After Z-Hour

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘That joke used to intrigue me when I was a kid, not because it was funny, but because it broke a fundamental narrative rule. Like if, after reading Wuthering Heights, sometime later reading Lord Jim you were to find a character called Heathcliff turning up in the story.’

  Wrathall raised a hand to silence me. ‘So you’re saying you don’t want to hear my explanation because you’re reading a different book.’

  ‘Yes. It’s the wrong punchline for this joke.’

  ‘I just thought you deserved to be told so you could judge for yourself whether you did something wrong in helping me. All your “motives” for not wanting to know about my murder make my explanation a bigger deal than it is.’

  ‘Well, that ought to satisfy your vanity.’

  ‘Be careful,’ he said, and got up. ‘You can’t always expect to get on top of things.’

  ‘I couldn’t always.’

  ‘You want me to leave you alone in this house,’ he said—not asking, telling me.

  I nodded.

  ‘Why? What will happen to you if I do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what is happening to me.’

  He stood looking down at me with an aloof and speculative gaze, then said, ‘Goodbye, Kelfie.’ And left the house.

  Mark

  Alan’s efforts to educate me were hampered by our lack of music. He was without his collection of records, packed carefully away in a cupboard under the gramophone in his family’s Bealey Avenue house. In their relative imperviousness to time and change they were as full of a potential to taunt and accuse as were the shelves of books in my bedroom at home—Keats, Kipling, Dickens, Dumas …

  Alan could only tell me about music; asserting: ‘Bach had an inexhaustible fund of melody’; impressing: ‘When I listen to Collegium aureum with my eyes closed I imagine a glowing, geometric web’; enthusing: ‘Tristan und Isolde, Chopin’s Preludes, Beethoven.’

  I believe I felt the same about taking him up the highest peak and showing him the long falls of land down to Canaan and the Riwaka Valley; cloud shadows flowing, swelling and shrinking, over all. Like one of Bach’s melodies, which always defied Alan’s descriptions, Messines, Oatlands, and my homecoming braided together in my mind—the theft of belief, then health, then hope. I could never explain how thoughts of one time always led to thoughts of the others—Messines, Oatlands, my homecoming—three yielding worlds of faith I fell through, away from ambition, vitality and peace.

  How could I explain?

  Human speech is a single instrument, guessing and uncertain, like that first bird, precursor of the dawn chorus, that would start up at the window of my downstairs sick-bedroom, when there was no light left in the fire, nor sound in the house. The human mind is, however, an orchestra, and, dissonant or harmonious, my mind might play those three themes together: Messines, Oatlands, my homecoming.

  For ten days in the Base hospital in Boulogne my wound was dressed every day, the old gauze removed and new gauze packed into the gouged flesh. My face, throat and hands were a stiff mass of gas blisters. When my wound was dressed this scabby mask of lymph would crack, like a crust on lava, overflowing.

  I bobbed in and out of delirium. It was as if I had ventured out beyond the breakers on one of the Bay’s steep beaches and was alternately lifted by the big waves to look out to sea, or sunk in a trough with a wall of green water looming above me.

  When the wound was sufficiently healed, I crossed the Channel on a hospital ship, and was taken by train and ambulance to Oatlands—the hospital for medical cases attached to the 1st NZ Base Hospital at Walton-on-Thames.

  I lay in the gas ward, a hollow needle piercing my back, attached to a rubber tube draining the fluid from my lungs.

  Each patient may as well have been alone, in a dreadful privacy of struggling, minute by minute, for breath. Air-hungry—in the night, or in an orange world under our eyelids, or watching the window’s square napkins of white sky and rain dribbling in thin rivulets from sill to sill.

  On our first day at Deville Wood I had felt we were invincible and invulnerable. I had within me, throughout my first engagement, a tightly coiled helix of fury and power. The thunder of battle bore me up, made my hair prickle and my saliva turn thick, salty and cold.

  The one German I came face to face with I bayoneted, savagely and joyfully, hating his fear and fumbling hesitation. Able to feel, forever afterwards, the shock of the blade striking a rib, glancing off and tearing through the taut fibre of flesh—like a spade pushed through grassroots.

  No man in my section received anything more than a minor flesh wound. We came out of battle wet, exhausted and unfeeling, but confident that we had proven to ourselves we had no hidden flaws of cowardice or unmanliness.

  We returned to the billets we had recently vacated, and I realised we had more room because there were fewer of us. Only then did I feel a twinge of discomfort at our survivors’ haphazard luck—but even this I took as a lesson that I must develop a larger, more accommodating philosophy of the fortunes of war.

  My quest for ‘myself as hero’ ended suddenly when Doug was killed by a shell, on a work party early in our winter on the Lys. A casualty of daily trench life, Doug’s death was brutal and unremarkable. He went neither in a raid nor battle, but shoring up the waterlogged walls of a trench, shovel in hand.

  Heroism and courage in battle were, I discovered, less attributes than accidents, or ideas like masks created to conceal from us the hideous shapelessness of life in war.

  I climbed the stairs like Essex mounting the scaffold. Emma beside me, talking, her voice shy and warm, sharing my homecoming, the fulfilment of all those longing letters. She too had dreamed I came quietly in out of the summer wind or winter drizzle—perhaps carrying the packages she had expected me to collect for her in the summer of 1915, the errands in Nelson, where I had said I was going to be fitted for a suit—her lying, runaway brother.

  I stopped on the landing. ‘I think I’ll go up on my own, Emma, if you don’t mind.’

  Her hand folded over mine, pressing it onto the banister, the hard, confident wood, oiled by palms and lamplight, by years of people coming down for breakfast and going up to bed.

  During my childhood it was in the conditions of Patriarch’s lease that we provide shelter for travellers crossing the Hill. These strangers had been an endless source of excitement to me. Arriving in the evening by cart, horseback, or coach—unhitching, watering their horses and standing with my father, Euan, or Larry Clifford (the third partner of the early years), talking about the weather, the state of the road, passing on news, or messages from friends in Collingwood, Nelson or Motueka.

  They would have supper, and stop over in the rooms down the hallway to the right of the stairs. And I’d be up early to inspect them: travellers, going somewhere, down the hill, descending into the world’s great business of visits, marriages, burials, missions, changes of residence and occupation.

  They would breakfast, hitch-up or saddle the horses. The ladies would thrust pins through their hats and coiled hair. They would all take a drink from the dipper chained to the pump, then set off.

  And I would chase their vehicles back to the road, dreaming of being asked along for the ride.

  After winter we went up the line to Messines.

  Deafened by the unremitting barrage—a pauseless roar, not the thudding I first heard thirty miles from Goose Alley, like God knocking on the outside of the sky, asking to be let back into the world. We were unable to hear the mines go up, but the earth opposite us swelled and burst like a bubble in boiling porridge. Twenty feet to my left Captain Green jumped over the parapet waving his swagger stick, and we followed, the earth crumbling and quaking beneath us.

  Rain on the windows, rasping breath, fluid draining ‘plink plink’ into the metal basin under the bed. At night the same sounds, and in addition the hiss and comforting smell of a kerosene heater.

  At times someone might be wheeled away to the bed near the door of
the ward, surrounded by screens. Once I watched as a sister and nurse took a lamp behind the screens and performed, in a magic lantern show, the washing of the body and the stripping of the bed.

  Sometimes the ward disappeared and I was alone with my body, an ailing engine that required all my concentration, all my will, to keep going.

  And one day, when the ward was awash with a weak liquor of light off the snow, I woke drifting, without pain or effort, my face two feet from the ceiling. Spinning slowly to hang like a kite, I looked down at a long, thin shape under the white sheets and blue blankets, his blond hair full of scurf and darkened by oil, his face raw red and glistening yellow, his eyes lashless and swollen shut.

  ‘My poor body,’ I thought, and was instantly plunged back into its pressure and pain.

  I turned left at the top of the stairs, walking softly and cautiously, like a thief, a housebreaker. The bedroom, bed, shelves of books, desk, papers, inkstand, pictures, wardrobe, the plush red chair with its lumpy seat all said, ‘Well? Where is he? What have you done with him?’ This room was the home of a healthy hill-country farmer, scarcely out of boyhood, with sound lungs and a strong voice—whom I had mislaid.

  We fled into the continuous, howling roar. The sound arched over us—earth and all its earthquakes. The hill had gone, the horizon had transformed into a miasma of dust, as if the world were evaporating. (Minutes before it happened Mac had said, ‘They are going to blow mines under those hills. That is our signal—’ I had no idea what he meant.)

  We ran into the fog of dust and falling debris. Our orders were to occupy the crater. Before I reached its lip I turned to check on Alan, who had been running directly behind me—in time to see him knocked over by a shell, twisted and tumbling backward like a man caught in a hard tackle.

  Before I was able to move, he was up. He started to run towards me, his white face eager and intent, but instead of coming forward, he veered left and stamped in a small circle, out of control. Then I saw that his left leg below the knee had been torn away and was hanging by skin and the remnants of his shredded gaiters, the booted foot bouncing and dragging behind him as he ran, lopsided, the bare bone of the stump piercing the dirt and leaving several small, blood-filled impressions. He flailed his arms, trying to keep his balance, galvanised by the barrage and still endeavouring to run.

  When he toppled I ran to him; he grabbed my arm and again flexed his legs to get them under him. Then he saw his injury, looked astonished, then aggrieved, pointed, and glanced at me for confirmation. I believe he felt no pain at first, but realised his leg was gone so lay down and began to sob.

  I tore open the flap in my tunic where my field-dressing was. The hot shrapnel had partially cauterised the wound, but sooner or later it would begin bleeding heavily, so needed dressing.

  As I bent over the wound, Alan sat up. Without thinking, only wanting to place the bandage where it would do the most good, I took his leg by the ankle and moved it to one side. He began screaming in horror and tried to push me away. We struggled for a moment. Eventually I placed a knee against his chest, pushed him over and knelt on him. Picking up the all-but-severed leg I saw it was, as I had thought, attached only by a flap of skin. I had unhooked the gaiters to get at the wound, and now the leg dangled, a useless impediment to my bandaging. So I tore it off.

  After my first month at Oatlands the nurses sat me up and had me write a letter to my sister. The tight red skin of my hands, full of fluid, appalled me—remembering Emma and her—my—fairness intact.

  (I was a stealthy whisper of a walk through dry grass, over the throbbing insect-riddled flanks of the hills, under a flattening sun—deathly, a whisper of sticky breath from sick lungs.)

  My first letter was four sentences copied from the book beside my bed: ‘All the visions and consolations of my youth are dead. We know little and are bad learners; so we have to lie. Ice is around me, my hand is burned with ice. Weariness has at last to lie down and sleep, even on the snow.’

  My second letter, a week later, was written as I looked out over the white grounds, river, bare willows like sienna smoke. (I was fever, high summer in an envelope of ice.)

  ‘Dear Emma,’ I wrote, ‘I ask you to imagine yourself here with me, coming in quietly by all these ill, unknowing men and tired nurses. Picture me looking out of a rectangular window: eight squares of glass in two vertical rows, a two-foot-deep balcony, a rail of iron spikes and sleet falling from clouds heavier than our winter clouds ever are. Unlike the airy white mist that gathers over the Hill when it rains, this is a deep, cold, unbreathable greyness, like a stone lid. European winter, even at the edge of spring, is immense. Picture me underneath it, a speck of dark earth in a drift of snow.’

  The division stayed weeks after the battle, consolidating the line. And gradually, in dribs and drabs, the lightly wounded were returned to us. In time new drafts replenished the battalions into their old shapes, with the raw, untested men—no longer volunteers, but conscripts, without our fleecy illusions.

  For a week after the battle I struggled with myself, as if I were a boat rolling in the surf which must be drawn safely up the beach, beyond the tide. In Alan—confident, communicative and charming—I had lost a bridge to those around me. He was my best friend, and without him I had to start everything over again with the world.

  Later I began to remember his look of accusation and betrayal. His wet grey face and faded eyes were an image cooling and constricting my innards—not unlike the visceral prayer Bach’s music induced in me.

  When someone would come to sit beside me on the fire-step, or shake me awake for a duty, I would start, my heart reaching—as a flame stretches towards fuel—for my vanished friend. I’d know it wouldn’t be him beside me, so I’d stubbornly refuse to look into the face of whoever it was.

  We were shelled intermittently throughout those weeks. One morning a near miss exploded on the other side of the parapet, sending a fountain of shrapnel up into the air and shredding the sandbags above our heads. Full of grief for Alan and fear for myself, I decided to tell their infantry that their artillery was hopeless.

  I clambered up onto the parapet, straightened, and began to shout, ‘You missed us! See—’

  Behind me, over the hiss of settling earth, men were yelling, ‘ Get down, you stupid bugger!’

  ‘Mark, for Christ’s sake!’ Andy screamed.

  I kept on shouting and waving, while in the kernel of my mind a rapt little voice was saying, ‘This is easier, easier—’ my head clearing and eyes focusing on the wasteland before me. I was at last standing straight, in the open, my head above ground, and able to look further than a few feet before me.

  I saw several square-helmeted heads peering out over the top of a nest of sandbags clustered around a machine gun, and a number of dirty, pale faces partway above the lip of the trench some thirty yards distant.

  Behind me someone commanded, ‘Come down from there now, Thornton—or I’ll shoot you myself!’

  My ankles were seized and I was hauled back into the trench. Price, Andy and the Lieutenant had hold of me, and were all furious. I ignored their anger. I resented them for so brutally concluding my brief moment of power and peace. I shook them off and told them to leave me alone. My voice, barbed, high and strained, surprised me. John and Andy backed off, but the Lieutenant, who I’d shoved away from me, stepped up to me again and placed his hands on my shoulders. ‘You didn’t need to keep on,’ he said. ‘We all heard you—there was no need to turn it into an election speech.’ Exasperated laughter behind his words.

  It was this that restored my equilibrium. I apologised.

  ‘All right.’ He struck my neck softly with his cupped hand, then turned and walked away.

  Andy said, ‘You’re not meant to push officers around you know, Mark.’

  ‘Sorry, Corporal.’

  ‘Don’t “Corporal” me, Mark, for God’s sake.’

  After this incident I stopped expecting to see Alan at every turn. A month later w
e heard his hospital ship had been torpedoed and he had drowned, trapped below decks with nearly a hundred others.

  The year passed. Tiredness, strange faces, more deaths came between us. I began to outdistance Alan’s memory, growing older than him, losing our shared enthusiasms.

  Spring came and, under the trees, crocuses thrust fleshy yellow spears out of the wet earth. The lawns blushed green. Everything slowly stiffened, swelled and flowered. Lung cases were the last allowed out, and were finally wheeled onto the lawns swathed in rugs.

  At this time I received a letter from Andy, the first I had from him. Awkward, each word carefully considered—and behind it all himself: fatherly, anxious, telling me that the Lieutenant had been wounded in the Ancre Valley.

  ‘Dear Mark,’ he wrote, ‘I hope this letter finds you feeling well. I am in fairly good nick myself, though in low spirits. They are keeping us very busy now, so things are not as bad as they have been at other times. However, the thought of another winter here makes us all very gloomy. I am beginning to wonder why any of this should be our job.

  ‘I am writing to tell you that the Lieutenant was wounded in April, in the Ancre valley. I am afraid his eyes are out. I know you will feel this badly, as I do, maybe even worse. We all feel it, him being one of the bravest, most decent men any of us have known—sharp tongue and all. He was always so steady, even when things were very bad. He had a soft spot for you, Mark—’ Here several lines were obliterated by a scribble of maroon-shaded pencil. The letter resumed, ‘Shortly before it happened he asked John P. and me if we had heard anything from you and I was sorry to say we had not—’

  He went on to talk about John Palmer, the last of our group other than himself, and about the food (of course), and how good it was to be out of the three-years-deadlocked line at last—ending on a cautious, but conscientiously upward note.