Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

  We were curious about prisons. A week or two before our mother’s departure, Rachel and I, imitating trackers in The Last of the Mohicans, had decided to follow her across London. We changed buses twice and then were appalled to see our mother talking to a very tall man who, holding her by the elbow, led her inside the prison walls of Wormwood Scrubs. The two of us retreated home, never expecting to see her again, and sat in our empty living room uncertain about what to do, then were even more confused when she returned in time to cook dinner. I would in fact half believe, after the discovery of the trunk, that my mother had never gone to the Far East at all but had dutifully returned to those prison gates to carry out her postponed sentence for some criminal act or other. In any case, if our mother could be incarcerated, then surely the more obviously anarchic Darter must at one time have ended up in such a place. We thought him the kind of man who would be most at ease escaping through a claustrophobic tunnel.

  During the following holiday I caught another job at the Criterion, washing dishes. This time I was surrounded with company and most of all could listen to the numerous stories being told or invented. How one had entered the country smuggled among chickens in the hold of a Polish ship and then leapt covered in feathers into the sea at Southampton; how another was the illegitimate son of an English cricket player who had bedded his mother beyond a boundary in Antigua or Port of Spain—all these confessions were dramatically shouted out while surrounded by the 360-degree din of plates, forks, water rushing out from taps like time itself. I was fifteen years old now and I loved it.

  During the silence of the staggered meal breaks, there was a different atmosphere. One or two sat on a hard chair for the thirty-minute lunch, with the rest of us on the floor. Then the anecdotes about sex began, where words like “quim” were used—and which involved sisters or brothers or mothers of best friends who seduced and educated youthful boys and youthful girls with a generosity and lack of ownership most of them would never witness in real life. The drawn-out, careful lessons of intercourse in all its varieties, described by Mr. Nkoma, a remarkable man who had a scar on his cheek, took the whole lunch break, and I would end up washing dishes and pots for the rest of the afternoon, barely recovering from what I had heard. And if, with luck, Mr. Nkoma was working beside me at Sink One the next day or the day after, the plot—like a long, intricate serial of my new friend’s youth—would continue with a further sexual episode. He was describing a universe of charms, with all the time in the world and with seemingly absent husbands as well as the absence of children. The young Mr. Nkoma had enjoyed piano lessons with a Mrs. Rafferty and, as if to climax the whole of his apparently fictional storytelling, late one afternoon when some twelve of us were decorating the stage in a banquet room for the night’s upcoming event, Mr. Nkoma rolled a stool over to the piano and sat down to play a luxurious melody while we worked. It lasted ten minutes and everyone became still. There was no singing, just his educated hands riffling the keys in a sultry and wise way, so it was impossible not to be thereby amazed at the truth of what we had thought were his earlier fictions. And when he finished he sat there for half a minute and eventually closed the piano quietly as if that in itself was the end of the story, the truth or proof of it, of what Mrs. Rafferty in the town of Ti Rocher, four thousand miles from Piccadilly Circus, had taught him.

  What did that glimpse of storytelling do to the boy I was? When I think of those episodes it is not the forty-six-year-old Mr. Nkoma with his scar I see, but Harry Nkoma, a boy, as I was then, when Mrs. Rafferty made him a tall glass of soursop, told him to sit down, and asked a series of quiet questions about what he wished to do with his life. For I believe that if anything was invented, it was just the graphic paragraphs of sex that he described so freely to his small lunchtime audience, the older man’s knowledge from his later life most likely layered on top of a more innocent youth. The truth was in the boy, scarred or perhaps still unscarred, who came with two other delivery boys to Mrs. Rafferty’s house, where she had said to him on that first meeting, “You go to the same school as my son, don’t you?” and Harry Nkoma had said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And what do you wish to do with your life?” He was looking out of the window, not really paying attention to her. “I would like to be in a band. Play the drums.”

  “Oh,” she said, “anyone can play the drums. No, you should learn the piano.”

  “She was so beautiful,” I still recall Harry Nkoma saying, describing to us all, with a novel-like skill, her coloured dress, her thin bare feet, the slim dark toes, and the pale paint on those nails. All those years later he remembered that clear line of muscle in her arm. So without any disbelief I fell in love, as Harry Nkoma had, with this woman who simply knew how to speak to a youth, taking her time to listen and think about what he had said, or what she was going to say, pausing, bringing something from the fridge, all of that leading, according to Harry’s grown-up tale, to a preparation for those sexual stories none of us could have imagined or was prepared for as we sat on the floor by the sinks at the Criterion, while Mr. Nkoma sat above us, on one of the two available chairs.

  He said her hands felt like leaves on him. After he had come in her—this curious and startling act of magic—her palms had brushed his hair back from his face until his heart stopped speeding. It felt like every nerve was finally stilled. He became aware she had most of her clothes on. In the end it had all been hurried, there had been no uncertainty or torment. Then she slowly undressed, then bent sideways so she could lick the last drop from him. They bathed by an outdoor tap. She poured three or four buckets of water onto his skull and it coursed down, his body suddenly aimless. She raised the bucket and the water fell along her body and she slipped her hand down within the run of it to clean herself. “You can play concerts in other parts of the world,” she said, later, during another afternoon. “Would you like to do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I shall teach you.”

  I sat silent on the floor, listening to this fairness of sharing I already knew existed nowhere else in the world, which could occur only in dreams.

  In the trolley hall, between the kitchen and the service lifts that rose to Banquet Level, a game of Scratch Ball took place. Whatever stage an anecdote had reached, whatever tiredness existed among the staff, the last ten minutes of our lunch were given over to two teams of five, who charged each other in the rectangle of uncarpeted concrete that was six feet across. Scratch Ball was not so much the skill of passing or running as it was of balance and brute force, where you heaved the scrum of your team forward, all your fury seeming more furious because it had to be done in silence. No verbal damnation, grunts, or yells of pain to betray the anarchy of what was happening in the trolley hall, like old silent footage of a riot. The squeak of shoes, the sound of falling bodies, was all that gave away our lawlessness. Then we lay there, breathing heavily, got up and went back to work. Mr. Nkoma and I returned to the large sinks, thrust fragile glasses into the rotating bristles, and tossed them a half-second later into boiling water so the person drying would pluck them free as they bounced back up and stack them. We could do over a hundred glasses in fifteen minutes. Plates and cutlery took longer but for now someone else was doing that, and it was just Harry Nkoma and I with our recent lunchtime anecdotes subsiding into what felt like needed sleep, where they belonged naturally. There was only the great noise of the kitchen in our ears, the taps gushing out water, the huge wet brushes humming in front of us.

  Why do I still remember those days and nights at the Criterion—that springtime fragment of a boy’s youth, a seemingly unimportant time? The men and women I would meet at Ruvigny Gardens were more incendiary, became more significant in the path of my life. Perhaps because it was the only time that boy was alone, a stranger among strangers, when he could choose his allies and opponents for himself from those who worked beside him at the sinks or played on the Scratch Ball teams. W
hen I broke Tim Cornford’s nose by accident, he needed to disguise it in order to continue working the rest of the afternoon so he wouldn’t lose his pay. He sat there in a daze, got up, scrubbed the blood off his shirt under a tap, and returned to work repainting a chipped floorboard so it could dry by the time guests arrived. For by six p.m. most of the ground-floor staff would have left the building, like little shoemakers needing to disappear before the real owners returned.

  I was pleased by now that The Moth took no interest in how I was surviving the job or what trouble I was getting into. I hid what I was learning, not just from him but from my sister, with whom I had once shared everything. The sexual fables of Harry Nkoma went no further, but the afternoons with Mrs. Rafferty would stay, and there was to be a brief, tentative bond with Harry. I remember us raucous at a couple of football matches we went to, or comparing at the end of an exhausting day our boiled hands and the pucker of flesh on each finger—even on those deft ones that had played the piano so surprisingly, stilling a room of Criterion workers. Where did he go eventually with that skill? He was already middle-aged. For all I knew, Harry would continue to corner others with his stories. But where was the future that Mrs. Rafferty had promised him? I would never know. I lost him. The two of us used to walk to the bus stop if we finished at the same hour. It took me less than thirty minutes to get home. It took him two buses and an hour and a half. It never occurred to either of us to visit where the other lived.

  * * *

  Now and then someone would refer to The Moth as “Walter,” but Rachel and I felt the vagueness of our chosen name for him was more apt. We did not have a stable perception of him yet. Was he really protecting us? I must have longed for some truth and security, much like the six-year-old boy who had once gone to him to escape a dangerous father.

  For instance, what was the sieve in The Moth that made him choose these specific individuals who filled our house? Rachel and I gloated with excitement over their presence, even if it felt wrong. If our mother had ever thought to phone us from wherever she was, we would no doubt have lied cautiously and said everything was fine, not mentioning the strangers who happened to be crowding into the house at that moment. They did not in any way resemble a normal family, not even a beached Swiss Family Robinson. The house felt more like a night zoo, with moles and jackdaws and shambling beasts who happened to be chess players, a gardener, a possible greyhound thief, a slow-moving opera singer. If I attempt now to recall the activities of one or two of them, what emerges are surreal non-chronological moments. Mr. Florence, for instance, pumping his “smoker,” which he normally used to calm and stultify his bees, into the face of a guard at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, forcing him to inhale fumes of burning wood combined with a sleep-inducing coal. The uniformed man had his hands held behind his chair as this was happening, and it took a while before his head fell forward, calm as a sleeping bee, so we could walk out of the gallery with two or three watercolours, while Mr. Florence pumped a last gasp of smoke at the unconscious face. “Right!” he barked quietly, pleased, as if he had painted an immaculate straight line, and handed me the hot smoker to put away safely. There are many such incomplete and guilty moments I have packed away, meaningless as those unused objects in my mother’s suitcase. And the chronology of events has fallen apart, for whatever defensive reason.

  * * *

  —

  Each day Rachel and I took a bus and then the train from Victoria Station to our respective schools, and for about fifteen minutes before the bell I would mill around with the other boys, talking excitedly about radio shows they’d heard the night before, a Mystery Hour or one of those half-hour comedies where the humour depended almost totally on the repetition of stock phrases. But now I rarely heard those programmes, as our radio listening was constantly interrupted by visitors dropping by to see The Moth, or he would take us around the city and I returned too tired to be curious about another Mystery Hour. I am sure that Rachel, like me, never revealed what our home life had really become—the existence of The Darter, the bee man still under a cloud for his past misdemeanour, and most of all that our parents had “gone away.” I suspect she pretended, like me, to have heard all those shows and so nodded and laughed and claimed to being scared by a thriller neither of us had heard.

  The Moth was sometimes gone for two or three days, often without warning. We ate our dinners alone and trudged off to school the next morning. He would mention later that The Darter had cruised by in his car to make sure the place was “not in the midst of a conflagration,” so we had been utterly safe, though the idea of The Darter’s nearby presence on those nights did not give us a sense of security. We’d heard him on other evenings, churning the engine of his Morris—both accelerator and brake pressed down simultaneously—while dropping off our guardian at midnight, and recognized his drunken laughter filling the street as he drove away.

  The music-loving Moth appeared blind to the evident anarchy in The Darter. Everything the ex-boxer did was at a precarious tilt, about to come loose. Worst were the crowded car rides when the two of them sat in the front, while Rachel and I and sometimes three greyhounds squabbled in the back on the way to Whitechapel. We were not even certain that the dogs belonged to him. The Darter rarely recalled their names, as they sat tense, shivering, their bony knees digging into our laps. There was one that preferred to lounge round my neck like a scarf, its warm belly against me, and once, somewhere around Clapham, it proceeded to urinate, through either fear or need, onto my shirt. I was supposedly going to a school friend’s house after the dog races, and when I complained, The Darter laughed so excessively he had to avoid hitting a Belisha beacon. No, we did not feel safe around him. It was clear he was just putting up with us and would have preferred we had remained at “Walter’s house,” which was how he referred to our parents’ home. Was this even his car? I wondered, for I noticed the number plates on the blue Morris were frequently changed. But The Moth was content to move in The Darter’s slipstream. Shy people are drawn to such types for camouflage. In any case, the tensions we felt whenever The Moth left home were the result not of our guardian’s absence but of the knowledge that The Darter had permission to oversee us with that grudging, uninterested concern.

  One day I was fighting with Rachel over a book I had lost. She had denied taking it, and I then discovered it in her room. Her arms flailed against my face. I grabbed her neck and she froze, fell out of my grip and began shuddering and banging her head and her heels against the wood floor. Then a cat-like noise, the pupils slid away, replaced by the whites of her eyes, her arms still flailing. The door opened, letting in noise from the crowd downstairs, and The Darter walked in. He must have been passing her room. “Go away!” I yelled. He closed the door behind him, knelt down, took my book, the stolen Swallows and Amazons, and jammed it into Rachel’s mouth at the moment she gasped for air. He pulled a blanket that was on the bed over her, then lay down beside her and enclosed her in his arms. Until there was only the noise of her breath.

  “She stole my book,” I whispered nervously.

  “Bring some cold water. Rub it on her face, cool her down.” I did that. Twenty minutes later the three of us were still together on the floor. We could hear The Moth’s acquaintances downstairs.

  “Has this happened before?”

  “No.”

  “I had a dog once”—he said it casually—“who was epileptic. Now and then he’d go off like a firecracker.” The Darter leaned against the bed, winked at me, and lit himself a cigarette. He knew Rachel hated him smoking around her. Now she just watched him silently. “That’s a crap book,” he announced, rubbing his fingers over Rachel’s bite marks on the cover. “You need to take care of your sister, Nathaniel. I’ll show you what to do.”

  How surprising The Pimlico Darter could be whenever that other side of him emerged. How good he was that evening, while The Moth’s party continued downstairs.

 
In those days there was more fear about the effects of epilepsy, along with the assumption that frequent fits impaired a person’s memory. Rachel mentioned these limits after reading about them in the library. I suppose we choose whatever life we feel safest in; for me it is a distant village, a walled garden. But Rachel tossed away such concerns. “It’s just ‘schwer,’ ” she would say to me, using her fingers to emphasize the quotation marks.

  * * *

  A woman who was going out with The Darter had begun strolling into my parents’ house, accompanying him, or arriving at whatever hour she was to meet him there. On her first visit, The Darter arrived too late to explain who she was, so my sister and I, just home from school, were left to introduce ourselves in the vacuum created by his absence. It meant we got a good look at her. We were careful not to mention other females The Darter had already escorted into the house, so we answered her inquiries about him somewhat stupidly, as if we could not remember much about his associates or even what he did, or where he might be. We knew he liked to breast his cards.

  Still, Olive Lawrence was a surprise. For someone like The Darter, who was so one-sided in his opinions as to the role women ought to have in the world, he appeared to have an almost suicidal tendency to select highly independent women to go out with. They were tested right away by being taken to crowded and noise-filled sports events at Whitechapel or Wembley Stadium, where there was no possibility of private conversation. The triple-forecast bets were supposed to provide enough excitement for them. Besides, for The Darter there were no other interesting public locations to visit. He’d never stepped inside a theatre in his life. The idea of watching someone pretend to be real, or of someone saying lines on stage that came from previously written dialogue, felt untrustworthy to him, and as a man on the edge of the law he needed to feel secure about how reliable the truth was that he was hearing. Only cinemas appealed to him; for some reason he believed truth had been caught there. Yet the women he was attracted to seemed to be in no way humble or easily persuaded maidens who would happily exist under his rules. One was a painter of murals. Another, after Olive Lawrence departed, was an argumentative Russian.