by Lia Mills
He sucked in a chestful of smoke, examined the tip of his cigarette, blew across it. It flared. ‘Things happen you’ve no control over.’
I came back and sat near him. ‘Tell me.’
‘Only a few weeks earlier, we’d to watch their infantry bayonet our wounded. They came at us, and we let loose – I don’t know how to describe it, we were possessed. When we got up there and had them surrounded, they dropped their guns. Mercy, mercy.’ He put on the accent, his face grim.
I was afraid to say anything that might break his trance of remembering, of letting things spill out unfiltered. He shook his head, the way a dog clears water from its coat. ‘Not bloody likely. Not after that.’
‘Liam wrote to me about that,’ I said, thinking that, like Hubie, he’d never finished the story. He never said what had happened next.
Yesterday they came at us, the biggest show yet. We started out, but they poured over from their line and we fell back. You should have seen how we fired to hold them off, more than the fifteen shots a minute, but they kept coming. They came with bayonets ready. Any of ours they found wounded, they finished them. They ripped young Michael Slattery open. His screams were terrible. Rage kept us firing. Our guns overheated. Fat oozed out of them. A captain ran up and down the line pouring oil on the stocks. We overcame them. When they were surrounded, they threw their weapons down and begged for their lives. Kamerad!
I’d nothing but murder in my heart. The silence fell on me as though I were dreaming. All you at home can’t begin to imagine the extent of the destruction, the laying waste. The human spirit itself is being slaughtered, here.
I don’t know if it was Hubie that trembled, talking, or me, listening to Liam’s words inside his. The whole room was unstable, the walls threatened to tear free from the ceiling, the floorboards wanting to buckle and pitch us out into the horrible night. ‘I read in the papers that their bayonets are terrible. Toothed, like a saw you’d take to a plank. That the worst wounds are inflicted on the way out.’
‘Ours were little better. They’re useless now. Hopelessly outdated. But we still have to use them. You’ve no notion, the savagery. Do you know what they told us in training? If you strike badly, or too deep, and your bayonet gets stuck inside a man? Load a charge, and fire. The recoil will do the rest.’
‘Oh!’ I couldn’t help the sound that escaped me, or the hand that flew to my mouth too late to catch it. He stared off, blind to me again. He may as well have been alone.
He stubbed out his cigarette, then thought better of it and struggled to light another one. I took a match from the box and struck it, held it steady for him. He cupped the flame with his good hand and drew in the smoke.
‘Bless you.’ He rested his hand on mine while he sucked in three quick breaths in succession, then let them out. The room filled with a benign, lazy kind of smoke. I watched it curl and spread in soft aromatic layers, trying, failing, to imagine poison in it. ‘Their English was yards ahead of our German, I can tell you. Except Liam, he’d a smattering. Those nights creeping around the wires would break anyone. He used to be sent out more than most.’
Phrases from Liam’s letters ran through my mind. I didn’t want to betray him. ‘He wasn’t afraid.’
‘Did I say he was?’
‘Not in so many words.’
‘There’s a state beyond fear. It’s there, but so are you.’
I took a breath, for courage. ‘His last letter had only two words in it: “No more.” He didn’t even sign it. It came when I was alone in the house. I burned it. I didn’t want to worry them.’
You’d swear I was the enemy, the way he looked at me. ‘They bloody should be worried.’
I got up and paced the room, to escape his anger or my terror, or both. I stopped at the mantel, in front of the candles. ‘The one before it said he could have walked into battle with empty hands. He said there were those who made that choice.’ I passed the flat of my hand across the flame. It dipped and grew back. I did it again, lower, so that my hand bisected the flame.
Hubie watched. ‘But then he’d have been useless. Worse than. There’s nothing more dangerous to the living than a man who’s decided to die.’
I stopped moving my hand. Pain seared through it and I jerked it away, despising myself. But there was a lesson in it. If you kept moving, the pain didn’t reach you. Stop, and it burned like hell. ‘I should have seen what he meant. I didn’t pay enough attention.’
‘There was nothing you could do.’
‘And then, once he was dead, it would have done no good, to say it.’ My voice wobbled at the edge of some precipice. I snatched it back. ‘I sometimes wonder, did he want the censor to read some of the things he wrote, mad things?’
‘Did he use the green envelopes, for officers?’
The envelopes had had a green cross on them, and a statement to sign, stating On my honour that the contents were personal only and had no bearing on the war. ‘What would have happened, if they’d been read?’
‘Nothing. They’d have cut out what they didn’t like.’
‘Was it not odd, to assume that officers had honour and the men had none? It must have been strange to read all they had to say.’
‘Plenty of it about us.’
‘They must have hated you for it.’ I rushed on, before he could take offence. ‘Did you know Liam was deafened out there? It happened early on. He said his hearing came and went. If we’d reported it, might he have been sent home?’ Could I have saved him, somehow, anyhow?’
‘No. That was common. It made no difference.’
I was in control of my voice again. ‘I thought I’d always have him. You know, that we’d die at the same time. It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to think that?’ Even to myself, I sounded like a child. ‘He put on a uniform, got on a ship and went away. For ages, after he was killed, I was able to pretend he was just that. Away. That he might, still, come back. If I saw him walk in through that door, right this minute, I’d believe it. It’s at least as likely as that he won’t. Seeing his grave might help. Will you show me where it is, on a map? I want to go there after the war.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why? Is it not true, that you buried him?’
‘We did, yes. But –’
‘But?’
‘Then the cemetery was bombed.’
It was this that made me cover my face and cry. I could not think about a bombed graveyard. Why should I have minded about the dead, who couldn’t be hurt any more? But I did. I minded a great deal.
A weight landed on my arm. I jumped, thinking something new had entered the room. It was Hubie’s damaged hand, trying to comfort me.
‘If the Front taught me anything, it’s that we should live each day, every single instant, as though it’s the last we’ll ever have. Look what’s happening here. And you all thought you were safe.’
There was the familiar scorn, even when he was trying to be kind. I took my hands away from my face. The candle flame was steady. Small, inky threads of smoke hovered over them. The walls leaned in to listen. The monkey was asleep in May’s chair, curled up on his red velvet cushion, snoring. I risked a look at Hubie, drawn to the good hand, now resting on his knee. Its long, graceful fingers set his glass on the floor, returned to his thigh, smoothed a crease from his trousers.
‘I should have been on this morning’s train,’ he said. ‘I’d be home by now.’
I should have known he’d be wishing himself away from here. Away from me.
‘In any given circumstance, I ask myself, what would I regret not doing?’ His face was in shadow. Only his eyes gleamed. ‘I mean, if it all ends – when it all ends – what would I be sorry for not having done? What chance would I wish I’d taken?’ His eyes fixed on mine with a tense, coiled energy. The air in the room was thick with things unsaid.
I’d a feeling like vertigo – the way a bird might feel when the gaze of the cat lights on it and settles. The shiver of shingle as the wave rises. The chair
creaked under him as he leaned forward. Of all the things I might have imagined from that harsh, surprising mouth, I could never have dreamed the delicacy of his lips brushing the skin of my face. My eyes slid shut.
He kissed my right eye, then the left. Each time he lifted his mouth, he paused, long enough for me to protest or move away, but I waited. My skin wanted to know where his mouth would surprise me next. The only other mouth I’d known was Con’s, pressed hard against me, as though to fix me in place. This man seemed to be tasting me, savouring every second. My heart thudded, like the slow tongue of a bell.
He kissed the throat I lifted to him. His hand moved my hair from my face, cupped the back of my head and brought it closer, then we were mouth to mouth and urgent. Whiskey, velvet, fire. I was parched earth, touched at last by rain. Softening. Ripening. A seed that thinned and split. Blood rushed to the surface of my skin through channels I never knew existed, my own secret, unguessed-at geography, all threading rivulets and streams running deep, slaking a thirst I’d never recognized.
At some point, he lifted his head to ask, Are you sure? For answer, I pulled him closer. I didn’t want to think. I’d assented to this long ago, maybe as far back as the night Liam died, when I’d climbed the stairs to Con’s room, shaking with a need I couldn’t name, to be held and obliterated at the same time. Certainly from the moment when I’d felt this man’s hand become solid in mine, the first time I found myself turning around in search of the light in his eyes.
I lay awake, disturbed by the interesting shape of his body beside mine. Its angles and smells. His breath loud in the room. The strangeness of my own damp skin. My legs burned, my nipples stung. I turned away from him. Stared into darkness. Turned back. Let my arm fall across him, cautious.
A slow heat began to build in my legs ’til I thought bits of me would melt away, like candle grease. I breathed in his ear to wake him. He stirred, came closer to me under the whispering, slippery satin bedspread. Then closer. We pressed against each other, straining to break through every barrier, skin, muscle, bone. Pillar of wax, tongue of flame.
‘I knew you’d be like this,’ he murmured, later.
‘Like what?’ But he was asleep again. How could he have known anything, when I couldn’t believe that this was me?
I was the one who was fallen, now. How could one word mean such different things? Those men, in the afternoon, bleeding on the road. And me, warm in tangled sheets beside – who was this man? Who was I, come to that, and what would the morning bring?
Thursday, 27 April 1916
The different types of gun all crashed together in a violent percussive storm. The house trembled. The skin of the canal puckered, scattering chips of reflected moon. Hubie let me take his damaged hand in mine and hold it. This is what time is, a river, banks on either side and leaning trees. The past carries you along but you have to travel the full length of it, come to the place where it wavers, undecided, to know what it means. Forward or back, fresh or salt, rise or fall, then it opens all the way, it is the sea, you are the sea, you’d never have guessed unless you’d made the journey; there’s so much, too much, you have to choose something, choose now quickly before it’s too late.
‘Katie, wake up. You were crying.’
‘Tell me how you were hurt.’
‘Shrapnel. From one of our own shells.’ Tiny scars shone like pale feathers on the smooth skin of his chest. I lay against him, my ear against his shoulder. His words were muffled, far away and underground.
‘There were sly fellows out there. Cleaning their guns, they’d lose a finger, a couple of toes. One company was known for a trick of holding their hands up above the ramparts during a barrage, like beggars, for credible wounds.’ His body stiff as rock. As impenetrable. ‘Theirs cheapen mine.’
It was so different from what Liam wrote to Mother, soon after he arrived in France, a letter she’d added to her memory-book. Everywhere I look, I see men from all over the world – there’s an Indian regiment, their hair bound up in a thick white cloth that makes their skin seem darker than it is. Canadians who don’t seem to feel the cold. It’s no mean thing, to have such men on our side. No matter where we come from, we’re together in this. When I see hundreds upon hundreds of men in khaki, from every corner of the Empire, all massed together and bent on the same task, it makes me proud. Every single man of us faces the chance of death, any hour, any minute. This is the adventure of our time, of our generation. Professor Kettle is right when he says that the absentee Irishman today is the man who stays at home.
Hubie moved the warm weight of his arm but I caught and held it, moulded myself closer to him. The martial law notice would keep people indoors a few hours yet. We wouldn’t be disturbed. I could lie here and listen, skin on skin, match my breathing to the rise and fall of his.
‘A sergeant I knew put a pistol in his mouth, held the muzzle against the lining of his cheek and blew a hole in his own face.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘The wound got infected and he died.’
I pressed my ear to the wall of his chest, listened to the sturdy knocking of his heart. He rolled on to his back. His ribs rose and fell under my spread palm. I traced the ridged skin of his stomach with my fingers, a pattern like barbed wire, dark weals punctuated by knots. He snatched a breath; his ribs stopped moving.
‘Does it hurt, when I touch them?’
He reared up and away. His back was wealed as well. I knelt up behind him, put my lips to the edge of his scars and breathed on them. Wrapped my arms around him and pressed my small breasts to the wings of his shoulder blades, rested my chin at his neck.
His good hand ran the length of my arm, encircled my wrist. ‘It’s hard to come back,’ he said.
I closed my eyes and tried to feel his words rise through my body, imagining the path they took through his: thought, nerve, gut, throat.
‘Those few days being here – before the fighting started – it was sickening. In France and in Flanders, I thought of little other than this – a bed, with sheets. A fire, a meal, a woman. I thought I’d never ask for more. But, being here, walking about – it disgusted me. People going about their business. Shawlies and their incessant wheedling and whining. Clerks, bankers, shopkeepers – all the men who don’t know the hell they’ve saved themselves from. Hardly anyone even wondering about what’s happening in Verdun, right now. Today. Sweet-smelling women like you, a reminder of all the things that will never be easy again.’
Hardly sweet-smelling now. ‘Such as?’
‘Every single thing. From the first instant of every day. Waking, and knowing.’
Ah, yes. I knew that one.
‘Buttons. Shaving. Food. Everything cack-handed. Your mind seething. You turn the corner of an ordinary street and the face of a dead man rises in your mind, a taste of gore, a roll of names, unanswered.’
He pulled away, stood up. ‘Even this. It’s no use.’
He plunged his feet into the legs of his trousers and tugged them the full length of his handsome legs, not bothering with underwear. He left the room without looking back, holding the trousers bunched at the waist with his good hand, the maimed one out of sight.
I gathered my own clothes and got dressed. Every hook and eye sealed the rich, strange smell of him against my skin.
He was standing in the pearled light of the early-morning garden, under the plum tree, listening to the guns. Ghostly shapes of hedges and trees gave way to the actual – as though they’d gone away for the night, leaving a mere image in their place, and were just now returning, one by one, to resume the business of daily life. A thin line of smoke spiralled up from his cigarette. Something stirred deep and low in me at the sight of his scarred and pitted back, a code that could take a lifetime to learn. I felt porous. I wondered what other surprises lay ahead. The haze lifted and the sun touched me. Shy as I felt, it warmed me through and through.
I walked out to stand in front of him. The hem of my dress was damp, the grass
cold on my feet and ankles, as though the sea might rise from underground, the old marshes reassert themselves any minute. ‘Will you please look at me?’
His eyes lifted to the level of my waist and stayed there. I took his two hands in mine. ‘You must know – your injuries don’t matter to me.’
‘Ha! They matter to me.’ He jerked his hands away, made the hurt one a claw and shook it at me. ‘Every time I touch you. This is dead. It feels nothing, except its own pain, a pain it’s not supposed to feel, in parts that don’t exist.’ His bitterness frightened me.
A series of explosions sounded, not far away. His mouth twisted, mocking a smile. ‘A part of me was glad when this happened, here. It makes sense to me. There, I’ve shocked you. It serves you all right! Why in hell’s name should you be spared?’ He stopped to catch his breath, rushed on. ‘Explosions, ruin, inferno … make sense to me.’ Fury blazed from his eyes.
I let it break on me, tried not to show my fear. It felt like a test. I’d stepped outside a boundary. This was the climate I could expect, the old protections gone. I touched his shoulder. Stepped closer, wary. Then closer still. At last, he put out his good hand and let it rest on my arm. In his own, dear voice, he said, ‘Katie. You’re not a bit like him, you know.’
‘Who?’
‘Liam.’
I turned back into the house. ‘I’m hungry. Let’s see what there is to eat.’
I arranged stale biscuits, a bruised tomato and a piece of sweaty cheese on a plate. We set to it without enthusiasm.
‘There’s that jar of plums, in the pantry,’ I said. ‘Will we have those instead?’
I pulled damsons, red as old blood, from their jar with a long-handled spoon, ladled them into his mouth, then mine. They tasted meaty: sweet, rich and dark as the sealed past they came from, with a hint of rust. A trail of purple juice ran down his chin. I licked it off. His skin was rough as a cat’s tongue, but his breath tasted like wine. Next thing we were entangled, slippery and close.
The sound of voices and an engine straining brought us to the window. A lorry full of soldiers passed. It creaked to a halt and they jumped down, crouched this side of the vehicle. No shots sounded. We moved back, out of sight, and looked at each other. I leaned against the wall and let my eyes take their fill of his face, the crooked eyebrow, the small pockmark on his chin, the full curve of his lovely mouth. I put the tip of a finger to the dent in his lower lip. He kissed it.
