Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

  It had been a torrid summer. We were not always confined to the mussel boat. Sometimes we picked up four or five dogs from a well-hidden Anderson shelter in Ealing Park Gardens and drove out of London with them in the back seat, peering out from the Morris expressionless as royalty. At a small-town gymkhana we raced them against the local dogs, watched them dart like cabbage whites across the marked fields, then drove back to London with more money in The Darter’s pocket, the dogs sprawled exhausted behind us. They were always eager to run, often in any direction.

  Whether our imported ringers would be natural racers or collapse from distemper we never knew. But no one else did either, which was its financial charm. All we knew of the dogs lounging behind us as we drove towards Somerset or Cheshire was that they were fresh off the boat. The Darter never bet on them. They were simply there like useless cards in a deck to camouflage a favourite. Amateur tracks were sprouting up everywhere and we followed every rumour of them. I’d be struggling with a large unfolding local map, searching for a village or a refugee camp that had an unofficial third-rate track. In some of them dogs chased a bunch of pigeon feathers tied to a branch dragged by a car in an open field. One track we visited used a mechanical rat.

  I remember on those drives how The Darter, whenever he stopped at a traffic light, would lean back to stroke the scared animals gently. I do not believe it was because he loved dogs. But he knew they had stepped on English soil only a day or so earlier. Perhaps he thought it would calm them, make them feel they owed him something when they raced for him on those distant tracks a few hours later. They would be with him only a short time, and by the end of the day there would be fewer dogs returning to London. Some would simply not have stopped racing and would have disappeared into the woods, never to be seen again. One or two he’d sell to a vicar in Yeovil or maybe to someone at the Polish refugee camp in Doddington Park. There was never sentimentality in The Darter about heritage or ownership. He scorned bloodlines among dogs as well as humans. “It’s never your family that’s the problem,” he announced, as if quoting some surprisingly overlooked line from the Book of Job, “it’s your damn relatives! Ignore them! Find out who can be a valuable father. It’s important to disturb rare bloodlines with changelings.” The Darter had never kept in touch with his own family. After all, they had practically sold him into the Pimlico boxing rings at sixteen.

  One evening he entered 13 Ruvigny Gardens carrying a heavy book he had removed with difficulty from a local post office, where it had been chained to the counter. It was a ledger published by the Greyhound Association eager to warn the public of “track spivery,” listing all persons suspected of criminal offences. Besides mug shots—some of them blurry and some of them vain—there was a list of incidents that ranged from forgery to the printing of tote tickets, as well as doping, race fixing, pickpocketing, and even warning of those who “coursed” through crowds with an intent to seduce. The Darter asked Rachel and me to leaf through the three-hundred-page list of criminals and find him there. But of course we could not. “They have absolutely no idea who I am!” he exclaimed proudly.

  He was by now sophisticated in his methods of tunnelling under the rules of dog racing. And he once confessed to us somewhat shyly about his first upsetting of the rules. He had thrown a live cat onto the track during a race. The dog he had put his money on—it was his first and last bet—had accidentally bounced off a fence at the first bend. Now a cat had been flung in front of the other dogs, who became so distracted that the only object still continuing the race was the mechanical hare, aided by a two-horsepower motor that ran at 1,500 revs per minute. The race was declared void, the cat disappeared, as did The Darter after getting his original stake back.

  None of The Darter’s lady friends ever wished to accompany him on these out-of-town journeys, but never having had a dog in my life I chose to sit in the back with their heat-seeking muzzles reaching over to rest on my shoulder. They were quick, mischievous company for a boy who was a solitary.

  * * *

  —

  We reentered the city around dusk, the dogs asleep against one another. Not even the blaze of city lights woke them, not even a crust from one of The Darter’s sandwiches tossed back over his shoulder a half-hour earlier. It turned out The Darter had a dinner engagement he wished to keep, and he persuaded me to take his Morris and return the dogs to the Anderson shelter in Ealing Park Gardens. He would be forever in my debt. I dropped him off at a Tube station to meet a new paramour, the scent of greyhounds still on his clothes. I had no licence, but I had a car. I kept the dogs with me and drove out of the depths of the city towards Mill Hill.

  I was to meet Agnes in another of those empty houses, and I rolled the windows down as I arrived to give the dogs air. I walked towards the house, turned and saw them watching me tragically, spectres of disappointment. Agnes opened the door. “One minute,” I said. I ran back and ushered the dogs into the small front garden so they could relieve themselves. I was herding them back into the Morris when she suggested we all come in. Without a pause they rushed past me and leapt into the darkness of the house.

  We left the keys at the foot of the front door and followed the excited barking. Once again there was no possibility of turning lights on in the three-storey building. This was the largest house either of us had been in, and it was undamaged. Her brother was moving up in the post-war property world. We heated two cans of soup on the blue circle of gas, then settled in on the second floor so we could watch each other and talk in the spill of a streetlight. We were more at ease now, there was less tension as to what would, could, and should not happen between us. We drank the soup. The dogs rushed into the room and out again. We had not seen each other for a while, and if we hoped our night would be passionate, it would be, but not in the way we expected. I didn’t know enough about Agnes’s past, but as I said, no dog had ever entered the rooms of my childhood, and now in the large semi-dark rooms of this borrowed house, we wrestled them to the ground, their long mouths warm against our bare hearts. We raced from one room to another, avoiding street-lit windows, signalling each other with whistles. One dog was caught simultaneously in both her and my arms. She turned her face up to the ceiling and howled through it to the moon. The dogs like pale anteaters in the half-light. We followed them into distant rooms. We met them coming down the strict narrow darkness of the stairs.

  “Where are you?”

  “Behind you.”

  Car lights filled a window and I saw Agnes naked to the waist with a hound hanging off her hip as she lifted it down to a lower landing, the one we had discovered was nervous of stairs: a sacred moment in my life I carry secure within whatever few memories I hold from that time, filed and labelled in that half-completed way. Agnes, with dog. Unlike other memories it has a location and a date—it was during the last days of that torrid summer—and there is a wish in me to know if that long-ago teenage friend of mine still remembers and thinks of that series of borrowed houses in East London and North London and the three-storey house in Mill Hill where we crashed our bodies into dogs that were in chaotic delight after being restrained for hours in the back seat of a car, now scattering their racing claws like high heels up and down the carpetless stairs. It was as if Agnes and I had given up every desire except to run alongside their high-pitched barking and pointless virility.

  We were reduced to being servants, butlers, providing fresh bowls of water that they slurped without grace, or throwing remnants of our stolen sandwiches into the air, so they were leaping high as our heads. They ignored thunder when it came, but when it began to rain they paused and veered towards the large windows and with tilted heads listened to its suggestive clicks. “Let’s stay the night,” she said. And when they curled up to sleep we slept on the floor beside them as if all around us these animals were our longed-for life, our wished-for company, a wild unnecessary essential unforgotten human moment in London during those years. Wh
en I woke, a dog’s thin sleeping face was beside me, breathing calmly into mine, busy with its dreams. It heard the change in my waking breath and opened its eyes. Then shifted position and placed its paw on my forehead gently, either as a gesture of careful compassion or superiority. It felt like wisdom. “Where are you from?” I asked it. “What country? Will you tell me?” I turned and saw Agnes standing, already dressed, her hands in her pockets, watching and listening to me.

  Agnes of World’s End. Of Agnes Street, of Mill Hill, and Limeburner’s Yard where she had lost that cocktail dress. I knew even then I needed to keep this part of my life away from The Darter and The Moth. Theirs was the world I was living in after my parents disappeared. And the world of Agnes was where I now escaped to alone.

  * * *

  It was now autumn. The race tracks and gymkhanas were closing down. But I was still so much a participant and essential go-between in The Darter’s world that he would find it easy to persuade me to skip school when term started. It began with missing just two days a week but I would soon be claiming a host of illnesses, from mumps, which I had just read about, to whatever disease was going around, and with my new contacts I could provide forged letters about my health. Rachel knew about some of this, especially when it had progressed to three days a week, but The Darter cautioned me not to tell The Moth, giving one of those complex waves of his hand that I knew how to interpret by then. In any case, this was more intriguing work than the time I was supposed to be spending preparing for my School Certificate exams.

  The Darter’s mussel boat began drifting with a new purpose. These days he was transporting European china for “the respected dockland merchant.” Boxed cargo was more manageable than greyhounds, but he claimed to have a bad back, and so needed help—“too much sex standing up in a dark mews or cul-de-sac….” He tossed the line out like a spectacular morsel. So he persuaded Rachel back onto our boat on the weekends for an extra shilling or two, and we now found ourselves travelling up narrow canals that ran north from the Thames, which we had been unaware of till then. Our starting points and destinations always varied. It might be the rear entrance of the Custom House at Canning Town, or we might find ourselves floating along the shallow streams by Rotherhithe Mill. There was no longer a need to silence twenty dogs, and it was daylight work and autumn silence. The days grew colder.

  Being so much in The Darter’s company, I was now at ease with him. Sunday mornings as the barge travelled under the trees, he sat on a crate and searched through newspapers for any upper-class scandals, reading choice ones out loud. “Nathaniel—the Earl of Wiltshire has accidentally asphyxiated himself by tying a rope round his neck then tying the other end to a large lawn roller while half naked….” He refused to explain why a person in the nobility might do this. In any case, the lawn’s gentle slope meant the roller had serenely continued downhill pulling the Earl’s undressed body along with it and strangling him. The lawn roller, the News of the World concluded, had been in the Earl’s family for three generations. My more serious sister ignored such stories and concentrated on learning her lines in Julius Caesar, for she was to play Marc Antony in the school play that term. By this point I was simply expecting to fail my School Certificate exams and ignored rereading Swallows and Amazons, that “crap book” as The Darter had called it.

  Now and then he would lean his head back and attempt a conversation with me, showing concern as to how I was doing at school. “Fine,” I would say.

  “And your mathematics—do you know what an isosceles triangle is?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Splendid.”

  Not that we are touched by such things as concern, even if false, when we are young. But now, in retrospect, I am touched.

  We steered our way up a narrowing cut. It was a different atmosphere now, with sunlight falling through yellowing leaves, the smell of wet earth rising from the riverbanks. We had loaded the barge with boxes at Limehouse Reach, where The Darter said they made quicklime centuries earlier. Immigrants disembarked there from the East India ships and walked into the new country without a common language. I told The Darter I had heard a Sherlock Holmes mystery on the radio called “The Man with the Twisted Lip” that took place where we’d loaded the china that morning, but he shook his head doubtfully, as if literature had nothing to do with the world he belonged in. The only books I’d seen him read were westerns and bodice rippers, specifically one that merged the two genres called Kicking Whores Pass.

  One afternoon we needed to urge the barge between the narrowing banks of the Romford Canal, my sister and I stationed on opposite sides of the deck yelling directions to The Darter at the wheel. The last hundred yards of the cut were almost fully overgrown. At its end there was a lorry waiting, and two men approached the boat and unloaded the boxes wordlessly, The Darter barely acknowledging them. Then we reversed the barge like a cornered dog for a quarter of a mile until the channel became wider.

  Romford Canal was just one of our destinations. Another journey took us along Gunpowder Mills Canal. At one time only shallow-draught powder boats and ballast barges had travelled along it, transporting munitions. The innocent-looking canal had been used for this purpose for almost two hundred years because at the end of it was Waltham Abbey, a gentle edifice lived in by monks as far back as the twelfth century. During the recent war, thousands had worked on the grounds of the abbey, and its explosives were transported along those same cuts and tributaries down to the Thames. It was always less dangerous to transport munitions on quiet waterways than on public roads. Sometimes the roped barges were pulled along by horses, sometimes by teams of men on either side of the canal.

  But now the munitions factories had been dismantled and the unused canals were silting up, becoming narrower between their overgrown banks. And on weekends this was where Rachel and I, the sidekicks of The Darter, now floated in the silence of those waterways, listening to a new generation of birdsong. What we carried was probably not dangerous, but we were never sure. And after our constantly changing routes and destinations, Rachel and I no longer fully believed The Darter’s stories about the delivery of European china to pay back the merchant who had let him borrow his barge during dog-racing seasons.

  In any case, until the weather turned harsh, we travelled those barely used waterways, guiding the boat along the narrowing rivers. The Darter with his shirt off, his white-ribbed chest bare to the October sun, and my sister memorizing her exits and entrances for Julius Caesar. Until the brown stones of Waltham Abbey rose into view.

  We sidled towards the bank and once again heard whistles and once again men appeared and loaded our boxes onto a nearby lorry. Again no words were passed between us. The Darter stood there half dressed and watched them with not even an acknowledgement or nod of his head. His hand was on my shoulder, which committed me to him, or him to me, and it made me feel safe. The men departed, the lorry bouncing away under the overhanging branches up a dirt road. The sight of two teenagers in a boat, one bent over her schoolwork, one with a rakish school cap on his head, must have seemed innocent enough.

  * * *

  —

  What kind of family were we a part of now? In retrospect Rachel and I were not too different in our anonymity from the dogs with their fictional papers. Like them we had broken free, adapting to fewer rules, less order. But what had we become? When you are uncertain about which way to go as a youth, you end up sometimes not so much repressed, as might be expected, but illegal, you find yourself easily invisible, unrecognized in the world. Who was Stitch now? Who was Wren? Did my assignations with Agnes insert a thief’s guile into my nature? Or my escapes from school to spend time with The Darter? Not because of the pleasure or gall of it, but because of the tension and risk? When my report card arrived I boiled a kettle and steamed open the official envelope to discover my marks. The comments by teachers were so dismissive I was embarrassed to hand it over to The Moth,
who was to hold it for my parents’ return. I burned its pages on the gas stove. There was just too much information. The days I missed school were legion. And words such as “mediocre” appeared on almost every entry like a chant. I tucked the ashes under the carpet on one of the stair steps, as if back into an envelope, and for the rest of the week complained that while Rachel’s report had arrived, mine had not.

  Most of the laws I broke during that period of my life were small. Agnes stole food from the restaurants she worked in, until one evening, before leaving work, she tucked a thick slice of frozen ham under her armpit. Held up with last-minute errands, hypothermia got to her and she fainted at the entrance, the ham sliding out from under her blouse onto the linoleum. Somehow the concern for her—she was popular—made her employers ignore the crime.

  The Moth kept reminding us still of schwer and to prepare for serious times. But I skated over and ignored what might be heavy or indigestible. The illegal world felt more magical than dangerous to me. Even being introduced by The Darter to someone like the great Forger of Letchworth thrilled me, just as Agnes’s shifting rules did.

  Our parents had been gone beyond the promised year—and the spirit level or whatever it was tilted in Rachel. She was now a night person, The Moth recommending her to his friend the opera singer to get her a part-time job in the evenings at Covent Garden. Anything to do with stage work fascinated Rachel—the floppy sheet of metal that produced the sound of thunder, trapdoors, stage smoke, blue reflections of limelight. Just as I had been altered by The Darter, Rachel now evolved into the world of theatre, becoming a stage prompter, not to nudge the tenors on their Italian or French arias, but for the props department who needed a cue to hurry on stage with cloth rivers, or to dismantle a city wall in sixty seconds of darkness. So our days and nights did not feel like the time of the schwer that The Moth had warned us about. They were to us wondrous doorways into the world.