Bitter Eden: A Novel (6 page)

‘He’s your friend?’ The voice behind me is carefully saying nothing at all and I know I am going to try and walk softly even though I am wondering why the hell I
should
?

‘No, only Douglas is my friend. But Tony’s OK,’ which he
is
though everybody knows he’s also a raving queer.

‘Then why the favours?’ persists the voice, shading now from offhand into chill, and I know walking softly is going to be no way to go.

‘Because you’ll be seeing me in one of his plays soon. That is, if you’re interested enough to come.’

He says nothing, only grunts as he heaves himself back onto his back and I see red. ‘Come off it!’ I quietly rage, not wanting those around us to hear. ‘Not everybody on the stage is a poof. Or do you think
I’m
a poof, in which case,’ and now I also turn back onto my back, ‘nice body or not, get off its lovely arse and come at me like a man. This is
prison
, pal, and you live and let live; and you
entertain
yourself as best you can or go mad; and if a poof can put on a play better than you can, then you
let
the poof do it and stop acting like an old woman who’s got a hand up her leg.’

Then I wait, my heart and gut flopping over like a fish that’s hooked because this is a
boxer
and, if he
does
get up, he’s going to do, at least, that Ite dentist’s job on my teeth and I have got enough problems with them as it is. But he merely asks, his tone as back to normal as though he hasn’t heard a thing I have said, ‘What is “smaak”?’ and I am scrabbling to get my bearings before I remember and say, ‘“like”. The Ites
like
musicals and plays,’ and he nods with a solemnness that betrays that he is not as comfortable as he pretends, then goes on, ‘So you are saying I have to go on the stage to get my hair cut?’ and suddenly we are both laughing, he whooping it up in a way that means
now
it is OK again.

But he is serious about the haircut, so I explain, ‘You can
pay
for a haircut. We’ve got real barbers here. We’ve got real just about
anything
here. You go two huts up from the theatre and you’ll find the pint-sized shack where the barbers will do anything you ask except give you a shampoo. The Ites not only know about it – they
run
it. In the mornings, they hand the barbers the cutthroats, scissors, clippers, you name it, and in the evenings they check that everything’s still there, then take it all away again. Not forgetting, of course, the commandant’s share of the poor guys’ earnings for the day.’

‘Yes, but
how
am I going to pay? I’ve no money on me!’

‘Didn’t they hand you any Red Cross grub and smokes when you first came?’ He nods. ‘Do you smoke?’ He says no. ‘So what did you do with the cigarettes?’

‘I stashed them. I always stash anything I don’t need because you never know.’

‘You’re damned right you never know. You hang onto those beauties because they’ll buy you your haircut and a span of other things you’re going to want.’

He stares at me, perplexed. ‘Look, they’re your
money
, man! In this camp, there are those who smoke and those that don’t. Those that smoke like to smoke more than they like to eat, so they will flog you their Red Cross grub – or even the camp swill – for cigarettes, and you grow fat while they grow thin like those seven lean kine the Bible goes on about. This is a cruel world, pal. Then there are those who like to both smoke
and
eat. They are the gambling boys – the Mafia. Every day, all day, sometimes half the night, they play cards. For what? Cigarettes. Play till they are rich beyond any decent slob’s dreams. Then they smoke some of the cigarettes, spend some to buy extra food, spend some more when they hire serfs to do the chores they are now too busy gambling to do themselves. This is where my mate and I come in. We are the working class. Every Monday, all Monday, we wash gamblers’ clothes, working our way up to someday being Mafia of our own, only we will have done it with our hands instead of the brains we don’t have. It’s a whole new system that’s growing here, pal.’ Almost I say his name, getting carried away, but restrain myself in time. ‘No banks, no taxes, no interest, no inflation, not even a printing press to print more dough. But it works. Don’t ask me why.’

‘Because the Red Cross is printing your dough,’ he at once says, and I mull that over and think, Christ, this guy’s no dope. ‘Also,’ he adds, ‘judging by those shorts you’re wearing, all that fucking around with other people’s crappy underpants doesn’t seem to be paying off the way you say.’

‘Capitalists are not made in six months,’ I protest, but there is an approving in his voice that I do not miss. ‘As for the shorts…’ and I tell him about the hulk and how I got to wear the shorts.

‘Sad,’ he says and it is not just a word. ‘I was in the tank corps. What were you?’

‘A machine gunner,’ I half-lie, not caring overmuch that I do; only hoping that he will not ask more questions and that
Douglas
will not someday let the rat out of the bag. A survivor with an attitude, I am not going to lightly admit that I was mostly an anti-gas wimp at H.Q.

But his mind is already back with himself. ‘I must run now,’ he says, jumping up. ‘Keep my place if you stay on.’ But then he turns back and looks at me appraisingly, then nods as if satisfied and goes, and I am envying him the hair on his back as on his front and the mahogany-dark tan that makes me wonder if his stock is not Celtic Welsh rather than Saxon pom?

Also I’m thinking that Douglas will be wondering why I’m lying here for so long, but there is a dissatisfaction in me, a feeling that some climactic point has not yet been reached,
must
still be reached, and I watch for him to, time after time, briefly appear in an arc of the camp’s perimeter nearest to where I am. Of one thing I
am
certain, however, and that is that, as he rounds the camp with a seemingly unvarying fluidity and grace, he is not conscious of anything save the honed and seamless machine that is his flesh and his driving need to subject it to his will.

But, slowly, as I wait for him to finish and return, a question is forming in me like the cloud that earlier built in a windless air – a question that, unbelievably, I did not at the time ask and that now seems laden with the electricity of meaning of a balance that a breath could swing either way.

And then he
is
returning, but from a quite different direction from the one in which he left, a smallish glass bottle glinting in his hand, and his breathing is deep but steady and his body sleek as a seal’s with sweat and his step proud. Also, there is a towel about his neck, which means that he must have called in at his hut, and now he stops at the ablution block and lays the bottle down out of reach of the splash of the taps, and strips off his underpants and crouches down under a tap.

Then he dries himself, slips the underpants back on, picks up the bottle and comes across to me. ‘You still here?’ he asks as though he did not expect me to be, and I take my cue from that and say, yes, I wanted to go but I have thought of a question that I should have asked him before and I would like to ask it now.

‘OK,’ he says and sits down flat, uncorking the bottle and shaking a splash of what smells like liniment into a palm. ‘Not much left,’ he mutters more to himself than me and begins to rub the oil into his calves and thighs. Then he starts kneading the small of his back with his oily hands, looking up at me with steady, preoccupied eyes, saying, ‘Need the wife for this’; then adds, ‘What’s the question?’ taking me by surprise.

Certain now that he is listening, I suddenly feel foolish, even reluctant to go on, but there is no question of
not
going on, so I hear myself say, my voice gruffer than I had planned, ‘Why is it, after you had been here a whole week, that you knew nothing about the way things here are run? Shit, I talked to you like on a guided tour and I could see that, to you, it was all new. Didn’t you or your friends
ask around
?’

For a long moment, he stares at me, his hands struggling with his back and a new question nagging at me that I am
not
going to ask because I am not looking for the job, namely, why doesn’t he ask me to rub his back for him like most other guys would? Or did he see me flinch when his finger touched my cheek?

‘I don’t
have
any friends here,’ he says at last, his voice disinterested and remote.

‘Well, couldn’t
you
then have asked around?’

Again he takes forever to reply. ‘I’m not a talking man.’

‘Well, you did all right with me today. Was I an exception to the rule?’

‘Depends,’ he says and grins, showing all of his white, square teeth, and I leave, mumbling something fuzzy, fleeing as from a thrashing between trees.

*   *   *

You can lead
me blindfolded into our hut at a time when, say, everybody is out and standing in a queue, and whip off the blindfold and I will at once know it is our hut. Big deal? Yes, because the Prussian-grey, dull-windowed prefabs are not only outwardly the same but – to the first glance of the uninitiated – inwardly even more chillingly so. But I am not fazed by every hut’s seemingly uniform debris as from a blast: the scattering of garments, mostly tattered and soiled, the dixies, mugs, spoons, whether washed or unwashed, the desperate substitutes contrived by ingenious or blundering hands, the tumblings of blankets and greatcoats in the three-tiered bunks even long after noon, the kitbags dangling from nails driven into the bunks, the ash, food scraps, mud, trampled into a patina of filth as ineradicable as the grain of the floors, the indefatigable flies.

But there is more, much more, to every hut than that. There is also a
spirit
, as there is a spirit to every human shape, individual and unique and compounded of the sweat, sperm, blood, fears, hopes, insanities or profundities, of the two hundred of us allotted to each hut’s precisely calculated space, the whole honeycombed with aisles down which only the skeletal sidle with ease. It is this spirit’s embracing me, enticing me into the manifold foetors of its crotch, that enables me to say this is our hut even before the blindfold is removed; and it is hastening to me again now, loud, amoral, yet curiously comforting as even the harshest of homes can be, as I come in from the long lying in the sun.

Douglas is part of this home. Take him away, I think, and there will be a wound that messily bleeds, that nothing heals. What am I trying to defend? Off balance as one in sudden darkness or blinding light, I stand at the bottom of the aisle leading up to our two bunks, watch him furiously flouncing around. In this slough of inertia and decay, he alone finds something with which to murder time, is forever scrubbing utensils with sand till they shine, whisking the broom of useless twigs down our aisle, making and remaking his bed (and sometimes mine), speed-reading the weightiest book the camp library can provide, prowling, eager for bargains, the one-man, one-box food stalls where the non-smokers with a talent for trade set out their Red Cross cans of margarine, jam or Spam.

And, above all, vigorously pestering the old bastard with the belligerent beard and dead-fish eyes who occupies the bunk between my top and Douglas’ bottom one and doggedly refuses to be bludgeoned into exchanging his squat for mine. This disrupter of our familial life distresses Douglas more than he does me, which the latter, I suspect, senses because he communicates when Douglas is not there, telling me – among much else – that he was a staff sergeant in Stores and hinting without provoking that he thinks Douglas is more than a little mad. For which he is not to be too greatly blamed.

This rank business is no minor issue because this is a camp for NCOs who are not allowed to volunteer to work for the enemy on pain of being court-martialled for treason after the war, which means that our interloper can slightly pull rank and probably is already doing just that by staying where he is. Sad, in a way, this senior in every hut becoming hut boss and the most senior of the whole camp becoming our link with the Ite brass, which means he gets to tell us what shit
they
want us to do next. Like a fowl with its head chopped off doing its shadow dance of life-after-death? What, I wonder, is Danny’s rank, then wonder why I should quite so sharply want to know, and carry on edging up the aisle.

Now Douglas is clambering down from my bunk, deliberately almost treading on the glowering enemy beneath, and I come up close and ask, ‘Hey, what are you doing up there?’

Startled, he hits the floor and turns and says, badly lying as any child, ‘Just tidying up your bunk,’ but I look at him and he looks away and I say, ‘I told you before, let it
be.
You can’t always have everything your own way.’

He shuffles his feet, then, and I know he is blushing somewhere under the professorial beard and that he will again be pestering the stubborn-as-he, pernicious presence in the middle bunk the moment I am no longer there.

‘What’s for lunch?’ I then ask, and I’m not meaning the once-a-day dixie of camp swill and two buns per man which is just about due, the hut headman already standing ready to give the word when our hut’s number is called and we must nip down to the gate to take our turn.

‘I bought a tin of Spam from that chap with one eye who came over with us on the boat. He’s opened a stall near the toilets with just about nothing to sell and I thought we should give him a hand. OK?’

‘How much did you pay?’

‘Thirty smokes,’ which is expensive, but I don’t moan because the Red Cross parcels are late this month, which means that the stalls’ stocks are running low and it is the sellers who are calling the shots right now.

Then Douglas is looking at me more closely and I know why. ‘But Tommy!’ he exclaims so that half the hut can hear and the little devil of my hatred of such diminutives is right there beside me, slipping his thin blade into my side. ‘Where
have
you been?’