Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

  But no. In the blast wave of the bomb, in that sudden desert of oxygen, they suffocated.

  Others have been thrown through the air. A seventeen-year-old boy wakes on a rooftop five streets away. A man finds his wife stuck rigid and lifeless to a neighbour’s shed door, her arms outstretched. Later, in the ruins of his house, on her kitchen worktop, he will stare, mute and bewildered, at the two eggs that sit unbroken in a china bowl.

  A fire blazes in the middle of the street. A broken gas main, you are told. It has been reported. Remember, smoking is not permitted. You nod, as if you have actually heard him. Water streams past your feet. Bobbing in the current, you see all manner of things: a toilet seat, a leather comb case, a family photo album, a baby’s rattle, a vegetable peeler, a tin of boot polish, a smeared letter, a bicycle tyre and a woman’s muddied hand. It still wears a wedding band. The hand upsets you more than the bodies you have passed.

  Later, at sunset, as foundations settle, fires burn out and the drains back up, boys from other parts of town will appear. You’ll see them searching the craters and the broken ground. They’ll dig under roof slates and beams. You’ll watch them whoop with joy when they find souvenir pieces of shrapnel, still hot to the touch.

  20

  The bombings, everyone said, were only a prelude. In a seaside town that boasted neither industry nor ambition, there were direct hits to the playing fields of St Mary’s Hall. To Chichester Terrace and Mount Pleasant. To Devonshire Street, Pelham Street School and Tamplin’s Brewery. The town centre stank of hops for days.

  August the 4th was forecast to be Invasion Day, the anniversary of the day Britain had declared war on Germany in 1914. The passage of time was marked by rumour. Next, it could only be August the 15th, the day Hitler had vowed he’d march through the streets of London. That day, too, came and went, but at last Mr Attlee spoke on the wireless. ‘The whole nation awaits zero hour. I want us all to use the waiting time, be it long or short, to the best possible advantage to our cause.’ But could the nation imagine it as Brighton could? So literal an invasion. The enemy marching up the beach.

  In the town’s blackout, illicit roof squatters smoked and star-watched, refusing to be shut in any longer, while in the dance halls of the town, from the Regent Ballroom to the unmentionable Sherry’s, revellers danced through the sirens as the bands played louder. Where the nation was stoical, Brighton grew reckless.

  Evelyn felt her own bleak sense of abandon. She would not be dissuaded by her husband from returning with her book to the Camp, where Mr Pirazzini lay in his bed, rattling with death but seemingly unwilling to die. He was waiting, Evelyn knew, for Mrs Pirazzini to appear. He had a dying man’s faith that decencies, even in a labour camp, would be observed; that Geoffrey would find his wife of fifty years. But Evelyn knew Geoffrey couldn’t admit to the old man that there were no reliable records; that the authorities had – in bureaucratic terms – lost his wife and her camp location; that he would inevitably die without her. Everything didn’t come right in the end. The wheel didn’t go round. Life took care of some and not of others. His faith, like the phrase, had failed him.

  Evelyn pressed his papery palm in hers. All she knew how to do was open her book and read to him so that he didn’t die in a morbid, miserable hush. Words were protective. They were beats of breath and life. But who was she really reading for, herself or him?

  Behind her, a makeshift screen divided her from the prisoner who’d laughed at her efforts during her first visit. Let him laugh now. He was back in the infirmary, to have the bullet extracted from his shoulder. The doctor had come at long last, a heavyset man with thick spectacles and stubby fingers. He stood in the dim light of the painted-over window, sterilizing his scalpel and forceps with the flame of a cigarette lighter.

  There were no precedents, no codes of conduct in an internment camp. For Mr Pirazzini’s sake, she informed the doctor, she would stay by her friend’s bed during the procedure. She would not be moved.

  Very well, he nodded, but she was not to concern herself if the prisoner cried out. Since Dunkirk, analgesics were in pitifully short supply. They had given the man two good, stiff shots of whisky on an empty stomach. It would not be a problem if she continued to read aloud as he operated. Indeed, he thought it better for her and her charge if she did so. If she felt obliged to leave the infirmary during the procedure, she should feel free. He could not attend to any faints.

  He disappeared behind the screen. The heads of the two guards were just visible over the top. Then the doctor gave the order to hold the prisoner down.

  The man protested, delirious and loud. ‘Butcher!’

  ‘I have a leather bite, Mr Gottlieb, should we require it.’

  ‘My God, if you amputate, I will –’

  ‘You are overwrought. We wouldn’t want you to bite your tongue. Now behave or I shall be forced to use it.’

  Evelyn wet Mr Pirazzini’s lips with the sponge from the bowl and patted his hand. Even she was aware that the removal of a bullet could damage a limb or kill a man where the bullet had failed. Infections. Damaged arteries.

  It was none of her affair.

  Mr Pirazzini’s eyes fluttered. ‘There, there,’ she whispered, rubbing his wasted arm. ‘It’s Evelyn, Mr Pirazzini. I’m here, and this business won’t last long.’

  A cry filled the room.

  She opened her book and stumbled into the first paragraph. ‘ “The sun rose. Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore, gilding the ribs of the eaten-out boat and making the sea-holly and its mailed leaves gleam blue as steel.” ’

  Another cry, deep and guttural. Mr Pirazzini’s eyes sprang open.

  ‘Do not allow him to move!’

  She pulled her chair closer. ‘“Light almost pierced the thin swift waves as they raced fan-shaped over the beach. The girl who had shaken her head and made all the jewels, the topaz, the aqua-marine, the water-coloured jewels with sparks of fire in them, dance, now bared her brows and with wide-opened eyes drove a straight pathway over the waves. Their quivering mackerel sparkling was darkened and –”’ Was that blood she smelled? She stroked Mr Pirazzini’s forehead, but what could she say without reminding him that he was dying, not in his own bed at home, but in a neglected sickbay in a prison camp someone had conjured at the top of Race Hill?

  ‘“As they splashed and drew back, they left a black rim of twigs and cork on the shore and straws and sticks of wood, as if some light shallop had foundered …”’

  She no longer understood what she read. Her thoughts spun.

  Then, ‘Nicht – zu – stoppen.’ A hoarse whisper.

  Don’t stop.

  ‘Is everything all right, Doctor?’ she called brightly.

  ‘Perfectly,’ he replied.

  She heard the bullet clink in a basin.

  ‘Mr Gottlieb has finally done the decent thing.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘He has passed out. The prisoner has passed out, Mrs Beaumont.’

  Nicht zu stoppen.

  She had to wipe her eyes with the back of her hand.

  21

  The following day, after a morning lost to the slow shuffle of food queues on the London Road, she set out again for the infirmary. Geoffrey was, he’d said, turning a blind eye to her visits – breaking the rule regarding female visitors – purely for Mr Pirazzini’s sake.

  She didn’t want his ‘blind eye’. She wanted him to see. But tacitly, they seemed to have agreed to speak no more of it.

  On The Level in the unwavering heat, children skipped rope with a drowsy listlessness. A few spun on the swings or lazily pointed their Woolworths pistols. Union Road was strangely empty of cars. Already the petrol rationing had turned the streets over to bicycles, refuse carts, and barrows laden with leeks and hay. Orgies of blue-bottles buzzed over the dung. A delivery boy rang his bell, swerving past her on the pavement so closely she could smell the sour breeze of his sweat.

  When she arrived at last, it was like a fist
round her heart.

  His bed was empty and stripped. The bowl of water and sponge were gone. Only the empty bucket under his bed remained.

  ‘Dear God,’ she whispered.

  Death, even when one has grown bored waiting for it, is a bewilderment. A terrible punchline. She sank on to the bare mattress.

  Later, when she demanded to know, no one would remember the actual time or manner of death; whether it had been the previous night or early that morning; whether he’d gone peacefully or in con-fusion; whether there would be or had already been a funeral. Perhaps the minimum rites had taken place already. The guard told her Jews liked to get it ‘done and dusted’. But who? she asked, who had been there? The guard had shrugged. All he could say for sure was that the old man’s body had been taken to the hospital morgue. The Camp had been unusually efficient. ‘The heat,’ he said.

  The few personal effects Mr Pirazzini had arrived with had been gathered up in a parcel and labelled for return to his wife, although her location remained unknown.

  Mr Pirazzini’s passing, the death of a good man, was entirely unremarkable. He had been alone. Even Evelyn had not been with him.

  How futile everything was. How careless. The world was treacherously random. Mr Pirazzini was gone and no one had noticed.

  Tears welled but she couldn’t, not here. A sob gripped her, and she had to bend her face to her knees to stifle the next.

  ‘I closed his eyes.’

  She straightened instantly. She’d forgotten. She’d completely forgotten.

  From the other side of the room, the man’s voice again: ‘I washed him. With just one good arm, so not very well, I’m afraid, but he wasn’t neglected. I covered him in a fresh sheet.’

  In her shock, she’d forgotten she wasn’t alone, and she felt once more the intrusion of Mr Pirazzini’s neighbour behind that screen. She’d leave in a moment. She’d get her breath back and leave without a word.

  ‘I requested candles and the assistance of two men to lower him to the floor.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘Custom. His more than mine, admittedly. I asked the guard to leave us for the night as a mark of respect. When he was suspicious, I asked him how far they thought I could run with a dead man on my back.’

  Flippant, even now.

  It was as if he’d been waiting to tell her, as if he’d composed the details in readiness for her visit. She didn’t want to listen.

  ‘I stayed with him till morning, till the ambulance came.’

  The day was so still she could hear a young Army corporal, helpless since Dunkirk, stammering his way through an exercise drill, even from the distance of the Camp’s parade square. His commands tugged at her nerves.

  ‘Did you bring your book?’ His voice again, but far away now, as if in some remote valley. She was willing him away.

  The hut was stifling, and not a single window opened. ‘I must see if there’s anything I can do …’

  ‘Read, if you would – please. From your book.’

  Nicht zu stoppen.

  ‘Read from where you left off.’

  She could hardly remember what he looked like, who he was, this man in the next bed. She no longer cared. He was an interruption. He was the smell of antiseptic and illness. He was a man who had intended to be dead by now. ‘I should inform my husband of –’

  ‘I’d be very grateful if you read.’

  She managed to get to her feet, but her face was hot. Her knees were trembling, and the floor seemed to rise up at odd angles. Fresh air. She just needed fresh air.

  The wheel goes round, the wheel goes round.

  ‘Please,’ trailed his voice. ‘You came to read, and I must insist you read.’

  Insist?

  Outside, the drill commands were ever-more fiercely stammered. The corporal’s syllables were stabs of anger and fear. He’d be forever at war with himself, she thought, after what he’d seen in battle. Or done.

  She had visited some of the BEF men in the Royal Sussex with the ladies of the WI. She’d thought she could manage it, but what comfort had she to offer? What could she possibly say?

  One man’s hands had shaken so badly she’d thought he was having a fit. But no, he was confessing, and to her, though she’d wanted only to be gone. ‘Shall I get a nurse?’ she’d tried. But he couldn’t stop. He had clutched a dead man’s body to shield himself. ‘From the gunfire,’ he said, ‘as I waded out to one of the boats.’ He’d known the man. Not well, but they were from the same unit. He’d had a good singing voice. As a boy, the dead man had sung solos in Winchester Cathedral. That’s what someone told him later. ‘I dragged him by the throat,’ he said. ‘For hours, till I made it as far as that boat. He was a ruddy colander, Mrs Beaumont, by the time I got mesself aboard.’

  ‘You have to forgive yourself,’ she said. ‘It was only right that you struggled to survive; it was the right thing to do,’ and, as she spoke, she felt herself adopt her WI face of composed womanhood. But all along she was thinking, You poor wretch. That man will never leave you; you’ll be hauling the dead weight of him for the rest of your days.

  And there had been another, his head entirely bandaged except for a slit at his eyes and nose. He’d been crying out, over and over, for a ‘smoke’, barely able to form the word, but the young nurse who’d attended him had finally understood, and when she did, fear got hold of her. ‘What can I do? What can anyone do?’ she’d hissed to Evelyn, wringing her fingertips. Evelyn had assumed she referred to the bandages. Perhaps, she suggested, the dressing could be snipped across the mouth. She’d find a cigarette. They could take turns holding it to his lips. She would go down immediately and ask someone in the street.

  No, the nurse said, as if Evelyn were a halfwit, as if she were making everything worse. Didn’t she understand? There was nowhere to put it. A mortar shell. He’d lost part of his face. There was nowhere to put it.

  She’d walked away. She hadn’t had the words. What were the words? He wouldn’t have lived the night, that man. Yet Evelyn couldn’t care, not any more she couldn’t, not with all the senseless – the nonsensical – violence always there, never ending, just at the edge of the everyday. Who had allowed life to turn to such chaos? How had everything run rampantly to war when no one was looking?

  She was becoming ‘sensible’, if slowly. (Tell yourself! ‘I am not interested in the possibilities of defeat – they do not exist!’) It didn’t do to go on wondering. It didn’t do to ask questions. What were the answers? Who could tell her where to go from here, after the Camp today, after Mr Pirazzini? Who could say where she belonged?

  A wave of nausea and heat crashed over her.

  Behind the screen, the German prisoner was clearing his throat. Nerves. Today she could hear the nerves behind his assured diction. He was afraid of being alone, or afraid of being left alone with the German guard perhaps. She had her own worries. Her stomach was tight. She couldn’t think. The sour sweaty smell in her nostrils was, she realized, her own, and her hair lay smeared in damp streaks across her forehead. Another wave of sticky heat crashed over her. Air. She just needed –

  ‘Your book,’ he persisted, ‘it might do us both good.’

  She got hold of the bucket just in time.

  *

  Such intimacies between strangers. Every sensation sharpened until he was aware only of her palms fluttering white against the pillow.

  Afterwards, when he lifted his weight, bruises appeared like bracelets on the pale undersides of her wrists. He felt a current of something run through to the core of him. Where had he been? ‘Lord. Leah, so sorry. What a clod I’ve been.’

  He’d marked her, not as badly as whoever had pressed her arm to the gas ring, but still, it was between them: a surge of something; a charge; a grim, irresistible knowledge. She met his eyes, held his gaze, then slid from beneath him to look, she said, for an earring she’d lost between the sheets.

  She usually left her earrings on, and once, her court shoes. S
he would check her lipstick before and after, sometimes touching up her beauty spot with the stub of a kohl pencil. He enjoyed it. It seemed womanly, not vulgar, as he would have once assumed. Yet when she threw back the sheet and reached for an atomizer on the dressing table, something within him lurched. It was a new acquisition. A gift, no doubt. Silver plate. From whom?

  Still naked, she sprayed a fine mist of her scent into the room – to cover, he assumed, the smells of bodies and cigarettes. The window seemed permanently open, and, for a moment, he imagined his explosion of utterances travelling all the way down to the street. How strange it was that he didn’t care; that he felt as detached, as unencumbered, as a traveller in a foreign city.

  Outside, as if in an adjacent dimension, trains clattered their way in and out of the station. Sometimes, here in Leah’s sparse little room, he could hardly hear himself think with the carriages pounding the tracks. It was a good thing. With her, he was reduced to flesh, need, a pulse. It wasn’t happiness – if he even knew what that was any longer – but he felt absorbed. He felt absorbed by her. She was not beautiful, not lovely, but every detail of her became his each time, and he lost himself in her, he who had made a point in life of not losing himself to anything.

  It was only as he reached for his clothes that he noticed the picture on the shelf. It hadn’t been turned to the wall.

  The man who stared back was his own age, mid-thirties. The face was broad and pitted blue-white by acne and shadow. His neck was too thick for his collar, but his lips were unexpectedly full and soft, and there was a depth in his black eyes that, he imagined, a woman would find hard to turn from.