by Adam Roberts
But we have destroyed the car and killed the soldiers, so it was a good day. And Hamar is dead, but I will soon be with him. Every day I kill some Senaarians I thank my private God that I have lived another day, that I survived long enough to kill more of them. And when I die I know that it will be in my heart to rage that I have not been granted one more day to kill some more.
We were able to retrieve three more needlerifles and some heavier projectile guns from the engagement in which Hamar and Capal and three others died.
Textualising these memories has had one curious effect. I have recalled the time before we made war. It has made me realise how war becomes a simple way of living, how it seems to provide all that a human needs as material and spiritual membrane, wrapped tightly around them. It is the reason to go on living; it is what to do, how to do it; it is how to arrange the priorities; it is the end of the day and the beginning of wisdom; it is the left hand and the right hand. I might almost say I am glad to be dying before the war comes to the end, for what would I do afterwards?
Mostly I feel the pain in my bones themselves. My arms do swell a little, and sometimes my teeth come away from their sockets and wiggle. Several teeth have dropped away altogether, but mostly now I eat well-cooked salt eels, where the flesh can be broken off only with the gums, and soft pasta, and some soups. I still have my hair, unlike many of us. But for much of my time since the cancer, I have found the pain a help to war-making. There is a step, a shelf, from feeling unhappy and unmotivated with misery, to suddenly leaping up to energy and killing-fury, where the pain is a goad. Hopping up this step gets harder with each sortie, but I manage it.
I must sleep now. That is the thing. Sleep.
I have dreamt, much more than I used to do. I would say it is my mind putting the events in an ordered sequence, tidying before closing down. Who can say? Sometimes I sleep only to jerk awake. The sensation is as of the world tipping, angling; and I lurch spastically awake. My dreams are of needles, of people dying beside me, of all the stench and pain of war. But if the pain has rooted in the bed of sleep, then the beauty is in a purer place, in my waking imagination.
But then I find myself thinking: is this war? Sometimes the memories arrange themselves as strange, as comical; a circus-war, a war with balloons and strange colours; a war set in a landscape of white, whipped up like peaks of cream. I find myself shrinking, collapsing in on myself so rapidly it feels like falling: and then I am a speck, a pollen-grain-sized man. Here, then: amongst the grains of salt, in all their geometric precision. The universe is filled with them, choked and cluttered with the cubes, the spheres, the rhomboids and the pyramids, all in their bridal white, all in their funeral white. And still I shrink, until my world is only the world between the shapes. I run along the ledge of a grain of salt, and hop from it onto a great ball of salt. White shapes looming huge, and all the rest a blackness.
Rhoda Titus
It was Ruby who told me about the drowned boy. He and his friends had been playing (she said) on one of the hulks, climbing onto the derelict structure, diving off into the water. They liked the hulk, of course, because it was well away from the shore, and well away from the scums of hard salt that accumulate there. But it was the depth out there that did for him. He dived and the mask he was wearing came off, and because there was so much chlorine on the water’s surface he choked and went under.
At first I felt an awful, physical sense of horror at the story, as if a fist were clutching at my heart with its nails inwards. Partly this was Ruby’s manner of telling it. Her wide face was red with the effort of hurrying up the main plaza and coming to the office, and she looked flushed and excited. Of course she was horrified too, but the impression she gave was of somebody over-delighted to have this piece of gossip. I remember thinking: some small boy’s death has this value, that it can be exchanged for an afternoon’s chatter in an office. But perhaps I felt bad because, despite myself, the news sucked me in, started my heart rapping. It was the news, and also the environment, the bustling of women about me. I was caught up, and along with the rest of them I hurried out of the office and down the main road to the seashore to watch the army diver bring the body ashore.
I had a hemp handkerchief, and I was blotting my eyes continually; the faint sting of the air simply swelling the sense of how utterly appropriate tears were, of how everybody was crying. I am not saying I cried because everybody was crying; that’s not exactly it. It was rather as if some shadowy permission had been granted, and a faucet turned, so that a great pressure of salty water could be relieved. Once, on Earth (how fine those words are! How they captivate the younger people when I talk to them) . . . once, on Earth, at my father’s farm, I had seen a vet deal with sheep. The sheep had some sort of intestinal complaint. The complaint seems exactly the right word, because that was what the sheep did: bleated querulously with the discomfort and the fixity of it. They were all lying on their sides, and every one of their sheep bellies was horribly distended, swelled as if with an enormous, monstrous pregnancy. Except that when I went to touch them (I was nine or ten) these bellies felt nothing like the comfortable yielding of my mother’s tummy, in which my brother was still hidden. The sheep felt hot and hard, with no give at all, and only a painful-looking sense of absolute bloat. I remember feeling scared that the sheep were going to explode; not so far-fetched an idea, said the vet. And when he arrived, flying over the hills, he said there was no time to lose. With the mixture of open fascination and inscrutable horror of the nine-year-old child I clung to my father’s knees and watched the vet go about his work. This is what he did: he took a large hypodermic from his bag, and then he pulled away the plunger and got rid of it, so that he had only the needle and the open phial at the end of it. Then he went from sheep to sheep, rubbing at a place on the wide pressurised belly, and sliding the needle in swiftly. And as he did this, there was hush sound, the trapped air inside came out, and the belly sagged and subsided, until it was only a loose sag of skin under the wool. He went from sheep to sheep doing this, and the miracle was as soon as the belly had been deflated, each sheep hopped to his feet and began again at his endless task of munching the grass over the hillside. There was something wonderful in this, to the eyes of a child. Afterwards, the vet took me from sheep to sheep as he fed each one some pill, to help clear the blockage that had caused the problem in the first place, and talked to me kindly. I think now that perhaps he was a little in awe of my father, and that this chatting with the little girl was a way of approaching the great man without having actually to address him. He was an intimidating man, my father; at least he was to other men.
But the memory of the sheep came to me that day, by the waters’ edge, because in a sense that was how the tears felt. There was that same mingling of physical necessity combined with a slightly shameful, even absurd and vulgar, voiding. My tears were releasing an intolerable internal compression, and so I could simultaneously hate them for the indignity, for the display, as if they were some appalling escape of wind: and yet at the same time feel so thankful for them that I almost offered up a silent prayer. The day was waning, and the sun was starting to blush slightly as it approached the horizon. Quite a crowd had gathered down by the seashore, and us at the forefront.
‘They ought to sink those hulks,’ said Ruby.
Clare, who was standing next to me, hummed her agreement. ‘They’re a danger. Kids will always go out to them, because the shore is always so blocked off with salt crust.’
‘And because they’re kids,’ said Ruby. ‘They’ll go for that reason alone.’
‘They can’t sink them,’ said somebody else. This was a woman who didn’t work in our office, and so who (perhaps) hadn’t got into the habits of public cynicism that were the patter with us. ‘They will still maybe develop them. They’ll be the first boats in the Senaarian Navy.’ The hulks had started out as the hulls for the great Galilean barges, ways of taking trade from Senaar to the other southern nations, at a time when the roads we
ren’t safe from the terrorists. But they had not been well built, and they had been extremely expensive, and when the terrorists were got rid of, the need to continue the project had faded away. I think it was true that the official version saw the hulks as a future investment, to be completed one day; but I suppose few enough believed that. Just to look at them, to see how much damage they had endured from the repeated Whispers and the corrosion of the chlorine and salt, belied the idea that they would ever be anything other than floating platforms of decay.
But once this other person had spoken the official line, about the Great Senaarian Navy, the mood to carp at officialdom was dissipated. It gave the occasion a nervous edge, and we felt like the children we were, bickering and bitching about parental rules.
‘Still,’ said Ruby, voicing one of the few comments that could be offered without being gainsaid by anybody. ‘Still, it’s a wicked shame about the boy being drowned.’
‘Oh, it is,’ said Clare. And she started crying again, and so did Ruby. And so did I, with that same half-ashamed, half-grateful sense of public release.
I think I had a particular vision of the drowned boy, one that came to me spontaneously as soon as Ruby had come panting into the office with the news. I saw him as I remembered my brother, Zed, when he was perhaps six or seven. I saw him as that sort of creature, with skin the colour of pale whiskey in the sunshine, and limbs narrow as ropes; I saw him dancing in the yellow sunlight of earth, laughing and rushing. There was always something fluid about Zed. Father was stern with him, because he was a boy, to exactly the degree he was yielding with me because I was a girl. Sometimes Zed would take refuge behind me, as if my frail femaleness could perhaps shield him. He was a fluid boy, always laughing, in motion, always flowing; but my father was as strong and as rigid as a rock. As strong as the hill about which the farm seemed to rest by sufferance; as tall as the town house in which we spent winter, six storeys high, dominating the street. I suppose that was why I thought of Zed, because the collocation of boy and drowned made me connect with my memories of the fluidity of my brother.
But then the crowd went silent, and the outboat started towards the shore, bringing with it only a hollow disappointment. The diver, tugged along behind the outboat, found his footing on the beach and started up through the water to the dry land, carrying the body, salt breaking like ice about his steps. He was no boy, to my eyes, but rather a man. I later discovered he was fourteen, a week shy of his fifteenth birthday. The tears dried up. He was not a boy, he was a man. They carried his lazily drooping body from the water’s edge, with strings of water dribbling from his flaccid arms and head. And suddenly the sight of him revolted me, and I had to turn away.
It seems strange to have experienced that sort of reaction at the thought of a man, of a man dead. I always valued men, felt most comfortable with men. Loved men, their company, their conversation, and simultaneously despised the banality of female companionship. But now I feel banished from the world of men. Now my world is the office, and the women I work with. There are few enough men around anyway, with the war taking the best of them. But after what happened to me, my reactions to men have been broken, like a long bone; the wound’s edge still bright with pain. From time to time, I might be struck with the sheer beauty of a squad of men marching down the road, their legs moving with such precise rhythm. But at other times, as with the drowned boy, the fact that I can mentally shuffle a human being from the ‘boy’ pigeonhole to the ‘man’ pigeonhole can lead to profound upset. Ruby didn’t notice me turn away, or at least if she did I suppose she assumed it was because I was so upset at the thought of a young man drowned. Ruby has never understood how friable I am, or even that a personality can be taken that way, with self-contradictory moods. Ruby sees the world as a straightforward thing.
Afterwards, back in the office, Ruby said, ‘I was speaking with somebody in the crowd. They say he was only weeks away from an army commission.’
‘I heard that,’ said Clare. ‘He was only a few days from turning fifteen.’
‘It’s a shame,’ I said, although I didn’t really feel it was. But Ruby and Clare exchanged significant glances. If ever I comment on a man they consider it significant, be the comment ever so conventional. They expect me to announce a sudden marriage, I suppose; and they think it odd that I have left it so long. It’s been years since hibernation, they say. A good-looking woman like you shouldn’t wait around for ever. I know, of course, without it needing to be spelled out, that when they say good-looking they actually mean not as good-looking as you used to be. I am broad now, and my midriff droops. I have started playing absently with my arms and neck in the shower, tugging at the skin there, pulling it into a flap and letting go. It slinks back into position, but only slowly. It’s nothing more than age, of course; nothing but Old Adam as Ruby puts it (when referring to herself, of course; she’d never talk about me in those terms). Ruby is biologically sixty-something and I am only just past forty, so there is more Old Adam about her. But she has a husband, a man younger than her, about whom malicious stories sometimes circulate. He is a supply officer in the army, which keeps him away from the front line. ‘Good thing too,’ Ruby says, and then blushes for thinking so unpatriotic a thing. I wonder what Ander would have done, had he survived. Would he have insisted on going to the front line? I think he would, because he would have feared the stigma of not doing so. And, more than this, I think he would have been a good front-line soldier.
When Father introduced me to Ander I assumed he was one of Father’s ‘people’. This nebulous crowd had never really coalesced in my imagination beyond an indistinct vision of interchangeable men in uniforms, or in suits, who sometimes called by the city house. What they did, or precisely how they related to my father, was not something I could easily have put into words. Nonetheless, it seemed to me utterly in the way of things that my father had ‘people’, just as it seemed logical to assume that all such people were smaller than he was. Father was a tall man, and not bulky about the body, but he held himself so taut he gave the impression of greater muscle than he had; and most of the people I saw him with were indeed shorter than he. Ander certainly was, a tubby little man with a swirl of hair on a bald head that even I could look down on, and which put me in mind of a pattern of debris left dry on the bottom of the sink after the water had curled away down the plughole. Perhaps, on that first day, it struck me as odd that Father went out of his way to introduce me to Ander, when he never usually bothered introducing other of his people. But it was only a full day later when I even began thinking about him properly, only when the realisation came over me (and, of course, Father would never say something like this in so many words) that Ander was intended as my future husband.
I was twenty-five. I had never really thought of myself marrying. Or, to be more precise, I suppose I had thought of marrying; I suppose I had always assumed that one day I would be married, as most women were, but I had never felt marrying. The emotion had never twisted in my solar plexus. The thinking, accordingly, had an almost abstract quality to it. I suppose I daydreamed about big weddings, about a house of my own, all those girl-things, but in these fantasies the role of the groom was always taken by some imaginary and indistinct man-figure. He was probably of the conventional sort, slim, tall, dark, blue-uniformed, I don’t know (it is hard to think back to pre-Ander and actually remember), but by the same token he was absolutely not real. I never, for instance, daydreamed of marrying anybody I actually knew. And when Ander said his first stuttering hellos, my mind was as ignorant and blithe as if he had been an old woman. I said ‘hello’ back, and we walked in the garden for a while. I thought I was making polite conversation. Indeed, I was making polite conversation; it was just that Ander heard more than politeness in it.
When it occurred to me belatedly, the following day, after a number of carefully non-specific hints from Father, that Ander was going to return and ask for my hand, I did feel panic. There was an instinct to rebel against this fut
ure; but that meant rebelling against Father, something I had not thought of doing since I had been a very little girl, and the grounds for rebellion had been accordingly petty. But to deny my father? This was so removed from possibility that I could only conceptualise it in oblique, symbolic ways. I thought of all the things that Ander might do to offend Father, and then I dwelt on imagining Father spouting his fearsome rage at Ander. But this was getting me nowhere.
And so I took myself to my room, at the top of the house, and lay on my bed, and tried to re-imagine Ander minutely. He was so plain that I had barely registered him, and it was hard to conjure up the precise order of his features. He was short, his flesh arranged itself in rolls, but not the loose, flabby rolls of the obese; rather, a series of tight, packed rolls at forehead, chin, neck. He was mostly bald, and his head was speckled like a red-pink egg. His lips bulged. I had never really contemplated kissing a man before, but as I struggled to recall his lips it seemed to me revolting to have to put my own thin lips against two such thick ones. A man shorter than myself! All the ridiculous girlhood fantasies, the dreams that most girls have at a younger age, pressed for entry to my mind: surely I deserved a soap opera husband? A man taller than me, as young as me? A handsome man? I thought how grateful I was that Zed was off on another training camp, because he would certainly have mocked me with theatrical and comical expressions of disgust at the prospect of Ander, and I daresay he would have made me cry.
But the thought of that somehow brought me a certain calm. I was able to discipline myself. When Ander returned two days later, he was even more nervous than before. We went into the garden again, as he hummed and coughed his way towards the question. And as I sat there I was struck by something about him. He was, as Zed would hootingly have pointed out, quite ugly; and even his ugliness was without distinction, for there were any number of men out in the city whose faces and figures were equally squat and coarse. But, for all this, he was a man, and a person. I stared at his eyes (it made him nervous, I recall), and I thought to myself, perhaps he was handsome once. He was forty-four when he asked me to marry him, but I thought of him at seventeen, or eighteen. And his eyes were a glowing blue colour. Indeed the flurry of his complexion, that redness, only served to make the blue eyes stand out all the more powerfully. I thought of him young, slim (maybe), with a full head of hair, and then I thought of those same eyes beaming out of his face. Why do eyes age not at all? Why can’t human beings be made out of eye-stuff, so that we might maintain our glow into old age? I thought to myself that Ander’s features connoted not ‘handsomeness’ but ‘man-ness’, and that as such they were perfectly fine.