by Neil Jordan
I awoke properly when the sun was going down, and the sheets were caked with sweat around me, or with something of more consistency than sweat. I felt I should wash but couldn’t face the corridor, the silence that would be in the house for ever now, and so I lay quite still, thinking of this body, no longer really mine, and the uses to which it could be put. I heard the sounds of the house going about its business in the silence, and when the silence became unbearable I put on the clothes I had worn last night, the stiff clothes, soiled below. I waited until the silence around was quite complete, and then wrapped the shawl around me and walked down the stairs, outside.
~
“The bullet had nicked my shoulder, there was more blood than damage, and as I lay back and tried to undo the gory buttons, I heard a scuffling on the floor behind me. I turned and saw her crawling towards me, the coin between her teeth. It must have reassured her because she helped me bind the wound, undid my buttons, smiling all the time, whispering in that language she seemed to assume I understood. I ripped strips off my shirt and wrapped them round, her hennaed fingers held the knot while I tied it. The words were guttural and vowel-less, but seemed infinitely kind, coming from her childish mouth.
“ ‘Thank you,’ I said, which seemed the only suitable response. Then I backed out into the street and saw her in the darkness of the room, huddling back into those shadows as if she would stay there for ever.
“The fury was dying. There were bodies again in the street, like ritual petals scattered wherever we went, mainly Turkish ones this time, bootless, mounds of wadding wrapped round their pitifully scarred feet. Sallow-skinned faces, covered in a fine blowing dust. Some of them were living, not bodies at all, they were moaning and an officer walked down bayoneting the live ones as he went.
“I was put to cleaning Turkish trenches outside the village, while the thing progressed towards a hill beyond, small figures running towards the distant barbed wire, lines of them that became gap-toothed as they went. Whatever the outcome was I was beyond caring, tired beyond belief. The dead here had been caught in situ, there was a horrible domesticity to the cooking utensils beside empty ammunition boxes, stale bread and olives. We grabbed each corpse and rolled it towards an outer trench which we filled with sand after we had filled it with bodies. We dug latrines and cleared the piles of faeces out since they seemed to have shat close to where they stood. By the time the moon came out, a white empty thing, we had the trenches fit for a new set of British corpses. And I watched them fill with live men who knew they could be dead tomorrow.
“I was sent back then, to the beach from which I’d come, told to find my unit of the Dubliners, a fruitless task since it had been obliterated in the first ten minutes. What was left of the moonlit fort was crowded now with mules and transports, huge towers of supply crates growing arbitrarily. On the beach beyond I could see the boats unloading, there were jetties built, a whole ramshackle city growing on the tiny beach, men naked in the water washing themselves. And the shoreline was cleared of corpses, there were barges piled high with them, chugging out towards the hospital ships. Where are you George, I asked myself, where are you?”
33
THE MOON WAS coming up again and the haystacks sat in the fields as if they would always be there, but I knew of course that come September they’d be gone. I walked down the road, along by the river in the direction of Janie’s, I would tell her, tell her it all I thought, and then it, whatever I was going to tell her, shifted inside me like a wallop and I sat on a bank of grass above the mudflats of Mozambique and felt my dress getting wet again. A horse and cart clipped by and I wrapped myself in my shawl like a travelling woman, and when the figure on it with the stove-pipe hat said grand night, I returned, the way Mary Dagge would have, grand night indeed.
I got up and staggered on towards Janie’s, I felt I had to tell her. And outside Mabel Hatch’s barn another wallop happened, and rather than fall on the road like an animal thing I made my way into the dark inside. I heard the owl hoot and then go still as I entered the dark, and the dark came clearer to my eyes, I could see the shadows of mounds of straw and the irregular ascent they made high up towards the broken wall. I was aware a passer-by on the road, by the river, could have seen a figure lying on the lower straw, and so I climbed up, out of sight of the road, slowly. Every step was another slow wallop.
~
“I found my trench, the trench we had dug the morning of that day, and pushed aside the dozing bodies to make room. I settled my pack down and my shovel and rifle and felt my left-hand sleeve stiff with the dried blood. I climbed out again and made my way to the bloodied shore, and was wading in the water when I saw a figure out there among the others, naked like them, but bigger, much bigger, bending with a pith helmet in his giant hands, filling it with seawater, pouring it over his cropped hair. I recognised the hands, I couldn’t have mistaken them.
“ ‘George!’ I shouted, and he turned, the moon and battleships behind him, the water dripping off his naked body, and he walked towards me then, held the pith helmet over his privates, then let it go again to embrace me, and said, with that crushing simplicity of his, ‘No larks here, Pip.’ And the salt water ran down his face like tears.”
~
I lay on the upper straw in the barn and waited for the owl to hoot one more time. One more time would do it I felt, would draw the thing out, would stop whatever was staining the shawl beneath my knees, the bale of hay below that. The yellow straw was silver in the moonlight and was turning a dull sea green below me, spreading all the time. And then I heard the low purr of wings and the brown thing flew over me once more and out of the triangular aperture where the moon was. That did it, I felt, whatever animal thing was happening was over now, and I remembered the stone woman in the circular passageway with her hands pulling her knees apart and me guiding George’s hand to mine. And I thought, that’s what her knees were open for. It wasn’t the birth of the river, it was the birth of this.
It was in my wet shawl, it had been inside me, it had a shape I didn’t want to see, a tiny form I didn’t want to feel, and so I wrapped the shawl around it. But I knew even then the less I saw of it, the more I would remember.
I got to my knees slowly and felt the bale beneath me shift and slide, and I slid down with it on to the bales below. I fell on my back and it fell on top of me, the wet shawl with the part of me inside it, a pearl, I told myself, a precious, bloody, dead pearl, and I wrapped it, getting wetter all of the time. I slid down then on my wet bum, down bale after bale to the strawy floor. I wanted to be back, for some reason, in some place I had felt happier, by the chestnut tree or near the glasshouse. And so I walked back down the empty road along the riverside through the copse of trees, out past the glasshouse to the orchard wall.
And there, in the orchard, Dan had left his spade by the rusty gate. I took the spade and went to where the earth was soft and I dug. I dug the deepest hole that I could dig in what I would call my weakened state and put my shawl in there for ever and filled it up again. And then I walked down the long field to the river, and underneath the chestnut tree I entered the water and swam. Not so much swam as floated. I would happily have been found there in the morning with the stains of death all over me, but the water did something, the river always did something as I was to find through the years, it washed me clean, and the pull of the tide left me back eventually where I had started, underneath the swing and the chestnut tree.
So I climbed out again and walked to the house, and if anybody met me and asked why I was wet, I was swimming, of course, just swimming, and if they asked why, in your clothes, I would have asked back, what, you think a girl should swim naked?
~
“I stripped by the rancid beach while George put his clothes on.
“ ‘I’ll mind them for you, Greg,’ he said, as if we were at a bathing spot in Bettys town.
I waded out into the hot sea and washed the grime off what used to be me in the pink foam. I knew nothing wo
uld ever be the same again, watching those huge plates of black metal out against the horizon waiting to spew their fire once more. I felt the dull pain as the salt seeped through the bandage, into the hole in my arm.
“ ‘Are you hurt?’ I asked him.
“ ‘No,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t hurt much.’
“ ‘What doesn’t hurt?’ I asked, and turned and saw his hand come up to his face and realised he was missing one finger.
“ ‘Don’t laugh,’ he said.
“ ‘How could I laugh, George?’ I asked him.
“ ‘I don’t know how,’ he said, ‘but it does seem funny.’ And he reached into the pocket of his tunic and drew something out, something small and pink that curled like a radish. ‘My finger,’ he said, with a dulled bemusement. ‘We were moving up the cliff-face, I reached up to grab a ledge and a bullet took it. It landed at my feet.’
“ ‘You need to sleep, George,’ I said.
“ ‘I know,’ he said, ‘and so does my finger.’ And he laughed, and I laughed too because I knew he wanted me to.
“ ‘Shall we bury it?’ he said, as I walked back towards him, shaking the drops from my naked body.
“ ‘Why not,’ I said. I dressed then, pulling my rancid trousers over my wet legs, buttoning my shirt that was stiff with blood and sweat, and George found a discarded bayonet, stabbed at the sand with it, gouging out a hole with his good hand. He placed the pink radish-like thing carefully inside, then covered it up, stamped the sand with his feet and stabbed in the bayonet once more so it protruded like a cross.
“ ‘Here lies my finger,’ he said, ‘which lost its little life somewhere near the beach, beneath the fort whose name I can’t pronounce. May it rest in peace.’ Then he blessed himself with his bad hand and the dried bloodied stump seemed not to bother him at all. He looked up at me with those eyes and it was hard to tell whether he was laughing or crying. ‘Have you anything to say, Gregory?’
“ ‘Yes,’ I said, and bowed my head. ‘I want to pay homage to George’s little finger, whose service to King and Country has been mighty and immeasurable, which finger died in the heat of battle in defence of Poor Little Belgium on a beach in Turkey. This finger paid the ultimate price and joins the ranks of glorious dead on these shores from Achilles to those thousands of poor souls around us as yet unburied. Amen.’”
~
I changed in my bedroom and walked down the stairs, carrying my wet clothes in a bundle, down the avenue with the crunching gravel, through the gates and along by the silver river. I threw my bundle in the water, and I walked with no object, just to walk, just to feel my useless body moving of its own accord along the pitiless road. I knew the road had no pity, just as the house would have no pity, as my mother and Mary Dagge would have no pity, and the only one who would have pity I could never tell, and that would be my father.
So I walked away from him, putting so much distance between him and me that I would never have to hear the sound of his breaking heart. I walked until the house had long disappeared behind the hedges and the hayricks and the broadleafed trees, and kept the river to my left with the graveyard by Mornington across it. And when the spires of Drogheda came into view, and the masts of the boats like spires themselves, I saw the round yellow light of a porthole come into view with a gangplank above it. I stood by that porthole and looked down at how the yellow light seemed to make the lapping crests of water below even blacker. I could have taken one step in and found myself looking at the hull of the boat from the crush of water below. But I heard a sound then, the lowing of cattle from the ship above, and I decided to go wherever those cattle went. I walked up the manure-caked gangplank, and on the deck I could hear nothing but the creak of the ship and the moan of cattle below. There were bales of straw stacked below the funnel, and I crawled up them like I had crawled in Mabel Hatch’s barn and I wrapped the loose straw around me and fell asleep.
~
“The trench was full of sleeping bodies so we burrowed into the sand above it like crabs. Or more like worms perhaps,” says Gregory, “the kinds of worms that leave their sandcasts on Baltray strand, ragworms, lugworms . . . We scraped the ground with our knives and wormed our way in, leaving the displaced sand like casts above us, facing the Turkish line, ready to catch whatever bullets they fired our way when the sun came up. It felt as if the earth was our only comforter and there was a sweet protection in being so close to it, not even an oilcloth beneath us. We belonged to it and only it, it would protect us and if needs be bury us, embrace us, turn us once more into itself through the agency of what we seemed to be, worms. I was asleep within minutes and when I woke the hot sun was climbing above us and there was a burning in my left arm.”
~
When I awoke the funnel was spewing smoke above me and the sun was streaming through it. There was a girl standing by the mass of rivets with her arms crossed, looking down on me. I couldn’t see her face for the smoke but I heard her voice.
“What do we have here,” she said, “a stowaway? Oh no, it’s the girl from the Laytown races.”
And I recognised the voice of the Colleen Bawn. “Are we moving?” I asked her.
“No,” she said, “we’re waiting for the engines to warm up. I never got your name.”
“Rosalind,” I lied.
“What are you running from, Rosalind?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You like sleeping on cattle feed, then?”
“No,” I said, “but I’ve got no alternative.”
“You better come down,” she said, “and have some breakfast or they’ll send you back to nothing.”
~
“By eight o’clock the guns were going again from the sea behind us, and we crawled out of our burrows into the trench where we re-acquainted ourselves with our kit. George opened a tin and we ate the meat together, it was in a warm stew of suet and water and tasted like nothing I could remember. We were told to kit up and walk forwards which we did, though if we had ignored the order I don’t know what they could have done since it came from no officer we knew, and besides, we hardly knew each other. But we walked forwards because that was why we came here, we had a dim memory of our purpose, and what were we there for, if not to walk blindly on to an unknown beach, across ridges of shale and scrub, through unannounced and unexpected red poppies, towards an opponent who only revealed himself in distant puffs of smoke. Maybe they had been cleared out by the bombardment, maybe they had fled, because we walked unopposed now, up small stony slopes that seemed hardly worth the effort.
We gained height gradually and made it to the ridge where I could see the whole peninsula—lines of men stretching away to the left arid right, thousands of them, an endless plain in front of us, four or five broken stone columns jutting into the sky and beyond them what someone told me was a village. I could see the bright colours far to my right, red and blue—or was it gold?—of the French troops, miles away like small toys, images of what I had always imagined were soldiers, small emblazoned ants walking forwards and every now and then one of them would tumble backwards and vanish from view.
So there was firing down there, we could gather, but from where we were the only thing to stop us was our own tiredness and thirst. Thirst more than tiredness. We could have sleepwalked on, eyes half-closed, feet moving forwards in the half-remembered imitation of the act of walking, but the thirst blinded us to anything but the need for a drop of the water we were leaving behind us. They had runners carrying cans of it from the beaches, but the further we moved the less of it reached us, until around noon we just stopped, like mindless donkeys who could move neither forwards nor back but could only stand, struggling for breath in the punishing heat.
They came at us then, from somewhere in the leafless bushes beyond, one of them waving a sword of all things. And we probably would have let them cut right through us, when a shell whistled over and exploded above them leaving pulverised pieces of the flesh of fifty or more, a pall of white s
moke, an echo that rattled from the gulley to our left and the distant groans of the men still alive, in a language that was unintelligible. But we understood well enough, they were dying, and that sounds the same in anyone’s language.”
~
She brought me down below, past the merchant seamen waking up, to where the cattle were shifting in their pens and her companions were sleeping on their rolled-up tent canvas against the portholes. She poured a pitcher of cold water for me to wash myself in and as they woke, one by one, the questions came.
“Are you in trouble, Rosalind, the kind of trouble she’s in?”
“What kind of trouble is she in?” I asked, and the older one with the straw-blonde hair rubbed her belly and laughed.
“The kind of trouble that shows,” she said, “the kind of trouble that’ll have her off the boards in a month’s time.”
“No,” I said, “I’m not in that kind of trouble, I’m not in any trouble at all, but I want to do what she does.”
“What do you want to do that I do?” she asked, looking at me with her clear blue eyes.
“Act,” I said.
34
“WE CRAWLED FORWARDS then through the groaning to an empty trench which they must have left. We settled ourselves in there and the more adventurous among us took up sniping positions and fired at anything that moved. George’s hand was now a mass of pus as if he had dipped it in custard, and my shoulder was no better, the wound bubbling away in its own juices in the heat. Neither of us could hold a rifle but we had two good arms between us, his left, my right, and we were put to moving sandbags from the back of the trenches to the front.
The stretcher-bearers came as the sun was going down and two of them got hit by a blast; one died immediately and the other crawled above us groaning, a great hole in his chest. We were told to take their place, one-handed stretcher-bearers, and we lifted him on it and scurried with it back the way we had advanced all day, sideways, bent like crabs. At the beach now there were rafts with piles of wounded on them, pulled by other boats with piles of the same. We lifted him on the raft we could reach, said nothing to his curses in that fine Birmingham accent, and as the raft pulled off I had an idea.