Making Shore

by Sara Allerton

  CHAPTER 13

  BETTER THERE THAN HERE

  ‘Where they taking us?’ Jack stopped in his tracks just in front of me, a few feet beyond the doorway and before my eyes could adjust to the biting brilliance of the sudden sunlight, I smelt the air, thick with the heavy fumes of running engines. ‘Where are we being taken?’ he babbled to no one in particular. ‘Where we going now?’

  My feet began to seethe at the sudden contrast between the coldness of the tiles in the warehouse and the burning heat of gritty, sun-baked sand. ‘It’s all right, Jack. Keep your hair on. They’ve given us clothes… It’ll be some kind of camp,’ I murmured, nudging past him.

  Two trucks had been reversed to within ten yards of the warehouse exit and the German soldiers coming out behind us began to usher us towards their open tailgates.

  ‘I’m not getting in any truck till some fucker tells me where the fuck it is we’re going now!’ Mac cried, clutching his towel and toothbrush to his chest and casting around defiantly in search of some kind of explanation. His bluster soon evaporated though, when one of the officers to his right lifted his rifle slightly and inclined it gently into the small of Mac’s back to move him on.

  ‘Could you tell us where we are being taken?’ Clarie asked, appealing to the younger officer who had questioned me.

  ‘Sebikotane,’ he replied politely, and Clarie, as though this answer were enough to allay all qualms, nodding and thanking him, pulled himself up into the truck.

  As we left the city at what felt like reckless speed, the quality of the roads deteriorated rapidly and to such an extent that soon a slightly raised promontory of rocks strewn with tufts of spiny grasses, running along the centre of a barely visible dusty track, was all there was in terms of demarcation. Rutted and pitted with enormous potholes, these grooves ran seemingly across the vast tracts of surrounding scrubland into nothing, though on reaching their apparent end, the bouncing truck would suddenly swing round again to plunge into a new direction through the next few miles of arid waste. Thickets of spindly bush grew up between the rocks and banks of boulders, and dust flew up in vast, suffocating clouds as our trucks smashed through, disturbing it. Flung from side to side and seeking desperately to clench our thighs against the wooden side seats and gain purchase by pressing our feet hard on to the floor, we choked and coughed as the grit and dust spattered across our faces, slashing at our eyes and forcing stinging entry into our mouths and ears and noses.

  We jolted and jerked through disparate gatherings of cattle and of goats, their tinny bells clanking skittish alarm at our approach as they fled to scatter about the scrub, while their herdsmen, hands on staffs, gazed on in groups of twos and threes, and chatted unconcerned. We sprayed up dust at women in brightly coloured robes on the roadside, who waded in slow motion through the heat, carrying their bundled burdens on their heads. We swayed bumpily through villages, catching just the briefest glimpse of barely clad children playing by the dusty, dried-up water holes and their mothers, who sat in the shade at the doorways of their huts, pounding at the bowls in front of them and waving away with languid hands the persistent flies that plagued them. The journey seemed interminable.

  And finally, as the shadows of the scanty vegetation began to slim and lengthen, and the molten colours of the evening sun, casting their more sympathetic influence, began to redefine the landscape’s stark severity with the softer browns of dusk, the trucks swerved suddenly from the beaten track and began to lumber and spin their way across the scrub towards a small cluster of concrete buildings lying low against the skyline. As we reached them and skidded round the dusty outbuildings, groups of native soldiers, who seemed to be standing about not doing very much at all, turned casually to watch our progress. We swung on regardless through the compound, impeded neither by gate nor surrounding fence, until we came upon a large, dusty, open square where we lurched emphatically to a shuddering halt.

  With every bone in my body reverberating and still clutching at my new belongings with both hands, I jumped down from the truck. My knees immediately buckled beneath me and, unable to help myself, I scrabbled forwards, sliding in the dust and almost knocking into the immaculately groomed middle-aged man who had emerged at our arrival from one of the flat, grey buildings that enclosed the square. His uniform, pressed and spotless, gleamed reprovingly as our tattered group descended, shaken and exhausted, to form a filthy, bedraggled huddle just in front of him. His attitude of disdain, compounded by small, beady eyes and a thin beaked nose, added to the overall impression of the neatness of his person. Nevertheless, as I skimmed to a stop almost at his shoulder, I suddenly became aware that here was a man who clearly, if mistakenly, believed that the most effective combatant to body odour was the over-liberal application of talcum powder.

  He turned on his heel without a word and stalked over to a small, wooden rostrum about ten yards away. He mounted it and then, nodding impatiently at his sergeant, a much bigger man who had been loitering in a nearby doorway, waited for him to realise that he was expected to come out and herd us in to the kind of order that might denote appropriate attention. At the sergeant’s sheepish bidding and with some puzzled prodding from our German escorts, we shambled over to form a half-hearted line and stood, grumbling to one another before his rickety podium.

  ‘Jesus, got a right one, here,’ Mick muttered in my ear as the petulant official cleared his throat extravagantly. Obviously relishing the height advantage the two steps up the rostrum lent him, he had placed his hands neatly behind his back and, taking care to position his feet precisely two lengths apart, he now drew himself up, sufficiently prepared for oratory.

  ‘Welcome to Sebikotane,’ he began imperiously, as if the square were full.

  ‘To where? That wasn’t what the guard said, was it?’ I heard Clarie whisper frantically, from somewhere further up the line.

  ‘As you can see, this is not a prison camp. This is an army barracks,’ he continued, effortlessly fluent, though the rapidity of his speech and the peculiarity of inflection his native French ascribed it made him difficult to follow.

  ‘I am the Commandant and you will address me accordingly. We have no fences here, no barriers. But you will not escape, for where…’ he paused and raised his arm, before sweeping it emphatically at the endless, barren landscape that lay, at every turn, beyond the buildings, ‘… where would you go?’ He allowed himself the luxury of a small, thin smile and then threw both hands up dismissively. ‘Pah! You would die like dogs in the desert. Here, you will have food. You will have accommodation. You will work hard. You will cause me not a moment’s trouble.’ He paused again, this time presumably to give us the chance to appreciate more fully the threat behind his precepts.

  ‘Is this understood?’ Clearly, one or two vague murmurings of assent from a reluctant audience were unacceptable, for, instantly enraged by our apathy, his hands sprang to his hips and, eyes wide with sudden fury, he bawled into the dusky silence, ‘Is this understood?’ It took us two or three lacklustre attempts to respond volubly enough for his satisfaction, before he dismissed us, snapping angrily at his lumpish sergeant, ‘Show these men their quarters.’

  We shambled slowly off behind the drooping figure of the sergeant, conscious that the Commandant remained stiffly attentive on his little rostrum, staring beadily after us, as if eager to impress upon our scrawny shoulders the understanding that each one of us had been duly and unfavourably noted. Fraser caught me up. ‘Jesus, has he been stuck out here too long,’ he muttered as he fell into step beside me. ‘Mad, and in the middle of bloody nowhere.’

  ‘Well, it’s not as if we’ve not been there before,’ I answered grimly, without looking up.

  The sergeant, posting two Senegalese soldiers outside the door, left us in a long, low room at the back of the barracks. It was bare, save for a heap of brownish, heavy-looking mattresses that had been thrown into a pile against a wall in one corner, and it took us more than half an hour to lug them down and drag them
into spaces on the cold, concrete floor. The one electric light bulb, which hung disconsolately down close by the door, illuminated little but a small circle beneath its pallid glow, so we laboured in the semidarkness, heaving one mattress after another down and across the floor. A startled yelp from Slim, who had returned to the corner to help Tomas and Big Sam work the eight or ninth mattress down from the pile, stopped us all.

  ‘Fuck! Fuck!’ he leapt backwards, dropping the corner of his burden as if it had just stung him. ‘Jesus, what the fuck is that?’

  Big Sam whipped his hands away from the middle of the mattress. ‘What?’

  ‘That! There! There! It’s fucking huge!’ he pointed, shaking his hand frantically at a dark, shadowy area against the wall. ‘It fell out from in between when we pulled this one off.’ The rest of us, dropping what we were doing, went over to investigate.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Wait… there! See ’im?’

  ‘Jesus, you can’t bloody miss ’im. What the fuck is that?’ gasped Mac. As he spoke, a black form, easily over half a foot in length, suddenly unfurled itself from the cover of the darkness and began to scuttle quickly along the side of the wall. Wider at the front and clawed, its back end narrowed off and, when the creature stopped just as abruptly, its tail flicked round, curling up back over its own body.

  ‘Scorpion,’ the skipper frowned. ‘Better kill it.’

  ‘Scorpion? They’ll kill you, won’t they? If they sting you?’ Jack flinched.

  ‘’S why we better kill it,’ the skipper replied evenly.

  ‘Have to stamp on it. There’s nothin’ else to do it with,’ Big Sam said. ‘Don’t look at me! I’m not going near it,’ he added, shaking his head and taking a couple of steps backwards. ‘And I’m not sleepin’ on the fucking floor either, with them about.’

  ‘Where the fuck else you gonna sleep?’ Billy sneered across at him. ‘Ain’t exactly got much fucking choice.’

  We showered the scorpion with boots, though it managed to scrabble its way round to the middle of the next wall before it finally stopped moving. And when Mick thought it safe enough, he went gingerly forward, boot poised in hand, to smash its body into pieces with the heavy heel.

  Having arranged our beds, we sat about until the sergeant suddenly reappeared, this time with three soldiers, two of whom wore greasy, splattered aprons and bore between them an enormous pan of wet and slithering macaroni. They dispensed it sloppily into the tins handed out among us by the third and then they left us to it. Macaroni. It was lukewarm and it was slimy but having eaten nothing since we’d breakfasted on the Dumont early that morning, it was very welcome.

  We lay down eventually, unwilling to sleep for, though weak and therefore still permanently fatigued, it was not only now the prospect of abhorrent dreams that fuelled our reluctance to surrender to the night. The thought of sharing floor space with whatever else might be lurking in the concrete crevices was almost equally horrifying.

  In the unnerving, palpable silence of the big, cold room, I lay with my eyes wide open and watched: watched the heavy darkness closing in and watched the livid, shrieking memories of the other men, who lay awake and watched mine. I wondered if it would always be the same. When we got home, when we disbanded and I could live a separate life, a life in which I knew I could not afford for any one of them to figure, would I, would each one of us, as we lay down at night to sleep, be forever bound by the horrors of our collective memory?

  Slowly, unexpectedly, sleep began to smooth at the edges of my mind and as I let her soothe, I felt again my body floating, rising and falling at the gentle undulation of the waves and heard the waters’ soft welter of disturbance at the slow and rhythmic digging of the oars.

  ‘Cub!’ Jack, who had taken the mattress on the floor next to me, slapped my arm and stage whispered me awake. ‘Hear that?’

  ‘The water? Joe?’ I could barely form the words, fear closing in my throat, smothering them down, as the sickening terror that I had woken in the lifeboat struck and then slowly subsided.

  ‘Wha’? It’s me, Jack. D’you hear that scuffing sound? What is it? Like something creeping… close… Jesus Christ!’ he shot up, ‘something ran over my arm! Turn the light on! Turn the fucking light on!’ he screamed.

  The door flew open and the guard, who had been posted outside purely for the sake of form, snapped on the light. He had clearly been asleep, for squinting and shading his eyes at the sudden contrast, he stumbled his way down the centre of the room to where Jack, white and wide-eyed, stood in the middle of his mattress, shaking and squawking about a furry animal having leapt on him. The guard tutted and kicked around at the sides of Jack’s makeshift bed before grinning slowly. Leaning down, he grasped at and then held up by one of its thick, hairy legs, an enormous, dark coloured spider, easily the size of his own fist. Chuckling softly, he bobbed it cursorily in Jack’s direction before turning, with the dangling creature held out in front of him, to make his way back towards the door. He switched off the light as he went out.

  The following morning and every subsequent one thereafter, we were escorted by whichever guard it was who had slept the night outside our door back to the square. There, day after day, we queued to breakfast on tepid, viscous macaroni and then, by order of the Commandant, ever pristine and waiting impatiently on his rostrum, were made to stand for the Marseillaise. Invariably, the trumpeter assigned the task of playing it, as the Tricolore rose above the Commandant’s quarters, squeaked and blared his way through his rendition while the Commandant cringed and glared at him an increasingly furious disapproval. The Senegalese soldiers served only to infuriate him further by undertaking then to perform an extravagant display of unqualified incompetence in their perfunctory efforts to complete their daily drill. Screaming orders and frustration from his podium, he would berate them wildly, as, out of time and out of step, they marched into and turned back upon each other, succeeding, every single morning, in effecting utter disarray. The Commandant, speechless by this time with apoplectic rage, would signal to his officers who, divesting themselves of any responsibility for the ridiculous charade, would rush in from the sidelines, beating sticks held high, and proceed to thrash the worst offenders to the ground, battering them until their bodies crumpled and slowly stilled.

  That first morning, weak and insignificant, I cried out pathetically in protest, prickling in alarm at what was taking place before our eyes, but unsure of what could possibly be done to prevent it. The rest of the crew stood around, appalled into silence, but it did not occur to me to appeal to any man among them for action. I had, albeit unconsciously, ceased long ago to refer to any one of them as a point of reference, for having all too bitterly been exposed to the expendable brand of brotherhood espoused by their majority, I found it only made me cling more desperately to Joe’s.

  And I realised that I felt not only fear and anguish for the soldier on the floor, but beneath that, a hard, impetuous and resentful rage. Rage at my own impotence. Rage at the hypocritical disgust of my companions, some of whom would readily have delivered such a vicious beating, or worse, upon the lifeboat. Even rage at Joe. Not for the first time, I wondered what he, had he been with me, and given his propensity to rush in for the underdog, would have done. Would he have risked his neck and taken on the Commandant? Would he have tried, no matter how worn and enfeebled, to stay the sticks of the assailants or would he have recognised the futility of interference and suffered with the pain of it? I did not know and I raged at him for leaving me alone and unanswered.

  The suspicion that he would have acted, that he could not have stood by and watched such brutal violence and injustice without trying, at least, to deflect it, spurred me on. I started from my line, arms held up to show surrender, but calling out my quavering objection. Startled by the unprecedented interruption and momentarily distracted, the officers stopped abruptly and turned to look at me, their sticks held high behind their heads, hesitant. I came to a standstill, ten feet away, afraid.
And to my complete astonishment, the soldier on the floor who I was certain was surely severely wounded, if not dead already, took advantage of the sudden hiatus and, leaping to his feet, ran quickly off to join his company. Their noisy cheers and laughter at his return, as they clapped him cheerfully on the back, resounded round the square. Aware that his narrow eyes were now upon me, I looked across at the Commandant. His arms were folded and the gleaming buttons on his perfect uniform winked as he leaned forward. ‘You are a fool. You do not understand these things,’ he spat. ‘None of you will eat today.’

  It soon became apparent that the beatings, and the manifest indifference of the soldiers to them, were, in fact, a daily ritual. I need not have, after all, had to endure the cold-eyed, bitter scorn of most of my companions for having deprived them of their food and the resentment that in some cases did not wane for several days.

  I did not care. I had decided how it was that I was meant to live. I had once been taken to the brink of death with a man whose generosity was natural, who had tried, in the worst extremities of experience, against all odds, to keep his faith in sympathy and in kindness and who had, in eschewing the hatred and selfishness borne out of fear, shown me what it was to try to live with grace. How could I not even try? I had at least been given the chance. He had not. What would Joe have done? There have been so many times in my life since then when I have thought it. And so often it has made me act, bringing out in me the better man.

  We were put to work clearing scrub. Every day, beneath the unflinching desert sun, a couple of disinterested guards accompanied us beyond the buildings, to any point in the vicinity they cared to sit, and there, they watched us toil against the undergrowth, slicing our hands, and in my case, feet, on the spiny weeds and grasses. It was a pointless exercise designed purely to keep us occupied, for the incorrigible bush reinvaded almost as soon as we had cleared it. Besides, the following day, we would be taken out to begin again in an entirely different place.