Copyright © 2015 Robert Allison
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To my parents
Contents
North Africa: 1942
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Three
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Acknowledgements
NORTH AFRICA
1942
One
1
He wakes in the desert, surprised to hear the anthem for his funeral. ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ – Gene Austin, Victor Orthophonic Recording – its refrain rising above the descant of flies.
On his back, he sees himself foreshortened, his limbs defined by a riot of wings. His greatcoat spread at his sides, its weave shot through, the tracery to some fierce onslaught. Towering from the crimp of his khaki drill shirt is a metal rib, brilliant with sunglare. Quite painless, unless he moves.
Oh, what a hard luck story.
Gm-C7-F-Dm
Other melodies come to him. ‘In the Mood’ – The Glenn Miller Orchestra, ‘There’s a New Day Coming’ – Harry Roy and His Orchestra. The Adagio to Bruckner’s Eighth: serene, ecstatic. In the next life, he thinks, I shall be a musician, composing a rag to misadventure. The sand humming, his fingers laying the beat, inselbergs and yardangs in song. He purses his lips to whistle.
A mistake. The spittle from his coughing draws the flies. They will press into the breach, laying eggs in his throat. His sun-blackened cadaver expanding and contracting, sitting at breakfast, reclining at supper. The puppetry of maggots: he has seen it. Dying will be a dirge.
Heat boils him back to the moment. The shadows of rock pylons newly canted, lazy clock hands across the desert floor. No perpendiculars, only inclinations, a parchment of obliques. His forehead is soused in sweat, likewise the hollow of his throat, the cave of skin below his breastbone. The membrane over his lips has lifted away.
He turns his head, disturbing the flies. Through the tinted celluloid of his goggles an acreage of orange scree billows into tall hummocks, sandstone reefs scooped by the currents. In the next life, he thinks, I shall be an artist, making a guazzo of this bare ocean.
There is even a wreck, lying some three yards behind him, hanging from a vine of black smoke. A motorcycle collapsed onto its haunches, its wheels crumpled like bottle caps. He has no memory of it.
Pain arcs through him, causing him to grasp at the sand, and for an instant he sees the picture of himself in the embedded shard. His last, strange portrait before he is to be reduced, dispersed into the sand.
The pain recedes, and he closes his eyes to imagine himself quitting his own body, spiralling downward, becoming unplottable. How far to the centre of the earth? How far to the underworld? His name understood there as ––––––, an Elysian murmur, a sonance unknowable to the living. Only the dry kernel of him left to mark the ground above.
A man with dark moons for eyes crouches over him. Black lenses stitched into a wrap of hide. His peaked cap displaying the insignia of a pale blue eagle over tricolour cockade.
‘Tommy? Tommy, can you hear me? Nice motorcycle, Tommy. Matchless Three-fifty cc. Overhead valve. Teledraulic fork. Good for the bumps.’ He hoists the sand goggles onto his forehead. ‘I know British motorcycles. Norton side valve. Velocette. BSA. I rode an Empire Star with sidecar. Very reliable, almost as good as German. But our Zündapp has Sperrdifferential. Hydraulische brakes. It’s the future. I said to my older brother to have my BSA but he bought a Benelli instead. Can you believe this? A Benelli. I said to him, don’t buy this Italian shit. They make nothing to last. Just like the mine you rode over. Rusted detonator wires, you see. The smallest touch and boom! Italienischer Schrott. Your Matchless is kaput, Tommy. Are you thirsty?’
Yes. Where did you come from? I blinked and you were here.
‘It’s okay, Tommy. Don’t try to talk.’ He uncaps a felted canteen and brings the nozzle to the wounded man’s mouth. ‘So you were a rider, a postman. I looked in your bag. Letters home. That’s a nice thing, Tommy. A great thing for your friends.’ The flask smells of cordite and gun oil, the water as warm as saliva. ‘Not so smart to ride without a helmet, Tommy. Even here. I’m going to take off your goggles, okay?’
Okay.
‘Can you see? You have blood in your eyes.’
Yes. Are you my confessor?
‘Tommy, there’s shrapnel between your ribs. I shouldn’t pull it out. There’ll be infection soon. Your lungs may be damaged. Have you had morphine?’
No.
‘Warum beschäftigst du dich noch mit ihm? Lass ihn einfach in Ruhe!’ The DAK man’s comrade is sitting in the sidecar of a sand-painted combo two dozen yards distant. ‘Das ist Zeitverschwendung.’ It’s pointless, he’s finished!
‘If I had morphine I would give it to you, Tommy. One moment.’
Yes, okay. I’ll wait.
The DAK man walks over to his fellow in the sidecar and speaks with him. He returns to unholster a pistol.
‘Tommy. There’s nobody near. Nobody coming. It doesn’t look good for you.’ He flicks off the safety, slides back the toggle. ‘I want to do what’s best for you. If you understand, just nod.’
Certainly. Can you hear my funeral anthem?
The DAK man aims at the rider’s forehead. Gott mit uns, Tommy.
Click.
Click 2. Scheisse.
Click 3. Arschloch.
The DAK man frowns at the weapon. Sand in the firing mechanism? A dud round? Mistress Fortuna?
Italienisch? the rider thinks to enquire.
The DAK man looks to his compatriot then shakes his head and holsters the pistol. ‘What’s your name, Tommy?’
‒‒‒‒‒‒‒.
He crouches and inspects the rider’s ID tags, an olive-drab octagon, a brick-red disc.
‘Tommy, can I take these? Als Talismane. Glücksbringer.’
Yes, take them. I don’t need them any more.
‘Seine Uhr!’ The fellow in the sidecar again.
The DAK man undoes the rider’s wristwatch. ‘I’m not stealing this from you. After the war I’ll find you again. I’ll give it back.’ He searches the pockets of the rider’s greatcoat and pulls out a small brown pay book. He flips the pages. ‘You see? Now I can find you. Maybe then we can be friends.’ He unbuttons a pocket on his field blouse and withdraws a crumpled packet. ‘Möchten Sie eine Zigarette? Victory V?’
Victory V = pee. I think I might wet myself. Don’t you have Woodbines? Players Medium?
The DAK man lights a cigarette and places it between the rider’s lips. The rider coughs and blows a bubble of blood, the cigarette toppling onto his c
hin. The DAK man plucks it clear and wedges it between the rider’s fingers. ‘So now I have to go, Tommy.’
No, don’t go. Stay.
‘Better for your eyes to wear the goggles.’
But I don’t want you to go.
The DAK man rises and walks back to his comrade in the sidecar. He kick-starts the motorcycle and gestures down towards it. ‘BMW. Always a good starter. Not like a shit Benelli.’ He twists the throttle, the combo throwing up a spume of dust as it motors away. His companion gazing back, expressionless, as the heat gathers them up.
The cigarette burns down to the rider’s fingers, causing him to snatch his hand away. Victory V = . . .
He doesn’t fight the sensation this time, allowing his bladder to empty. That precious physic which cools Vickers gun barrels, refills radiators. That when trodden upon toughens the soles of the feet. In the desert, one wastes nothing. He turns his head to see the postbag lying beside the broken motorcycle, ransacked and close to empty.
I was a rider, a postman. A great thing.
At night the crackle of dunes gives way to a cantata of sighs. The cold now entering via the channel of steel in his breast, vitrifying the bones, congealing the blood. His heart is beating quicker, his breaths shorter, the muscles of his arms and legs stiffening. The end, he supposes, must be near.
He pulls off his goggles, the moon an exit wound in the blackness. He recognises the Dog Star, the constellation of the Hunter. He remembers the rotating charts from The Observer’s Planisphere of Air Navigation Stars (Francis Chichester). Key to the Indestructibles.
A scuttle between the rocks alarms him, those creatures who secrete themselves by day now busy. Something skitters over his hand, making him start, and he tries uselessly to shift position, his legs heavy and inert. This wretched sentence!
He closes his eyes, trying again for detachment. But there is no peace in the dark, images of a furious conflagration insisting upon him. The roiling carcass of a tank, its tracks slipped from its wheels, the steel of its hull phosphor-bright, oil smoke vented in magic-lantern staccato. He runs towards it but too late, each step a fatal interval. A man emerges hauling the drape of his skin behind him, two others fused into a single trunk as they heave themselves up, both blanketed in fire.
He trembles at the sudden compression of gravel, the slide of grit. Some sly predator, bearing upon him unseen! He waves an arm, crying out with the effort of it, a brawl of pale robes already dazzling the corner of his eye. A white keffiyeh. Then quick black eyes.
The vagabonds whisper to one another in a mysterious tongue while they ransack his clothes, his pockets, imparting in their closeness a train of balms: oiled goatskin, sumac, za’atar, tincture of frankincense. They take from him a small magnifying glass, an ID card, a pocketknife, a silk map from the waistband of his tunic, the buttons from his pockets. They find an envelope in his shirt pocket and toss it aside, then turn him over to complete their ransack, the sensation dizzying to him. They rummage his postbag, then strip the Matchless of its battery and its leather seat before stealing away, pale gallabiyas tapering into the dark. If he had the fluids for it he would weep. The nausea is worse, the pain worse, the body’s poisons welling. He looks again to the motorcycle, seeing in that moment the tale of it. The hot breeze as he had put his head down into the wind, the sting of dust, the huffing of Teledraulic forks over rises and gullies. The shock as he had been snatched up by a ferocious bloom of air, the Matchless careering end over end. His first thought afterwards: that he had bitten his tongue.
He uses his elbows and heels to draw himself towards the wreck. He gathers the postbag to him and pushes any loose letters back inside. Then pulls the bag beneath his head as a pillow. This is where I will stay, he thinks. With all these names.
2
Can you hear?
How is the pain now?
Are you dizzy?
A finger is brought close to his face, drawn to the right, then left, up, down. An infant’s learning game.
How many fingers now?
What do you see?
A half-lit world. The moon over ironstone, Cassiopeia rising. What can he see? Three fingers. Then four. Then two. (Is it two?) Nothing of purpose.
Are you thirsty?
Yes.
They put a mug to his lips, and mop his brow as he coughs.
*
They had come for him in the dark. Given him water and lifted him onto a stretcher then ferried him to an ambulance. Not an ambulance proper but a lightweight truck daubed with a red cross, his stretcher wedged between jerrycans on its hardwood bed. They had driven without headlights while he had watched the stars leap, his head lolling in the fetors of gasoline, grease and rubber. One of his rescuers had smoked a cigarette, its tip shrouded with a holed tin to douse the glow, and he had turned around every now and then to call through the canvas. Not far now, just hold on.
They had brought him to an encampment without lamp or firelight, a modest leaguer comprising several small tents and a parked Quad tractor, a squat, blockish vehicle designed to haul twenty-five-pounder guns. He had been lifted from the truck and taken into one of the tents, several sombre-faced spectators following. They had laid him on an iron-framed bunk, where they had cut the urinous and sweat-lathered clothes from him while he had spun helices about himself, his bearings still aligned to a yawing axle. Soon have you shipshape, one of them had said. Got to you just in the nick.
‘Sorry about the piss,’ he’d mumbled.
One of his benefactors had sat on a locker by his bedside. ‘Can you tell us your name?’ A chorister’s voice, pitched in the higher registers.
He would have replied with an aria if he’d had the air. Instead he had shaken his head. ‘The Germans took it.’
How many?/From what direction?/Just one vehicle?/Are you certain?
‘No. I’m not certain.’
They had anointed his skin with iodine, then burst the thin flesh of his hip to introduce that grand elixir of calm. He had drawn it into his veins and swum in the warmth of it, absolved. The fellow with the cigarette patting his shoulder as he had risen to leave, saying, ‘We brought your letters.’ As though they were the very sum and essence of him.
There is a stain on the side of the tent which fascinates him now, a Rorschachian smear given definition by the light of early morning. He is blind to its colour because all he sees is red. It might be grease. It might be blood. A sudarium wrought in the sanguine and phlegmatic humours. A man might discover himself this way, by printing one’s face in three dimensions and scouting its uncharted defiles. Journeys of the cheekbone and brow, a cartography of fascia and bone.
But such notions can no longer distract him from himself, the discomfort from bruised muscles and torn skin pushing through narcoma, his hearing chambered and dull except for an insistent, high-pitched tone. In the roof of his mouth his tongue finds new pits and hollows, the palate bloodily re-engineered. The shard of metal has gone from his chest, replaced by a square pad of lint, but beneath it he can still feel the ridge of skin. And now the flies are returning. At first one by one and then in groups, buzzing and crawling through the loose flap of tent, settling on the offcuts of bandages and kidney bowls of carbolic. Their assault soon mounting to a full-fledged invasion, forcing him to shrink beneath his woollen blanket. And still their tiny heads and forelegs push inside.
He is close to tears. Why is there no more morphine? The effort of holding up the blanket makes him wheeze. He wants to cry out, but he has no breath for it. How can they leave me like this?
It seems an age before a medical orderly appears to calm him and brush away his tormentors, then to offer a mug of tea as if nothing at all has happened. There’s a biscuit with marmalade, if he fancies. How is his breathing now?
A trial. May I have more morphine?
When the orderly leans over to administer the injection, the rider notices that the man’s eyelids are swollen and discoloured as though by fire, the flesh of his brow simila
rly melted then sealed. And he is filled with wonder at this patient minister, whom he decides must be the archdeacon of opiates.
When he wakes again, he is called upon by the fellow who had questioned him at his bedside and who now gives his name as Brinkhurst, Ranulph.
‘Can’t offer you much in the way of scoff, I’m afraid. Just the usual Fray Bentos, some tinned sausage meat. Perhaps we can rustle you up a stew, something easy to swallow. Cup of cha, how would that be?’
Brinkhurst, he thinks, is an officer, but without the insignia to declare it. Slight in build but bearing the bale of jurisdiction, the type to sit with another and assume a hierarchy. Were it not for his sandblasted face, one might think him a country gentleman, a patrician whose world view might be served up in a shot glass. Yet he introduces himself without title. Soldiery as a workers’ collective, perhaps.
He says he will try to eat, and Brinkhurst seems gratified. Before leaving he pegs back the tent flaps to allow a wider view of the leaguer, and it takes a minute for the rider’s eyes to adjust to the glare. What had seemed in the darkness a modest arrangement appears in daylight more impoverished still, a schoolboy’s conceit in sticks and rags, a few canvas dens punctuating the flatness of a natural depression, the settlement’s boundary scored by slit trenches. The truck he was brought in on is parked alongside the Quad, each draped with scrim. Behind them is a small corral fenced with barbed wire in which two chickens bob and peck. And then a wide ditch overfilled with automotive debris and weeping oilcans. At the furthest reach of the camp there is a small cairn of stones, its crucifix fashioned from the helves of entrenching tools.
Brinkhurst reappears carrying a mess tin of bully stew and a mug of cocoa, both covered with lids. ‘Courtesy of the cookhouse,’ he says. The rider heaves himself upright on his mattress, mustering himself with a steady inhalation. He sets the tin on his lap and sifts the stew with a spoon, leaving one hand free to bat at flies. ‘Cookhouse’ is a flattery. He can see it through the opened tent, a crude fabrication of tin sheet and sandbags, only its apex rising above the surface, its greater measure lodged in the cooler earth. Beside it is a pyramid of stone-filled cans serving as a rudimentary water filter, and then a shallower dugout lined with corrugated sheeting and half-filled with sand. A rectangular ‘flimsy’ petrol can with a hose attached sits over the pit, a makeshift tap fitted to control the flow of fuel. An ingenuity that here verges on the Hellenistic.
The Letter Bearer Page 1
