by Martin Booth
‘Tadashi? Is there anything wrong? Can I…?’
He received a gurgled and garbled response.
Mishima tipped sideways and rolled down the roof. As he twisted over, Sandingham saw the knife pressed in under his sternum, the polished sharkskin hilt flush with Mishima’s stomach.
He fell down the roof after Mishima, vainly trying to stop his descent. Yet it was to no avail. Mishima was dead.
* * *
It was raining. Overhead there was a dense black cloud and he could vaguely hear thunder.
Sandingham stood up, his spine aching from the exertion of gathering the rubble with which he covered Mishima’s body. He knew it was not a grave: a bulldozer would come one day and level the area. But in the meantime at least no birds or scavenging dogs would feast off his friend’s corpse.
The rain fell in big spots, not heavily but consistently. He did not know for how long it came, nor indeed for how long it had been falling. He just became gradually aware that it was settling upon him in its own sad way.
The drops hit the skin on his bare forearms where he had rolled up the sleeves of the jacket. As each one touched him, it left a charcoal-grey stain, as if someone with a cruel sense of humour was bespattering him with diluted classroom ink, the Stephens’ black ink of his schooldays.
The fall of rain terrified him, though he could not appreciate why. His flesh unaccountably crept, and he scuttled over the roof and into the safe shelter of the area beneath.
* * *
The tram was gutted. Only a steel skeleton remained. The sidepanelling had warped, fractured and prised loose. The glass that had been the windows had melted and run down the sides, cooling like a coating of speckled sugar on the wheels and road surface. The paint was seared off.
Sandingham walked up to the tram, not knowing why he did so. Nothing was making sense to him. Inside, the seats had disappeared and only the frameworks remained in their original rows, twisted crookedly. On the floor of the tram cabin was a partly congealed liquid slush of greyish-brown matter in which lay some broken branches, stripped bare of their bark.
It was more than a minute before he realised that the floor-covering had been people, the branches nude bones.
He did not vomit at this realisation. His stomach did not even lurch towards his throat. There was nothing left to throw up – not food nor bile nor rage. He was growing devoid of new emotion, his inner store insufficient for what he was experiencing.
He simply cried. It was not a loud venting of tears but a gradual, miserable sobbing, such as a child might make when its toy was irretrievably lost.
* * *
Their hair, eyebrows and eyelashes had been scorched off and, when they closed their eyes, the upper lids snagged under the lower. Few had skin left on the fronts of their bodies. Some were smeared with vomit that had stuck to their chests and breasts. Some walked with their arms held out before them, as if in supplication to a greater power for a hint of mercy. Many were naked and, of those, some had even their pubic hairs singed short.
They all moved with their heads hung, not speaking, not complaining. Their submission chilled Sandingham even more than their hideous wounds.
As he studied them shuffling past him, he saw upon the backs of a few the patterns of straps or elastics, of flowers or birds or delicate designs printed indelibly upon their skin.
* * *
A boat was being punted across a river by a Japanese man. Helping him was a priest. He was European. His soutane was besmirched and stiff with sweat and grime.
Sandingham watched them guiding wounded over the water. They worked with little conversation, passing instructions to each other but saying little else. He thought at once that he should give them assistance, to help them as any man might another in a crisis, and began gingerly to step over the debris to where a flight of stairs was cut into the bank.
As he neared them the punter spoke to the priest in German.
‘Da ist nichts zu machen.’
Joe thought better of offering his assistance and turned aside, keeping his face to the rubble-strewn ground.
* * *
‘Wakarimasen,’ the old man uttered.
The teenage boy lifted his index finger to the smoke as if instructing his elder on one of the finer points of warfare.
‘Molotoffano hanakago.’
He overheard this as he shuffled by the pair. They were sitting on an inverted and much-dented trader’s tricycle. No other words passed between them.
Hanakago, Sandingham knew, meant flower-basket. He wondered how a bomb could bear blossoms.
* * *
In the middle channel of the river there sailed a gunboat of the Imperial Japanese Navy. It made slow headway. In the bows stood an officer. He was holding a megaphone through which he shouted unintelligibly.
The marvel to Sandingham was not that the gunboat had appeared but that it was so trim and tidy, so unadulterated, its shape clean and purposeful, deliberate and ordered. And the officer was so neat in his uniform, so dispassionate. He was almost serene.
* * *
It was nearly evening and the fires were dying in the city centre. Against a wall that had withstood the blast because it had been end-on the epicentre, Sandingham paused. He was utterly tired but unable to consider sleep quite yet. He slid down to a sitting position against the wall and hunched his knees to his chin, hugging his calves with his arms. So far, no one had recognised him as a foreigner. Few people were in a position to care.
Wherever he went there were bodies. He had never seen such carnage. In Hong Kong at the fall, when someone died, they just – died. The bullet that did for them might make a small hole going in and a large hole coming out, but that was all. Someone freshly shot in the head was not mutilated but simply broken. Those caught in the ambush at Wong Nai Chung Gap had lain on the road looking like humans that were now ceased. Even those caught in a crossfire of mortars were still recognisably human until the flies and the ants started their forays.
The dead he now saw littering the wreckage of the city were not like that at all. Many were as unlike to human form as was conceivably possible. They were not necessarily dismembered, but hideously disfigured. Sandingham was used to seeing the dead lying in grotesquely contorted positions, but not like these.
He had found a man bent backwards over a post, his head touching the backs of his knees, his stomach unsplit but stretched so tight it had contouring under it the coiled map of gut. The man’s skin was maroon and his arms hung back against the shoulder sockets.
At one point in the afternoon, he had paused by a water butt to drink. His throat was parched from retching and swallowing smoke. He also wanted to try to wash off the blotches the rain had given him.
He reached into the water. It was cool, indescribably cool. It was luxurious. He slopped water on his arms and rubbed at them. The rain spots did not even smudge let alone show signs of washing clean.
Resigned to leaving himself dirty, Sandingham leaned over the edge of the barrel to press his face into the surface and suck up the water. His reflection stared back at him. Beside his face was another. It was floating a foot under the surface. The eyes were holes. The mouth was a slit cavern of darkness. The hair willowed around the scalp. He did not drink but watched. The face folded up in the water. He was dreaming. It was the effects of exhaustion. He thrust his fingers into the clear jet-black of the water and felt for the face. There was nothing hard there. No skull. No corpse. Yet something soft brushed against the back of his hand and his forearm. As he brought his arm clear, something clung to it. It was light and wrapped itself on to his arm like algae. He straightened his arm. Clinging to it was the face: no features, just a flat mask of skin, peeled from its owner and cast into the water.
Sandingham screamed. He flicked and threshed his arm trying to dislodge it, but it would not move. It was glued to him by the water and its own grossness. He could not bear to touch it: instead, grabbing a piece of wood, he scraped it off, all th
e time hollering. The face fragmented and came away like curds off milk.
In a temper of panic, he toppled the butt over, the water soaking invisibly into the dry ground.
By the time he reached the river again it had become a tide of dead. The once-living wallowed to and fro in the wash, rising and falling with the slow motion of obscene lovers. Old men, young women, children. For fifteen minutes, Sandingham had blankly watched a baby floating next to its mother, her hand entangled forever in the infant’s clothing. Between the bodies, where they were not log-jammed together against the shore or a collapsed waterfront building, hundreds of tiny fish floated belly-up. An occasional seabird filled in the occasional space. In death, they were all equal.
He found himself talking quite loudly to himself in English and instantly jammed his mouth with his fingers. This slip of concentration brought him out in a cold sweat of fear, for leaning against the wall a few feet away was a young Japanese man.
Sandingham glanced sideways to see if he had been overheard.
The man was bruised all over his side and was nursing a broken left arm. The shattered bone was protruding not just through the skin but also through the shreds of clothing he was wearing. He was moaning.
Sandingham edged along the ground to the man’s side.
‘Doshita no desuka?’ he asked.
The man raised his face to Sandingham but made no reply. His open eyes saw nothing. It was quite obvious that he was blind.
Finally he mumbled a reply. Sandingham, not understanding it, said, ‘Doshite agema shoka? Nanio motte kimashoka?’
‘Mizu,’ answered the man, his fingers pressing to his arm. Then, again, ‘Mizu. Mizu.’
Sandingham could do nothing. There was no water.
After a while the young man got to his feet, rubbing his back up the wall. He staggered off in the direction of the river but, after going about a hundred yards, he fell on to his side, gave a yodelling howl and lay still.
All through the late afternoon, wounded figures had been continuously going by him, walking aimlessly, stumbling, tottering, lurching, feeling their way, crawling even. For the last half-hour, however, this traffic of pain and despair had eased.
The evening sun was trying to sever the clouds and smoke. It was weak and lifeless.
Leaning now against the wall, Sandingham sensed he was not on his own. He looked around him. No one alive was in sight. The dead youth lay in the road. The dead girl opposite was still there, partially covered by ash that had drifted against her like snow. The little group of dead by the remains of the food shop was unchanged. The dead cat beside the burnt-out car had not moved. Yet he felt he was with someone.
His eyes focused on a section of the wall to his right. There was someone there. They were standing in the centre of the street. Their shadow was plainly outlined on the plaster of the wall. Sandingham gazed at it. Yet in the street there was no one.
He stood up hurriedly and ran to the point where the person should be. Still no living person in sight; yet the shadow was still there, imprinted on the wall.
He took two quick strides and his own shadow merged with the other. He was where the person had been, should still be. If that person had had a soul and that soul had had a shadow it would be inhabiting his body now. They would be in him, safe in the deep recesses of his marrow. He heard himself shout – a shriek, his dry throat ripping apart as the sound rose to a whistling falsetto.
He ran, his own shadow flitting over the rubble of the houses and the bodies of the dead; his voice he left behind in the air, hanging there like the shadow that had lost its owner.
* * *
He was worn out, totally enervated. All he wanted to do was sleep, lose consciousness forever, just as Mishima had chosen to do.
After leaving the shadow he had fled along a maze of streets and, as darkness fell, found himself on the edge of what appeared to be a public park. There was a mass of people on the ground within it, lying or squatting upon the grass. Their silence shocked him deeply. Some were moaning or wheezing, some keening in undertones of anguish, but no one was speaking.
From a gate pillar there hung a gate. It was still, miraculously, on its hinges. Pointlessly, for the second half of the twin gate had disappeared, he pushed it open and stepped on to a pathway.
As soon as he passed a group of people on the ground, and they noticed that he was unhurt and standing upright, they begged water of him, or help, or comfort. They did not clamour or shout or demand. Nor did they really ask. They merely said it in soft, lover-like voices.
‘… awaremi tamai,’ they pleaded. ‘… awaremi tamai.’
He had no pity left to offer.
An old woman was going from one corpse to another, skilful in her ability to distinguish between the living and the non-living: there was often little apparent difference. From any corpse that wore spectacles she helped herself to them, trying on pair after pair before discarding them. Sandingham followed her movements until she discovered some that suited her vision and disappeared behind a clump of trees.
One man lying beside a split tree trunk captured Sandingham’s attention. He sat cross-legged on the ground, stark-naked like a grotesque holy man. His body was covered with dancing stars. He was muttering something to himself, over and over. Curious, Sandingham went up to him and listened to his liturgy.
‘Tenno heika, banzai, banzai, banzai, banzai.’
The stars around his body were made by the brittle evening light splitting apart in the hundreds of glass splinters that were embedded in his skin.
Towards the centre of the park the people thinned out and the shrubbery that had survived the blast rustled in the hot night breezes. Behind him, the pitiful congregation were illuminated by the dying fires in the city.
The bushes offered Sandingham the shelter and protection he needed to sleep. His eyes were leaden and his brain numbed by all he had seen. He pressed the branches aside and entered the cavern of the undergrowth.
The men were sitting in a row, their legs stretched out before them.
Sandingham eased himself on to the earth, not noticing them. Gradually, he felt their presence. He looked up at them.
They were all alike. Their faces were entirely burned and the frail skin hung from their cheeks and foreheads like the flaking surfaces of the hoods of ripe mushrooms. Their sockets were red voids and the mucus of their melted eyes shone glutinously on the raw, hanging flesh of their faces, like the glass from, the tram windows. Their lips were gross, swollen slits surrounded by creamy pus and plasma.
He jerked back. They heard his movement and whispered through the cracks of their mouths. They hissed like creatures of the underworld. They spoke as insects might.
One of them tried to get up, rocking himself from side to side on his buttocks. Another raised his arms very slowly towards Sandingham. As he did so, Sandingham could hear the tissues in the man’s armpits tearing.
He grunted with fear, with ultimate horror. He wanted to scream but could not.
The dead were coming to life.
He picked up a clod of dried earth and hurled it at the man with the crackling arms. The ball of soil hit him on the chest and disintegrated like a tiny grenade. The earth made a radiant pattern on the man’s flayed skin which darkened as the blood soaked into the dirt, absorbing it into the meat.
Sandingham ran pell-mell through the park, standing on people’s hands, tripping over their prostrate bodies, oblivious of everything. He ran until there was nothing in his life but the next step following the last step and the cartoon strip of all he had witnessed that day flickering in an endless loop through his brain.
* * *
He was lying in a ditch. Over his head, thin leaves were shifting in a breeze. A bird was cheeping somewhere, readying itself for dawn. Far off, a dog was howling and barking.
Opening his eyes, he stared upwards at the pattern of the tree against the vaguely lightening sky. Mud was caking on his chest and his left cheek. His right cheek wa
s cushioned by wet clay. As he lifted his left arm to pull himself upright, the dried mud cracked. He shuddered and checked that it was just mud and not his flesh.
He took a deep breath and slapped his hand on the mud to reassure himself. The grimy splash spattered his soiled skin.
‘I’m alive,’ he said to the tufts of grass by his face. ‘Filthy, agreed. But alive. Definitely!’ He raised his eyes. ‘But why? Why on earth me?’
* * *
His tatame stank of sweat. He lay on his side, hunched up like a foetus, trying to exorcise his memories. The other prisoners avoided him, for they had listened to his description of the city and what he had seen and they knew what he must be thinking. For some of them his concern was unexpected. The Japs had given the prisoners a time in hell and the dropping of what they all assumed to be a vast cluster bomb had come as a just retribution.
The guards kept well away from the prisoners. They still mounted watch over them but they seldom interfered with what they did and there were no more work parties sent out to factories, the shipyards or the timber works. No punishments were meted out and no fatigues ordered. Two prisoners in the eiso were released without explanation.
Five days after Sandingham had returned to the camp, walking in through the gates which the sentries held open for him, a turmoil was caused by an American aircraft flying low overhead. He heard the first pass.
‘Joe! Joe! For Chrissake, get on out here! We’ve been spotted! It’s the USAF!’
He walked listlessly to the door of the barrack and squinted against the bright morning sky. Out to sea, he could hear the whine of the aero engine. It gathered in volume.
The Grumman Avenger flew over so low that Sandingham could even make out the features of the pilot’s face as he gazed down from the cockpit. Every rivet and exhaust-oil stain was pin-sharp. On the third run over, the aircraft climbed to a thousand feet and littered leaflets across the camp and the surrounding fields.
One of the leaflets fluttered down to the ground by Sandingham, who picked it up.
‘What’s it say?’
He turned to find that Mick Harwood had joined him in the sunlight. His sightless eyes stared flatly at Sandingham but the remainder of his face betrayed his eager inquisitiveness.
