acting like a maiden aunt now. Weren’t you just a little flattered by his too obvious lust? You thought you could stick your toe in that maelstrom and then run off after the thrill. But he got you, didn’t he Fielder? Almost thrust you through physical sex into oblivion, and made your life embarrassing.

  The light was dying as Tom sat on a tree stump and held his head in his hands. The newly nursed-back hope drained out of him. His head thrummed with threats and recriminations. By the time he reached the main street of the next village, it was dark and coming around the top of the street was an omnibus bound for Ludlow. He climbed on it as it stopped to let several passengers off, and staring blankly ahead, let it take him away from his home, from Joss, everything he wanted.

  How long he had been walking, Tom didn’t know. He alighted somewhere in the dark and walked along silent, frosted tracks in woodland. Moonlight threaded between the thin spindles of coppice, lattice-like, and he walked deeper into the forest. Ink outlines of bare oaks loomed towards him, over him, their shape primeval and disturbing, as though the twisted thick boughs were those ghosts walking between worlds of despair. It was imperative he kept walking, kept moving so that those things squirming in his head, trying to metamorphose into thoughts, were thwarted. The pain of hunger gnawed at his insides. As the night deepened, a mist closed in from the trees; it was like walking through a dream. A fog closed in tighter and tighter so it seemed immense, like vaporous snow that chilled the sweat on his forehead. Sweat? How could he be sweating when it was so cold it was actually stinging his face? But he walked and walked until he met a glacial, colourless morning. Reaching a hamlet he saw lights were on in a one-storey, timber-clad building. He went towards it, a desperate, inexplicable hope surfacing. Saw it was a coal merchant’s house and shop, the latter beckoning him with the thought of food. He felt in his pockets; his fingers grasped four pennies. Nothing more. But he had to eat. He walked in, feeling faint, swaying. Saw that flour was the cheapest item so he asked the older woman at the counter for four pennies’ worth and, as she moved around the back to weigh it out, he stuffed his pockets full of anything at hand – chocolate, dried fruit, rice. Throwing the money down on the counter he ran down an enclosure bank into the wood. When he had run himself out, he forced himself to eat, swallowing quickly to get more in. The next moment he was on his hands and knees, vomiting painfully, feeling as though he would die with the strain. He strained to hear if the shopkeeper was coming after him, but there was only silence and the thick, silent fog closing in on everything. He wandered on, not knowing which direction he was going in. Somehow it didn’t matter now. Soon he reached a silent, empty road, walked along it and then sank down on the side of it, with his knees drawn up to his face. He wasn’t sure if it was minutes or hours later when the muzzled outline of lamps came towards him with an eerie tinkle of bells and the clank of wheels. It felt like the realm of a magic land with the overwhelming whiteness of the fog and the unusually sharp sounds of the cart, and then came the snorting of horses, a sudden whinnying. A lamp swung in his face.

  ‘Looks fit to drop,’ came a man’s voice.

  ‘I think he already has,’ a woman replied.

  The next thing, Tom was being helped up and a shawl wrapped around him. It smelled of the warm, soft scent of woman. She steadied him against her; the contact was comforting.

  ‘If he ain’t going to speak, we’ll have to take him to the poor house,’ came the man’s voice.

  ‘In Ludlow?’

  ‘Yeah. They’ll know what to do.’

  So that was where he was going. Ludlow. Yes, of course, he remembered now.

  The cart rattled and jangled on and the death-cold fog nuzzled around them, crept up noses and into lungs. It was like driving into a white, cobwebbed void, trusting there was something on the other side.

  An hour later, they drew up outside an isolated building. Voices conferred quietly below as he was led into a dormitory, full of iron-framed beds and hard wooden chairs. In a far corner stood an unlit stove. Sinking onto the bed, he forced his boots off, curled up beneath the blankets and fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.

  He woke later that day and looked up at the grey room and the faded picture of a rural idyll in its broken frame, and walked out. He needed money, needed to let Joss know where he was. So he walked. It was important
to keep walking, even though his legs felt as though they were moving independently, his feet dropping like lumps of lead, like a machine trying to stay in perpetual motion. Soon he found himself in the middle of Ludlow where he found a bank. He withdrew some money, put it safely in an inside pocket then went to the telegram office. He wrote: Am all right but need to move around for a while. Will be back. V. soon. Tom-Thomas

  After he had paid for it, he realised at the back of his crammed, whizzing mind what a short, self-absorbed message it was, but if he went any further he was sure a whole floodgate of misery would come streaming out and he wouldn’t know how to control it. But he knew he had to let Joss know he was all right. Joss should not have to worry. So why the hell didn’t he just get on the nearest train and go back? What was the matter with him?

  The sun had come out, triumphed over the earlier fog. He sat down heavily on a bench by the castle bailey, looked out at the market; this was a taste of the spring to come: warmth, sunshine, bright colours, so why was his head full of darkness? Why? It was like a black mass of flies, humming insanely as he tried to pull himself out of a vat of glue. He tried to focus on the sunlit stone of the castle, of the sun on the renewing grass of well-tended lawns, but instead his mind seemed to collapse in on itself. Tatters of flesh on barbed wire under clots of flies, tatters of other more appalling things stinking on the wire, vomited into his vision. He leant forward and wept, hiding his face in his arms, oblivious to those who saw him.

  Later he wandered around Ludlow, passed rows of half-timbered houses and ancient stone-built shops and did not see them; trailed down the narrow side alleys that led somewhere, but he did not know where. The buildings were jostling for space: shops offering food, clothes and comfort, and hotels and coaching inns extending golden invitations with fires crackling in hearths and enormous meals on plates. The hunger in Tom’s guts felt like a sickness. Walking back to the castle at the top of the market place, he slipped through the main door, which had been left ajar. Then he was walking in these silent, ancient enclaves. The limestone rock was cold to his hand. He kept thinking of Joss but all he could feel was guilt, guilt about going with the prostitute and a gutting, insurmountable guilt about the sex with Roger Deerman. How would he be able to look Joss in the face again when his own carnality was now common knowledge? Now that he was mocked? Joss had said he knew what happened but did he know all of it? Had Deerman told him everything? He desperately wanted to believe what the doctor had said to him, to feel that Deerman had orchestrated the whole event, but then he pictured himself in the fire-lit room, naked, standing there, his urgent erection on full view and the women’s soft hands exploring him, as he stood, his eyes closed, drunk with arousal. Going with the woman had conflated itself with sex with Joss, but, however he tried to view the activity with Deerman, it could not be explained away. What he couldn’t avoid was the point in the act when he gave up struggling and let Deerman continue. How, flitting through his mind like a dart, was the thought that if this was going to happen to him, then he would find out what sex was like with another man, and Deerman was well-practised, knowledgeable about arousal. A bigger lust had coursed through him as he lay on that bed that fought with the intellectual sense that it was all wrong for him, that sex with that man was just plain wrong. It had been like some primordial thing within his sense of himself, battling with what made him civilised, thoughtful, loyal. How could he own up to that? Despite the lifeline the doctor in the hospital had thrown him, he knew what he had thought and felt his body crunch into the cold, cold stone. How the hell was he ever going to face anyone again? He crouched into the black recess of a window and waited for the cold or the ghosts to finish him.

  Waking as it grew light the next morning he was surprised to find he was still alive, but he was. Ice cold, barely able to uncurl himself, but still here. The endless months in the freezing trenches had clearly made him more resilient than he thought. He unfolded himself and tried to stand up, looking around and trying to focus, work out exactly where he was. He remembered and realised he had been locked in the castle. He had to get out before anyone arrived for work so, climbing onto one of the walls he edged into the deep recesses of what would have been an upper room window. The rising sun was starting to pick out the fallen masonry on the steep bank down to the River Teme, which moved far below glinting through the early morning mist. His head felt as light as a seed head, being buffeted this way and that. He could see people looking up at him from the bridge far below. They probably think I’m a suicide case, he thought, better get down and away. He edged onto a lower wall and scrambled, bit by bit, to the ground outside the castle and into oblivion. He then walked unsteadily to the market area, and, finding a cafe was already open, ordered a large breakfast with a pot of tea, which he ate and drank as soon as it arrived. The shaking in his hands stopped, and, for a moment, he felt that he could simply walk down to the railway station, buy a ticket to take him back to Heathend and Joss. Then the thought struck him: what would happen if Joss didn’t want him back? What would happen if he couldn’t bear to touch him? What if he, himself couldn’t perform? He hadn’t even thought of that. So he did and it sapped everything, and, after paying in silence, he wandered out of the cafe and over to the seats in the square and sat, waiting… for what? Thoughts scrambled over themselves like puppies in a basket, but they weren’t like puppies, these were images of death, of sex, of faces of people he loathed, all coming at him so he got up quickly and started walking again. Just walking. Went dead straight, clambering over fences, straight through faintly emerging crops, even went through a couple of back gardens until he reached the scarp of Titterstone, that grey, monolithic rock which was slowly being mined away by man. It was like the Front, but in geological slow motion. The only sound up here was the wind, which gusted into his face and tore at his hair. He looked back at the town, the quiet country town that was sleepy in the grey winter mist. He turned back and into the faint sound of a quarry, which became louder until it was as thunderous as the guns had been; the boom and thudding of extraction with spumes of dust billowing up and out, infecting the air and casting a bloom over the vegetation. As he walked nearer, he heard the grating of cables, the squeals of iron against iron, rising to a wail, like the sound of the front-line trench: manic, inhuman, terrible. Then the blast of a Claxton horn and, seconds later, an ear-splitting explosion and the earth thundered and shook. He ran past the spoil heaps, further out past the cramped, red-bricked houses and older coal spoils from nearby mines, standing ugly, black and huge. Went down tracks dirtied with coal grit, then suddenly down a steep bank and out into space, air, and freedom. The wind carried off the confusion, banishing it back to nightmares, so he was alone again and in silence. And it was silence, taking away all traces of mankind. Tom’s pace dropped as he crossed a moor that shivered with the brown, frail bodies of last year’s harebells. Coming to a small enclave of coppice wood, he found himself on Silvington Common. All around was heather, burnt brown by frost and wind, with last year’s bracken glowing bronze in the oddly orange sunlight. The silence was extraordinary and seemed all his. He could stay here, hide here, stop. At least his mind had stopped buzzing.

  Catherton Common stretched before him, an intricate interwoven world of brown, fawn and grey, peaceful and untroubled, it seemed. A distant figure was cutting bracken, another was herding cattle onto grazing, a post-cart was making its way up the lane, which dissected the moor. Everyday life was going on without him and that was a relief, a relief that they didn’t know everything about him and his body. That was it, wasn’t it? That he had allowed himself, his body, to be exposed, so that there was nothing Deerman didn’t know about him, hadn’t seen, explored, groped, or penetrated. And he’d known that Deerman had been watching as he copulated with the prostitute, enjoying Tom’s powerful orgasm. Had known that that had been part of the plan and that, as he lay there afterwards, what would happen next. But hadn’t he rebelled the next moment? Hadn’t he? Up here, now thoug
h, he was just another stranger and the people working below knew nothing about him. It felt as though he had come to the limit of some line and the heath was the end, and his strength. That strength was its permanence, its very presence, a judgement on the summit’s hacked-away, man-made hell. The glacially splintered rock showed grey beneath the mats of bilberry and heath, gaunt and pale, like dried out bones in this winter-bitten world.

  The absence of a letter from Tom had jolted Joss momentarily, but then he started reasoning. The post had been held up; a letter had gone missing; Tom had posted it too late the previous day. They started as upbeat thoughts but, as the morning drew on and there was no second post, his hope started to fail, slide away, so by late afternoon there was a raw fear and inertia. If only he could just talk to Tom. Know he was safe somewhere. But nothing. So he resorted to that which had helped in the past and pulled down the box within a box from the very top of the dresser, the box that held the opiates – one small tablet, or an injection, and… a happy oblivion, well, oblivion at least. So after the Greeners had gone and had instinctively known not to ask after Tom, Joss took the medication and slid into nothingness until sunrise.

  Later that morning a telegram arrived, and Joss’ s heart pounded painfully in his throat, in his head. The Greener boy stared over to Joss and sensing his stare, Joss walked back into the farmhouse and shut the door with a slam. Am all right but need to move around for a while. Will be back. V. soon. Tom-Thomas Joss’s mouth tightened and a sense of anger, of bitterness broke out on him, like a sweat. Thanks very much. You didn’t think to say where you were. While you’re roaming, I’ll just sit here and keep everything going. As soon as he thought this, he wished dearly he hadn’t, but it had been felt, and that seemed irrevocable. For the rest of the day he worked, tight-lipped, in the glasshouses, re-potting the small strawberry plants, not knowing what else to do. The helplessness of sitting in mud in the trenches, under the possibility of a painful death the next second, percolated through his mind. As he walked over the courtyard, he noticed that the flowerbed Tom had sown last spring was a jumble. The hollyhocks were brown and bent, fallen like cripples, the foxgloves had been knocked to one side, probably by the cart, and the sweet peas were barely recognisable in the jungle of winter-browned goose grass and bramble. He tried to remember when he had last noticed this patch, whether he had even registered the riot of colour last summer. As he looked over the meadow, he heard an owl hoot and saw its ghostly form glide silently over the earth; it turned its spectral face towards him, as if in warning, then flapped away over the scarp to the heath. Joss tried to shake off this image, but it stuck like a burr in his mind. Looking around, he realised that the meadow was the only intact grassland they had now. The rest was a ploughed expanse of mud glistening under the starlight after the rain of the late afternoon. From the barn new machinery glinted, like a huge impersonal army. Only the hedges and trees and this remaining pasture seemed to equate with anything of their old dream. Then he thought back to an evening a few weeks ago when he crossed the courtyard and heard the clatter of machinery from the barn. Tom had been inside tacking up Jasper to one of the new ploughs. Ideals were not going to fill their stomachs he had said when Joss had asked him what he was doing, and he had led the horse out with lamps flaring, and then was out in one of the fields ploughing up the last areas of scrub, unreachable in this new obsession. But it was late now and his leg and back ached; he reasoned with himself that this time it was strictly medicinal as he reached for the morphia and, within minutes, passed out in the old armchair by the fire with Nico draped over his chest.