The Death of William Posters

by Alan Sillitoe

  It was cruel and weird, this voluntary wilful parting. He kissed her and left, casually, as if coming back in ten minutes with fresh bread for their breakfast.

  She lay still, the door slamming through her, feeling that he’d never open it again. If he weren’t back in two weeks she would take a plane to London, go to the house in Buckinghamshire and wait for her baby which, by time scheme but not physical possibility of touch, could have been George’s. After that, she would carve out her own life as Frank was carving out his, in action and not love. If he survived his crossing of the desert he would know where to find her. In that sense they belonged to each other and she would always wait for him.

  The blue light of dawn clawed at her belly. She had a baby, and love must die. The universe was taking it back. Where the claws of love had rested the flesh was rotten. Frank knows this, and is acting it out in the only way possible, by leaving me. Will God allow the world to be proletarianized in this way? He’s emptied me of love, but I feel better than I’ve ever felt in my life. To live out a great emptiness is to fulfil yourself completely. I can’t put into words what has happened.

  23

  A wet Atlantic wind lurched in from the chopping sea, and all the clouds, ragged and green, looked as if they’d decided to come south and make a party of it. ‘One big downpour,’ Shelley said, ‘and every dip of the road between here and the desert will be a lake. In which case we won’t get through this side of a month.’ He decided on the coast road, rather than risk the mountains beyond Tetuan. Egrets stared into pools by the open roadside, their reflections like question marks upside down. ‘If you hadn’t looked so much like a working man, our friend at the bookshop wouldn’t have smelled two rats. Especially when you wouldn’t take his gelt,’ he went on, continuing an earlier argument.

  An anaemic forest spread out from the road. ‘He can stuff his gelt where it belongs,’ Frank said. ‘What do I want money for? I don’t care if my job isn’t pensionable.’

  The word H I E L O was written plain and big along the side of their covered lorry. Ice it is, Frank thought, but bugger-all whisky to go with it. He’d brought nothing except two cartons of cigarettes and some money, and couldn’t imagine a more perfect way to depart. Shelley was at the wheel, and Frank took the spare seat, a closed map on his knee. Four Moslems lay on bales and boxes behind, smoked and talked, well-built, thuggish men of about forty wearing khaki trousers and battledress under blanket-like burnouses. Another six would flag them at a crossroads beyond Fez.

  A squad of police manned a roadblock at the next junction, a zone of short steel spikes laid out like a carpet. ‘You’d better make with the Arabic, or we’ll have to use those guns on these bastards.’

  Shelley pulled in: ‘Keep quiet.’

  Frank saw himself back in Tangier by midday, either laughing about their misadventure in Myra’s arms, or cursing his luck behind bars, with Myra trudging up to the Kasbah jail with a billy-tin of rice and mutton, kif-fags and tea.

  The Moroccans in the back were motioned outside, not a word said, rifle spouts and law-faces moving around the lorry. Shelley’s hand stretched from the cab. The officer looked at his papers, saluted as if a bee had flown out from them and stung him, and waved them on. The Moroccans climbed back, and Shelley manoeuvred the lorry through a gap in the spikes.

  ‘What was on those papers?’ Frank asked as they turned up into the olive-grown hills. ‘Khrushchev’s signature?’

  ‘The Prophet himself signed it,’ Shelley laughed, ‘then Mao Tse Tung. Don’t think we’re the only lorry on Route Twenty-One. Not that there are many. As always, the north fares better, because you can always find ships to put stuff down along that coast. You’d be shocked if you knew how many Englishmen were making a fortune on that run, with their little ships from Gibraltar. Trust the Limeys with their little ships.’

  In the afternoon, under a lead-coloured sky, the lorry roared its guts beyond Meknès and up into the Middle Atlas. Snow soon piled on either side of the road, curving and twisting to seven thousand feet. ‘This is nothing,’ Shelley said – though no one complained, ‘you’ll be crying out for water in a few days and having your nuts scorched off.’

  ‘I’d have brought a keg of brandy if I’d known,’ Frank said. ‘You mean to say they’re fighting a desperate civil war over there for country like this? Don’t blow your top, commissar. I’m making a joke. I know it’s rich country for all that. The Yorkshire Moors are rich, as well, snowed-up or not. Still, the desert is healthy, for hermits and scorpions. At least I could have brought my skis though, if I’d known about this.’

  Peaks and rolling flanks were bolsters of snow, a vast rumpled skybed that someone had left in a hurry. The sight and smell of snow when they pulled-up for a legstretch made him almost lightheaded. Moroccan shepherds huddled their flocks into rough shelters. Frank was salaamed when he gave one a cigarette. A knife wind scraped along the drifts, dusted the road that had been cleared by ploughs a few days before. A bus, its top piled with bales and suitcases, passed at a speed even Shelley shook his head at. Veiled women and Old Testament faces of impassive men gazed from inside.

  The snow made Frank feel spiritually clean. He’d never seen so much of it, nor been so high among mountains, nor so many miles from any churning sea. This last fact impressed him most, and he wondered whether the moon got this far inland. Certainly the sun did. A bleak thumbprint showed for a minute from a mountain shoulder. A Peugeot cruised by, a French family up from some holiday oasis, woman driving, crewcut head of a man leaning out with a ciné camera aimed at the sheepfold and forest of high cedars humped and laden with snow. Snow took the sense of density out of a forest, made it seem more accessible in that it widened the space between trunks. Larch trees and ilex patched the cedars, hard to pick out unless one had the trained eyes of Shelley. ‘I expected a desert and I got Siberia,’ Frank said, glad of his cap, overcoat and heavy boots.

  By nightfall they were over the Middle Atlas, and ready to bed down near Midelt. In spite of bitter cold the Moroccans slept in the lorry, guarding in turn the stuff they were moving south. A fire in the hotel yard huddled them in talk except for the blackest hour of the night. Frank and Shelley drank Pernod at the kerosene-lit bar inside. Frank asked why there was so much unemployment in Tangier and Morocco. It didn’t puzzle him, yet he wanted to know.

  ‘Since the French pulled out of Morocco the industry has collapsed. Also, a developing country needs a statistical system to measure its progress and potential, otherwise, it doesn’t move. You can’t do anything until you get one. When Tangier became part of Morocco, forty banks closed in one day. And when money stops circulating, the economy stops running – what little there was.’

  ‘People can work, even without money,’ Frank said, ‘until things get properly organized. It’s better than no working at all.’

  Shelley smoked a pipe on long hours of driving, and lit up now. ‘They’d work for food, if there was any to hand out. They’re primitive enough for that. And they’re good workers, in spite of what a Frenchman might tell you. But there’s no surplus flour to pay them with – unless it’s a handout from Uncle Sam.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a case of them having the wrong sort of government.’

  ‘Some people in the big cities are trying to alter it, but it’s hard. Most Moroccans are tribal and primitive – let’s face it – and they don’t want things to change.’

  ‘It’s the towns that matter,’ Frank said. ‘Sling me some more of that water. This stuff’s punching holes in my stomach.’

  ‘The Chinese Revolution began with the peasants. Same in Cuba and Vietnam. Algeria as well. You’re old-fashioned, still harping on 1917. I don’t have much faith, Frank, in the modern masses, as too many individuals are called. The only magnanimous action of modern times was a passive and unconscious one – that they allowed the hydrogen bomb to get cooked up. Which is where we come in. Guerilla wars are the only possible ones from now on.’

  ‘You t
alk as if capitalism is finished,’ Frank said. ‘It’s not that easy. I wish it was.’

  Shelley laughed: the idealist with practical solutions. ‘Capitalism is a luxury liner washed up on an island: the people already there swarm down to the shore and loot it, to rebuild their own boats with its help – almost from nothing.’

  ‘Have you ever tried to make a nut and bolt?’ Frank asked, fed-up with his flippant images.

  ‘No, but I’ve known many people who can make them. They’re a dime a dozen. I’m getting stoned. I’ve got to sleep. Allow me to flip off to my pad like a cross-eyed penguin.’

  Through the rock-rock-rocky mountains and the pure-and-driven snow, balancing on bootlace roads with the smell of pine cones and nostril-burning frost to clear the head, Frank became as adept at such turnings as Shelley, as if they’d been on the trek for weeks. Stapled by front bend and backmirror hairpin, the new land blinded him to past or future. Trees hammered the sky over them like a circus tent in which only thoughts and sensations of the present could perform. In spite of plenty to eat and smoke and a shower last night at Midelt, he already felt as if he were living rough, a tramp with a purpose, sharpened by driving and fatigued by lack of past or future.

  The country was cold (even at midday), stony, laced with iron trees, vast. The world is small until you come to the wilderness, he thought, then you see how big it is. Beyond the desert there was jungle, land still unexplored, unsurveyed, unconquered.

  They followed a narrow river hemmed in by sheer rock, going under a tunnel at one place. The first palm trees appeared, stuck like Worn-out mops along the water-edge, thickening to a belt of green on either side. Luxuriant green snaked between barriers of red-coloured rocky pinnacles, the narrow wedge of a valley opening towards blue sky. Under high sedate palms grew orange, lemon, pomegranate trees, flourishing by the knife-glint of irrigation ditches cutting out from the main bountiful stream.

  Seen from above it was a pattern of glass fragments, crystal strips scattered in green chaos, yet made orderly and precise by the water rations delivered to each plot or field. Nothing had come about by accident, only by labour and brain, time and patience, a battle for increase against the nearby desert – so marvelled at by Frank that he once misjudged the acute switch of a curve and almost shot the whole of them down towards it.

  They stopped for a meal of cold beans and mutton, bread and mint tea. Filling watercans and loading them on the lorry, he tried to imagine what Myra might be doing at this moment, saw her dimly in the flat wearing her maternity dress, reading and relaxing on the Frenchman’s grand divan, abstracted and distant from him, as he was from her, certainly. He loved her like that, hoped to be back with her soon, to be there when the baby was born. He heard its cries already, brought to the nearby stream as an antidote to the desert.

  West and south from the last village of their trip, dusk-clouds higher than the highest reddening escarpment were banked up tall and rugged with pink fire, as if part of a wall enclosing the whole world in whose middle he seemed to be standing. Transfixed, he stood alone, a clank of buckets and gabble of women at the well behind.

  The light at dusk was of a half-clear quality that made him doubt the power of his eyes, rub them and wonder whether he needed glasses. But wind and dust was the breath of evening desert in midwinter. He expected to feel particles of snow against his skin but got grit and sand, differing temperatures striated one within the other. The sharp line of spectacularly jagged cloud seemed like real wall from this village of gardens and date groves, goat-bells and camel-grunts. They would head towards it at night, as if darkness were the only way to get through safely, no meaning left of its terror. They would come back that way, return under its mounds and hillocks – if it were still there.

  Smoking, shuffling his boots on a boulder, he turned to see whether this same red wall surrounded everything. Since it rarely rained, why were such big clouds gathering? All he could see was a deeper fallen night, a corrugated ceiling to the spreading darkness, with land the same non-colour. He returned to his more livid views of the Hamada du Guir, but they had gone, red wall vanished – though perhaps only the deepening night concealed it. The nearness of the desert made him feel like a machine rather than a man, its capacity well-marked and he his own toolsetter for it. He walked back into the village, finding his way in darkness over-stones, and rubbish.

  All number plates had been taken from the lorry, and they had given up their passports to the village agent. Frank felt glad as he handed his over, as if the last of all labels had been unpinned from his back, though remembering how impressed he had been on receiving it.

  The road soon worsened, headlights bucking at rocks and sliding gravel. They drew back as if shaking a fist at the sky, then dipped. The lorry rocked, like a lifeboat in a storm disregarding what other boats flee from. Bringing his head forward from the seat Frank looked out at lights and dust, the occasional bush, desert rose, or rockhump Sliding out of vision like an escaping footpad who had had second thoughts. They moved slowly south in the bitter night cold of an empty three-thousand foot plateau, yet it seemed that the way was a strip of land only a few feet wide, and that they would pitch into nearby oblivion should the lorry, on one of its two-wheeled tilts, slip right over and roll, roll, roll.

  ‘This is the safer route,’ Shelley explained. ‘We’re bypassing a Moroccan post where the officer isn’t so sympathetic to the Algerians, believe it or not. He’d hold us up a few hours, which would throw us into daylight and get us seen by one of the flying napalm wagons. So we’ll go this way – because any rational man would think it’s suicide. The French don’t look much where we’re going.’

  ‘What about these lights?’ Frank said. ‘They’ve had me worried all the way from the village. We can be seen for miles. Or don’t we bother about that sort of risk?’

  ‘We’re a long way from the border yet,’ Shelley laughed. ‘I’ll clip them off when the time comes.’

  Frank hung on when the sway took him unawares, thinking that a man could get seasick this way. But no one did. Ten of them were packed in behind, all smoking shit-fags, except Shelley who smoked his in a pipe, sucked away as if it were whisky in the bowl. Frank couldn’t imagine what lay ahead in the way of landscape or human events. He was spinning out the rope of his life behind. It dragged along the ground, and only when it touched hard rock did it disturb him. In front was space; untouched, spiritual and corporeal territory, darkness for a sharpening mind to enter and fill up on. Unable to consider the past, he tried feeding on the future, but shied back from it because nothing was there. Only idleness has a future. Work, fatigue, dust and grit imposed the prison-minutes of passing time on him. He had to think on the present, dwell on it with the great concentration that can only be employed by a man who has no future. ‘These are the times when I’d like to read,’ he said. ‘At least you can see something in daytime.’

  ‘Recite a piece of poetry, then,’ Shelley laughed, ‘or a passage from the Bible. Isn’t that what the English do when they’re in a tight spot? If we can’t rub the boredom out of our lives we’re no use as people.’

  Frank smiled, in response to a grin he didn’t see but knew had happened. Those clearcut platitudinous teeth of Shelley’s will be the ruin of him, he thought, like the third match in the trenches. Three grins, and a mortar bomb’s got them all.

  By night and in secret they crept nearer to the border. ‘It’s no use looking for it on that map,’ Shelley said, maintaining the air of uncertainty. ‘According to mine we’re in Algeria already, so take over while I hand out the medal ribbons, will you?’

  Lights off, towards dawn they stuck in an unexpected pool of sand. ‘You bloody night-owl,’ Frank said. ‘I thought you knew the way a bit better than this.’

  ‘You can’t stop mistakes. What sort of a holiday do you think gun-running is?’

  ‘I always thought it was a man in a turban,’ Frank said, ‘picking off Beau Geste with a silver-handled blunderbuss and then
getting signed up for Hollywood.’

  Shelley rubbed his greying, close-cropped head. ‘No, it’s just getting jammed in a patch of lousy no-good sand when you’re not expecting it, and at me most god-awful time.’

  Everyone worked, with rakes, planks and shovels. Rubber burned from wheels uselessly spinning, and the futile grind of the motor seemed to broadcast its trouble across the blackness. Shelley tried again, but every attempt to get it out by engine-power dug the wheels further in. He raged at the unexpected: ‘We’ll have to race for that ravine now, to drop in safe before dawn.’

  The fire they were playing with was beginning to burn their fingers. Frank wanted to get at the wind and throttle it – in spite of the fact that, as Shelley said, it would obliterate their tracks. Its erratic moaning made him sweat. The sky was an owl’s eye they were crawling around in. Stuck fast in the sand, the whole dawn world of the wilderness was hooting softly over them – until totally drowned by a raving lorry engine like a massive dum-dum drill dividing his life with the maximum pain and clumsiness.

  Four planks were under the tyres, sand spaded clear. They were a team of horses and, all their goods scattered as if to start a market where one had never been before, the wheels gripped and climbed along the wood. Frank felt like cheering. The sand was grey grit, bone dry, and once off the planks they were in it again. The pool had turned into a lake, a morass of dust. This was the raw, real sweat of life, plagued by a burning cold wind and empty stomachs, tindermouths opening from the extreme backbone of life, trials and hazards before dawn where everything is impregnated with the total discouragement of universal past happenings. If the spirit can recognize this feeling and laugh at it, boot it down and go back to hope and work, then the book is closed and the trek without print or maps can begin.