by Lia Mills
I wanted to say something about Hubie, but I was afraid that if I started to talk about him I wouldn’t be able to stop. Instead I told her I might go to London to learn about antiques and fine art, come back to work in a shop.
‘What’s stopping you?’
‘Good question.’ I was an adult, after all. Thousands of people, millions, made their way through life alone. Why did I need my parents’ approval?
Vivienne mistook my silence. ‘Are you tired? I am. But let’s keep going as long as we can.’
I’d stopped noticing corners and low-hanging railway bridges by then. Anyone could have shot at us, at any time, but no one did. Less was said as the night wore on. Less needed to be said. There was a fog in my mind that matched the smoky, acrid air. I lost track of time, but hours must have passed before the engine stuttered and we coasted to a stop on a side street off Great Brunswick Street.
‘That’s it,’ Vivienne said. ‘We’ve no more petrol.’ Some soldiers pushed the car into a yard, said it could take its chances there for the night. They told us to go on up to Holles Street, where there was a waiting room set up for volunteers like us, with blankets on the floor for us to sleep on.
The waning moon took a knife to the sky, spilled a weird light through the smoky air as we made our way along. Was it my imagination that the walls of the houses we passed were warm, that they breathed sulphur? Ahead of us, at the mouth of a lane, were three soldiers. One of them had a corporal’s chevrons on his sleeve. They were looking our way. A fox in a moonlit garden is one thing; in a kitchen seeking eggs it’s another. I wished I’d Liam’s coat to pull around me.
‘Well,’ the fat soldier drawled. ‘Well, well. What have we here?’
Their eyes were hard and flat. I pulled myself up straight and tried to walk past, but he lowered his rifle and stopped me. Vivienne stood a little behind me. She was so small, almost like a child.
‘Let us through.’ I hated that my voice was uneven.
The fat soldier planted himself in front of me, so close the buttons of his uniform grazed the front of my dress, his face pushed towards mine. I could smell him. Sweat and the rotten breath of teeth unwashed for days, a stink of tobacco.
Cold stirred in a place so deep inside me I couldn’t name it. Everything inside me slowed. I’d a sensation of creepy-crawlies tracking across my skin, through the fine hairs on my neck and down my goose-fleshed arms. This was my city. They’d no business here, telling me where I could or couldn’t go.
Fatty bumped himself against me. ‘Give me a fucken reason.’ His voice slimed into my ear. ‘Just one.’
Liam’s voice bid me go easy, but words flooded out of me in a low torrent. ‘My brother fought and died in your army. If he was here now, he’d soon sort you out. Have you nothing better to do than harass women on the streets?’ The strangest thing happened then. I felt Liam leap to surround me, like a cloak, his hand at my mouth. Say no more.
The fat soldier bounced his bulk against me again, almost gently. ‘And have your lot nothing better to do than stab us in the back?’ He stood back and lifted his rifle to my breast. ‘If this was a bayonet,’ he growled, ‘I’d rip your traitorous, bitching guts out and spread them for the dogs.’
I couldn’t speak through Liam’s restraining fingers, or the hammer of my heart.
‘Steady, Phil.’ The Corporal gripped his arm and pulled it back. The other soldier shouldered his rifle and slipped away, eyes averted. The Corporal spoke rapidly into Fatty’s ear. ‘Save your bullets for them that needs ’em.’
Fatty bristled and glared, but he lowered the gun.
‘Come on.’ The Corporal’s voice was clipped. He stamped along beside us, a tense escort, leaving his horrible friend behind. When we reached the back door to the hospital, Vivienne thanked him. I said I’d go on back to Percy Place.
‘There’s a curfew,’ the Corporal said.
‘I have a permit.’ I showed him the paper I’d taken from Con’s car. While he scanned it, I told Vivienne she could come with me if she liked. I wasn’t sorry when she said no, she couldn’t walk another step, she’d stay in the waiting room. She said she’d keep me a spot, in case I was turned back.
The Corporal sighed. ‘Considering what happened to you earlier,’ he said, ‘I’ll walk with you.’
We didn’t speak on the way. I moved in a half-dream, as though I flew, towards Hubie.
There was a checkpoint at the bridge. Yesterday’s slaughterhouse. No, it was past midnight, that carnage was two days ago. ‘Let her pass,’ the Corporal said.
‘You live here?’ the sentry asked. ‘One of your neighbours got himself shot this afternoon. Watching. What do you all think this is, sport?’
A chill ran through me. ‘Who? Which house?’
‘Go on before I change my mind,’ the Corporal said. ‘Stay off the streets from now on, or you’ll get what’s coming.’
All the young leaves had been blasted from the trees. A hole in the paving showed where the big gun had been. Every window gaped, empty of glass. I craved water. The canal was a black velvet ribbon beside me, a margin I could slip inside and vanish, nestle on the reedy bottom, where the world was cool and silent.
I put the palm of my hand flat on the paint of Dote’s front door. It swung open, as though it had been waiting. I stepped over the threshold, straight into Hubie’s arms.
‘I was so afraid.’ His mouth at my ear. His voice coursed through me, flooded me with a rush of feeling I told myself was relief at being indoors, enclosed again in the incurious sheltering darkness of the house.
A piercing, unearthly shriek made me jump.
‘He missed you.’ Hubie moved away, struck a match and held it to a candle. Paschal leaped from the newel post to my shoulder, tugged my hair, butted his head against mine. He grabbed my collar, jabbering away.
‘Hello, yourself,’ I said.
‘What’s this?’ Hubie touched the bandage.
‘Nothing, only broken glass.’
Paschal patted my hair. I shivered a little. ‘It’s colder in here than on the street.’
‘It’s warmer in the kitchen; I’ve the stove going.’
In the kitchen, two lamps threw amber shadows on the table. I put Paschal down and went to the sink, poured a long cold drink of water, then another.
‘You’re pale as a ghost,’ Hubie said. ‘Look, I found a cake of soda-bread, fresh, made by a woman who gave it to me for cigarettes. And these.’ He put two smooth eggs into my hands. ‘We’ll have a feast. Katie? You’re shaking.’
He took back the eggs and set them in a bowl. I leaned into him and shut my eyes. He smelled of something like straw in the sun, a smell of summer dust and horses. ‘I’m so tired,’ I said to his solid chest. ‘I can hardly stand.’
‘Where were you?’ He helped me out of the borrowed cardigan and put it aside. Rested his thumb in my palm.
It was too big a question to answer. Instead I said, ‘A soldier said one of the neighbours was killed. Who was it?’
‘Mr Hyland.’
‘I was afraid it was you.’
He busied himself with a pan on the stove while I eased my sore feet from my shoes and worked the toes, telling him about the fires, which he could smell for himself, and the people streaming into Beresford Place for shelter. ‘Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.’ I was half hallucinating – was it Lockie I heard, banging that skillet on the stove, rattling plates loose from the dresser? What house was I in – everything smelling of peat and fire. Was I in the countryside, somewhere with a bonfire raging, was it autumn? No, I was in Percy Place. There was Hubie, coming with a knife to cut the bread. Behind him a tap dripped into the Belfast sink. If I looked, I’d see the stained, coppery runnel in the enamel.
‘There’s no butter, but the eggs will help.’ Hubie pinched salt on to perfect domes of golden yolk. Pierced, they bled sweetly into the floury bread. The most delicious thing I’d ever tasted. When I’d mopped the last trace of egg from my plate wit
h the bread, pushed the last crumb into my grateful mouth, he told me I’d a choice. Black tea, port wine or whiskey?
I said port.
The first sip woke my mouth. The second coated my throat and all the way down to my stomach with a fierce glow. I was ravenous still. I could have eaten three more eggs in quick succession. Just the one was nearly worse than not eating anything at all. ‘I feel so greedy, I’d eat the whole world if I could.’
‘I like you that way.’
He pushed the plates aside, refilled our glasses, lit two cigarettes and passed me one. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘We could go up to the parlour, but the windows have gone. Or we could go to bed.’ His face intent on mine. ‘We’d be warm up there.’
‘What about the others?’
‘No one can come ’til morning.’
‘I did.’
He lifted the hair from my neck. ‘You’re different.’
‘I need a bath.’
‘I think we can manage that.’
He dragged out an old copper hip bath from the scullery, half filled a large pan with water, and the kettle. Asked me to lift them to the stove.
‘Shouldn’t we fill up the pan?’
He waved his hand, no. How stupid I was, with tiredness. I’d have to do the pouring, when the water was hot.
Paschal curled up on a cushion in the corner chair with a contented sigh. I went over to the dresser, the low-burning lamp.
‘Are you cold?’ Hubie asked. ‘I could open the door of the stove if you want, but the water will take longer –’
‘No. I couldn’t bear it. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to face a fire again.’
‘Wait ’til winter, you’ll be glad of it then. Come here.’
I squashed into the straw chair beside him, curled my legs up, leaned into his arms. His ribs rose and fell in a steady rhythm that was easy to match. It was calming, to simply sit there and breathe, together. To wait for water to come to a boil.
Steam rose from the water. ‘That’s hot enough.’ I got up and emptied the pot into the tub. ‘Are we sure they won’t be back tonight?’
‘Not hardly. It’s after midnight.’
Shy, even in the lamplight, I took off my clothes. Tested the water, and sat into it, my knees drawn up to my chest. The tub was a tight fit. Designed for a child maybe. But I was glad to bend forwards and show him my back. He immersed a flannel in the water and squeezed it, letting the drops fall to my spine.
I drifted in a jewelled boat while he washed my back, then dabbed my face clean, avoiding the dressing. He put his lips to it instead, as light as breath. He soaped my chest and under my arms, ran the soapy cloth down my legs, along my feet and back up to my neck, squeezed water from the cloth to rinse me. Then he leaned in, to kiss me. My wet arms went up around his neck. He wrapped me in a towel and I was standing against him, falling into him, when there was a whoop and a splash, and waves of water sloshed over the sides of the tub. Paschal bobbed up with soapsuds on his head. He rubbed his eyes and chattered, took up the flannel and twisted it, wrung it out, tutting at the sudsy water.
We had to laugh. Hubie made me sit on the chair wrapped in my towel, put Paschal on a ladder-back wrapped in his, and dragged the bath to the back door. It shrieked across the stone flags. He tipped it out, one-handed, on to the grass.
‘Where there’s a will,’ he said, holding out his good hand. I put mine into it and got up to follow him upstairs, with Paschal, chattering, behind.
Hubie’s eyes were warm and dark, like rare, fabulous stones, tiger’s eye or topaz. I stood in front of him, unsheathed and bare. The feel of air on my skin was different when he was there. Those honeyed eyes passed over me, cupped the air and moulded it around me, changed it. I dropped my chin. My hair slid around my shoulders, fell down my back.
‘You’re beautiful.’
‘Thin as a stick,’ I said, quoting Florrie. Odd, to think of Florrie now – her blighted, postponed wedding. All this still ahead of her.
‘Curved,’ Hubie said, calling me back. ‘Like a scythe. Come here. Slay me.’
He’d planted something in me. Rooted behind my ribs, its shoots stirred. I was pinned to the bed by pleasure, a melting lassitude, my bones like jelly. All my life I’d walked around inside my skin not knowing what it was, what it opened to. I didn’t know what my body could do or want. How easily it could break. ‘Why does no one ever say?’
‘Maybe there are no words; we can only go around it.’ He drew a narrowing spiral on my stomach.
‘Strange how shy and stubborn words can be when you try to hook them to ideas.’ Alanna’s paper dolls came to mind, the flimsy tabs, how interchangeable they were.
‘So I’m an idea, am I?’ His hand stopped over my navel, rested there, called up a pulse I’d never known before. ‘What are you thinking now?’
‘That you’ll leave. When this is over, you’ll go back to your own people in the country.’ Maybe even tomorrow.
‘Will you miss me?’
I wrapped my legs around his and laid myself along the length of him, pinning him to the sheet.
‘I found out what happened to your Peace Man,’ he said later, when we were quiet again and Paschal was snoring on top of the wardrobe. ‘It’s not good.’
Cold crept through me while he told me that a priest saw Skeff’s body when he was called to administer the rites to a dead boy who’d been told to kneel down in the street and pray while an officer shot him in the head.
Like a kick, it would have been. Sudden. I pulled away from him, sat up.
‘There’s a lot of bluster, but I heard your man who did it is off his head.’
‘He should be shot himself.’
‘It’s just the one story. There’s fault on both sides.’
‘You don’t know this man. Everyone loves him. This is a bad, a rotten thing to happen.’
He gave me an ironic look. I went on, defiant. ‘We’re all worse off, if something’s happened to him.’
‘Not just him. There were others. Journalists. The twist of it is, they wrote for government-friendly papers. Which only goes to show, your man wasn’t thinking straight. They’re trying to smooth it over, but another officer reported it.’
‘Don’t.’ I hated his brittle, flippant tone. It made him sound like someone else, someone I would never know or want to, and that hurt nearly as much as the idea of that big bear of a man and his untidy beard, of all people, having been killed. Even children used to tease him in the street. ‘This is the worst,’ I said. ‘The worst they could have done.’
He pulled me back down against him. ‘You don’t know what the worst can be,’ he said into my hair.
‘Con says there’s not enough coffins. They’re burying people in gardens, storing bodies in halls.’
He went very still.
‘What?’
‘One billet we were in, they were busy making coffins outside our window. All night, they were at it. And in the morning they were stacked against a fence we had to march past. Those coffins were for us. That crowd out there’ – he gestured towards the window – ‘the things I’ve heard people say – you’d think they invented sacrifice. You’d think they’d never heard that a million or more young men have sacrificed themselves already.’
I told him about the soldiers who’d stopped Vivienne and me. His good hand stroked my arm and calmed me. Through the empty windows, fog crept into the room to listen to me tell about the hatred in the soldiers’ voices. How that private had smelled, the rough feel of his hands. These were men that Liam and Hubie might have loved, out there in Flanders. Their companionship, friendship, brotherhood – whatever it was that bound them – had kept Liam safe, up to a point. Then it destroyed him.
‘It was the strangest thing. Liam was there. For real. I felt his hand on my mouth. Telling me to be quiet and not provoke them.’
‘Good advice.’
‘You don’t believe me.’
‘You’d be surprised what I believe.’
>
‘Do you believe that he’s still with me?’
‘Why not, if you carry him?’
‘I thought I saw him once. I hear his voice, in my mind.’
‘Did Liam ever mention Thatch Doyle to you? An abrasive man, face like a ferret, but handy in a fight.’
Yes, he had. I saw my first corpses today. We moved into some German trenches that had been cleared by shelling, came to a place partially blocked by a spill of earth. Made our way around it and there they were. One lay across another’s lap, a pietà. Their uniforms in shreds. Skinless faces. Empty sockets for eyes. The seated one still wore his helmet. The most surprising thing about them was their teeth, ordinary in the strangeness. Grinning. Waiting for us to get the joke. Doyle worked the jaws, made them speak obscenities. No one laughed. He gave it up soon enough and set about burying them with the rest of us.
I’d imagined worse. The dead have no power here.
‘There weren’t many officers could box, but Doyle was good. Quick on his feet. One day after a skirmish – one of many that played out exactly the same that winter, gain ten yards in the morning, lose them all by nightfall, lose at least one man in each – I saw Doyle, leaning against a tree, during the roll. As close as you are now. But he didn’t answer when his name was called. I looked right at him and said his name again. The third time I said it, he went.’
‘Went?’
‘One minute he was there. Then he wasn’t. One of the men brought up his tags and his notebook, taken from his body an hour before. But I saw him.’
That night was a candlelit cave or a chapel. Gold and amber lozenges roamed the walls. Only a river I loved lay between us and a ravening, roaring beast, all red and black billows, snapping and loud, crushing buildings and stealing air. This flame was of a different order. When I held my glass to the candle, it kindled to shapes, a tongue, a globe that broke apart. He tilted his head and looked at me. I felt peeled, raw. My hair sat, heavy, between the bones of my shoulders.
