Bitter Eden: A Novel (2 page)

I pass another tent sunk in the sand. Again the ubiquitous robot’s playing games, denying midnight now. Frenziedly the hands polish the buttons on an officer’s tunic, button-stick inserted round the buttons so that the Brasso will not whiten the sullen cloth, bring upon the hands a comic wrath. The tunic’s shoulder flaps flaunt a crown. I am thinking ‘Christ!’, beating back bile.

He is coming towards me, studying the anonymity of my fatigues, two pips glinting on his shoulders, sandy hair lifting in the awakening wind. The hair, the prissy pursing of the lips, the button mushroom eyes, warn of the worst of the breed and I snap him my still smart training college salute. He floppy-chops an arm back, barks, ‘Unit and rank?’

I think to tell him I am Colonel this-or-that because how would he – now – ever find out otherwise, but the solemnness in the air like bells’ dissuades me and I say, ‘Sergeant. Second Divisional Headquarters. Sir!’

His eyes widen a little as he balances between surprise and what I suspect is a chronic tendency to disbelieve. ‘Div. H.Q.? What do you do at Div. H.Q.?’ There is a slight emphasis on the ‘you’.

‘Chemical Warfare Intelligence and Training. Sir!’

He is impressed and it shows in a slight inclining to me of stance and tone, and something like a greediness of the eyes, which makes no sense and which I dismiss as a stress-induced fancifulness of the mind.

‘Do you want to hand yourself over like a sheep or make a break?’ His voice is casual but his glance is sharp and I hear myself saying, ‘Make a break,’ even though previously there had been no thought of that in my mind. I am honest enough to admit that I am no hero and, even now, I am painfully aware that my excitement at the prospect of escape only slightly exceeds my congenital dread.

‘Get in that truck then,’ he says and indicates a battered three-tonner a few paces off. ‘Where’s your kit? Are you armed?’

‘No kit, sir. No arms.’ Even as the words still sound, I realize what I’m saying and I hump not my kit but my shame as I for the first time am faced by the fact that I never even thought of retrieving my kit from the anti-gas truck before I set the latter alight. As I said, I’m no hero and more likely to be stood against a wall than paraded for a gong, but he does not seem to mind, even nods, and I get into the truck and see that there are already others in it, lying flat, face down. Surely veterans, these, because they have lined the sides of the truck with the kitbags that
they
did not forget to bring, and another spider of fear scuttles up my spine as I understand – as I should have at the start – that they are braced for the crossfire that is already raging in my mind.

It would take but a step and a jump to again quit the truck, but I stay put and we are off, the truck weaving and rattling over the moonscape of the land, roiling up a hot white dust that settles in our hair, eyes, clothes, till we look like labourers in a cement factory coming off shift, and the knotting in me slowly slackens as there is still no shot or shout.

Then, without warning, we stop, the suddenness of it sliding us around like loose cargo on a canting ship, and the cab door slams and the lieutenant is shouting to us to leave the truck, hands raised. And we stand up, but don’t raise our hands because we don’t know what the shit he is on about, and the Jerries are ringing us round and the lieutenant is proffering his revolver to the brass in charge. But the brass waves it aside and the lieutenant turns to us and smiles, but there is nothing behind the button mushroom eyes and I know the meaning of betrayal and the rottenness that slinks in the flesh and breath of men.

‘Come,’ says the lieutenant. Then, patronizingly: ‘We could never have got through, anyway.’

‘And you knew that,’ says the hulk with a beard beside me and a gun seems to flow into an extension of his hand, but his aim does not match the buccaneer beard and the lieutenant stares, chalk-faced and open-mouthed, as his shoulder shatters and the revolver farts a useless round into the sand.

The brass fires then and the hulk’s face explodes, splattering me with blood and bone, and I lean over the truck’s side and hurl up the supper I never had. Then the Jerries post a guard over us, gun drawn, and another gets into the cab beside the driver and the truck turns around and heads back into the dying town.

The lieutenant does not look back as the grey, stolid shapes close round him and I unashamedly claim the hulk’s kit as my own and, upending his water bottle into my hand, cleanse my face and fatigues as best I can.

‘Anybody lying here?’ asks a pommy voice, referring to the narrow space on my left, and I open my eyes, but the sun is level with them now, blinding them, and I close them again and say, ‘No.’

As expected, he takes the space without any further asking my leave, which would have been unnatural anyway in a place where anything unclaimed is everyone’s prey, and I am only surprised that he had anything at all to say before he flopped himself down. His shoulder lightly brushes mine and I wince aside, not only because I dislike poms, but because I have never been one for touching or being touched and, as a prisoner, I have been leant upon, trodden on, shoved all possible ways, with a frequency and vehemence that should see me through for the rest of whatever days are still mine. Also, he smells of soap, the overly scented yet almost frothless shit that one can sometimes beg or buy off a guard, and his shoulder is wet as though he has just crouch-bathed under one of the rows of taps in the open-ended shelter across the way.

I almost grow curious enough to turn around and look at him, but the sun is a gold leadenness in my limbs and I am back under that other sun as the Jerries add us to the biblical multitude that waits, not for any Saviour, but for the older than that assembling of the enslaved, the time-before-time’s smashing of the rebellious knee.

Actually, the conqueror turns out to be not at all like a royal Caesar or a rapacious Genghis Khan. Or should that be the other way around? Flanked by his panzers in his one overt try for histrionics and his face shrouded in the shadow cast by his cap, he speaks to us as one who too, dixie in his hand, stands in the queue when grub is up. We are, he assures us, lions (which, secretly and guiltily, we know we are not), but our officers are donkeys (which, most passionately, we know but too well), and a sigh like a wind in ripening wheat runs through us as we stand, belly to spine, locked in our adoration of this new god of war.

Not me, though. I am still seeing the lieutenant turning to us with his savouring smile of a little boy who pulls wings off flies and I am wondering what other and less pleasing agenda lies behind this companionable charade. And this mistrust is still prowling in me when a guy I know I know, but cannot at once place, comes up to me, humping his kit, sweat like a wounding under his arms, and says, ‘I am from Div. H.Q. Aren’t you?’

I look at him and nearly say, ‘No,’ because, one, I’m by nature a loner and my one-man job as the anti-gas freak has allowed me to indulge that up to now, and, two, this man looks like he’s going to make more of a loner of me after the first few exchanges about the nothing we share.

It’s not that he
looks
all that bad. He’s got this hook of a nose that reminds me of Issy Kapelowitz who was in our class at school, but I don’t think he’s a Yid because (unless he’s a convert which only happens about once in a trillion years) there’s a crucifix slung about his neck and, if you’re asking me, it’s ivory and he had better watch it or his parting from it is liable to be the brand of sweet sorrow he could well do without. His hair (what I can see of it under the dust) is brown and soft and more wavy than curled, and his brow is high (which does not necessarily mean that he has sense) and his chin juts (which does not necessarily mean that he is anything other than several kinds of an obstinate cunt).

His eyes, though, hold no ambivalence, interpret all else. Sunk deep in his skull, ringed by the bruises of a sleepless night, crinkled at the corners as though he laughs a lot or is a lot older than his flawless, clearly still natural teeth would have me believe, they are gentle – and conciliatory – and understanding – and every other damned innocuous quality that can sometimes so set my teeth on edge.

No, even with those eyes, his face is not intolerable, and his body is not laden with any belly and his legs go down straight and his arms, though no weightlifter’s, are reasonably muscled and male. What
does
put me off are his
movements
: the little almost dancing steps he takes even when, supposedly, he is standing still, the delicate, frenetic gestures of his hands, the almost womanliness of him that threatens to touch – and touch – and
touch
– and I have already told of my feelings concerning
that.

But then I look around me at the facelessness of the crowd, the namelessness of it because there are so many to name, the stemming of us into this sweating, defecating mass by the single thin wire strung on makeshift posts pushed into the dispassionate sand; and the alienness of it all, of this scarred and dying world that holds nothing of the green exhilaration of my own heart’s land, overwhelms even my solitariness and I look at him with something of a despairing and say, ‘Yes, I’m from Div. H.Q.’

‘I
knew
I’d seen you there!’ he exclaims and his hands flutter like exuberant wings. ‘I was a clerk in Intelligence. Typing and files. That sort of thing. What did you do?’

‘Nothing much,’ I lie. ‘Emptying the generals’ piss-pots most of the time.’

‘Oh,’ he says, a little thrown. ‘But you are joking, aren’t you now?’ Then: ‘Well, I think we chaps from Div. must stick together, don’t you? At the moment I feel more like a child out of school than anything else and yesterday I quite sinfully enjoyed destroying all those stuffy files! But the feeling won’t last because God alone knows where to from here. So,’ and he thrusts out his hand, ‘my name is Douglas – Douglas Summerfield. What is yours?’

‘Tom – Tom Smith,’ I say, struggling to get my hand back from his lingering clasp and naming my names as coarsely as I can in the hope that this will emphasize their commonness as opposed to the grandiloquence of his and so, from the start, abort a relationship upon which he seems ferociously intent, but from which my entire ego quails. I do have enough of a conscience left, however, to remember with some measure of guilt that the names on my birth certificate (and which I hardly ever spell out to anyone) are Thomas Aloysius Smythe.

The small, mean ploy fails. When I sit down on the dead hulk’s kit, he sits down on his – next to me – and talks and talks, not irrelevantly or even tediously, but with a bright hungering for communication with – grappling to – another that bewilders me and draws me even deeper into a shell which he does not seem able to sense is there. Or does he and is it that which is spurring him on to ever more determined efforts to break me down?

There
are
moments, always brief, when he falls silent, takes a rosary from a button-down pocket of the tunic with its three stripes of the rank that we share and, running the rosary through his fingers, mutters under his breath with an intensity that unsettles me even more than the usual prattling of his tongue. And sometimes a sudden surging of the crowd will separate us and I will try to slip away from him through the bodies standing densely packed as mealies in a field, but always, somehow, he finds me again, either suddenly reappearing at my side, fine white teeth smiling and glad, or waving to me over the intervening heads like – I savagely think – a drowning clown or a tart desperate for trade.

Later in the day, the Jerries begin to truck us out of the temporary camp, travelling in slow convoy along the coastal road, the sea sometimes seen, sometimes only the salt of it crying ‘Here!’, and Douglas is again right there beside me in the truck, having held onto my arm with a bruising stubbornness throughout the crazed battling to get aboard. Why, I am wondering, did we so object to being left behind when, so Jerry tells us, we will tomorrow morning be handed over to the Ites who, we are assured, are something else again?

Dusk shading into night, the convoy stops as at a sign and the trucks melt into the side of the road. Ours crashes in under a low, almost leafless tree and the driver-guard whisks a camouflage net over the still protruding bonnet with the deftness of an old angler casting his line. Why, I do not know, because the sky has been clear of our planes all day. Have we still
got
any planes? Are the Jerries, the Ites and us all that is left of humankind? Where are the
wogs
to whom this soil belongs?

I get off, Douglas shadowing me – who else? – stare out over the flat endlessness at the other side of the road, this solitary tree. Ancient flint glints in the half-light, the earth seems tinged with as old a blood, stubborn scrub starts up out of it like terrified hair and I am crying inside. Douglas, clinging to my profile, puts out a mothering hand, but I strike it aside and he exasperatingly smiles, nodding that he understands, and I come closer to prayer, fiercely, entreatingly, wishing him gone.

Astonishingly, the driver pours water from a jerry can into a canvas basin on a collapsible stand, invites us to wash our faces and hands, pantomiming what he means when his tongue fails. Warily as beasts too many traps have scarred, we edge closer, do as he says, but quickly, knowing that our necks are achingly exposed, and he fetches some cup-sized cans from somewhere in the cab, not fearing that we might cut and run – where to, anyway? – and begins to open them, not with a bayonet, story-book style, but with a civilized tin-opener that stabs me with thoughts of other places, other times, as poignantly as it punctures the cans.

Then he hands us each an opened can, pantomiming ‘Eat!’ and I see that the cans contain chunks of a grainy, grey meat in a splash of thin and oily slop, and I take out a pinch of the meat with cautious fingers and taste it, and it is as though I had never known a tasting tongue before, and I bolt the meat and slurp up the slop with all the passion of the hunger I had forgotten my belly held. And Douglas, forever vigilant, looks at me with as passionate a pitying and hands me the still uneaten half of his can, saying he is not hungry, and I am sure he is lying and make to hand the can back, but then think, as much of irritation as of hunger overcoming me, ‘What the fuck! If he wants to be a prick, then
let
him!’ and the Jerry picks up our two empty cans and puts them with the other empties into a sack and throws the sack into the cab, asking nothing of us, more captive than conqueror and a
kind
man who does not wish that we litter this small refuge that none of us might ever again have reason to disturb.