A World of Other People

by Steven Carroll

  But tonight it doesn’t. Tonight the world does not turn black. Suddenly, his memory is lit up and he bursts upon that world that lies on the other side of darkness, which has been there all along. And there he is. Smith. Hammering at the perspex. Screaming to get out. And Jim knows there is an axe inside the plane. And that with the axe he could smash the door of the cabin open and set Smith free and the screams would stop. And at the same time the voice is yelling in his ears, saying it’s going to go. Any minute. All of it. It’s going up. But even as he imagines going back into the plane, the voice, no longer calm and reassuring, becomes frantic. It’s going to go. It’s going up. All of it. Get out. Get out. For God’s sake get away! And his feet, his treacherous feet, are taking him backwards. Away from the flaming plane. Away from the screams and the waving arms of Smith. Away from the noise and the heat. Then everything explodes and the world turns black.

  When he opens his eyes his coat is unbuttoned, his hat is gone. His hands and face and neck, in the cold, wintry church, are running with sweat. And people near him are staring. It is then that he realises he must have cried out and that those nearest heard, for only those nearest are turned judgementally towards him. His eyes are blank. The reel of recovered memory has run out. But no sooner has it run its course than it starts up again. And again. At the front of the church Eliot closes the slim volume of poetry and puts it back in his briefcase. So slim a volume, Jim notes, so few words. But these words, spoken in the driest of dry voices, were waiting for him all along.

  It is then that Eliot, gaunt, lean, pale, begins to make his way from the church, amid further applause. Slightly stooped, the air of an elder statesman, he nods to the crowd, a hint of a smile. And then he stops; for a moment he stops because he is staring directly at Jim. And those eyes are coming from deep inside the mask, peeping out from behind the face that he wears to greet the faces that he meets, and Jim stares directly back at him. And in that moment they are equals. They are one and the same, for they each, Jim immediately recognises, inhabit a world of other people. For you and me the world is other. Isn’t it? And being one and the same Jim can speak his mind. Or, rather, convey his thoughts and all their attendant, messy emotions without need of speech. That was my plane. That was my kite. We died that night, but you saw only an idea. A useful idea. A way of saying things that you hadn’t known how to say until we burst from the clouds and showed you. We weren’t real, were we? None of it is real, is it? Ash, old men, houses with the life bombed out of them. None of it. And will the applause, the applause you now nod in recognition of, will the applause sting one day? Will it sting because you know, and I know, that when you should have been moved to care, you were taking notes instead? Remaining perfectly still, as a poet must? We were useful for a time, were we not? That was my plane. That was my kite. We died that night, but at least we were alive enough to die in that flaming moment. Were you? Were you ever? Will I ever be again? They are dead now. They are gone. They have crossed over. And here we are, you and I, one and the same. In a world of other people. Neither alive nor dead, but walking a dead patrol through that no-man’s-land in between.

  The exchange takes a moment, and Eliot moves on, the applause slowly fading as he approaches the door of the church and disappears into the street, wrapped in his coat and hat. And he is no sooner gone than Jim summons all the strength he can from his jelly legs, rises slowly and unsteadily and stumbles out into the night. Drunk, they’ll think he’s drunk, stumbling about and yelling in a church like a drunk and beyond caring. Hatless, his coat flapping in the wind, he shambles onto the street and now longs for the oblivion of the world turning black. For this is how it always went. Everything exploded. And then the world turned black. That was how it always worked. For the world did turn black that night. And it stayed black until he woke one morning in a hospital to learn that he had crash-landed in a country field and that all his crew were gone. That he’d been out of ‘radio contact’ for weeks. That nobody had expected him to pull through. But here he was, ‘back on the air’. Lucky Jim. And all the while, somewhere in a sealed-off section of his memory, Smith was screaming to get out. But his screams went unheard. Too far away to reach his ears until tonight, until those few words parted the clouds. For the poem contained that terrible truth and had been waiting for him all along, bursting with its secret. And so he wanders hatless into the snow, the screams that his mind had chosen to forget echoing in his ears, coming up from the well of memory, from the depths where they had been consigned to non-existence all this time.

  And it’s just as well she wasn’t there. Just as well she was spared the whole business. And so much for that voice, that voice saying I come from the world of other people and I … He pauses at an intersection and wonders which way to turn, then realises it doesn’t matter. Nobody can take him back into that world now. He has lost it. Like childhood, he cannot return. Not now. Never again. The sky, from which invisible snow falls on the street and on the city, is black. Dark, so dark he can touch the darkness. He is almost walking blind, parting it as he goes. She’ll be sleeping, or still in the pub, playing musical chairs. And laughing out loud, letting the world know with that laugh that it takes a lot more than a bomb to stop her. And he envies the laughing eyes of the girl in the ARP coat as he crosses into a wide road, the name of which he can’t see — no cars, no people, no sound except for the distant bell of an ambulance or fire truck.

  In the church, a woman, a regular who helps out when she can, is walking between the pews, cleaning up and looking for forgotten items. She stops at a pew in the middle of the church, bends down, and picks up an air-force hat. And she knows it belongs to a pilot from the wings on the front. It’s a fine hat, and this is not the sort of weather to be wandering around hatless. Whoever dropped this will soon be back for it. You can rely on that. And she walks over to a cloakroom that houses lost property and places it on a shelf with an extraordinary collection of spectacles, gloves, keys and umbrellas, confident that it won’t be there long.

  What has she done? She’s walking home through St James’s Park, the sky light enough for it to be morning, but only just. She suspects it won’t get much lighter for the rest of the day. The snow will continue to fall. It’s got that sort of look about it. In the end, after she and her companion gave up on the rooftop, they took refuge in somebody’s office on the top floor, sitting and drinking whisky in relative warmth. And she’s sure it’s the whisky keeping her going now, for she will return to her flat just long enough to rest and have breakfast then go back for a full day’s work if she can keep her eyes open that long.

  Fatigued as she is, she becomes aware of something out there in the sky. Faint at first, then louder. And from the moment she hears it she catches her breath. She can’t see it, but it’s there, she can hear it. That familiar droning of engines in the sky. Here I come. Here I come. And she wonders what on earth it’s doing there in this weather. Then a bomber drops from the clouds, stark against the grey sky, and continues across the city and beyond. And she follows it until it becomes a dot in the distance, willing it home — willing it on with every ounce of energy left in her tired body. What has she done? What did she succumb to? There, that’s life, suspended up there between earth and sky. Homing. Homing, like a … what? Yes, that’s it … like a dove. What fabulous nonsense did she give in to? She doesn’t hold anybody’s fate in her hands and never has. There are no invisible hands guiding events and never have been. And the only duty she feels compelled to observe at this very moment is her duty to live. And there, that disappearing speck in the sky, that’s life.

  BOOM, she mentally cries as she strides across the park to her flat. BOOM, then again and again. The dot fades then disappears altogether, but it doesn’t matter. And she doesn’t know if her heart’s pounding from striding across the park in the snow or from going BOOM. And she doesn’t know if there’s anything to be retrieved from the mess she’s made but she must find out. She won’t stop until she does. Fool! You lit
tle idiot! She leaves the park, her face set, telling herself that she has been a fool once, but never again. They’ll never catch her again, those thin-lipped armies of the self-righteous! And just then the thin lips of Mr Eliot and his thin-lipped poem of cold, draughty churches and medieval gloom come back to her. Never again. That was life out there — ordinary, impure, silly human life that chases the runaway horse of love because it just can’t help it. There is time. There is time, she tells herself. Surely there must be.

  She comes to a stop in front of the black door in the tiny laneway where two phantom figures pressed against each other. She is no longer tired. She is beyond being tired. Everything is suddenly urgent. And there isn’t a minute to lose, for too many have been lost already.

  Inside, she sits at the kitchen table and writes. A short letter that says all of this, that her mind had succumbed to nonsense when she last spoke to him on the telephone, that it was now free of nonsense and was clear. Please, please write back. Tell me that there is time, after all. And that if there is, we will live it together, all that time, until it runs out.

  She has never written such a letter before. Such letters have been beneath her, written by silly people, turned silly by love. But as she seals it, and writes Jim’s name and his base address on the envelope, she knows without doubt that it is the simplest, truest thing she has ever written.

  It is exactly as the poem said. He follows a dirt road, more of a track really, rough and bumpy, running straight through the bare open fields, perhaps for a mile or so, he’s not sure, the hedgerows covered in a blossom of snow. Blossom out of season. Winter’s bloom. And he’s not even sure what he’s doing here but he follows this rough road up towards a scatter of buildings that calls itself Little Gidding and then comes to a pig-sty. He’s been up all night, and he must look it. But he barely gives it a thought. Besides, tired, washed-out faces are everywhere. Nobody gives you a second glance. Everybody looks like they’ve been up all night. And his night has passed as in a dream. Wandering through dark streets that followed no pattern, hardly knowing where he was, not caring. Beyond caring. What did it matter? That last look of Smith’s made nothing matter. Not any more. That last look, watching Jim back away from the plane as he hammered at the clear perspex window. What was in that look? He asked himself again and again the same question as he rambled from underground shelter to church courtyard through one dark, twisting street after another, the snow falling steadily all night and he barely noticing it — what was in that look? Nothing other, he concluded, than the blazing desire to live and the utter astonishment that Jim could leave him. Just walk away. Back into the land of the living, leaving Smith to the flames.

  Presumably, at some stage, somebody lifted a phone and reported it. A ball of flame doesn’t fall from the sky into a city park without somebody noticing. A phone call, setting in motion a well-rehearsed routine. Fire engines, ambulances, bells ringing in the night. He never saw any of it. Never saw them hose down his kite and reduce ‘F’ for Freddie to a sodden mess of charred remains. Never saw the steam rise from the carcass of the plane, the metal ribs of the fuselage exposed to the moonlight. Never saw it carted off in the first light before anybody could see the broken remnants of the bomber and the charred crew still inside, as though all of it, ‘F’ for Freddie, never existed. He never saw any of that because the world had already turned black.

  Yes, it is just as the poem said. Just like a map, a directory. For he turns behind the pig-sty, and there is the church, a chapel really. And the house. The farming fields all around are covered in snow. He barely notices the cold; he has been cold all night. He is beyond being cold. And he is tired and worn out. More than worn out. Spent. He is more tired than he has ever been. And it is the kind of tiredness, he knows, that will not go away. That will leave him tired forever. All he wants to do now is sleep.

  Why here? He can’t tell. He doesn’t know, not really. All he knows is that he finished up at the station that he always came back to after leave, from which he caught those slow trains that always took him back to the base. But as he looked around the station he knew he wasn’t going back to the base. He was never going back there again. It was simple really. He’d made his decision. The war, that whole world of bombs and planes and targets, could go on without him. His war was over. He’d come here to this tiny community instead, because he’d felt the overwhelming need for home, and, in the absence of it, this place was the nearest thing to home he could think of. It was as though the decision had been made during the night in the hidden command post of his intuition, and Jim were just following orders. And now, gazing out over the snow-coloured fields behind the pig-sty, he knows it is the right decision. That there is something deeply satisfying about being here. Logical, even. And that pleases him. That somehow there is a logic to all this. His mind, that mind that took years to train, is still good. He is still functioning.

  But he is tired. And all he wants to do is sleep. He looks again across the snow-covered rooftops and fields. It is neither a town nor a hamlet even, but a community. A religious one. They’ve got their own church. It’s an old one, with a plain grey facade, that has the look of a church that is used and cared for. There’s a tombstone at the front, covered in snow. But everything looks shut up. There is a small cemetery behind the church, and as he ambles about it he notices that the same family name crops up again and again. He tries the door of the house, but it is locked. He tries the church itself and it, too, is locked. Nobody is about. Whoever lives here has gone away. He is tired, and he just wants to sleep. I’ve had enough, a voice is saying. I’ve had enough. No more, let me sleep. And he wanders beyond the buildings to a bare tree in a field that looks back to this small, closed-up community, and slowly, pulling his collar up and wrapping his coat around him, lies down in the hollow of the trunk. It is snug, like a crib. And warm. Deliciously warm. And he is tired. More tired than he has ever been. And from the moment he lies down he feels sleep coming on. From the moment he curls up in the hollow with his coat wrapped about him, he feels his whole body, his whole being, sinking into a delicious sleep. One of those stolen sleeps of childhood: drifting off in front of the fire in the lounge room in that distant Little Germany, in which there is no war and which acknowledges a different history and where the rhythms of sleep rise and fall to a different measure of time; that distant suburb in which he grew up, with the wireless in the background and the reassuring sounds of his mother and father talking quietly in the kitchen. And from somewhere in a sealed-off section of his memory the cries of Smith are released and come to him again, Smith’s eyes wide with disbelief as Jim leaves him to the flames. But they are distant cries. And distant flames. They don’t touch Jim. For from the moment he curls up in the hollow of the tree trunk he feels his whole being sinking into a delicious, stolen sleep. The stolen sleep of childhood that is sweeter than all the sleep that follows. And the more he sinks into sleep the fainter those cries become. Until they fade altogether. And a voice, calm and reassuring, says: ‘You know what to do. Just close your eyes …’ He is home. He is by the fire once again in that Little Germany. The wireless is playing in the background. His mother and father are talking quietly in the kitchen. The world is as it should be. Everything in its place. The native has returned. The moon glances down upon the scene. All is well. He closes his eyes. Sleep envelops him. And the world turns black.

  The field is white with snow. And the snow is still falling. Gentle, even snow. One tree stands in the field. An old, bare tree, its branches white with the blossom of snowfall. The small community is shut up for now, but later in the afternoon when the caretaker arrives, after he has checked the doors and the locks of the house and church, he will stand for a moment and look out over the field, at the tree covered in frozen blossom, and notice something odd. A dark smudge in the hollow of the tree. And as he nears it he will realise that the smudge is, in fact, a man, hatless, wrapped in an air-force greatcoat, curled up as if in childlike sleep. And the figur
e will not stir as he approaches. And he will know, as he draws nearer, that it will not stir again.

  8.

  AN UNFAMILIAR VOICE ON THE TELEPHONE

  The snow has stopped and the clouds have parted. The high sun is brilliant. The day is clear. It is mid-morning and Iris has just concluded a long call with a senior staff member. Not that she can remember half of what they said, for her mind is elsewhere, not here. And so when the telephone rings again she assumes it will be the same dry voice she has just been speaking to at the other end, and is surprised, but not particularly concerned, by the sound of an unfamiliar voice.

  It is an official voice. A military one; she can tell that from previous work dealings with the military. They all seem to have the one voice, as though they put it on with their uniforms. He gives Iris’s full name and asks if this is who he is speaking to, and she says yes. And when he’s satisfied he is speaking to the right Iris, he introduces himself. He is a captain and a squadron leader. And there’s something in his voice then that reminds her of the policeman in the movies who stands at the front door and says he has some bad news. He asks if she knows Jim, and he gives Jim’s full name and rank, which throws her a little because he’s always just been Jim. But of course she knows him, she says. She nearly adds that she more than knows him and is tempted to ask can she please speak to him, but she waits, telling herself that there will be time enough for that. And then, after a slight, uneasy pause, he goes on to say exactly what the policeman in the movies says.

  It is then that the world goes dreamy. And when she looks back on this call, and the days that follow, she will look for the words to describe it and she will call it a dream. And she will float through these days, blown like a balloon. Life suddenly weightless, as insubstantial as dreams. For the odd thing about death (and she has just been told that Jim is dead, even though the captain doesn’t use that word; that his body was found in a country field under a tree the day before), the odd thing about death is that it is not real. That it is a dream, almost too weightless to be sad, a dream from which you will surely soon awake. But not at the moment. Not today, not over the next few days or the months to follow, even. For, she will conclude, the sheer incomprehensibility of death takes a long time to absorb. If it ever is. And so from the moment she learns that Jim has been silly enough to go and get himself dead, and that her runaway horse has run away, the world becomes dreamy and light.