Key to the Door

by Alan Sillitoe

  “It’ll be the last time for me, though,” Brian affirmed.

  “You can never be sure about that,” Odgeson said in a tone of resentment, as if they were blaming him for their hardship.

  “I can.” Brian felt a sudden hatred of Odgeson, who, he realized, would never forget whose side he was on.

  “That remains to be seen, Seaton.”

  “It don’t.” Blind obstinacy brought the words out, as well as the conviction that what he said would come to pass. Even no backing from Baker or Cheshire could not weaken his words: I’m on my own, he thought, and don’t need help from anyone. “We ain’t been told to write ON ACTIVE SERVICE on our letters for nothing, and we ain’t lugging rifles this time to fire at shadows or fireflies.”

  Odgeson saw what was wrong. “I’m not interested in discussing politics. All I want is to get these chaps out of that plane. In other words, while we’re up here, you’ll do as I tell you to do.”

  “All I said,” Brian said, “was that this was the last time I’m going to be a pin on a bloody map. And I mean it. And nobody’s going to stop me saying what I feel.”

  “All right, so you’ve said it. But if you say it once more, you’ll be on a charge when we get back to camp. I don’t care how near the boat you are.”

  Brian was the last to move, looked through the trees over the three of them forming the bottom loop of a letter S—Odgeson leading. We argue and the slob throws his rank, but I’ve got something to throw at him in my hand: I could put a bullet into his sanctimonious mug and nobody would be much the wiser. I can’t think of any better reason for carrying this lead-heavy rifle and fifty shells. You’ve got a mouth to speak with and good cause for opening it, and even when what you say’s got nothing to do with tearing your guts out to find that aircrew, you still get told to wrap-up. You might as well be in the grave if you don’t open your trap.

  Baker had taken the lead, but everyone at the same time saw an enormous wound in a tree before them, bleached by some meteor-scoop from the sky. The uppers of the tree were ripped down, flayed open and back like the rough parting on a doll’s head long after Christmas. Brian’s heart beat heavily, and a slice of steel was nicked into sudden glinting light by the sun. Their troubles seemed over. “It’s trying to send morse to us,” he thought. Under the dark shed of the trees the hillside flattened, became more varied instead of the common up or down, and they followed a ploughed lane of cracked twigs and creepers, snapped so that sap and juice still stained the white ends and were sticky to the touch. A shallow trench of iron-coloured upturned soil started and finished after a few yards, and embedded in a bank was the battered and clawed-at nacelle of an aircraft engine. It lay well into the clay, as if it had been shot dead before swallowing the hard bite of earth it had gone mad for and crashed down from the sky to get. They stood amazed and awed, in spite of having expected eventually to find something like it, at seeing a piece of marvellous engineering planted in the middle of this primeval smell. “Now where’s the rest of it?” Odgeson wondered.

  “Scattered all over the mountain,” Baker said. “We’ll have to sweat blood for every piece.” Brian was past caring: “What can you do, O what can you do, But ride to your death on a kangaroo?”

  “You’re right: the bits that count can be miles away,” Odgeson said to Baker. They separated, split four ways like a signpost and agreed to meet at given whistle-signals.

  Brian was alone and liked it, walked from the nacelle with a feeling of ease as if taking a stroll on a quiet afternoon. The landscape was different, humid and arduous still when he had to clamber up a bank, yet being beyond the sight and sound of the group was an immense relief. The jungle appeared less alien, and he felt that it was somehow tamed for him, that he was beginning to understand even the harmlessness and maybe necessity of it. Voluminous leafage moved back to his advance, and the underfoot smell had a richness of decay that no longer held a threat of fever, equal to fresh air since the wind was still, and it took away his incentive to peer up through the tall trunks for a pinprick glimpse of the sky. Water dripped slowly down a rockface and, finding no stream bed, he churned the soil into a red mud that hung on to his boots like manacles—much as he’d sought to enjoy every street pool with his wellington boots as a small boy.

  After a quick smoke he swung himself under and over creepers, going up another bank until, reaching leveler ground at the top, he saw someone staring from between parted leaves. It was a white face below short black hair, gaunt yet with the sort of calm experience and gentleness that becomes ferocious when roused for no plain reason. Brian also noticed that he wore a green shirt, before sliding to lower ground with the intention of taking cover by a tree. But the man was already leaping, a kris poised.

  An overwhelming grenade of sick fear burst in his stomach, yet within this cloud he felt himself struggling free of his pack and shouting wildly, hoping the others weren’t too far off, in a long high meant-to-be-everlasting yell that carried little distance through the trees and undergrowth. His pack rolled, and while discarding he had considered the wisdom of hanging on to it; he only now knew this feeling to have been reasonable when he saw his rifle sliding away at the same time.

  He reached level earth, fear and hysteria in every extremity of his limbs. Yet he felt himself existing in different zones of consciousness, waiting and watching his chance instead of backing away on the chance of escaping the deathly feel of the blade. The tree, soil, bushes, and smell of the jungle, the dank fatigue-memory of the fruitess search, became locked in his senses. The man grunted (The daft bastard thinks we’re going to hurt him. Why?) and the split-second in which the kris stayed poised was a long enough time in the soundless trees to make him pleasantly surprised at taking in so much detail—a lightning speed of animal assessment extracted from his unwritten nightmare journal of afterwards.

  The wavy blade of the kris was rusty, as if it had been left uncovered in jungle rain, though it was grey near the edge to show it had lately been sharpened. I’m finished, he thought—a short message flashed by the enemy part of himself—I’m going to be killed. He shouted out in terror, catching the man’s emotion, who breathed heavily and grunted as he struck. His hands went out, as if the fires of survival had set themselves alight in his brain.

  Both sprang together: his arms sped with uncanny precision towards the blade—an old ruse of unarmed combat taught him by Bill Eddison at the cardboard factory years ago. He fastened both wrist and elbow of the wiry arm gripping the kris, and pressed them with all strength away and backwards. Terrified that the trick had worked, the sweat of control poured from him and he fought as much to keep up his determination to carry it through as to vanquish the actual danger.

  He fixed his eyes on what was visible of the blade, which stayed so long in place that he had a desire to laugh at the possibility of it’s being glued there, resisting this weakness because it would rob him of strength. The man grunted and kicked, swayed the trapped arm and struck out with the one still free, but Brian ignored the smashing of his ankles, and the kris didn’t stay long enough in place for the man to think of trying to reach it by the blade-end. The more Brian ground his teeth and pressed, the easier it became to make his attacker drop the kris. It seemed a stupid task, as if the man’s arm would break, because all the brute force of his labouring days was behind the pressure and he knew that no one could stand it for long. He wanted to laugh and let the arm go, tell the man to blow town and not be so bleeding daft. The kris slid into the leaves and he pushed the man back, rammed like lightning with his fist and boot, then drew away. His fear returned now and, gasping and stumbling against his pack and rifle, he watched the man free himself from the bush and search among the undergrowth.

  Brian picked up the rifle: he’s a nut case and might try something else, but if he does I’ll bash him over the skull with this. I’ll plaster his loaf all over the trees. Why did he want to come for me like that? He drew back the bolt, slotted it in, a mechanical noise whose si
gnificance he only realized as its clear echo died away, retrieving a picture of a dog by his DF hut lying like a length of rag and floorcloth with a hole in its head. The Chinese dropped the kris, stayed a dozen yards off with lifted hands, close enough for Brian to see the left side of his lips twitching on an otherwise hard and resigned face. What’s he put his hands up for? Why don’t he get running? He drew back the catch to safety, unwilling to press the trigger by accident and be brought up for murder: that’s a charge Odgeson wain’t be able to put me on. The silence grew: Brian shifted his stance, cracked twigs.

  “Ger moving,” he said, half afraid the man might be crazy and make another rush. “Piss off”—threatening to kill him should he refuse.

  Words as if spoken by another person deep in his own mind told him he was a bandit, though Brian repressed the thought as being the safest thing for the man before him, and for himself. Maybe he doesn’t understand English: “Scoot, for——” But the man lost his bewilderment and neutral face of capture, turned and leapt along the level of the jungle, scrambling away fast. Brian stood, still and frozen, then his hand shook, and he held the rifle between his legs while he leaned against a tree to light a cigarette. A plane droned overhead, but he was too shaken to look, could only stare at the soil and undergrowth. The war in Malaya and all he’d heard of it seemed to have no relevance in this forest foreclosed with darkness and humidity, and he told himself that maybe the man had a hut and garden nearby and thought he was someone who had plundered it last week, so had been waiting in ambush for him to come back.

  Weakened by legs that seemed turned to rubber, and a sensation of chaos and death—he sure wanted to kill me, by the look on his mug—he made his way towards where he had parted from the others. Maybe the man had been a bandit, but Brian threw the idea away, then drew it back and hung on to it as though, should this be true, it might turn out to mark some saving of his sanity, to be the salvation of his soul in some unpredictable manner. In any case, he wouldn’t have been a bandit but a Communist. There was a difference—that much he easily saw. The picture that crossed his mind was of a gloomy autumnal dinner-hour opposite the factory canteen a few years back during the war, a composite memorial of many dinner-hours spent in that way. A Communist speaker stood talking about the Soviet Union bleeding to death in the good fight against the German Nazis and Italian Fascists, saying it was time Britain and America started that second front now, when a voice from the crowd heckled: “Why aren’t yo’ in the army, mate?” But somebody capped the heckler with: “Why aren’t yo’?”—which stopped his gallop with even bigger laughs.

  Brian leaned against a tree, screaming with laughter, a mad humorous rage tearing itself out: “And I let him go! Odgeson and all you bastards, I let him go because he was a comrade! I didn’t kill him because he was a man.” The certain knowledge that he had been a bandit was a fist that made him lie down in the soil, curl up, and go on laughing, separate from himself yet unable to look on, roaring at the outcome of his own safety, no matter what the man had been. The bastard, though, I should a pulled the rifle up to my shoulder and pinned him to the soil with a bullet like he would have done to me with his kris if I’d given him half the chance. He smoked a cigarette: I’d better get back and see if the others have found the plane. But if any clever bastard says to me: “Why aren’t yo’ in the army?” I’ll give him the biggest mouthful he’s ever heard. He walked on, quiet in his tracking for fear that other bandits were about, and that if there was a next time he might not be so lucky. Stone-cold with horror, he suddenly recognized the nacelle where he had parted from the rest, an aluminium case holding a complex aero-engine whose image vividly recalled the click of the safety-catch a few minutes before. He bounded up the bank, beyond the sinister machine-product, towards where he hoped the others would be. Without forethought, he fired off rounds into the treetops and sky, let fly half a dozen rapid shots at what ghosts and remnants of his conscripted mind the sight of the Communist had let loose. He emptied the magazine, lobbing the rest more carefully at manufactured shadows between the trees, each round buried into some distant invisible soil or trunk after a heyday crack that seemed powerful enough to scare and weal the whole range of mountains. “What did you do in the war, dad?” “I caught a Communist and let him go.” “What did you do that for, then?” “Because he was a man.” And not everybody’ll look at me gone-out. “Brian, my lad, I’m proud o’ you,” the old man would say.

  Calmer now, though still bright-eyed (I feel like a paper lantern, all hollow and lit up), he made his way along the hillside. Odgeson, Baker, and Cheshire walked a few paces in front, making so much noise they didn’t hear him trailing them. “Hey,” he shouted. “Seen owt yet?”

  They gathered into a group. “We heard some shooting over there, so we’re heading for it in case it’s Knotman’s mob.”

  “It was me,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “A bloke came for me, a bandit I suppose, because he bolted when he saw I’d got a rifle. I didn’t hit him, though.”

  “It sounded like a machine-gun,” Cheshire said. “You must a been cross-eyed not to bring him down.”

  Odgeson looked serious: “We’d better stay close and watch out. There aren’t enough stretchers for all of us.”

  “Knotman shouldn’t be too far away, with the army,” Baker called from behind. “Shall I get them on the blower?”

  Odgeson thought not. “They won’t be listening anyway, so let’s get moving and not have so many questions.”

  “He’s coming out of his shell on this trip,” Brian said to Baker as they trekked on. “These pally bastards allus turn out to be the worst.”

  Baker was close behind and replied: “My old man says that in the Great War they used to shoot about ten officers a month. The Germans got the rest of them.”

  “It didn’t mek much difference,” Brian said. “They kept scraping ’em up from somewhere.”

  “The reason the war ended, though, was because they were running out of officers, not because they didn’t have enough bods like us. I’ve been to a public school, Brian, but I’m just a slave like you are.”

  “Belt up,” Brian said.

  “That’s no argument.”

  “It’s an answer, though. I might be a slave this minute but I’m going to stop being one soon.”

  “Only because they’re letting you go.”

  “That ain’t what I mean. I don’t care if it takes five years: I’m going to stop being a slave.”

  “Close up,” Odgeson shouted back. “Here’s some more of the plane.”

  “It’s like a jig-saw puzzle,” Cheshire said. “Three-and-six from Woolworth’s.”

  “You’ll never stop being a slave to something,” Baker said.

  A tail elevator of shining aluminium lay in their path like a gate barring their way to an abundant and well-cultivated small-holding. They stepped over it one by one, as if afraid to damage it and have to pay the farmer for its repair: Baker had the sense to kick it fiat. Brian took the radio from him: “I didn’t try and hit that bandit I saw back there. I fired plenty, but hoped I wouldn’t get him.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to stop myself,” Baker replied, not believing. A clearing had been brewed out of the jungle by the main wreck of the plane: it had come to rest against the far end of a plateau, a cigar-shaped fuselage, a priceless accomplishment hanging dead and derelict halfway down between the trees, pieces of wing and wood and glittering fabric scattered all around. It was inaccessible without ropes, ten or fifteen feet up, looking like the victim of an unsuccessful attempt to decorate a Christmas tree. They stood fifty yards off, speechless after having searched for what seemed like weeks. The fuselage was scattered with rips along its frame where branches had impeded its clumsy uncalled-for descent, some foliage seeming to grow out of the plane itself as if it had been there far longer than forty hours. There was no movement, noise, or cries of life from it. On the underbelly by the pilot’s cabin, as though some great hand had given it a no
sebleeder, was a broad crimson mark, dried and hardly noticeable in the first look. “O Christ,” Brian said, unloading the radio.

  “What a way to die.” Baker slung down his pack.

  “Poor bastards,” said Cheshire. My stomach’s hard, but my heart’s as sick as a dog’s, Brian felt, while Odgeson blew his guts out on the jungle-rescue whistle, hoping to reach Knotman and the army. Its dull throat-notes filled the air, low and warbling, the sort of alarm-noise that during the war sent Colin and Dave scurrying from their fireside cups of tea into the backyard and cold November streets to avoid the coppers they imagined after them. When Odgeson had no breath left, he asked Brian to have a go.

  It was accepted, and he flexed his lungs so that both God and the Devil would hear, only to be startled by the solid lead-heavy crack of what seemed a tree bough, as though the plane had weighed sufficiently and long enough to snap one down. Baker ducked, as if, Brian thought, the whistle unblown between his lips, the bough was right above their heads and threatening to fall. Another sharp crack revealed this and the first as rifle shots—now they were all down, pressed into the undergrowth as, from the direction of the plane, in the thick bush under its stranded body, leapt a wide-toothed saw of bullets, flying close around, burning into tree bark or burying their noses into soft clammy soil. It wasn’t difficult to find cover: Brian moved back, dragging the wireless set, to shield his face, towards a length of tree trunk that kept his guts secure, though he felt his feet exposed at the mixture of twigs, leaves, and random bullets scattering about them like the butt-end of a typhoon thunderstorm. The incredible noise numbed him with a feeling of helplessness, as if the bullets came from such an army that it was no use fighting back, like an uneven rattling against the palings of hell that left only the impulse to press hands to each ear. “It’s the army,” Cheshire said. “The bastards think we’re bandits. Hey!” he shouted. “It’s us. Nark it, for Christ’s sake!”