The Letter Bearer

by Robert Allison

  ‘Coming back to you yet? Anything?’ It’s implicit in Brinkhurst’s tone. What soldier could forget his station?

  The rider shakes his head, tentative in his swallowing.

  ‘Your uniform had no markings of rank, no colours.’

  But there’s nothing for the rider to add, leaving Brinkhurst somewhat chagrined. ‘So I suppose you’ve no idea of the score?’

  The rider notices that his interrogator has the habit of repeatedly drawing his index finger from his lip to his ear and palpating the jaw muscle. The motion of unzipping himself, pulling back the officer carapace to reveal the commoner beneath.

  ‘Where are we?’

  Brinkhurst dips his forefinger in a dish of carbolic then rubs onto the tent’s canvas the contour of a long coastline, topped by the reclined head of a giant. He points out two locations close to one another. ‘Derna and Tobruk.’ He drags his finger further down the map. ‘El Adem.’ He trails his fingertip downward until it is dry. ‘And here’s the spot. Or thereabouts.’

  The rider nods, impressed that they have moved into uncharted country.

  ‘It’s the last day of May,’ adds Brinkhurst. ‘In case you were wondering. You’ve been out nearly two days.’

  The rider lifts another spoonful of stew. ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘Plain luck. Swann over there was on a recce when he spotted smoke.’ He gestures towards a bare-chested fellow inspecting the truck’s tyres, the tattoo of a cobra winding up his right arm onto his shoulder. ‘We guessed it would be a mine. Bloody Ities dropped a truckload of them here when they were trying to wipe out the locals. Have to mind how you go.’

  The rider watches Swann as he squats to peer beneath the truck. The perfect antipode of his name, showing nothing of the elegant, the flexuous. He moves with a determined weight, giving nothing to the sand.

  ‘The letters you had,’ says Brinkhurst. ‘They’re all from the same battalion. Third Tank Regiment.’

  Swann realises he is being studied and zones in on the rider’s gaze, holding it briefly before dismissing him.

  Brinkhurst is undeterred. ‘Were you a DR for battalion HQ? With Signals, perhaps? Postal Unit?’

  The rider gags on a mouthful of stew, the coordination of breathing and eating suddenly lost to him.

  ‘It’s all right, don’t worry.’ Brinkhurst lifts away the mess tin and spoon. ‘I’ll have Mawdsley look in on you.’

  The rider mops spittle from his chin and wipes his eyes. He examines his chest dressing for a widening stain, the pain worse again. When he looks up, Swann is stooping at the tent’s entrance, shirt in his hand.

  ‘I’m takin’ her out,’ he says, displaying at this range a youngster’s face, unlined, the broad and full cheeks implying a geniality. The rider recognises his Scottish accent from the truck and is beset by a sudden envy, that a man can become so unmistakable by his phonology. If his own voice carries such clues of geography then they are quite inaudible to him.

  Brinkhurst frowns. ‘I thought we’d agreed.’ (The hint of West Country, a battened rusticity?)

  ‘I agreed to tell you is all.’ Swann pulls on his shirt, its sleeve displaying the emblem of a stag’s head above the single chevron of a lance corporal. He saunters back to the truck and loads it with several jerrycans, each marked with a white cross. He fires up the engine to a steady growl and steers the truck from the leaguer, its suspension squeaking as the vehicle wallows over uneven ground.

  And all is at once clear. The lack of a command structure, the putting aside of rank. This is not some specialist unit, or even the dogged remnants of one, but rather a corpus of the disaffected. These men have made the desert their bolt-hole.

  Brinkhurst registers the alarm of comprehension. ‘We do things our own way here. We do what works best. You’ll see for yourself.’ He rises. ‘You should probably rest for a bit.’

  A flush of panic overcomes the rider. There will be no hospital, no specialists, no surgeons. His body is to subsist in its corrupted state. Do they have enough morphine? ‘I need to see a doctor. I have more pain. Just here, going through to my back.’

  ‘Mawdsley will set you straight. I’ll have him come right away.’ Brinkhurst makes his exit. Let him know, he adds, if there’s any recall of fact or detail. It could be critical.

  The rider leans back, enveloped for a time in his own tides, the soundscape of an underwater swimmer. He looks on as the wind picks up dust outside the tent, others in the camp now and then passing by, offering a cursory acknowledgement or none at all. A listless theatre. Perhaps in this ruined state he will live out the last of his time, inanimate, a pedlar of gazes.

  But such diversions dull with the light, leaving only the imaginary to captivate, a fleeting escape to be made in the conjuring of a cityscape, of minarets ranked against a lowering sky. And in the foreground, a grand basilica drawn out from the buttresses of the encircling basalt, its ramparts swelling to a vast and pearlescent rotunda. A great desert shrine, secret to all but the wounded and confused. If he narrows his eyes he can see within it a maze of archways leading to a chimney of floodlit space. And then a figure emerging from the immensity of light. Legs adrift, bird head of Ra. His form becoming gradually human as he approaches the rider’s tent, his long-limbed frame folding as he bows to enter. When he stands tall again and removes his peaked cap, he shows a polite smile. Though there’s no distracting from that brow of seared flesh.

  Terrell Mawdsley, he says. Come to answer a summons.

  ‘You’re going to feel rather sore, I’m afraid. There’s quite a bit of heavy bruising. Some laceration. Nothing broken except a cheekbone. We took a two-inch piece of shrapnel from between your ribs. The stitches will feel tight. Try to avoid sudden exertion, stretches. That kind of thing.

  ‘I think both of your eardrums are perforated. It’s difficult to tell with the inflammation. The sulphonamide tablets will help prevent infection. The dizziness and nausea are probably vertigo. That should go.

  ‘As for your eyes, I don’t know what to tell you. You say everything is red. It sounds like the retinas might be damaged. Perhaps some part of the brain. I’m not an optician.

  ‘This confusion you’re experiencing. The amnesia, the disorientation. It’s to be expected. An explosive force tearing through your head. Some memories might have gone completely. Blown away, so to speak. You might find yourself emotional, angry. That would be normal.

  ‘The worst problem is your lungs. You need to understand this. It’s the pressure of the air moving through your body, the vacuum when it draws back again. It ruptures the tiny structures of the lung wall, causing unstable pressures, oedema, air emboli. The lungs can’t heal. A hospital wouldn’t help. I’m sorry. I think you should know.

  ‘It’s hard to predict from here. No one can say. I once saw a man in your condition go on for several weeks. Luck plays a part, one’s general vitality. We should be able to make you comfortable.

  ‘This new pain you report, it sounds like constipation. Shock would do that. The morphine would have made it worse. We should give you a laxative. Outside would be best. The flies, and all. As soon as you feel able.

  ‘I’ll leave this pen and paper. You might want to write down anything you remember. Your name, if it comes to you. Your religion.

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t do more. I’ll look in on you later. Sleep would be best now. As long as you can. It won’t help to be awake.’

  3

  In the morning Mawdsley comes to see him again, bringing a cup of sterile-tasting tea and some biscuits with marmalade. He listens to the rider’s breathing. ‘How did you sleep?’

  ‘The gut cramps are worse.’

  Mawdsley inspects his arm. ‘You’ve been bitten. Let me see.’ He lifts the edge of the blanket, revealing several red bumps on the rider’s legs. ‘Sand lice. We usually debug the place every few days. They crawl out of nowhere. Anyway, your bowels. We shouldn’t wait.’

  He gives the rider a No. 9 pill, guarante
ed to do the trick of flushing him, and enlists a recalcitrant Swann to help him outside. It has the flavour of an execution, the convicted man naked except for his blanket, brittle from the punishments already inflicted. The lance corporal guides him to some stowage boxes and helps him sit. ‘Don’t do it here,’ he says. ‘Not near the burner. Shout when you’re ready.’

  The rider pulls his blanket tighter.

  Swann joins Mawdsley in dragging everything from the rider’s tent: metal bed frame, mattress, lockers, bins, blankets, clothing. They dismantle the frame and beat the pieces with a spade to dislodge the insects inside, stamping them underfoot before repeating the procedure for the lockers and bins. They shake the materials and fabrics and lay them out on the ground for Swann to soak in paraffin, the rider shading his eyes to watch. Mawdsley collects a blowlamp and begins setting light to any metal or hardwood items, paying particular attention to any corners or recesses. A man perfectly at ease, notes the rider, with the element of his ruin.

  Swann calls to the rider, asking if he is ready to unload his bowels, then glares when he shakes his head. Any respectable soldier of course being able to shit on command.

  The rider looks away from him to survey the outlying terrain, the camp’s flat basin encircled by a towering ring of basalt, its revetments swept steeply from the featureless core. Only a single channel to break the barrier of rock, allowing passage to and from the arena. One could not arrive here but by chance. Yet here are these few, improbably settled, as though the tribe of some recondite faith, their outpost described in careless artefacts. An improvised chessboard marked out in the sand, scraps of paper pinned down as pieces. A rusted wheel raised as a miniature Colosseum, its rim anchored in gravel. Pairs of shorts and socks flapping amiably from a washing line. The diversions of men secure in their inertia.

  But for himself there is no such escape. Everything is subject to conjecture. He has become lost within some vast and unfathomable puzzle, unable to deduce the design of it. Could a man be more pitifully adrift? Is it even possible to fully account the loss? A final summing of the deficit? One might devise some elementary model for it. A pie chart marked out in the sand: Volume of known fact/Volume of erased memory. Any conclusion bound of course to be flawed. One can understand oneself as a fraction only in light of the whole: quite impossible when one’s mind has been sheared of vital matter.

  What then is left to him in such a meagre percentage? His command over certain processes and routines seems intact – how to drive, handle a gun, and so on. And then there is that uncanny ability to recall with startling clarity excerpts from particular songs, symphonies, books or poems. But mostly there are only fragments of a former identity, discontinuous and without context, adding only to confusion.

  Though at least from these there might be the beginnings of a repair. Perhaps a sequence of Bailey bridges shunted into his skull as sutures. Better still, some cordial or vitamin. Though one would first of all have to live long enough, and he has been advised otherwise.

  He feels a sudden cramping in his gut. Now!

  Swann rushes over and takes him by the arm, half assisting, half dragging him. Not, as expected, to the more private reaches of the camp but towards the rusted wheel at its centre. A black scorpion huddled within the rim, its claws lifted, its tail actuating. Something in the wind.

  ‘So y’want to aim for that wee bastard,’ instructs the lance corporal. ‘Name’s Rommel.’ He pulls the rider’s blanket away to leave him naked, then turns him so that he is facing away from the wheel. ‘Come on then, one good shot t’end the whole fucken war. S’all on you.’

  The rider’s vision blurs. He hears encouragements to aim true. A little to the left, a step back. His bowel retches, loosing a foul-smelling stream down his legs and onto his feet. Then a further volume, causing Swann to curse and release his arm, leaving him to teeter with the force of his own evacuations. Rommel quite untouched throughout, neither advancing nor retreating.

  A couple of the others have emerged from their tents, giving Swann his audience. ‘Target right in his sights and he hits everything fucken but!’ He brings over the can of paraffin and splashes the liquid on the rider’s purpled legs and abdomen, dousing his groin, his genitals. He tosses a rag onto the rider’s shoulder then walks off, shaking his head.

  The rider looks down at himself, trembling. He picks up the rag and begins to wipe, but before he knows it he’s weeping, his hands shaking. Why such cruelty? It’s despicable, senseless. Is there nobody here to help him? He stumbles away from the wheel to cower in the shade of the Quad, where Swann brings him another blanket and a pair of sand goggles; a blasé contrition. The rider puts on both to sit in silence, frightened to cough or vomit, anything that might overtax his heart. It’s the invisibility of it that terrifies. He has become a wire-walker, recognising only his height from the ground, unable to find the point of balance. Even his own filth bewildering to him. What happens to the deceased brain matter/the flotsam? Is it broken down, processed, excreted? Has he just sponged away his own memories? Shit-for-brains.

  Mawdsley comes over, solicitous. He apologises for Swann’s behaviour and asks if the abdominal pain has gone. This nurse who will see the sick debased. Brinkhurst fetches him some soap and water, then offers him some tinned bacon for lunch. He tells him he can return to his bed if he wishes, and the rider assents, weary of sunlight, weary of the colour red, anxious more than anything to be away from his tormentors. Helped back inside, he pulls the tent closed and tugs off the goggles to curl beneath a blanket, retreating into a cave of his own precipitous breath. If only he could be sturdier through it, weather the thing with indifference. But then who could blame him, when there is to be neither clemency nor sympathy? His muffled sobbing leading him at length to exhaustion and then to sleep, as has been prescribed best for him.

  Sometimes the rider will awake at night thinking it must be day, the stillness making him fretful and unsure. At other times sleeping through daylight with a hibernatory soundness, no quantity of noise sufficient to rouse him. They come to visit him occasionally – either Brinkhurst or the archdeacon – usually on the pretext of bringing food or drink, but more from curiosity, to see if he has recovered his memory yet, or perhaps relaxed his grip on life. Though when it begins to appear that he is not to reach either state in short order both seem to lose interest, leaving him to observe the camp from the seclusion of his hide.

  It’s more or less a window to absurdity. Brinkhurst busying himself with inventorying food stores while Swann will strip and clean a Bren gun, lathering gun oil on his forearms and cheeks. Or now and then joining another fellow in a spitting competition, both men positioning themselves on a hummock to hawk gobs of mucus into the breeze, whooping like children as the wind carries their best efforts across the shale. Often they will play card games, the lance corporal dragging impatiently on a cigarette while glancing wistfully to the sky, perhaps hopeful of some airborne antagonist. A dive-bomber even, that curdling fanfare of Jericho Trumpets. Anything to galvanise.

  The rider counts five inhabitants of the camp in all, two still unknown to him. Other than the spit hawker, there is a skinny and unshaven fellow who keeps to himself. Dark-skinned and sunken-eyed, he wears a Bustina field cap, puttees and sturdy ‘chukka’ boots. Only the Italians dress so well. POW? He has that look about him, listless, beaten down. He stays mostly on the fringes of the camp, often talking to the chickens or pottering with junk from the ditch. The rider wonders if the others ever address him by name. For himself, he intends to learn the names of all here. His likely pall-bearers.

  Generally the days fall into the same rhythm, the men circulatory in their distractions. Mawdsley the idler, Brinkhurst the keen-eyed administrator. While always the same exasperated impulse to adventure from Swann, the lance corporal well practised in his routine of pulling off the truck’s scrim net, checking the pressures of the balloon tyres, inspecting for coolant, oil, fuel leaks. He will smear engine oil on the twin aeroscre
ens and throw sand on them to muddy the glaze, then pause in the cab to light a cigarette before driving from the camp without a backward glance. Each leaving effected with the same casual certainty, as though to declare it the last of his business here.

  After one such departure the rider is called upon by the spit hawker, the fellow inconsiderately sloughing dust in his tent. Up close he appears to have two mouths, the lower of them a vivid weal across his chin. He shows a deck of cards. ‘Pinochle? Gin rummy if you prefer. Two-player whist? I can teach you?’

  ‘Thank you, no.’

  ‘Name’s Coates. Quinn.’ He extends a hand. ‘Sorry I didn’t say hello before. They said you were doped.’

  The rider shakes it. ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘So you don’t remember anything.’

  ‘Nothing helpful.’ (Can he remember whist? Gin rummy? He doesn’t think so.)

  ‘You reckon it’s shock? It could be shock. There was this guy on the wheel of a twenty-five-pounder. Only one to be pulled out after an eighty-eight shell came through his crew. No idea who or where he was. Thought he was on vacation someplace. A beach break. Imagine.’

  ‘You’re American?’

  ‘Canadian. Met my wife in Ontario, married her in Bishop’s Stortford. Way before all this.’ He grunts, as if acknowledging some remissness, and unbuttons his shirt pocket to pull out a folded photograph. He spends a moment in appreciation of it before passing it over.

  The rider takes the photograph into his hand. A professionally taken portrait shows the Canadian in an embrace with an attractive young woman. He feels the edges of the paper, brushes the sheen of its surface. What if he were to see pictures of his own wife, fiancée or sweetheart? Subjects likely as remote to him as any characters from fiction. He glances to his own ring finger, scanning in vain for a circlet of pale skin.