by Paul Sussman
The first thought that crossed my mind was whether or not it was going to be painful. Hopefully not. The main reason I’ve carried The Pill around for so long, after all, is on the assumption that if and when I do finally pop it, it’ll do its job instantaneously. What, however, if it doesn’t? What if it takes time, and if during that time it hurts? True, Emily told me it would kill within seconds, but that was almost a hundred years ago. Its potency might have faded. Diminished over the decades.
I became, I must confess, a little alarmed. Nobody, let’s face it, sets out to kill themselves painfully. Perhaps, I thought, I shouldn’t do it with The Pill after all. Or perhaps I should take The Pill and then immediately jump off the castle battlements, thereby ensuring that if it did give me a bad tummy I wouldn’t have to endure it for too long before I was smashed to death on the rocks 300 feet below.
My fears, however, were only momentary. I trust my pill. Over the years we’ve built up quite a rapport, and I know for a fact it would never hurt me, any more than I would hurt it. Of course, I won’t be certain until I swallow it, but I’m as convinced as one can be without proof that, when it comes to the crunch, The Pill will do its business swiftly, neatly and with a minimum of fuss.
‘I’ve absolute faith in you, old boy,’ I said, holding the tiny white disc up into the pale sunlight. ‘We’ll do it together, and we’ll do it painlessly. Teamwork. That’s what it’s all about.’
‘I quite agree,’ said The Pill.
Having laid those worries to rest, I then turned my thoughts to what I’d look like after I’d died.
It’s strange to think of oneself dead. Not an easy connection to make. Whenever we picture ourselves it’s invariably in a living context: running through summer meadows, bonking attractive women, performing heroic deeds – an active, breathing, thinking, sensate being, full of flowing blood and tingling nerves and pulsating tissue. It’s hard to conjure yourself as a carcass, devoid of those vital elements which, taken together, make you the person you are. It’s like trying to paint a self-portrait of a complete stranger.
Ideally, I’d like to be an attractive corpse. A noble cadaver, sitting bolt upright in my red wickerwork chair, a peaceful expression on my face, my eyes, perhaps, still open; a picture of dignified decease. Something people can admire. Something that allows me to maintain a little self-respect.
Whether it’ll work out like that, however, I’ve no idea. I might just as easily fetch up slumped on the floor of the dome covered in vomit. Or with a bright-blue face. Or a snotty nose and a frothy mouth. I might be a ridiculous corpse. Or a disgusting one. I might even start to smell. (I remember seeing a corpse in France during the war, and it was a horrible-looking thing, with bulging eyes and a trickle of blood coming out of its mouth. Very unappetizing.)
Ultimately, however, I suppose it doesn’t really matter what I end up looking like, any more than it matters what happens to a house once you’ve moved out of it. My body will be just an abandoned casing, no more and no less, something that was once a part of me but has now been sloughed off, like the skin of a snake. I do hope, however, that I don’t shit myself, particularly in my white pyjamas. That would simply be too demeaning.
I wondered who would find my body – Dr Bannen, probably, the discovery no doubt precipitating a particularly intense bout of wheezing on his part – and what would happen to the castle, and all the various odds and ends within it. I wondered if I would be buried or cremated, and what sort of effect my suicide note would have on those who read it. I wondered, too, if I’d get a mention in the papers.
Above all, however, I wondered, as I’m sure do all those who are preparing to die, what exactly is waiting for me on the far side of death. If, indeed, there is a far side of death, and the whole thing isn’t simply a vast, blank, all-consuming void. A sort of eternal full stop against which the essay of my life will run up like a train against a set of buffers.
Emily, for her part, believed, or at least she did when she explained the whole thing to me aged ten, that when you died you became, of all things, a breeze, blowing endlessly around the world, conscious yet intangible, an awareness without form or shape. Sometimes a group of breezes gathered together and formed themselves into a wind, whilst a hurricane was little more than a large and somewhat unruly convocation of the dead.
‘It’s wonderful,’ she opined. ‘You can go where you want, and do what you want. You can fly right up in the air, and knock old ladies’ hats off. It’s fun.’
Personally, I’ve never been entirely convinced by this, although I can’t help wondering if there isn’t something beyond that final moment. Not so much an after-life – I’ve never been a great one for heaven and hell – as a new life. A different life. Perhaps death will be just one full stop amongst many in an essay that runs on for ever. Perhaps I’ll finish the chapter of this life and straightaway begin another. Perhaps we simply go on and on, disintegrating and re-forming, breaking up and coming together, across the aeons, ad infinitum.
I tried to picture what things might be like after death. If there is a continuance, for instance, will it be in this world – the world I know – or an entirely different one? Will I go up, down, forwards, backwards, sideways or in some completely other direction, one that physicists, or whoever it is who deals with these things, have yet to discover? Maybe I’ll reappear in the past, or way, way in the future. Maybe I’ll live exactly the same life again, or the same life but with subtle differences, or perhaps a completely different life, but one that has, at some point or other, intersected the one I’m soon about to end. Perhaps I’ll come back as one of my own victims, as though time were a merry-go-round about which we revolve eternally, on each circuit riding a different character. Perhaps I’ll return as Keith, or Walter, or even, God forbid, Mrs Bunshop. Perhaps, in eternity, we are everyone we have ever known.
I grappled with these and other such conceits for the remainder of the day, and before I knew it the sun was sinking behind the heads of the westward hills, the first stars were twinkling in the east and I was shivering with the evening cold.
‘How time flies when you’re killing yourself,’ I chuckled.
I emptied my fourth bottle of wine and stepped from the dome on to the concrete surface of the roof. As I did so, however, I tripped and fell backwards on to the dome’s winching mechanism, banging the upper part of my spine against the metal handle. Had I been sober, it would have been extremely painful. Fortunately, however, I wasn’t, and simply got back on to my feet, laughing at my frailty, and headed downstairs to get on with the note.
‘Merry Christmas, stars!’ I called as I descended into my bedroom.
No one knocked on the door all day, or threw any stones.
I’ve wasted more time and space than I intended describing the events of this afternoon – if one can indeed call the processes of one’s mind events – and am already well on my way along the first wall of the cellar. It’s cold and damp down here, which, if nothing else, is helping to sober me up, and I have had to pull on a jumper over my pyjama top. My writing, thank heavens, is rather straighter than it was an hour ago.
I’ve got a funny feeling in my back, where I banged it on the roof. It’s not a pain, or an ache, more a soft tingling, like gentle bolts of electricity radiating outwards from the upper part of my spine. It’s covering the area of my wings, and I’m a bit worried I’ve damaged them. It’s not an entirely unpleasant sensation, however, so I’m not too concerned. I suppose if you fall over at my age you have to expect some sort of after-effect.
Back problems or no back problems, however, I need to get on. Time’s ticking away and I still have a brace of murders to commit. My candles are burning, my pen is scribbling and The Pill sits contentedly in the pocket of my pyjamas. My last ever Christmas, and it’s all but finished. I feel a little sad. One more carol, I think, just for the road:
Silent night,
Holy night,
All is clear,
All is bright, etc.
&
nbsp; And now onwards.
CHAPTER TEN
I GOT INVOLVED in the Second World War because of – who else? – Emily. Before I bumped into her that freezing late-January morning of 1940, shortly after the accident with the giant safe, I had no intention whatsoever of going into the army. On the contrary, I had every intention whatsoever of staying out of it.
Then, however, I saw her, golden-haired and perfect, scrabbling round on the pavement picking up her spilled shoeboxes, and, as always happens, my excitement got the better of me, so that before I knew what I was doing I was waving my call-up papers and making all sorts of rash promises about going off to fight for king and country.
‘Oh Raphael,’ she cried. ‘You’re so brave! I knew you’d do something like this. You must let me see you off.’
Of course, at that stage, neither of us knew that I would be doing very little in the way of actual fighting. My war was to be one of prolonged incarceration. Not the easy option, by any means – many around me were sent utterly doolally by the whole experience – but, all things considered, I think I coped with imprisonment remarkably well. I’m not sure Emily would agree, but that’s getting ahead of myself. In the harsh winter chill that morning, she stood on the platform waving a monogrammed silk handkerchief as my train puffed out of Liverpool’s Lime Street station, and appeared utterly enthralled.
‘You’re a hero, Raphael!’
‘I’m an idiot,’ I muttered, slumping back into my seat and wondering how on earth I got myself into these situations. ‘A bloody idiot.’
‘We’re all going to die,’ wailed a ginger-haired young conscript beside me. ‘We’re going to die! Die! Dieeeeeeee!’
I shan’t waste time and wall space with too detailed an account of the early part of my army career. Suffice to say that after eight weeks’ basic military training, and a further six weeks’ instruction at an officer-training unit, I was duly posted to the 7th Battalion of the Green Howards with the exalted rank of Second Lieutenant.
I spent some two weeks at the Howards’ headquarters in Yorkshire before, at the end of April 1940, my battalion was suddenly ordered to France. On arrival at Cherbourg I was promoted to First Lieutenant, for no obvious reason other than that at that particular time, in that particular place, first lieutenants appeared to be in rather short supply.
A further two weeks were spent building airfields in the freezing countryside up near Boulogne, before we were all stuck in trucks again and moved south-eastwards to Arras, where the 4th Battalion of the Green Howards were frantically holding positions along the River Scarpe. Casualties, apparently, had been heavy, particularly amongst the officers, which probably explains why I received another lightning promotion as soon as I arrived, to Captain this time. Given the circumstances, I was somewhat less than flattered by my additional pip.
Thus it was that a little less than four months after killing Mr Popplethwaite, and only four weeks after joining my regiment, I found myself sitting in a crumbling dugout beside the River Scarpe with a Bren gun, several very frightened soldiers and a bottle of excellent Chablis I’d been given by a local restaurateur. The Pill and The Photo were buttoned up in the pocket of my battledress, whilst a nightingale was tweeting in a thicket away to the left, even though it was the middle of the night.
‘When do you think they’ll attack, sir?’ asked one of my men.
‘I have absolutely no idea, Jenkins,’ I replied. ‘I don’t even know where they are, so keep your eyes peeled.’
‘We’re all going to die. Die! Dieee!’ This from the young ginger-haired conscript I’d met on the train from Liverpool, who, by an extraordinary turn of fate, had fetched up not only in the same regiment as me, but in the very unit I was now commanding.
‘No, we’re not going to die, Lemon,’ I told him firmly. ‘Just keep down and keep quiet and keep looking. I’m going to have a shit.’
Whereupon I stood up and, taking my bottle of Chablis, clambered out of the dugout and scampered over to the thicket on our left, where I pulled down my trousers and squatted amongst the brambles. The nightingale continued tweeting for a moment above me, and then flew away with a chirrup of disgust.
‘What I wouldn’t give for a nice comfortable lavatory,’ I groaned, ‘with a proper seat and nice loo paper and a chain that . . . Jesus Christ Almighty.’
A huge explosion shook the ground, throwing me forward on to my face. There were screams, more explosions and the jarring rat-at-at of machine-gun fire. Momentary plumes of light illuminated the scene, giving way to an intense, inky blackness. I struggled to my feet, but, quite forgetting that my combat trousers were still around my ankles, pitched forward again, smashing my nose on an old tree stump.
‘Bollocks,’ I hissed.
I could vaguely make out people running to and fro. One came directly towards me, running at full tilt, before another explosion lifted him off his feet and deposited him on the ground about two feet from where I was sprawled. He lay very still with his head twisted at a curious angle, eyes bulging and blood seeping from the corner of his mouth. It was Jenkins, and he was dead.
Had I been a halfway decent officer, I would, at that moment, without hesitation, have pulled up my trousers, unbuckled my Webley .455 and charged forward to help my men. As it happened, however, I didn’t move an inch. I buried my face in a tussock of grass, held my breath and prayed for the ground to swallow me up. Even when I heard Private Lemon’s pathetic voice squealing, ‘Sir! Sir! Help me, sir!’ I still didn’t move. I kept perfectly still, perfectly quiet, perfectly pathetic.
Which is how, twenty minutes later, I was found by the German soldiers: spread-eagled, face down, with my face buried in a mound of grass and my trousers around my ankles. There was a cackle of laughter, and I felt the muzzle of a rifle being wiggled between my buttocks. I was then hoisted to my feet, relieved of my bottle of Chablis and led away into captivity. I was a prisoner of war, and hadn’t fired a single shot.
Although we didn’t know it at the time, Offizierslager 18B, fondly known as The Bosch Butlin’s, was situated about 30 miles west of Bremen. I was in the first batch of prisoners to arrive, and remained there for the duration of the war, until we were liberated in April 1945. As the title suggests, it was a prison camp solely for officers – 500 of them at full capacity, from Britain and the Commonwealth; no Americans: a fact which, if it didn’t necessarily make for more comfortable living, at least allowed us the illusion of being prisoners of the highest class. No hoi polloi in our compound!
A square affair some 600 yards long by the same wide, 18B sat in low scrubland with hills away to the west and a large forest to the east. It was surrounded by an electrified wire fence on which birds would land and immediately burst into flames, as well as the five barrack blocks (A, B, C, D and E) in which prisoners were housed, two guard rooms, a camp office, the commandant’s quarters, a punishment block, a kitchen block and a set of foetid washrooms. Seen from the air, it would have looked something like this:
Aerial View of Offlag 18B
I was assigned to barrack room C, where I had the bottom half of a bunk-bed in the corner nearest the door. The top half was occupied by a large Welch Fusilier who snored and farted in his sleep. Snored and farted, indeed, louder than anyone I’ve ever known in my life, so that in five years of captivity I don’t think I enjoyed a single decent night’s kip.
‘Is there no way you could move him, sir,’ I asked Colonel Dishby. ‘It really is intolerable.’
‘I sympathize, Phoenix, I really do, but I’m afraid you’re just going to have to pucker-up and knuckle down. We’re in a bally pickle here, and we’ve all got to pull together. Chin up, nose to the grindstone, that’s the way.’
‘But, sir—’
‘Now, now, Phoenix! Don’t want Jerry to see us squabbling, do we? Grit your teeth, give it a bit of gumption and we’ll be back in Blighty in no time.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘That’s the ticket! Now, how about a game of whist?
’
Colonel Dishby was the senior ranking officer in our barracks, in the whole camp, indeed, and it was to him that we deferred on all matters concerning our daily life. A small, rotund man with a bristling moustache and a pronounced limp – ‘Bally sniper got me in the knee. Damn poor show!’ – he spoke a language entirely of his own devising: an arcane, bantering gobbledegook that owed less to the English vernacular than it did to the extraordinary workings of his own imagination. A trip to the lavatory block would thus be described as ‘a lightning shimmy down to the old flush-wallahs’ whilst a meeting with the camp commandant was termed ‘a quick how’s-your-father with Obersturmführer Pisspot.’ Amazingly, despite the prosaic obtuseness of his sentences, we generally understood what he was getting at. Not so the Germans, who were convinced he was talking in some sort of secret code and took him off for frequent interrogations with sallow-faced SS cryptographers.
‘Gave me the old once-over with the bally thingummy-do-daa,’ he would declare cheerfully on his return. ‘Silly blighters.’
The colonel was determined that prolonged captivity should in no way dampen our spirits.
‘Got to keep morale up!’ he opined. ‘Don’t want Jerry to think we’re rum-baba. Plenty of bing and bong, that’s the ticket!’
To this end he organized an endless round of activities to keep us busy. A typical day in Offlag 18B would begin with a bit of drill practice, followed by some gardening on the camp vegetable plot, then a game of cricket, some football, a gym session, more cricket, more football, more drill, some singing, a play rehearsal, a bit of barrack cleaning and all manner of other little diversions to while away the time and persuade us that, despite our enforced inactivity, there was, in fact, some overriding purpose to our existence.
There was but one area of camp life over which the colonel didn’t exercise control, and that was escapes, these being the preserve of a haggard-looking major from the Black Watch called, appropriately, Major Burrows. The latter arrived some five months into my captivity and immediately assumed responsibility for all break-out attempts, although what actually qualified him for the job I never found out. Rumours abounded that in peacetime he was a circus escapologist.
