by Paul Harris
“Oh, it’s like that, is it? You going leching?”
Bird winked, somewhat foolishly. “You know me, Rod, I can charm the birds from the trees.”
“Really?” I laughed, clearly exhibiting my doubt.
“How do you think I got this name?”
“It’s beyond me,” I replied, handing him some money and watching as he went off in hot pursuit. He slithered up, trying to appear casual, throwing shapes at the bar, tossing and turning, and, eventually, rather theatrically, clearing his throat. “Would you ladies care for a drink?”
They giggled, and then turned their backs on him; demolished him like an old tenement. He stood there, bemused and awkward, trying to work out his next move. “Would you like to join my friends and I?” There came no response, absolutely none, not even laughter. He was lost, and knew that he looked ridiculous. He muttered something foul under his breath. Amos and I were shaking with mirth. He lost his composure, completely. “For God’s sake,” he begged, “please!”
“Sit down, you fool!” I shouted, between bursts of laughter.
“Just get the beer!” barracked Amos.
“You’re well in there, son. How do you do it?”
Bernard placed three opened bottles in Bird’s hands and ushered him away, contemptuously. He was pretty lucky really: Bird could be dangerous when his pride was dented. He took it well this time though. He was almost smiling when he got back to our table, and it wasn’t long before he too saw the funny side.
Then, the door opened behind me. Bird looked startled, his eyes were on stalks, and his mouth dropped open as if in astonishment. “Well, well, would you believe that?”
Amos and I followed his gaze. It was one of the boys out of the rowing boat. He saw us, but it didn’t bother him. The locals all knew him. He was on his home turf and it looked as though we might be in for a bit of bother. He slowly walked over to us, with a large plastic bag in one hand. I kept my eyes focussed on his other hand, waiting for a glint of sharp steel, preparing to jump on his throat. His hand never moved, except to pick up a chair and drag it over to our table. He casually straddled it, with the back of the chair leaning on the table. He looked each of us up and down. Amos took an empty bottle from the table and I knew what he was intending to do with it. Then, the young man spoke: “You the scooter boys?”
“You’re English?” I gasped.
“Of course I’m English! Those your scooters over the street there?” He gestured towards the hotel.
“Why didn’t you say you were English earlier?”
“You didn’t give us much chance, did you?”
“I suppose not,” agreed Amos. For my part, I still wanted to fight him anyway. “And, yeah, they are our scooters. What about them?”
“Have you looked at them since you parked them there?”
“Why?” I asked, still snarling a little.
“Me and Tommy caught some little bastards ripping the mirrors off one of them.” He placed the bag on the table. Amos opened it, and then looked at me.
“They’re yours, Rod.”
I snatched the bag up and emptied its contents onto the table. They were my mirrors. “Bastards! How do I know you didn’t rip them off?”
“Like I’d be sitting here with you now?”
I shrugged. “Guess not. Where’s this Tommy bloke?”
“Back at the digs. Got a nasty crack on the back of his head; maybe a touch of concussion.”
“Sorry about that,” I murmured, bashfully.
“He’ll live.”
“And, it was the mirrors that you were reaching for in the bottom of the boat, right?”
“Yeah, of course. What did you think?”
Amos and Bird examined the mirrors, and then looked at me, accusingly.
“Now, hold on, it weren’t just me, we were all at it.”
“Forget it. The name’s Peter.” He held out his hand. I shook it, and we introduced ourselves. I got him a beer and a large brandy chaser to make amends.
“You got a scooter, Pete?”
“I’ve got an old Lambretta back home; a DL125 from 1969, you know? It’s my pride and joy, that’s why I couldn’t stand by and see yours get wrecked. I’ve got nothing here, though, apart from an old rowing boat that me and Tom found floating in the river earlier.” He laughed.
“You on holiday here, or what?”
“Nah, you must be joking! I can’t stand this town. We’re working on a building site down by the river; just the other side.”
“Good money?” I asked.
“Same as home really, but it’s nice to have a change of scenery occasionally, isn’t it? Trouble is you spend everything you earn. That’s why we come to this dump; it’s cheap and cheerful. There’re other places to go if you like crowds.”
“We know,” said Bird, who was still gazing, mournfully, at the girls at the bar.
Peter noticed his distraction. “You like them?” he asked.
Bird looked at him. “What’s not to like?”
“Should I introduce you?”
Bird gave him a sideways glance and then looked at the girls again. “You know them?” he asked, excitedly.
“I know everyone around here. You want me to call them over? Should I?” he teased.
A thought crossed my mind as he was baiting Bird, and I acted upon it. “You say you know everyone around here, right? Ever come across an Englishman called Sol?”
He looked blank. “No; and, believe me, I’d know if there were any other English dudes using this bar in the last six months.”
I felt confused, and almost betrayed. I looked at Bird, trying to catch his eye, but he evaded me.
“Fanny!” called out Peter, “Bring some drinks over.” The girls came over at his command. They took their coats off and joined us at our table.
“Easy when you know how,” mocked Amos.
“Fanny?” whispered Bird, with a lecherous grin on his face, “Is that her real name?”
“I doubt it,” said Peter, “I just call her that; I call them all that. It don’t make any difference, they don’t understand anyway.”
As the evening wore on, the bar filled up with younger people. The veterans from the early shift seemed to fade into the already faded wallpaper and disappear, chameleon-like, into the woodwork. All that remained of them was a ghost-like murmur of disapproval.
The decibels were rising and Peter was in his element. We’d had enough to drink, by now, to get into the spirit of it. Suddenly, the air burst into life with music. The girls leapt to their feet and began to dance.
“Where did that come from?” I asked, straining to be heard above it.
“Jukebox,” said Peter, motioning towards an unlit alcove near the toilets. He put his beer down and joined the girls on the make-shift dancefloor.
“God damn!” I expostulated, to no one in particular. “Why didn’t someone say?”
I went and poured some coins into it, and everybody started to dance. The place was rocking, and even Bird and Amos were strutting their stuff. Bernard was dancing, uncomfortably, like a wooden toy, with a big dirty grin on his face, drinking from a bottle of wine, and loitering with intent around Fanny and her friend. The more wine that he drank, the louder the music got. Every time he had to go behind the bar to serve someone, he took a yank on the volume knob. We bought as much alcohol as we could. It was a great sales gimmick.
The room was spinning for all of us. Passers-by were hearing the thumping rhythm from miles away, and walking in off the street with bottles and crates. It was topping up to be one of my best ever nights. A girl in lycra pedal-pushers was up on a table wiggling about. She tore her blouse open; she had nothing. We booed and jeered her; she fell off the table into Amos’s arms. Bernard was behind the bar again. “Louder! Louder!” I was shouting at him. He was grinning inanely, pouring out brandy and whisky and rum without measuring it, and spilling more than he got into the glasses. There were drops of spittle dangling from his bushy straw-like
moustache and you could see the fine red veins in his nose throbbing, as if fit to burst. Sweat rolled down his forehead. He winked at me through the smoke and put his fingers on the volume control. But, suddenly, he froze; like a statue; as if confronted by Medusa herself. His eyes were glued, projecting up the dim corridor behind the bar. It led to the stairs to his private quarters, and at the end of it, loomed a giant shadow.
He leant over, like a fool, like a broken marionette, with his mouth agape, sweat dripping onto the red linoleum. He roused himself from his stupor, and turned the knob. He cut the music dead; he cut all of us dead; there was silence. He stood up erect, a look of dread on his face; a death mask. The party had stopped; mercilessly snuffed out at its peak. We were motionless, as if someone had pressed the pause button; all of us stuck in a moment that we couldn’t get out of.
“Ma femme!” Bernard was heard to mutter.
There was an uneasy murmur, then silence once more. I began to creep away from the jukebox. The shadow at the end of the corridor hadn’t moved. I was standing next to Peter. He raised his hand to his mouth and whispered, “We need to get out of here.” He seemed to know the score, so we started edging towards the door. In five minutes flat, the place was deserted.
We stood outside, a whole group of us, hurriedly whispering in French and English, and trying to come to terms with our nerves. The lights of the bar went out and, shortly afterwards, an upstairs window was illuminated. We could hear shouting and cursing, and then the crashing of heavy objects, and then yelps of pain and pleas for mercy from what had once been a man.
We began to relax, as the one-sided skirmish petered into a steady squabble, and the joie de vivre returned to the evening’s activities.
“So,” said Bird, rubbing his hands together with anticipation, not quite sure of himself, like Christopher Columbus approaching the edge of the World, one eye firmly fixed in the starboard direction where Fanny was swaying from side to side, “what now?”
“I’ve had enough,” said Peter, “Tomorrow’s another day.”
“Me too,” I said, wearily.
“Mais, pourquoi?” The girls seemed disappointed, and their comprehension seemed to improve with every shot of Vodka.
“Let’s go eat,” suggested Amos. The girls were all for that, and so was Bird.
“Not me,” I said, “I’ve had enough excitement for one night.”
As Bird, Amos, and the two girls trudged back off in the direction of the square, Peter gave me a nudge. “We got some top grass back at the room.” And, that’s how it happened. I went back to Peter and Tom’s room and smoked my brains out all night long, and Amos and Bird went on a dinner date with two beautiful women, Bird dribbling sweet and sour sauce all over his t-shirt.
Chapter Sixteen
Lochnagar
It was like a patchwork quilt, billowing in the wind, the way the endless empty roads criss-crossed undulating fields of various colours and shades of summertime. It was a fine, clear day with a very slight, but warm, breeze. Cereal crops were swaying to the rhythm of the tractor engines that could be heard from behind the brow of every incline. The country was calm, unimaginably calm, the most relaxing scene that one could ever picture. It was impossible to even envisage shells bursting all over the place, swallowing whole battalions of soldiers, and leaving giant craters in the soft fertile soil; crude tanks rumbling through copses and over corpses, staggering drunkenly into battered trenches. The birds were singing in the trees.
We were heading North-East to Bapaume; the Thiepval memorial was standing to our left like a withered old nipple, sucked dry by death. We drove through tiny villages, nothing more than hamlets, which had once been larger villages, before destruction came. A monument, erected for one regiment or another, stood on nearly every corner, in every churchyard, and on every village green. We passed the Tank Corp Memorial and took a right. Bird was leading; he seemed to know where he was going, as if he’d already got the route planned. The roads were soiled and muddy, little more than farm tracks, accommodating nothing but tractors and British tourists. Rusty shells were heaped, at intervals, along the roadside. Huge cemeteries littered the countryside, row upon row upon row of headstones; the teeth of hundreds upon thousands of dead men, rising, in defiance, from the chalk-brushed soil.
We passed a wooded area to our right with a cemetery facing it. There was a row of memorials hidden amongst the trees and the foliage. The three of us drove past, staring in awe. It was clear that this area had seen lots of action; horrors that we could never imagine. We passed a sign for Longueval, but no houses, not anymore. At a crossroads, Bird waved us down, and we stopped. Amos and I drew up next to him. I took off my helmet. “Thank God for that! I’m gasping for a fag!”
“A fag?” exclaimed Amos, “I’m bursting for a jimmy.”
Bird said nothing; he was gazing at a massive cemetery that was tucked away beyond a little grass verge. I looked at Amos. He was looking back at me in some discomfort, puckering his lips, his right leg shaking involuntarily. “I’m not kidding,” he whispered.
Bird removed his helmet, dismounted, and walked across the cemetery, and there he stood in silence, examining the boundary wall. He stood there for ages, absolutely motionless. We thought it best not to follow him, so we waited on the verge. I took my cigarettes from the pocket of my shorts. The packet was crushed, totally, because of the way I’d been crouched on the scooter for so long. I emptied the contents into the palm of my hand. I had enough loose tobacco to fill all the calumets in Arizona, but nothing that was any longer distinguishable as a cigarette. I flung it into a nearby hedgerow, and cursed beneath my breath.
“Rod!” Amos was still whispering, still shaking his leg, clasping his groin and turning an alarming shade of scarlet. “Do you think it’ll be okay if I go behind a tree?”
I puffed my cheeks out and gravely shook my head. “That might be a bit disrespectful, you know. And I’ve got a feeling that Bird might cop the hump over it. He seems like he’s on a bit of a deep one.”
Eventually, Bird returned and stood before us just staring at us, looking us up and down. He shook his head, condescendingly. “And you said my lot weren’t in it.” He put his helmet back on, climbed aboard, revved, and shot off in the direction from which we’d come. Something told me that our expedition had met its destiny and that the search for Sol was nothing more than some bizarre charade.
Amos and I jumped back on our scooters, fumbled with our helmets, and raced after him. We were speeding now, through the mud and manure. I could feel it peppering the back of my legs. We reached the main road and took a right, back past the Tank Memorial. We were gaining on Bird but not by much. He was giving it loads of throttle down that hill. Something really seemed to be needling him. We could see the Golden Virgin, towering through the hazy sunshine at the end of the road. I remember hoping that Bird wasn’t going to let loose like this all the way to Calais.
In time, he slowed down, indicated left, and pulled onto the forecourt of some kind of motel or tourist complex. There were coaches on the car park from places like Chester, Rochdale, Northampton, and Potsdam. We parked and went inside. Amos made a desperate dash for the gents. Bird still wasn’t talking. I asked for a packet of cigarettes, but they didn’t have any. “No machine or anything?”
The woman behind the counter shrugged. “Try the shop.” Her English was perfect.
“Which shop?” I asked.
She shrugged again.
France was like that; you couldn’t buy cigarettes anywhere, even though nearly everybody smoked. Not many bars sold them and the grocery stores didn’t stay open late like ours do. I suppose, there’s something to be said for being a nation of shopkeepers. If it was a Sunday or a late night, you were knackered; you had to stock up when the opportunity arose.
I shrugged back at her, sarcastically, and she walked off without even serving us, muttering something to herself in French. “English pig!” or words to that effect, I was guessing.
“Thank, God! Where’s the beer?”
“It’ll come,” said Bird, calmly, “All things come.”
“Bloody hell! You’re still here, then?”
“And so philosophical too!”
“It’ll come,” he repeated, mysteriously, without responding to our jibes.
I looked at Amos. He was shaking his head, with a wry smile on his face. “What’s up with him?” I mouthed, silently.
The waitress came hobbling back and placed a packet of Camel Lights in front of me. I shuddered at the thought of having to smoke Camels. “Oh, c’est magnifique!” I cried enthusiastically, “Combien?”
She waved me away. “No, no, they’re mine. We don’t sell them here.”
“But, I must give you something.” I insisted.
“No, I have plenty; you have these,” she smiled.
“Well, thank you. Do we have to pay for the beer?”
“I think so,” she laughed, “Three?”
“S’il vous plait.”
She poured the contents of three rather non-descript looking bottles into three plastic glasses, and we took them over to a table. Each table had a plastic tartan tablecloth laid over it and a small vase of violets in the centre. The cruet set made me feel hungry, but I knew that Bird wasn’t in the eating mood, so I said nothing. He and Amos seated themselves, while I dragged a chair over from another table.
“So, what’s up, Bird?” coaxed Amos gently.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, with the long silences and staring at cemetery walls and stuff?”
Bird sighed and leant back in his chair, revolving his glass around between his fingers, and looking unusually meditative. “Ah, nothing really. That wall was a memorial to the men that are still missing.”
Amos tried to look interested. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. My great grandfather’s name’s supposed to be on it somewhere. I was just looking for it.” He trailed off, deep in thought. “I couldn’t find it.”