The Ephemera

by Neil Williamson

  "Sutherland?" Marten shrugged his eyebrows laconically.

  "Not Sutherland," I snapped. "Tell me again, where is your Captain?"

  "I told you, Sir. He's out..."

  "I don't believe you."

  He stared back impassively, as if he didn't know what all the fuss was about.

  "Marten," I said, maddened that he continued to deny the sound I had clearly heard, and desperate to make some sense of the situation. "I have reason to believe that something has happened to your CO. Understand that I will use this gun if you do not tell me the truth." I hardly knew what I was saying. It was a ridiculous threat. I had never shot anyone face to face, and I was pretty sure I did not possess the unwarranted ruthlessness to carry out my threat now. And it looked like Marten knew it. "Aren't you afraid?" I punctuated my words by rolling back the hammer of the gun.

  The supercilious smile that came as he said, "Not a bit, Sir," almost tipped me into unreason. I would have done almost anything at that moment to wipe it off his face. I felt my finger begin to squeeze the trigger. Saw that he observed that twitch.

  Another muffled sound. This time more of a scream than a moan. It came from the shadowy rear of the room. I strode over there, and discovered a curtained off alcove behind one of the empty bunks. I yanked aside the grimy cloth and found a man lying in a rough hollowed-out bed-shelf padded with blankets. He might even have been fairly comfortable were it not for his bound limbs and the roll of old bandages stuffed into his mouth. I had no doubt that this was the mysterious Braithwaite, but I could not for the life of me fathom what their purpose was in keeping him like this. Then I looked again. Something about the face, the soft jaw line, the straight sandy hair. Braithwaite. I had been at school with a Braithwaite. A cheerful chap with whom I'd passed many muddy, happy hours in the second fifteen. Unbelievable that this could be the same person, but I could not doubt the similarities.

  When I reached out, his eyes flew open, bulging wildly. I imagine I saw a flicker there that he recognised me too. Certainly, nothing else can explain what was to follow. As my fingers touched his shoulder, he trapped them between his wrist-bound hands. I struggled to free myself, but he held on with grim determination. When I looked back to the men for aid, I discovered the muzzle of Gordon's rifle six inches from my chest.

  "I'm afraid we can't let the Captain go, Hawthorne," Marten said. "It's like I told you, my man. He's very, very good to us. So good that we have to keep him safe from any possible harm. We need him. It'd be our ruin, if he ever left us."

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but the captive was clearly terrified, possibly to the point of mental breakdown. "Your Captain needs help," I managed, pain blooming in my hand as the man's grip tightened.

  "Not possible," Marten shook his head. "No doctors for Braithwaite, I'm afraid. And that goes for you too. I'm sorry but you can't be making any reports about this. It's been difficult enough keeping him secret this long. Sorry, old man." Then he executed a what-can-I-do shrug.

  Gordon levelled his gun at me and I knew then with absolute certainty that they were going to kill me. Perhaps in as little as a few seconds. My limbs were heavy, filled with the same icy water that beaded my brow, collected around my collar. I was aware only of the gun and of counting my hopeless breaths. And of Braithwaite's grip around my fingers, a hot, hot clench that tightened until I thought my knuckles would pop and dislocate, my slender finger bones splinter.

  There was screaming, but it wasn't mine.

  Braithwaite let go.

  And I was no longer afraid. Of anything.

  "I think it's time Corporal Hawthorne went for a stroll, Gordon," Marten said.

  Everything after that was dreamlike, I remember it all vividly but none of it seems in any way real. I nodded meekly, accepting my fate and not minding. Allowed myself to be ushered to the stairs, even as the Captain began to wail again. As if he knew what was coming.

  "Bye, then," I said, and began to climb the stairs, Gordon and his gun at my back.

  Outside, on the firing step, peering into no-man's land, I noticed with surprise that night had fallen. A clear, black sky, prickled with uncountable stars, stretched across the blasted field. Bright wands of search light beams angling up from both sides made it feel like fairyland. That was what I thought of as I clambered out of the trench—that it was a place as ethereal as the music of Debussy. It utterly delighted me. I looked back once, saw Gordon watching from the shadows. He sketched a cheerful wave, and I smiled. It was a pleasant evening, and as I began to walk, I felt good. More than that. Happy. As if all my cares had been lifted from my shoulders. Even if I stumbled over the broken ground, had to pick my way between the blackened and shattered stumps of trees, all that remained of a once charming little wood. Even if I knew I was being watched with incredulity by snipers. Even if I was waiting for the bullets to come as soon as the Germans got over the surprise of this idiot Englander ambling along like a weekend promenader. Waiting for the bullets. Happy, I began to whistle as I walked.

  The bullets came singing harmonics to my tune.

  ~

  It's been two months since they shipped me back. I've healed well—you can hardly see the limp thanks to this Kentish weather and the country lanes that make my daily walks a pleasure. To all intents and purposes, I appear fit to return.

  There. I've told it.

  No, not quite all of it.

  Because it's not really my health you're interested in, is it, Doctor? Not even my noted curious calm and good cheer while all around me here were jelly-headed wrecks. In fact, I even doubt that you are a real doctor—something about the way you mutter 'shell shock' as if it covers a multitude of mental malaises, the way our conversations loop around repeatedly to the nightmare I had three nights ago, the way you were unknown at this hospital until two days ago. The way you keep asking me, how I know. How I know details of the latest disastrous push along the Somme when the Commons haven't even been told yet. How I know, to the minute, when it happened.

  What can I tell you? For two months I have lived without fear. Can you imagine that? No nightly terrors as memories of the trenches populated my dreams. In fact no dreams at all. No daily anxieties about being sent back, either. Going back would have been no more than a nuisance—after all I love it here. I possessed not one ounce of fear of death or danger. But not just that. All those minor trepidations that hamper one's life were gone too—fear of infirmity, fear of old age, fear of living a life unloved, fear of failure. All gone. I was confident, relaxed and generally happy with the world. If it was insanity it was a most benign form. I didn't even care what people would think of me for extenuating Braithwaite's plight by keeping quiet about it. I try to tell myself that anyone who witnessed the daily horrors of the Somme might have done the same.

  Three nights ago I dreamt for the first time in two months. I dreamt of the trenches. We were crouched on the firing step, awaiting the signal. Then up and over the top, and immediately figures around me were spinning and crumpling amid a rattling hail of Maxim fire. One of them was Braithwaite. I woke screaming and sweating, and knotting my sheets in a heart-gripping panic.

  I felt fear.

  That's how I know what I dreamt was real.

  And yes, now I'm scared of going back; and I'm equally scared you won't believe this ridiculous story and report me as a spy. It has all returned after my cruel emotional lacuna, and it feels a dozen times worse than I remember. But at the same time, I know I've got it easy.

  Think about this. Marten and his boys had a problem. It was all very well managing to keep the state of affairs under wraps in the long stretches of inactivity, but when the order came for that push, what were they to do with Braithwaite? If they left him behind they risked discovery, and faced court marshal, and much worse—losing him. If, miraculously, any of them survived. Really, they had no choice than to untie him, stick a tin hat on his head and a gun in his hand, and take him with them.

  Good old Captain Brai
thwaite—a man who so cared about the young soldiers in his charge that he'd have done anything to help unburden them of their anxieties.

  Imagine him as the whistles shrilled along the line, stumbling along behind his brave boys who strode ahead, shielding him as well as they could, unfazed by the notion of walking towards their deaths. Imagine the crushing weight on his soul of not only his own personal terror, the excess burden of six others.

  I can't stop thinking about it, Doctor. Believe me, the foggy fields of shell shock would be welcome. Even death, a blessing.

  But this war is neither generous nor even-handed with its blessings.

  I wish I could tell you something that would have you certify me as unsuitable for service, keep me here until the war is over, but there have been enough lies. I thought of myself as a good man, but I have been colder and more callous than I would have believed capable of my nature. And all at the expense of a man who, even in his own terror, recognised me as one who once called him a friend.

  Perhaps it is right, after all, for me to return to the front. If you have any compassion, Doctor, perhaps you would tell them that that is my wish. It is surely fitting for a man to choose to die in a place where he found happiness.

  ~

  For this one, the ending came first: that scene of a soldier strolling through the Great War no-man's land entirely without fear. Once that scene was written, I had to work out how it came to be.

  Cages

  "Hello, Wilson. It's me, Jericho."

  The old man's eye surveyed me blankly through the narrow crack; dull grey, blinking, once, twice, and then gone as the door closed again. My heart sank. I thought maybe he was having one of those days where he didn't recognise me, and I would have to endure the process of introducing myself, jogging his memory until he remembered. I called his name again and raised my hand to knock a second time, but stopped when I heard the tentative jangle and clack of the security chain being removed.

  The door swung inwards at my touch. The tiny hallway was deserted. Old Wilson could move fast enough when he wanted. I hefted the grocery bags into the crook of my arm so I could close the door, and took them into the kitchenette.

  "I got everything you wanted, but they only had plain flour and they'd run out of baking powder. Have you got any here?" I paused putting the groceries away, waiting for an answer. It came eventually, indistinct.

  "Doesn't matter."

  I shrugged and returned my attention to the groceries.

  "What is it you're making anyway? A cake or something?"

  No answer, so I went through. I didn't see him right away, but then he turned his head slowly towards me and he was there in his armchair as always. The curtains were drawn, diffusing the light, leeching what little colour there was from the room. I ached to throw them wide open, but Wilson would complain like hell if I did. In the dim grey light it was hard to discern between his grey skin and his grey clothes and the threadbare grey fabric of the old armchair. As I passed the window I brushed the curtain, briefly allowing a hard bar of light to probe the room, touch his face, and he flinched as if struck. In that second of illumination I saw that he was crying.

  He had been looking at the canary in the cage which sat in the corner. The bird's name was Buster. It looked dreadfully thin the first time I'd seen it, but at least it had most of its feathers and chirped occasionally. In the intervening weeks it had lost still more weight. Now it lay weakly on the bottom of the cage beside its water dish, on a carpet of its own feathers. It was not yet dead. I could see the rapid rise and fall of its delicate rib cage, the occasional blink of a helpless eye. In the two months I had been visiting Wilson I could not remember ever seeing him feed the bird. In the cage there was water, yes, but no food. I could well believe it was starving to death.

  I don't think Wilson was a cruel man. Senile, forgetful to the point of neglect, perhaps. But not intentionally cruel. It was a desperately sad thing, but even so I found it hard to stomach.

  "Oh, Wilson," I sighed, reaching a finger through the bars to stroke the bird. It was trembling. "Look at him. We need to get him to a vet." I looked back at the old man. He had not moved. "When did you last feed him?"

  "Feed him?" His gaze travelled back to the cage. His voice was small, as if from a long distance. "I've run out of seed."

  I made to reach for the handle of the cage, saying, "I don't suppose it matters. I'll take him away right now and get him some attention, okay? He'll be right as rain tomorrow."

  "No!" The sheer unexpected volume of his voice stopped me. Like a crack of thunder from a cloudless blue sky, so out of place in this oppressively quiet room. Wilson was looking at me, his eyes incongruously bright, like new things set amid his faded paper features. He and I both knew there was no vet. Not for people like us.

  The way he held my gaze froze me there until he spoke again. His voice returning to its normal pitch, held a note close to pleading.

  "Don't take him, Jericho. Get the seed. It'll be alright if you get the seed. Just don't take him away. I need him here with me."

  He got up and shuffled over to the sideboard where he rummaged around in a drawer for a minute or so. Eventually he emerged triumphant. In one hand he clutched a very crumpled piece of paper. He smoothed it out, before pressing it into my fist. There was an address written on it. A West End address, across the river. It would take me hours to walk up there and back.

  "That's where to buy the seed."

  "Wilson," I said as gently as I could, although in truth I was getting a little impatient with him. I could see little point. The bird was probably too weak to eat solids by now. Best just to let me take it away and put it out of its misery. "That's miles away. Buster might die before I get back."

  He looked up at me levelly for a good thirty seconds, as if I were a slow student missing the point, before he said,

  "I might die before you get back. But I don't want to. I haven't been out of this building for twelve years. Hardly even out of this room, out of this chair here. And I've always had my Buster. Lynn understood."

  He pressed a thick wad of notes into my other hand. I protested.

  "This is too much, surely,..." but he stopped me with a tired hand on my bare arm. His skin was cool and uncomfortably smooth; worn.

  "Get my seed. Please." He sank back into his chair again. "I can't go. Even if I was fit, even if I wanted to, I couldn't. This room..." There was despair in his countenance now, and something else. He looked afraid. "I'm a prisoner here and I'll never, ever leave."

  ~

  I took the stairs; eleven flights. The lifts hadn't worked for seven months and it didn't look like they'd ever be repaired. I wanted to believe I was just doing this to humour his senility, but part of me knew what he meant.

  We are all confined by our circumstances. At least the we who live in these damp-ridden concrete towers, slowly sinking into the ever gluttonous Thames. Above the high tide mark and below the poverty line, sharing our homes with the rats and the roaches. Social Services' answer when you have no where else to go. Well, no one would live here from choice.

  Lynn understood. She was his daughter. We became lovers soon after I came here; but more than that, I don't know, companions, soulmates. At least so I thought. We traded dreams attempting to raise our horizons beyond the concrete walls and the ever expanding mudflats. I never knew she had a father until she was gone, chasing her own private, desperate dream—the one I never shared—leaving a note which read, Love you. Bye. Look after Dad.

  Prisoners of circumstance, yes; and Wilson even more so, physically and mentally bound to his tiny concrete cell of a flat. I think he may even have spent some time in jail, but I'm not sure. I visited him every three or four days, making sure he was alright, buying his food once a week. Every time I saw him it seemed he had faded a little more into the pattern of that room. That drab collection of featureless clutter. His life's possessions, all unremarkable individually, just an old person's things but together constitutin
g a mosaic which had absorbed him. As if the pieces had subtly shifted around him over the years to make a place for him in the picture.

  ~

  The seeds were expensive, costing almost all the money that Wilson had given me. I carried them home in a paper bag. He took the bag from me, carefully, almost reverentially, and set it down on the sideboard beside the cage. I hung back at the door. From there the canary inside seemed completely motionless. I wasn't sure it was still alive. He tipped the bag out onto the sideboard and began to sift through the pile of seeds.

  "The man said it's mixed, I'm sorry. They didn't have just canary seed."

  "Doesn't matter. There's bound to be some canary in amongst it. Ah." He had found what he was looking for. Wilson held several large oval-shaped seeds up to show me and then opened the door of the cage. Buster proved he was still with us by lifting his head a little to meet Wilson's hand. Then quickly, and so roughly I thought he must break its neck, Wilson forced open the bird's beak and jammed one of the seeds right down its gullet. The little eyes bulged as it choked the obstruction down and the bird collapsed again to the floor of the cage.

  Wilson turned round, wiping his hands on his trousers and smiling broadly. Then he ushered me out, saying, "He's all right now. Come back tomorrow and you'll see him. He's all right."

  ~

  It was a most beautiful thing. In that half lit room its feathers shone gold with a brilliance that bordered on luminosity as it flitted and darted around our heads. I couldn't help but laugh to see it, and to listen to the joyful music of its song. Wilson was chuckling quietly to himself and the happiness in his face gave me as much of a buzz as the miraculous bird itself.

  And then I saw what lay on the floor of the cage. The joy drained out of me and I swear I almost threw up. I have said that I didn't think he was a cruel man, but even if he did not understand that birds must be fed more than the occasional biscuit crumbs, what else can you call his treatment of that poor creature. I gently lifted the wrecked carcase out of the cage and wrapped it in newspaper. The old man's attention remained fixed on the other bird which was singing away cheerfully on the top of the dresser. Buster. Sick joke, and it wasn't even intentional.