If Then

by Matthew de Abaitua

  “You’re here to rescue the bailiff? I thought you were here because my men need a whore.”

  He turned to Alex. “You’ve been remiss in not explaining the situation to our guest. Or did you find it impossible to put it in terms she could comprehend? Her understanding of her situation is so meagre I suppose any revelation would constitute brutality.”

  Ruth was indignant. She would not let men bully her.

  “The situation is actually very easy for me to understand. You are a boy playing at war.”

  “I’m not playing at war, seamstress. I am remembering it.” His eyes were green-rimmed, like those of a falcon. “I hold within me a perfect memory of the war. If you like, I could share it with you.”

  Alex put her arm between them, her fierce small face defiant.

  “Leave her alone.”

  “Don’t put yourself between us, Alex. I’m dying. I’m bored of pretending to care about you.”

  He turned to Ruth, and offered her his liver-spotted hand.

  “Take my hand again, and this time you will know exactly what the war was like. You will know what it is to die slowly of your wounds in no-man’s-land. You will look down and be able to touch where the machine gun eviscerated you. More than the pain, you will know the boredom and the terror of months under fire, the sensory agony of it, smells, sights and sounds of horror; and when you feel that you can endure no more, and that every idea that you were made of has been proven to be nonsense, and that every thought you ever had was wrong, and everything you ever did was pointless, then you will understand the war itself.”

  “The war was over a long time ago.”

  “It never ended for me. I was wounded at Suvla Bay, you see, shot in the head. The surgeon operated. Something happened under the knife. I was cursed. After a hundred years, we’re still only beginning to understand that curse. The feelings, sensations and experience of the war survive intact within me. And I can pass them on at will, from mind to mind.”

  His palm was firm-fleshed and youthful, the back of his hand decrepit.

  “They’ve kept me alive for so long trying to recreate my curse. A hundred years in which I’ve had to watch humanity degenerate to the point where it can barely wipe its own backside.”

  His smile was a skull’s grimace, everything below the eyes was already in the grave.

  “I am the last human,” said Omega John. “You’re just animals. I could show you how reduced you have become. But giving a sheep an understanding of its sheepness is crueller than slaughtering it: if I laid my hand upon its brow–” he reached again for Ruth, by way of demonstration “–I could show it how it is defined solely by its usefulness to a superior species, how it is bred for flesh and wool, nothing more, no meaning, no legacy, its loved young kept alive solely for their succulence.” He smiled at the children, and said to both of them, “My friends went over the top, with the guns of the army police at their backs, and as they were cut to pieces by the machine guns, into itty-bitty little pieces, they baa’d like lambs.”

  He leant forward and put his hand upon Alex Drown’s cheek. The air tightened, Ruth felt it in her stripe. Slowly, Alex’s legs stiffened and she reared up out of her seat, his caress still upon her cheek; blood flowed freely from her eyes and over the back of his knuckles; the back of his hand was a map of high ridges, gullies and shell-torn land, the liver-spots were the discolouration of overturned earth, her blood a river coursing across an otherwise arid terrain. Alex convulsed and paled; he withdrew his touch, and she slid off the stool and onto the floor. Around her, the soldiers swayed and staggered from table to table, oblivious to her.

  Omega John sighed and turned back to the piano.

  “There. Oh Alex, you made me cross. And I hate being cross. Life is so intense. I wish I could play you music that communicated the correct spiritual aspect with which to face life. I wish I could touch you and share the beauty of life as I see it. But I was made in war, and war is all I have to give.”

  Alex lost all physical dignity, contorted upon the floor of the estaminet. Ruth knelt next to her, but was afraid to comfort her. In the shock and pain, she was gasping for breath. Ruth took a risk. She slapped Alex so hard across the face that her head rapped against the board. It released her. Alex took a deep gulp of air. Her chest heaved. Ruth used her shirt to mop the blood welling in Alex’s eyes. She was temporarily blind, and her nurse’s uniform was wet with sweat and urine.

  Omega John closed the lid of the piano. He stood and buttoned his decorated tunic. His face held only the selfishness of a dying man. His adjutant handed him his peaked cap and cane. He stepped around Alex Drown, then looked down at Ruth.

  “The implants are made out of my cells. James and Alex are part of me and I am part of them. You cannot save someone from themselves.”

  Again, Ruth begged him to stop. Her defiance was gone, replaced by something else, a magical desire to wish away all her ills. He slipped slightly in his hob-nailed boots then tapped thoughtfully at the boards with his cane, dipping its tip in the darkening pool of Alex’s urine.

  “I always forget that your type cannot detach your mind from your suffering, that you lack even that rudimentary control over yourselves. You are trapped within the algorithm that creates the self-awareness of painful input signals.” Omega John cleaned the end of his cane in a soldier’s beer. “We must use your capacity for suffering in our game.”

  At an imperceptible signal, his adjutants opened the door, and the general departed to a mass salute from the soldiers in the estaminet.

  21

  A hand on his shoulder wakes him. Standing over James, in a clean and intact uniform, is Jordison.

  “You alright, mate?” asks the yeoman. He shows no indication of recognizing James.

  “Yes. I think so. Do you have any water?”

  Jordison takes out a water bottle and hands a cap of water to James. He accepts it, and then asks: “What’s your name?”

  “Jordison.”

  “Do you have a brother, Jordison?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. But you have a wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “And three children?”

  “Exactly three. Barely twelve months between each.”

  “Then we’ve met before,” says James.

  “We must have. Though for the life of me I can’t remember. Are you feeling better?”

  “A touch of ague,” says James.

  “The lieutenant colonel said that no man of the ambulance division was to fall sick. Made it very clear, he did.”

  The lieutenant colonel had not been seen since the first night.

  “If you’re shipshape, I’ll be on my way.”

  “Wait. Help me up.”

  The yeoman reaches down to him. He grips Jordison’s thick upper arm, then his forearms, then his rough large hands. Warm living hands with a deep life line and broken fingernails.

  “You are remarkable,” says James.

  The yeoman recoils an inch at this unexpected compliment.

  “I mean, I saw you die and yet here you are. You can’t deny that is remarkable.”

  “You’re mistaken. We’ve just landed from Lemnos.”

  “Your wife works at the mill. You don’t smoke cigarettes. You like gardening.”

  “All true. But then, that’s true of many a Lancashire man.”

  James feels faint again. The lightness begins in his fingertips and toes.

  He asks Jordison, “Do you forgive me?”

  With a long, rustic stare, Jordison weighs James’ condition.

  “You should get some bully inside you, mate,” he says. He doffs his pith helmet and trots away to rejoin his squad as they hustle in single file on a gully path toward the salt lake.

  James shivers with weakness, and his head feels absurdly light again. No, not this time, he will not allow himself to forget. He will not be patched up and wiped clean like Jordison. James presses his index finger into the ridge of scar t
issue at the back of his head. They hollowed him out in Tipperary. For everything he learnt in basic training, ten other pieces of knowledge were removed. Exactly how much they took out of him, he cannot say. A lot. He has forgotten a lot.

  In the dugout, the stretcher squad is buzzing with the news that their commanding officer has been found. The Field Ambulance had lost their lieutenant colonel and presumed him dead. According to Private Brilliant, in the confusion on the beach that first day, the lieutenant colonel had simply taken command of the 33rd Ambulance division. As a regular officer and veteran of the Boer War, the New Army recruits all looked the same to him. Hector is amused at the thought of it, and imitates the quick bowlegged prance of their superior officer, up and down the beach, throwing off orders and chastisement to the wrong men. Collinson and the others laugh.

  News of this cruel satire spreads to the lieutenant colonel and he seeks out the men of the 32nd Field Ambulance. Flanked by breathless adjutants, he reddens at the sight of the ragged squad lolling around in the dunes like a drinking party at Camber Sands. Barker Bill, they call him, for his noisy incoherence. The lieutenant colonel takes his sergeant to task, ranting in Hector’s pale face. His delivery is so splenetic and spittle-flecked that his words are indecipherable. He speaks in an invented language, like something out of a child’s game. At first, James assumes that his ear is unaccustomed to the accent or even to the manner of the officer upper class. He moves closer so that he can hear more clearly. No, Barker Bill’s voice is not even human. The tone and pitch vary wildly; sometimes he sounds like a monkey howling through the wireless, and then his tongue makes a loud knocking sound like that of a cold diesel engine.

  The rest of the men must be so struck with fear that they dare not point out that their commanding officer sounds like a broken machine. He looks like one too. His eyes, for starters, are bloodshot pools without pupil or whites. His head is red raw, and his ears are wet smooth plates without the curls and canals of a true human ear. He punctuates his alien utterances with slaps of his Malacca cane against polished field boots – this gesture, pure Barker Bill, has been retained but the rest of him has been poorly sculpted. Either side of him, ragged adjutants quiver at every stab and holler of his rage. Only by concentrating can James bring definition to the lieutenant colonel. Slowly he tunes in and this concentration turns the alien chatter into the King’s English.

  “How dare you come on duty dressed like that?” The lieutenant colonel points at Hector’s calves with his cane. “Where are your puttees, dammit?”

  “I forgot to put them on, sir. During the attack, we–”

  “How dare you answer me?”

  The lieutenant colonel stares Hector down, daring him to answer the question.

  “Place yourself under close arrest, sergeant.”

  “Sir?”

  “The rest of the squad will proceed without you. You must remain on the beach until I return.”

  The stretcher squad falls in. The lieutenant colonel strides past James, his officer’s tunic gathered tightly around his narrow waist. He does not see James and almost walks right through him. With one boot off, one boot half-on, James is in between worlds, he understands that now. Between the land of the living and the land of the dead, between the sane and the mad, between what-might-have-been and what-will-be.

  The sea mist mingles with the smoke from the distant burning scrub. The ambulance division trot off into this fog, leaving Hector and James behind.

  “He’s gone mad,” says Hector.

  “He’s very strict about the King’s Regulations,” says James.

  “To keep your sergeant back from the searching zone just because he’s not wearing puttees is mad.”

  “He has to follow King’s Regulations,” says James. “There is nothing else to him. He has been hastily put together. He’s a botched job. Have you seen the way he walks? Clearly some kind of broken mechanism. Perhaps there was no time to make the knees.”

  The dune grass flattens and straightens. They begin the walk back to the beach.

  “I am concerned,” says Hector. “Are you putting this on?”

  “What do you mean?” asks James.

  “This madness. Are you feigning it?”

  One moment of vertigo and you are lost.

  “Were you feigning it when the sniper came for you?”

  Exasperated, Hector quickens his pace. James appeals to his reason.

  “When I was in the necropolis, I saw through the veil and into another life, another world. On the stretcher, I had the same sense that this battle is an illusion. No, not an illusion. It’s clearly real–” James kicks a stone to prove this point “–rather, the war itself is mad and we are sane men trapped in it, you see, and we daren’t wake up to the madness in case we lose what little sanity we have remaining.”

  Hector doesn’t want to listen to this counsel. James grabs hold of him.

  “I saw Jordison again. Alive. I saw him twice. I even spoke to him and he didn’t remember me. I could take you to him.”

  “I ask you again.” Hector puts his hands either side of James’ head to hold his gaze. “Are you feigning this? Wouldn’t you rather I shoot you in the hand? If Barker Bill discovers you shamming madness to get out, he will have you shot at dawn.”

  “Barker Bill can’t see me,” says James. “He has no eyes. He shouted at you for not wearing puttees, but one of my boots is hanging off and he didn’t even give me a second glance. Where has he been for the last few days? Where has our commanding officer been? I’ll tell you. He was killed on the first day, and so we’ve been sent a replacement. But these replacements are like dud shells. Resources are running low. The soldiers are coming off the assembly line unfinished, you see? The Turks aren’t real Turks either. When I looked through the Zweiss glass, I did not see enemy soldiers – I saw men and women taken from my town and impelled to charge into our guns by the same spirit that guides this entire battle. Maybe the entire war.”

  “Stop shamming!”

  “Every indication is that this is not how things should be. Collinson understood as soon as we landed, when the men were bathing instead of fighting. We can’t apprehend the truth of this war because we are under the influence of it.”

  “Under the influence of what exactly?”

  “The war is being guided by a force exterior to either side. A spirit or vital fluidic ether of some sort has got into us. But its influence wanes under certain pressures and it disappeared altogether underground, in the necropolis. The others suspect it, I think. The men of intelligence. Father Huxley and Doctor Blore. They are drawn to the necropolis for this reason. I must speak with them.”

  “No, they will know you are shamming. You will be court martialled.” Hector looks around in anguish, for something to hand to restore his friend’s sanity.

  “You must find a way back to us, James.”

  “We were together before the war. I met you on the Downs. Don’t you remember? And you couldn’t speak. You were like a doll. I took you into my home. We looked after you. And then I followed you into the war. My home is just over the ridge. If we don’t get back there, we’re going to die here.”

  “But like Jordison we can be resurrected?”

  “I’m not like him.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes. No. You’re somewhere in between. I don’t know.”

  “Other men are mere automata and you alone are the true human; really, if you must feign madness you could be more original in your delusions.”

  Barker Bill had ordered Hector to remain at the dugout, a reinforced hole covered with a corrugated iron roof and door twenty yards north of the casualty clearing station, and await the return of his commanding officer.

  The white canvas of the bell tents ripple against the bright blue Aegean sea, fresh as yacht sails. In an open-air operating theatre, buried a few feet deep into the chocolate-coloured soil, Blore and his orderly complete an amputation. The left arm of the soldier is bound just below
the elbow, and the orderly has placed a white folded towel over the patient’s brow to shield him from the sun. The wounded man’s feet are black. Arrayed upon two covered boxes, the surgical instruments gleam in the rising sun.

  A listless herd of wrecked men sit and wait outside the bell tents, as if the dressing station is a doss house. They are mesmerized by the crackle and chatter of sunlight upon the lilt of the blue sea. Exhausted stretcher bearers add to their number, dropping off pale blood-stained men with ghastly smiles to be given a woodbine and a refill of their water bottles. The doctor beckons and another bad case is dropped onto the trestle table in the operating tent.

  The boom of a great gong: the shelling begins, as always, at eight in the morning. A shell strikes the centre of a Sikh mule train, flipping over its intricate rigging of ropes and knots, and twisting its carefully weighed burdens and somnolent mules cyclonically around one another. A few men outside the clearing station flinch and try to stand, to go and help; most do not even notice. They stare unseeing at their black feet or pick mechanically at the lice in their ragged vests. The shelling ends fifteen minutes later in accordance with the bureaucracy of the battle. Rations are passed around for breakfast, but James has found that shelling destroys the appetite as effectively as it did the mules.

  After a long dull wait, Doctor Blore comes up from the operating tent for tea and a smoke. He notices James, and walks over to him.

  “I’ve been meaning to speak to you, James. We are to set up an advanced dressing station in the Kiretch Tepe to the north. I was wondering if you and Sergeant Hector could go with twenty-five or so men up the ridge. Find somewhere between the hills where we can work.”

  “Is there to be an advance along the Kiretch?”

  “I have no bloody idea.”

  “Sergeant Hector is under arrest.” James explains about the reappearance of their commanding officer, and the incident with the missing puttees.

  “Your commanding officer is erratic. Did you speak to Father Huxley?” Blore’s voice drops to a whisper, “I think you and he had an interesting chat. He told me more about your bouts of vertigo.”