Days Like Today (22 page)

The children began to ask questions about the story he was telling. He answered and went on. He threw in a few extra jokes. They all began to enjoy the walk, the fresh air, and being together. He turned the story into the nonsense tale he and his army friends used to recite when they’d been drinking: about the poor boy and the contest to win the hand of the princess and give her the kiss of true love.

The version he used for them was always heavily censored. Some sections were his own invention. For instance, as he told it, the boy started to have good luck when he paid attention at school and his studious efforts brought results at the end of a year – a year and a day: the teachers at the school awarded him one of the entrance tickets to the palace dinner. Many tickets had been distributed throughout the length and breadth of the land but they weren’t given to just anybody, because you had to earn prizes and treasures in this life. If you didn’t earn them, you didn’t deserve them.

He could have chosen other stories but since this was the one all the children liked best, he knew he could slip in
some moralizing and get away with it. He was surprised to find that many of his interpolations, and even the offshoots into the sententious, produced requests for more, just as if they’d been part of the original fabric.

The food list was especially good; the main portion represented the combined efforts of his combat unit over a period of years. But the best sections had been made up one winter’s night by a friend of his to whom rhyme came easily – a lighthearted young man who’d been blown to pieces in the same explosion that had taken away his own left hand.

The children would listen, entranced, sometimes joining in. And then they’d insist on having everything repeated. One of the best-loved sections described the clothes everyone at the palace wore to the ball before the kissing contest began. They loved the clothes and the food, the names of the characters, the music of the words, the fact that it was all unreal and sounded silly and that there was also a beautiful princess in the story. And, of course, that the hero won and everything ended happily.

Only the children who were seriously ill failed to respond to the poor boy and the princess.

In the army the favored verses were the ones that dealt with the ‘kissing’, which involved the princess trying out all the men, and vice versa, until the hero – the poor boy – won.

‘For true love is sweetest,’ he told his children, ‘and true love is best, and whoever finds true love is happy and blest.’

When they returned from their walk, his wife was standing in the doorway, breathing out a narrow cloud like a
banner. The air was cold enough to see your breath, but he’d smelled the nicotine from a distance. He stopped in front of her and held out his hand. From behind her back she produced the cigarette. He took a drag and handed it to her again. He half-closed his eyes as he exhaled. That was when it was best: on the way out, where you could look at it in the air, while you were still tasting it.

They stood like that, sharing the cigarette until it was finished. He let her have the end. She stuck a toothpick through the last of it. When there was almost nothing left, she squeezed off the fire, stepped on it and saved the few unburned strands to be collected with others and made into a fresh cigarette.

That was their conversation, their apology and explanation.

Neither of them mentioned the beating. They showed each other no sign that they wanted to hold on to the memory of violence nor to the knowledge that everything had taken place in front of their children. The kids would find out about marriage soon enough, just as they were discovering everything else; not that every marriage was the same. In this one, he knew, the day when he allowed his wife to get away with striking him in the face, whether she did it in public or in private, was the day when she’d make up her mind to replace him with a different husband. She had vigorous ideas about what a man should do and be. Some things she wouldn’t stand for at all. At other times she’d pretty much ask to be kept in her place. Sometimes what she wanted from him was to know what he expected
from her. He still thought that they’d be all right as long as he trusted his instincts and they didn’t talk about any of it.

Where on earth had she managed to find a cigarette? From one of the aid workers, of course. But what did she have to offer in exchange? Nothing, while he was there. A promise – that was all she’d have to bargain with: a look in the eye, which she could deny afterwards. Unless she didn’t want to.

He admired her quickness of wit, her suspiciousness and cynicism. Before the fighting started she was so different that he could hardly remember what she’d been like. He could only recall a vague picture of the way she’d looked: fresh, eager, delicately slender. But he’d been different, too. He had no idea what he’d been like – a nice, decent young man, probably. Now he was like everyone else – like a ragged, mean-looking cur that snuffles around the garbage piles at the back of a village.

They waited for the aid workers to bring supplies and another consignment of orphans – perhaps a batch of them hardly old enough to feed themselves: children who had to be closely supervised. Maybe there would be even more than in the first distribution.

The term ‘aid worker’ was relatively new. They used to be called charity workers. People no longer knew what the word charity meant. They didn’t know the meaning of love or pity or how similar or different they were; they saw no strict divisions between compassion, condescension and contempt. The weak went under. If you didn’t want it to happen to you, it was to your advantage to make it happen
to somebody else. That would give you a better chance.

Sometimes at night he thought he could hear the howling of dogs. If real, and not simply a thing he imagined while he was waiting for sleep, the sound would be like the first howling he’d heard, and probably coming from the quarry. Abandoned mines and quarries were good places to keep prisoners or to bury them. You could fit a lot of people into a mine: put them in, station armed guards on the heights and blow up the entrance. And even more could be thrown into a disused quarry, although usually the intention there would be to free them at some stage because they’d remain visible.

Nobody talked about the quarry and everybody knew. It had a long history. Since his return, the only time he’d heard it mentioned openly by anyone except his wife was when a stranger had laughed about it, saying in a whisper, ‘The divorce court where you don’t need to bother with lawyers.’

When he was a child, life was orderly. Parents were strict; indoors they told their children:
Don’t keep rushing everywhere.
Don’t jump around like that
.
Why are you laughing in that silly
way? Be quiet.
Outside the house they said:
You’re making a
spectacle of yourself
.
Everybody’s looking at you. Stop showing off.

The teachers at school were also fairly uncompromising. They specialized in verbal castigation. Some of his friends preferred that. They knew how to defend themselves against it. He would rather have been strapped on the hands or whipped. That happened too, but none of it was too bad.

He had two close friends who followed or led him into escapades that ranged from the hilarious to the terrifying.
Because they were such a small group, and because they never did anything really bad, they had no worries about betrayal from within. His brothers and sisters didn’t know what he was up to and anyway they had secrets of their own that could be used against them if they told on him. So at the age when he was ready for adventure and adulthood, he and his two friends were climbing out of their houses at night and heading for the one place in the neighborhood where there were no rules: the abandoned quarry beyond the far side of town.

Once, when still a boy, he’d been persuaded to spend a night there on his own. It was almost like the more usual dare to stay overnight in a haunted house, except that there was a big difference between fear of unknown other worlds and fear of unknown genuine trouble. At the time so many stories were in circulation about the place and what went on in it that the quarry exerted an attraction nicely balanced between dread and longing. They all knew, even as children, that it was where people went to meet each other unobserved, to plan robberies, to hand over stolen goods, to see men and women who were disapproved of and ‘to do it’. It was the latter activity that had become irresistibly fascinating to their imaginations. They wanted information. A prize had been selected: a ticket to something they also wanted desperately. He remembered that part only vaguely.

He and his two friends turned up at their usual meeting place and began the long walk to the quarry. In those days there were several sets of stairs leading down to the bottom, where by daylight the ground looked like a riverbed
in time of drought: gravelly, full of dried bushes, sand and patches of mud and water. The place was huge, with divisions of landscape like the ones you might see in a large park gone back to the wild: the narrow offshoot like a tree-lined canyon, the uneven ravine bulged with sloping rock faces that were tilted and stepped like the overlapping waves of a sideways-moving sea; the clearings surrounded by scrubby undergrowth, the big open plains.

By luck they had chosen a cloudy night when the moon was full enough to allow some vision but not bright enough to make hiding impossible – just the sort of time and weather everyone wanted. And the ground was dry. His friends left him at a set of stairs covered by shadow. He’d agreed to meet them at dawn in the abandoned farm shack they used as a clubhouse.

He started down the steps, remembering as he moved not to trust the rotting handrails nor to look for complete safety in the stone below and by his side. Where the walls and stairs were worn, they could be slippery, glassily polished; and the stone had a method – peculiar to itself and treacherous – of retaining or breathing out moisture.

While he was undergoing his ordeal, his friends indulged in a midnight feast at their clubhouse. He expected that they’d be asleep when he got out but, because he’d promised, he did what they’d arranged: at three in the morning he climbed up the quarry stairs again and took the long walk back.

The others hadn’t slept; they’d finished up the food and after that, all night long, they’d been telling stories. They
wanted to hear everything. Without proof, naturally, they wouldn’t hand over the prize.

He tried to tell them. As he talked, he grew less shocked, although there were some descriptions he didn’t even attempt, nor could he convey the absolute terror he’d felt – not just at the idea of being caught, but at the sight of what was happening in front of him. He’d witnessed all sorts of activity, much of which he didn’t even identify as sexual. He had looked on at gambling, knife fights, nakedness: men, women and children. There had been hundreds of people down there. Some groups had been peacefully eating and drinking around a fire – large parties, some of whose members would go off together into the straggly bushes and then drift back to the crowd. There had also been smaller gatherings where whatever went on was being forced on one or more people by others. No one interfered in any of the quarrels, which were loud. Yelling and screaming was ignored by the rest. Most people were drinking. As he talked about his adventure, it came to him that some of the bodies he’d stepped over and fallen against in an effort to remain hidden hadn’t been dead but simply drunk, or asleep, or both.

His friends didn’t believe half of what he told them. But since there was no question that he’d been down in the quarry and had seen quite a lot of what they imagined must be going on there anyway, they let him have the prize, whatever it was.

The days were warmer, but the real spring wouldn’t come
for over a month at the soonest and probably later than that. You could smell it in the air and feel it in the ground; that meant nothing. They could still have storms and weeks of freezing rain afterwards. Nevertheless, Peg-leg decided that the moment had come for him to move on. He announced his departure early one morning and said good-bye the same afternoon.

All at once it seemed as if a period of disappointment had begun. He refused to imagine that they might be heading for a stretch of bad luck: after what they’d gone through already, that would be ridiculous, although the thought of it was always near.

Until the aid workers brought new refugees and food-ration credits, they’d be living right at the edge. Without the extra bread, everyone felt nervous. Despite what they’d hoarded, most of their provisions were near exhaustion. Once the weather changed, transportation and travel in general would be easier. It was possible that that was what the authorities were waiting for.

Good weather was also needed for planting and putting the house in order. All he’d really been able to do before the cold months was to make the place watertight and as warm as possible: to block the holes and board up the windows. A coat of fresh paint, whitewash and new windows would make the house look more normal again, less like a half-derelict construction behind which a family was barricaded.

If you’d approached the district at night, it would have been like coming to a place that had the reputation of being
haunted. All the houses still standing were like his, and some much worse.

That was the prize, he remembered: for spending a night in the quarry – the reward was a ticket to a traveling fair. And he’d gone to the show they all called the Haunted House, which was actually named the House of Horrors. It was a collection of optical illusions and things that jumped out at you while you rode in the open car of a miniature train. The train carried a full load: children, parents, lovers, all laughing and shrieking. When you heard them calling out around the bend, you knew that there was something you should be prepared for. He’d whooped and cheered with the rest. He’d loved it. At no time was he so frightened as when he’d had to sit still and watch and be silent down in the quarry.