If Then

by Matthew de Abaitua

  “The war is useless from any point of view. But I cannot remain behind. Every soldier I see makes me feel ashamed.”

  “You would not die of shame.”

  “Yes, I would. There was an opportunity to join the field ambulance, and I took it. They asked about my religious beliefs. I told them I was a mystic agnostic, and that was that: stretcher bearer. It’s not as glorious as being a soldier. But I can’t bring myself to kill.”

  She put her needle and cloth aside. He knelt by the fire and she stroked his head as he spoke: “It is not wicked in us to fight, it is just mistaken. The buffoons in The Times maintain the war is necessary to purify the race. Nonsense. The strong were the first to die. No one knows what the outcome of this war will be, although I am convinced it will be contrary to the expectations of both sides. Something new will come of it, though. Some new expression of the life force.”

  “But what can you do?”

  “I can show kindness. Without kindness, all that the soldiers will bring back from the war is horror. I will dress wounds and take the other end of a stretcher and carry the wounded from the battlefield.”

  “You’ve found a way to be heroic without the risk of being a conchie.”

  “I don’t want to go to war. Nations appal me. Guns are revolting. But it is happening whether we agree with it or not. If I stay at home, we will never recover. You and I. The other women will shun you. I’ll go to prison. I’ll never be able to work.”

  “It’s no different from boys pretending their sticks are rifles. You all think you can be heroes.”

  “Do you think I want to go and live in some camp ground with dull filthy men?”

  “And if it is unpleasant to you, then I must forgive you?”

  “I will go for you.”

  “Don’t you dare say that.”

  “If I don’t go, you will suffer.”

  The fire flickers in the grate. It is hard to leave the hearth behind. He thinks of cowardice, of St Peter warming his hands around the fire and denying his master.

  “James?” Hector’s angular white face drifts over the cosmos. “Can you understand me?”

  He pulls on Hector’s sleeve, and nods at the water bottle: water would make it easier to speak.

  “Has the doctor been around to see you?”

  The sergeant’s kindness moves him deeply, and his jaw aches with unexpected sorrow.

  He pulls again on Hector’s sleeve, finds purchase on his shoulder, and pulls himself up.

  “Jordison?” asks James.

  “He was very brave,” says Hector. “I couldn’t go back for his body. We could only save the living.”

  The cosmos fizzes and whirls overhead, and the indigo swirls of Milky Way seethe. Hector’s face is moon-pale and adrift.

  “The sniper.” James coughs out his strength.

  “The sniper was our fancy brought on by nerves,” Hector whispers.

  “No. I saw him.”

  The sniper was taller than a man, covered in branches and twigs and he wore a hood to protect him from the sun. In the shimmering haze of the scrub fire, he stepped forward and shot Jordison. Previously, the Turk had respected the red cross and had even sent over officers bearing the white flag to apologize when they accidentally killed a stretcher squad. Yet this sniper had sought out the stretcher bearer, and, having shot him, bent over to inspect Jordison’s head wound with a demonic diffidence.

  “The sniper is connected to us. He is part of the convergence.”

  “Let us make a pact: you will not speak of my sniper and I will not tell anyone about your convergence. We don’t want the men to think we are cracking up.”

  Hector puts his hand on the back of James’ neck, encouraging him to rest. He is so tired that dream images and thoughts tumble unbidden beneath his eyelids. Ruth sings his name. She comes ashore, naked through the moonlit waters, her skin gleaming. She takes his hand and with one firm kick of her legs they fly upward. The earth falls away. He looks down to see the grey clouds and the termination line of the dawn advancing across the dark sea. The trenches and battle lines are scored across the earth. She touches his cheek. He is weary and too tired to kiss. The weariness of the soldiers and mules weighed down by packs and wagons. She is different from him. She is more highly evolved whereas he has devolved, become a troglodyte, a thing of the earth, an underground beast. She is of the air and of the water, intangible and quick. A contrary principle to him. “The life force speaks through us.” Her voice is fire and smoke. “Our actions are the words of God, which time strings together into sentences, paragraphs, pages. A marriage is a part of the Divine Argument.” She is the Eastern Queen of the Universe. He enters her and her face is transformed into the cosmos, into fire, time and space. The thoughts cascade, faster and faster, until he is no longer able to catch them.

  Ruth was sat beside the fire, sewing a summer dress for the little girl in her class, Sylvia. He leant against the counter in the small dark kitchen. She often complained about the kitchen, its stained warped work surfaces and lack of ventilation. They had worked so hard all their lives and had less now than when they had first married. No home of their own, no children, and no work. Outside, the streets of Lewes were quiet. He took no solace in the Seizure. The only way to survive change was to align your interests with the interests of the powerful.

  “I went back to the Institute,” he said. “They repeated their offer to find a role for me.”

  “As what?”

  “There will be no leaders under the Process. No state, no police, no army. But we will need protection and enforcement. The people will provide that by consensus, most of the time. But in exceptional circumstances, certain men will be used to enact the will of the people.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If I have a gun, then I will become a tyrant. But if I can only fire that gun when everyone agrees that it needs to be fired then I become an instrument for the maximum possible public good.”

  “How will you know what the town wants?”

  “The Process will aggregate the will of the people and enact it through me.”

  “You will have an implant.”

  “Yes.”

  “You will not always be in control of your own actions.”

  “When have I ever been?”

  “Did she take you through the procedure? The side effects? Did Alex tell you what you might lose?”

  “We have nothing to lose.”

  “Tell me what she said.”

  “It’s experimental. There are risks. The Process can do more than just control my actions. It can change how I see the world. What I think about it. My memories and beliefs will be part of the Process. In some sense, there will be no distinction between the Process and myself. There will just be the Process and the part of the Process that thinks like me.”

  “That sounds like death.”

  “It’s a chance to start over and to leave behind all the aspects of myself that aren’t working. No one will notice, least of all me.”

  “I’ll notice. I’ll suffer. Will you be capable of love? Afterwards?”

  “Sex?”

  “Love.”

  “I’ll still be with you. We’ll still work at life together. But instead of digging a hole, we’ll be building a bridge.”

  “What about your work?”

  “What about it? The world has violently changed. Nothing we do has any value and any future prospect of our work being useful has been exterminated. Everything I believed was wrong. The other side was not right, either. But being right or wrong is irrelevant. There is only power or powerlessness, necessary or unnecessary. We’ve been given a chance for power.”

  “And what if you do something terrible under its influence?”

  “I will not be responsible.”

  * * *

  “Private? Are you awake, private?”

  The priest steps carefully around sleeping, drugged men. Father Huxley is an ascetic beanpole. His hands are soft, un
touched by experience; as with so many of the soldiers, his skull is indecently apparent, the eyes hollow, the lips thin. His cheekbone presses lustily against the skin.

  Huxley puts his Bible down between them.

  “The sergeant tells me that you are a Sussex man. My final year of study was at an institute near Glynde, outside Lewes. I was meant to be spending my time in devotional reading and exercises, but instead I was often out on the Downs and exploring the Weald.”

  James nods. The priest wants to talk, so let him. Relieved, no doubt, to speak to someone who is not in a ghastly state.

  “Lovely town, Lewes. Nestled in the Downs, with the river running through it. I had breakfast in the ruins of the castle with an archaeologist, a Mr Dawson. Perhaps you are acquainted?”

  Stretcher squads are on the move again, ragged wraiths fetching the vacated stretchers from outside the dressing station. The Milky Way pulses overhead.

  “I grew very fond of the fauna and flora. The starlings winging their way out to sea. The great oak trees in November, so sad and ancient. The Institute had the most marvellous gardens, bursting with rhododendrons, and surrounded by woods so laden with life I fancied that evolution was going on all around me.”

  He had dreamt of an Institute. Of a woman who cut a hole in his skull, like the skulls he found in the tomb on the ridge. The precise details of the dream had dissipated and would not come into focus, like very small writing that did not reveal its meaning no matter how close he brought it to his eyes.

  “In a chestnut tree outside my window, a little owl would set up for the night. I studied to the rhythm of his hooting. “

  “There are no birds here,” says James. It is an effort to speak.

  “Not for another month, I suspect. And then the cliffs will be full of their migration. I doubt even the shelling will scare them away. Instinct is so strong. It’s bred in the bone. Did you ever see the starlings over Eastbourne pier?”

  James coughs and cannot stop himself coughing. The priest apologizes, and unfolds the first of his legs from his cross-legged position. James stops him.

  “Father, I’m troubled.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m suffering from a kind of vertigo.”

  “Do you want me to fetch the doctor?”

  “No. Vertigo of the soul, if such a thing exists. Do I sound mad?”

  “Reason will not help you here. Only faith.”

  Around them, the wounded men moan and shift in their sleep. Instead of the healthy snoring of the dugouts, the sounds of the clearing station are muted: weak curses and morphine whimpers.

  The priest whispers to him, “This is part of God’s plan. This war. Your suffering. It must happen.”

  With difficulty, James struggles up then looks out to sea. The silhouettes of the battleships are like cutouts in the bay. The lighters beetle in another division, the same as the night before, and the night before that. Upright, his chest is less congested. He breathes in the sea wind. It does not hurt so much.

  “You took an urn from the tomb,” says James.

  “Yes. I hope to keep it safe and deliver it to the British Museum.”

  “There is a skeleton in it.”

  “I daren’t open it. The air will turn its contents to dust. But yes, I imagine there are human remains inside.”

  “In the tomb, did you see the holes cut into the skulls?”

  “Trepanning. To let out evil spirits and evil thoughts.”

  “The belief that good can come from suffering is an evil thought.”

  The priest’s eyes glitter. “What would you say if I told you that I thank God for the war?”

  “You cannot!”

  “This is my prayer: ‘Thank you God for making me a priest, and thank you God for this war.’”

  “Do you say this to all the wounded men?”

  “The sergeant said you were an intellectual and a mystic. On those terms, I thought we could speak. Tell me more about your vertigo.”

  “I see glimpses of another life. Similar to this one, almost a reflection of it. Imagine laying your forehead against a cool mirror. The thoughts of your reflection are obscure to you. And that impression – no, my intense conviction – is that I’m home. The landscape of Sussex and this place converge. The ridge of Kiretch Tepe has seven peaks, just the same as the Seven Sisters running along the South coast.”

  “I know it well.”

  “Where the Cuckmere river reaches the sea. Over the next beach, instead of Anzac Cove, there is the sheer cliff beach of Birling Gap. I spent my honeymoon there. In the vertigo, it’s more than a memory.”

  Huxley grips him, his thin hand ridged with tendons.

  “Tell me, when you were in the trench and it was on fire, was that the moment in your life when you felt most fully and fruitfully alive? God did not create the world. God is still creating the world. Creation is a process that we must participate in, and witness. The front line marks the advancing edge of Creation, and you were there.”

  From further along the line, a soldier falls into spasms. His weary mate calls for a doctor and a priest. Huxley takes up his Bible. The glitter in his eyes is like shrapnel in the sun.

  After the priest moves on to deliver the last rites, James attempts to stand, and finding it possible, absents himself from the wounded. Hundreds of fresh troops mass on the beach.

  He takes out his Zweiss glass and, careful not to blacken the lens with his thumbs, he sweeps the heavens. Stargazing makes him feel like a boy. The act summons the memory of childhood, and that is comforting. He wouldn’t need Cavorite to get to the moon nor to be fired out of a cannon. A mere act of will would suffice. He finds Venus. It is so bright because its cloud cover reflects the sunlight. Such stultifying clouds would make the surface unbearably hot and intensely pressurized. Trees planted at altitude, where the temperature and pressure were not so great, might begin the work of converting the carbon dioxide to oxygen. What kind of man would adapt to that environment? We would not be land dwellers. We would live in the clouds. The winged men of Venus. Was there any truth in the priest’s obscene optimism? Would the descendants of man, high in their Venusian aeries, gaze back at the Earth and say that a war helped man to a new knowledge of the communion of all men? That the war was a practically unavoidable step in the dialectic of human destiny?

  He is filthy with smoke. Bootless, he walks across the scrub, through the milling troops to where the sea laps quietly against the pebbles. He unhooks his braces, takes off his shirt, removes his trousers and his undershorts. The new troops shuffle in their ranks; naked, he wades into the sea. “The way your head twists when you swim,” said Ruth, “it’s as if you are violently disagreeing with the water.” He stretches his body underwater, his hands clasped together, reaching forward to stretch his stomach muscles. Then, as she taught him, he kicks his legs forcefully, staying close to the surface but not breaking it. His lungs are too sore for him to stay underwater for long. He surfaces. A lighter has run aground on the sandbank, and the troops who can swim are disembarking with full packs into the deep water. The sea water cools and cleans his entire body. Ruth taught him to always stay calm in the water and to control his stroke. It was a time of sensual instruction. The body does not forget such lessons.

  Ahead the troops plop into the sea like stones. The fittest swimmers have a rope that they are bringing into shore, hoping to use it to dislodge the lighter. As he gets closer to the boat, he can see the hopeful, anxious white faces of the men peering down into the water. One man is familiar. Jordison climbs up onto the stern, his broad yeoman’s face contemplating the waves. James calls to him and yells. Jordison! You’re alive! The Lancastrian takes up his pack and rifle. He looks out into the sea in search of the voice that knows his name, but the light is at his back, and it is all dark ahead. Then, with a grim look, Jordison steps off the boat and disappears into the water.

  19

  Private Brilliant brings over the dixie for morning tea. Two cups and s
aucers on a tray balanced on an overturned crate.

  “Tea up,” he says.

  Collinson carefully spoons a dollop of apricot jam upon a biscuit. The moment the jam is out of the jar, fat flies cluster upon it, their emerald-and-ruby heads inscrutable and calm in the face of Collinson’s fussy gesticulations; he waves, the flies disperse, the flies settle upon the jam before he can bring his hand back again.

  “The problem,” says Collinson, “is that a fly’s perception of time is keener than mine. A single second to a human is a lazy Sunday afternoon to a fly.”

  Brilliant is a small man in an ill-fitting uniform and he makes a rather baggy silhouette against first light over the Aegean, swinging the dixie on its handle as he goes. James reaches over to take the cup and saucer. Half of Collinson’s eyeglass is entirely caked in earth and yet he has not bothered to clean it. His dark eyebrows are rimed with dirt.

  “At Cambridge, we had a trick to keep wasps away. When we were taking a picnic beside the river, we would set a pot of jam under a tree some way back from our party so that the wasps would congregate there rather than trouble us while we were dining. The efficacy of this tactic was dependent upon the number of wasps: if wasps in the immediate area exceeded twelve, then we would have to open two pots of jam.”

  Collinson tests a corner of the biscuit with his front teeth and, finding it resistant, flicks it out of the dugout.

  “The question is: how many flies are there and at what rate are they increasing?” He sips noisily at his tea, and finding it as unsatisfying as the hard biscuit, flings the cup’s contents out in the direction of the sea.

  “Every day we provide improved breeding conditions and food for the flies. Their rate of growth must be exponential. But how can we be exact?” Collinson taps the bowl of his pipe clear then digs out charred remains from the stem. His bottom lip is blistered and his muzzle is wild. There is a long tired pause as he tries to remember how to light the pipe, then the bowl of embers seethes and smoulders like Chocolate Hill. The smoke stirs him from his reverie. He gets up and walks over to the discarded jam and biscuit. With the toe of his boot, he prods at the feeding clump of flies.