The Thing Itself (3 page)

On my last day of leave I was walking down near the West Pier by the bathing machines when the guns started up again. There was a gang of limbless men huddled together near the gents' toilet. One with no legs perched in a wheelchair; several with one leg and crutches. They were watching the young women come out of the machines with their buckets and spades. The girls screeched and giggled as they paddled into the cold water.

I threaded between the sailboats drawn up on the shingle between the huts.

‘Someone's copping it,' I said to a man with no arms. He ran his eyes over my stained uniform and gave me a nod. He saw me looking at his empty sleeves.

‘I had to go into no-man's-land to cut a bit of wire,' he said. ‘So that our major could show it to his old woman. I knew the idea was she would be so proud of his bravery she would let him have a bit of grummer.'

‘“Grummer”?' I said.

‘That's what some Irishmen call the “blow through”.' I still looked puzzled. ‘Sex, man, sex.'

‘Of course,' I said. ‘Sorry.'

‘I hope he's like me, and when she's on her back waiting for him to up her, he won't be able to get a hard-on.'

He spat next to his polished boot. I nodded to him and walked on, past barrows loaded with herring, twenty-four for a shilling. They stank but it was a better stink than I was used to.

I was thinking I wouldn't mind a bit of grummer myself, but wondered if I'd be able to manage.

I stepped aside for big, lumbering horses pulling carts piled with tradesmen's wares and a coal cart pulled by the biggest horse I'd ever seen. I was surprised these animals weren't at the Front.

On the King's Road there was a hubbub. Khaki-clad troops marched by, their uniforms spick and span. I heard someone say that the fresh-faced youth at the head of the march was Prince Edward. They were singing
Sussex by the Sea
and then
Tipperary
. I looked back at the group of limbless men and shrugged.

Someone screamed and I looked around, then up. There was a Zeppelin, cutting lazily across the sky. It was too high to see the crew leaning over to toss out the bombs, but I saw a dozen or so explosives drifting through the air before they plummeted sharply, growing larger as they fell to earth.

The explosions were loud. The sound bounced off the tall buildings. Ten minutes later I reviewed the damage. The Grand Hotel had taken a hit and a tram had come off its lines. A motor car swerved by it, throwing up dust on the dirt road.

The hit on the Grand would cause panic right enough. I'd been in there the day before for afternoon tea. It was stuffed with people who had left London for fear of air raids. Members of the royal families and the aristocracy of Britain and Europe rubbed shoulders with theatre and cinema stars, wives of bankers and industrialists, profiteers and more obvious London crooks like the Sabinis, who ran the rackets at the racecourse.

Most German Zeppelin attacks on the coast had been in the east, in Suffolk and Kent. German warships had shelled the east coast. In consequence, those people taking holidays flocked to Brighton rather than Broadstairs.

I thought about going out into the country, maybe down to Black Rock. But I also had the address of a brothel. It had been given me by a man who died beside me at Le Couteau. He joined up in 1912 at Preston barracks, just outside Brighton. His father had taken him there when he turned sixteen. His father had kept the shilling his son was paid as a new recruit.

He was with the Second Sussex. He told me he was a virgin but he'd been given this address and on his first Blighty leave he was going to see to that. He died an hour later without ever knowing a woman.

I looked across the road at the slums that came right down to the sea. I could find some girl in there who'd do it for a penny and a tot of gin but I was mindful of disease.

Ted's wife had asked me if I'd go to see a friend of the family, who was invalided up on the Ditchling Road in a school converted into a hospital. She said he was very low. A grenade blast had caught him, splintered his right arm, blinded him in his right eye; crippled him.

I went there now. It continued to be a hectic day. There were a lot of men in the hospital coughing up their lungs from the poisoned gas. More Zeppelins soughed over, bombs falling out of the sky. They were trying to hit the munitions factory in Hove. I came away not knowing which of us had tried harder to be cheerful.

I
didn't get a scratch in the Great War. Not even a Blighty wound for me. I knew a lot of men who prayed for that wound serious enough to earn them a ticket home without being life-threatening. Some men tried to inflict it on themselves. One man shot off his toes and then had to hobble unaided to the post where a firing squad was waiting to shoot him for cowardice.

As the war ground us ever more finely, I knew many men become so desperate to get out they would happily sacrifice a limb. Two limbs. Maybe some of the men I saw in Brighton did the same.

Men put their hands up above the trench parapets to have them shot by the Germans. Soaking a gunshot wound in a filthy pond would ensure a worse injury. Some faked abscesses by injecting paraffin or turpentine under the skin. One man drank petrol to make himself ill but he drank too much of it and died.

The authorities came down hard on malingerers. They got field punishment number one, morning and night for up to twenty-one days. It didn't hurt but it humiliated them. They were tied to a wheel by their wrists and ankles. From a distance, they looked like they'd been crucified.

I don't know many survivors of the Great War willing to talk about the horror of those four years. I'm not the man to describe it. I will say that I never saw a bayoneted baby. I will say that I never would have imagined the many ways in which Humpty Dumpty can be taken apart, with no hope of him ever being put back together again. I will say that we played football with the Hun in no-man's-land on Christmas Day, but on Boxing Day we were sticking German heads on poles all along the top of our trench.

Sigmund Freud might fruitfully have explored the effect of that close confinement in the stench and ooze of the trenches on the libido. It destroyed the urge for many. But just as the devastation wrought by pipe grenade and machine gun and howitzer shell blurred what it meant to be human, so the edges of sexuality dissolved for others.

A batman I knew called himself his colonel's slut. Married men openly comforted each other in the most physical way imaginable. Men with sweethearts at home loved other men. Less welcome – but unsurprising, given the darkness at the centre of all our beings – men raped other men.

You won't read about that kind of behaviour in the poems of Mr Sassoon or the memoir of Mr Graves.

At Mons, where the battle was ghastly beyond description, I saw acts of tenderness amid the horrors. I saw Ted's brains blown out, but further down the line I also saw two men going over the top hand in hand. In the calm after that phase of the battle I saw a Royal Sussex man I vaguely knew cradling his dying mate in his arms.

‘I'll give you your mother's kiss, Bob,' I heard him murmur. ‘And one for me.'

He kissed him twice on the brow.

I saw men cry all the time. But then there were no words to describe what we were experiencing. Later I realized that the only true account was the thing itself.

I was raised in pessimism and sorrow. After Jim, Jack and Ted all copped it I steered clear of pals. I decided I could not get too close. I know comradeship is one of the great themes of the Great War. At the time, the authorities pushed the idea of the Pals battalions – friends from before the war fighting side by side. But it was a lie.

What was the point of making pals who would be dead within the week? Once, we were playing marbles in our trench and someone straightened up and was shot through the head. At Mons, in those tremendous twenty-two hours, the deaths of my fellow men seemed a very small thing. Why, in the first thirty minutes I saw two thousand gallant men lay down their lives.

I learned not to stop to help wounded men and I was not alone in that.

The years passed. Every day I expected to be killed. Every winter I expected to freeze to death. I began the war in fear. Shuddering, corrosive fear. I was surprised at how long a man can live in fear. But then I decided I was going to die and I accepted it. Fear replaced neither by fatalism nor resignation but by certainty.

In that I was wrong. I lived. But at what price? I have not shed a tear for twenty years. I am unable to feel anything except self-loathing. My body is not my own. I came back from the Great War cut off from everything and everybody. I pretend, of course. I make a facsimile of living.

I survived the war: the Hun couldn't kill me. But the Spanish flu almost did. The pandemic. Millions died – more than in the Great War. I was laid low in a hospital in London for months. I recovered, although I didn't know until later that it had made me sterile.

I resumed a life. Of sorts.

A
fter the war I had an appetite for the ladies and the money to feed it. Then, in 1925, up at the racecourse, I met a young woman and her swaggering brother. The young woman took a shine to me, her brother less so. They were both cockneys but were Italian by descent. The brother worked for the Sabini family, who controlled the rackets on many racecourses.

The young woman worked in Liberty in London. I was footloose. I moved up to London. She held out for marriage. In a moment of foolishness – she was a beautiful woman and lust was about the only emotion I was capable of feeling – I married her.

We honeymooned in Siena, her family's city of origin. She hoped for children but it didn't happen. The Spanish flu. I joked it could be worse. I knew of people who had contracted sleeping sickness through the influenza and hadn't woken up yet. She didn't find me funny. She got depressed. Blamed me. Blamed herself. There were rows. She had a fiery temper.

Oswald Mosley founded his fascist party and I joined straight away. I wore the blackshirt uniform with pride. I was interested in a better Britain. My wife and I visited Italy when we could. Mussolini was doing great things. He was keeping the Socialists down. The trains ran on time.

Her brother was wary of my uniform but reluctantly accepted me when he discovered we had something in common. Hatred of kikes. The big Jew and the small Jew, as Sir Oswald described it. I hated them for bringing our country down. My brother-in-law hated them because the Italian gangs were at war with Jewish ones for control of Soho and the racecourses.

Her brother warmed to me further when I saved him from a beating at Brighton racecourse. He was openly a gangster now. I happened to be around when a man came at him with an open razor. Man? He was little more than a teenager but with an evil face – a long razor slash down one side of it. I knocked him to the ground without really thinking twice, but he had two older men nearby who I could tell knew how to handle themselves.

We squared off but then it all drizzled away.

My wife put on weight as only Italian women can. Screamed at me. I took mistresses. One in particular. She knew the Chinese method. It was whispered Wallis Simpson knew it too. If it made a king abdicate, what chance did I stand?

My brother-in-law saw us together one day. I was expecting a beating – knuckledusters and coshes.

‘The racecourse thing?' he said. ‘We're even.'

I killed my mistress for her infidelity. There was a knock on the door. I let my wife in. I didn't ask what she was doing there. I'd long suspected she was having me followed.

She stood by the radiogram looking at the body on the rug, the blood thickening around it. She pointed at the saw on the table.

‘What were you intending to do with that?'

‘What do you suppose?'

She looked at me for a long moment. Looked at the apron covered in bright red flowers.

‘And then?'

I raised my shoulders slowly. Let them fall.

‘I hadn't thought that far.'

She nodded.

‘Do you have any knives? Kitchen knives?'

‘A set,' I said.

‘Good. But we also have to do some shopping.'

‘What are we buying?'

‘We're buying a trunk.'

My wife and I were standing looking down on the open trunk and the body beside it, the knives and the saw on the table, when the apartment door opened. Her big and burly brother entered.

‘I asked him to help,' she said.

He was carrying a parcel of brown paper wrapped in twine and a large can of olive oil, presumably from one of the Sabini brothers' restaurants.

‘Let's get to it,' he said, scarcely glancing at the body.

Later, on the drive down to Brighton, I asked him: ‘What's the plan?'

He smirked.

‘You're mine now.'

We were trying to get the trunk out of the car, parked on the cliff edge across the road from the racetrack, when I spotted a middle-aged couple watching us suspiciously.

‘Change of plan,' he said, pushing the trunk back into the boot and slamming it closed.

When I got home, late in the evening, my wife was waiting in the kitchen with an open bottle of Chianti. She handed me a glass.

‘Welcome home,' she said.

I drank the wine. It tasted coppery.

‘Keep the apartment on for another six months,' she said. ‘I'll take the legs and feet in a suitcase to King's Cross luggage office tomorrow. When it's discovered, the police will think it's the White family's handiwork.'

The White family ruled Islington and King's Cross, though it also had a piece of Soho.

‘Then our life can resume.'

I put my glass back on the table. I had to ask.

‘What did your brother do with the head?'

W
hen the trunk was found at Brighton left luggage office, the press dubbed it ‘The Brighton Trunk Murder'. A few weeks later there was a second so-called Trunk Murder. That had nothing to do with me.