by Chris Cleave
With his left hand Alistair knocked a tin of sulfa powder to break up the lumps. He scattered a pinch into the wound. His head festered. The headache was sickening, extending down his spine to his liver. He shook with fever. The body could barely fight back. Not when the bread was one quarter sawdust, and the water was down to the mud at the bottom of the well.
When he stood to put the tin back on the shelf, he saw stars. There was less of him now. There was less of them all. Officers and men dragged themselves around in uniforms three sizes too big, new holes punched into every belt, every collar hanging loose. They were a garrison of skinny boys performing a play about soldiers. It would not have been surprising to discover that their stubble and scars were drawn on with grease paint.
Fingernails bled. Everyone coughed. For weeks the men had lined the ramparts, looking down on the terraces that covered the escarpment. There, under strict supervision, the crops were harvested for the island’s collective ration. It was maddening for starving men to watch the almonds and apricots ripening sixty feet below. The garrison had pet names for each farmer, each terrace, each tree. Using artillery spotters’ binoculars aligned with clinometers on sandbagged and stabilized tripods, the battery’s trained observers monitored the ripening of each individual fig, gave it a number in the military system, and ran a book on the day it would be picked.
Lately the men had begun to give ranks to the fruit: this fat-arsed pear a major, this smug plum a brigadier. When food was collected they stood at attention and saluted the trucks leaving for the warehouse. When a farmer ate a tomato behind a wall, the men knew it. They lined the ramparts and beat out their indignation on pan lids. And still Tom’s jar of blackberry jam stood unopened in the alcove of the rifle port in Alistair’s room. If he opened it, the dust would get into everything he minded about.
“I should think you will lose the hand, don’t you?”
Simonson had appeared at the door. He eyed Alistair’s wound. Alistair took a clean dressing and began to wrap it.
“If I do lose it, you can come and gawk at the stump.”
“I think you should call me Major,”
Alistair lifted one weary eyebrow. “Really? They made you major?”
“In their wisdom. As soon as two little brass crowns can be fought through on a convoy, you will see them on these shoulders.”
“What about Anderton?”
“I never thought he was major material, did you? Plus, he was killed last night. Car went in the sea near Valletta—wind took it clean off the road.”
“I used to enjoy your sense of humor.”
“I couldn’t make it up. After all this—killed by the wind. Imagine writing that to the poor man’s wife.”
“I expect they’ll say ‘killed in action’, don’t you?”
“And that he was a credit, etcetera.”
“Well,” said Alistair, saluting with his bandaged hand. “Major.”
Simonson returned the salute. “Heath.”
“So, the command of the battery?”
“Mine all mine, old soldier. Logan will take over my troop. You can keep yours, if you like. Or hurry up and lose that hand, and I can have you shipped home on the next available empty. With luck you’ll be torpedoed.”
Alistair worked to remove any expression from his face.
“If only that Hun had brushed his teeth,” said Simonson.
Alistair wished he would leave. Simonson poked around the room, picking up books to peer at their titles. He nudged at a rack in which Alistair kept his bottles of turpentine and thinners. “What are these?”
“I use them to clean my wound.”
Simonson took the bung from a bottle of acetone, sniffed, and recoiled.
“God damn it! If you put this on your wound it would bloody well catch fire. What do you really use it for?”
“I fuel a squadron of tiny enemy bombers upon which my men practise firing with tiny anti-aircraft pieces. Afterward we make tea for our dolls.”
“Oh come on, though. Really.”
“I’m restoring a painting, sir. As I did before the war, sir.”
“That was another life. Is the Tate still there, do you suppose?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Who can? London might be ashes by now and none of us would be the wiser. There’d be a Ministry of Letters, forging notes from all our girlfriends.”
Alistair tried not to think about it. He hadn’t heard from Mary in a month. For a while she’d written every day and then, abruptly, nothing. Everyone else had got letters. Every now and then a mail plane was shot down, but it didn’t seem likely that nothing at all from Mary had got through.
Simonson peered at the thinners. “So what are you restoring?”
“Nothing important,” said Alistair. “Local artist.”
“Go on, I’d like to see it.”
“Sorry, but it’s private.”
Simonson closed his eyes for a moment. “Alistair, it’s been weeks. So we had a ding-dong. So bloody what.”
“I put you in an unbearable position.”
“No, you did the decent thing. I’m sorry I didn’t come to help sooner.”
The two men shook hands—Alistair had to use his left—while the red sand hissed in through the rifle port. Simonson held Alistair’s hand for half a minute before he let go. “I used to be less of an ass, you know.”
“It gets to us all. I used to be Ginger Rogers.”
“Explains why the men are so sweet on you.”
“The painting is under the bed. If you actually care.”
“Get it.”
“Get it yourself, you lazy sod.”
Simonson crouched by the cot and pulled the painting out. He unwrapped it and set it on the mattress. It was a Madonna and child in the Caravaggist style—the woman in a carmine dress, the child with amber skin, the contrast of the strict chiaroscuro diminished by a layering of soot. Four feet by three, the gilt frame blistered and charred on the left, which was also the side from which light entered the painting. The impression was of a pacific moment caught in time and lit by the residual heat of catastrophe.
“Where did you turn this up?” said Simonson.
“It was rescued from that church the plane crashed into.”
“You went back there?”
“The priest gave it to me to restore.”
“As your penance?”
“Something like that.”
Simonson went to the rifle port and looked out, hands in pockets. “You know we’re allowed to kill Germans? That it’s encouraged?”
Alistair said nothing. His head throbbed and fever crept down his back. He only knew that it soothed him to make the painting good again. He liked the Madonna’s slightly vexed smile, as if something inconsequential had just been knocked over and would need to be swept up. As if she might have just sworn under her breath. He liked the honey tones of the child’s skin, the paint not scoured by wind or crazed by concussion. He liked the clean smell of the thinners cutting the forlorn odor of soot.
“It is a fine painting,” said Simonson.
“Isn’t it?”
The two of them stood together, looking.
“One forgets,” said Simonson.
“Forgets what?”
He waved a hand in irritation. “I don’t know. Women. Light. Oh, carry on.”
He turned and made to leave. The wind bellowed, shaking the tower.
Alistair said, “I haven’t heard from Mary.”
Simonson took a step back into the room. “There will be a sound explanation. Perhaps she has realized how ugly you are.”
“Heard from any of yours?”
“Oh, Alistair, they write without pause or reason. There is nothing I don’t know about the menu at Black’s or the fashion at McIntie’s. I am fully ap
prised of the current mot du jour, which is ‘swell,’ and of the words now considered déclassé—including ‘war,’ apparently, which we must now refer to as ‘this trouble.’ I know everything, you see, apart from how to reply. I can hardly write that we are down to skin and rivets. That the enemy could knock us into the sea with a well-timed look.”
“Perhaps you should tell them how it is. It might winnow them down.”
“Having three women suits me fine. It takes a royal fool to pick one. I can’t imagine why you’re so good at it.”
Later, under the violent sky, Alistair took his troop gardening in the moat. The Victorians had taken the ditch as they found it, simply building its walls higher to make the fort, which defended the western segment of the Victoria Lines, which in turn defended Grand Harbour—the Mediterranean base of the Victorian Royal Navy—against a land invasion from the north. In short, as Alistair’s men delighted in pointing out, the moat was the perfect thing to protect something that no longer existed against something that would never happen again. “Well then, you clever bastards,” Alistair told them, “you might as well plant potatoes in it.”
He split his troop into its four guns as he had each day for a fortnight, putting each seven-man team of gunners to dig and plant a strip across the moat. He reckoned to cultivate around thirty yards in a two-hour shift from four to six p.m. Two hours of labor was all the food ration allowed. Even then, Alistair sometimes looked at the men’s gaunt faces and their sharp, shirtless ribs as they worked, and discovered that his watch must be running slow. He usually declared six p.m. at a quarter to.
Today was the worst it had been. In the bloodied light the men sweated and swore as the dust storm screamed above the moat. The parched earth would not submit to shovels and required to be loosened with picks before the lumps could be put into sacks and smashed against the stone walls of the fort. Only then did the stuff resemble soil. And when the precious seed potatoes were planted in their shallow drills and irrigated with the foul water from the kitchens and with the men’s own urine, the moisture was baked out instantly. It was difficult to believe that a crop would sprout from terra cotta.
With his rotten hand Alistair could offer no help. He made himself as useful as he could, bringing water from man to man and finding errands on which to send the weaker ones to give them some reprieve. A little before five, the men unearthed something. When Alistair saw a deep opening he called them off straight away and sent them back sixty feet.
The picks had broken through into a cavity, and the danger was the possibility of unexploded ordnance. The opening was around three feet square, and Alistair tiptoed to the edge. Lying flat, he looked over the lip of the hole and waited for his eyes to adapt. He could smell his hand, even with the wind.
The base of the hole became visible, and it wasn’t deep. He lowered himself in. His feet touched bottom while his head and shoulders were still above ground level. He motioned for the men to wait where they were, then ducked down out of the wind. He waited for the bile to sink back in his throat. His head pounded. Out of sight of the men, he allowed himself to close his eyes and recover for a moment.
He lit a match. Bones shone. The pit was small, five feet long by four broad. The bones were human, three skeletons aligned east-west with their feet toward sunset. They had neither skulls nor hands. Alistair was crouching on ribs that cracked under his shoes.
It was the fourth such pit they had found in the moat. There were no artefacts this time, nothing by which a layman might date the bones. In any case the story didn’t change. The island had been contested so many times, and the ground was so impenetrably rocky, that one did not have to dig for long in any patch of workable earth to learn what had happened to all the garrisons before one’s own.
He closed his eyes again. How nice it would be to lie down in these bones, and quietly die.
He struck another match. These men had got off rather lightly. With any luck they had lost their heads before their hands. In another pit, a week earlier, they had found a skeleton with every long bone broken and the rusty flakes of nails driven through the spine. Anyone might have done it—Malta was eight thousand years of nails. It was nothing one wanted the men to think about while they waited for the enemy’s paratroopers to arrive.
Alistair put his head and shoulders back out into the wind, gathered the last of his strength, and hoisted himself up on his good arm. He went over to the men and stood them down. He watched them disperse into dust, bent against the wind. Every bump of their spines was visible.
He kept Briggs back. The two of them said a few words over the remains, ran bayonets across some of the moat’s retaining sandbags, and filled up the burial pit with sand. When they were done it was after six and Alistair was exhausted. His eyes wouldn’t focus. He hauled his headache up to his room and took the bandage off his hand. It oozed yellow poison. He boiled water on his Primus, salted it, let it cool, and cleaned the wound.
Through the rifle port,the sun was setting. The scream of the wind fell slightly. He lit a lamp, reducing the wick so that it burned as little kerosene as possible. He propped the painting against the wall. Its gilt frame shone in the close glow of the lantern. The figures were best in such confidential light. He was so tired that he fell asleep sitting up. When he woke he found himself reaching out to the painting with his wounded hand, in fragile light as the kerosene exhausted itself. He stared at the dying hand before him, and for a moment he wondered which poor chap’s it was.
April, 1941
PALMER BROUGHT MORPHINE IN a brown glass bottle with a pipette built in to the stopper. Mary thought it ingenious. Everything about the tincture delighted her—that its smell was soberly medical, that a few drops on the tongue were a remedy for feelings, and that Palmer seemed able to procure it without fuss. On her return from hospital he had taken to appearing at three-hourly intervals with the pewter tray—not the silver, since her father was still away at the constituency. From the tray he would set down the brown bottle and a glass of iced water, on pewter coasters backed with green felt, together with fruits in a porcelain bowl.
Palmer would then dematerialize, leaving Mary to dispense the morphine at her convenience. This was proper, since it placed the stuff in the category of remedies, which were taken in private, and not of tonics, cocktails, or pick-me-ups, which were mixed to order and then taken while the butler hovered in case the blend was found to want celery salt, or bitters. The little bowl of fruit was appropriate too, since fruit was something—just like morphine—that one could easily take or leave.
Mary thought Palmer so painstakingly humane that she felt unable to disturb his sleep by ringing for him at three in the morning when she awoke in a sweat from nightmares that wouldn’t release her. Instead she sat up in bed with the covers pulled tight, wide-eyed while hallucinations of her dead children scratched away at the inside of the wardrobe doors. Kenneth Cox whispered behind the fire screen, behind the cheval mirror, behind her head so that she had to keep looking around.
It was a horribly long time until Palmer came in at seven with the tray, and then it was difficult to wait while he opened the curtains and laid out the newspaper and unfolded the newly issued day. Only when he vanished could she fall on the morphine and squeeze the red rubber bulb to draw up the seven trembling drops that the doctor had prescribed, and the further ten drops by which the doctor had underestimated things.
Mary lay back on the bed and dissolved into the immaculate morning.
At nine, finding her fingers still too relaxed for fine work, she needed her mother’s help to dress.
“You will want to quit that stuff as soon as you can,” said her mother, buttoning Mary’s blouse. “I don’t know what you plan to do with the day, but I cannot see it involving successful interactions with objects or persons.”
“You know the morphine is only till my wound is healed.”
Her mother picked up the bru
sh and began on Mary’s hair. “It has been a whole month, darling. If you had cut something actually off, one might not begrudge you the paregoric. But you are a North, Mary. We don’t go south over flesh wounds.”
“The doctor says I shall have a limp.”
“Then live the rest of your life seated, if you must, but please do it sober.”
Mary stared out of the window, bracing her head against the tug of the hairbrush. She watched the freshly laundered clouds dissipate and resolve. The eye was an extraordinary instrument. How mysterious that it could be brought to bear on that tiny, distant pigeon—there—and then refocused in an instant on an object that existed only in memory. She watched herself at the same window, aged five, sucking on an orange boiled sweet, popping it out of her mouth from time to time to check how much remained and to peer at the slowly resolving city through the translucent glass of the candy.
“Mary!” Her mother set down the hairbrush with a bang. “I won’t have you go to pieces like this. Tell me your plan for the day, and I shall expect an update over supper. Why don’t you write to that man of yours?”
“To Alistair? Oh no. I haven’t written to him since I was hurt.”
“Why ever not? The poor thing must be frantic.’
“I no longer enjoy any happiness I have taken from Hilda. I hope Alistair will understand.”
“But you were so serious about him!”
Mary tried to bring her mother’s face into focus. “You have always insisted that I am not a serious person.”
“Then won’t you go for a walk, at least? Take an umbrella for the showers, and call on Hilda.’
“Hilda will be sleeping. We work nights, as you know.”
“Enough of this ‘we.’ You are not to go back to the ambulances. If you’d only listened to me . . .”
‘Then I’d be Mrs. Henry Hunter-Hall by now, in Gloucestershire, berating the keeper for displaying poachers’ heads on the railings.”
