The Cloud Forest

by JH Fletcher

  ‘Sure,’ Wally said, squinting through the smoke. The shared vision of the forest and of those things you could not touch and therefore dared not acknowledge tied them in complicity.

  ‘You need to get outa yourself,’ Wally said.

  Colin was wary of such a suggestion. ‘What you gettin’ at?’

  ‘I gotta girl.’

  Colin was impressed. ‘We only bin ’ere three days.’

  Wally gave him the slow smile of a man who had his priorities right. ‘No time to hang about. You ’n’ me, we could be mud in another week.’ Another pause. ‘She gotta friend …’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Gotta live while you got the chance,’ Wally told him.

  ‘How’d you meet ’em?’

  ‘That village back down the road …’

  Colin knew it: three or four lop-eared houses sagging under the blows of the unceasing rain. You could hardly call it a village at all.

  ‘All I ever seen there is a couple of old women.’

  ‘There’s a bit of a shop. Went in there to buy some fags. She was in there.’ Again Wally gave him the confident smile of the seasoned campaigner. ‘Chatted ’er up.’

  ‘Speak French, do you?’ Remembering the long-abandoned phrase book that had been issued to them, back in the innocent days when the war still had the brightness of adventure.

  ‘Not a word,’ said Wally.

  ‘Then she …?’

  ‘You don’ need words.’

  Colin contemplated the amazing vision of Wally discovering a girl in a place like this; more, of chatting her up without even words to help him.

  ‘Life goes on,’ Wally said. ‘Gotta make sure of that.’

  ‘How’d you know she got a friend?’

  ‘I saw her.’

  ‘How do we manage it?’ Because there were rules. When it wasn’t killing you, or even when it was, the army was great on rules.

  ‘We’ll sneak out tonight …’

  There would be military police; like lice, the MPs were everywhere, an unavoidable hazard of war. But Wally was clearly a man expert at living in the shadow of death; Colin was content to leave it to him.

  Tonight, then, and a woman who five minutes ago he hadn’t known existed.

  8

  A stream separated the rest camp from the village. That night, with the moon hidden behind cloud, they crept cautiously across the saturated grass to the edge of the water. The river’s dark surface was streaked with foam; it ran glugging between banks that occasionally, undercut by the current, collapsed splashing into the stream.

  Colin looked at it apprehensively. ‘How deep is it?’

  ‘You can wade most of it. Might have to swim a yard or two but it’s safer than the road; the cops patrol the bridge.’

  Which they could see, a hundred yards downstream.

  It was early summer, supposedly, but the water was cold enough to freeze the breath in his throat. Freeze other things, too, but Wally was right; they only had to swim a fraction of the way and in no time had reached the other side, soaking but triumphant.

  The houses formed cubes of blackness against the sky. They clambered quickly up the steeply shelving bank and made their way towards them, the wind cutting ribbons of ice through their cringing flesh.

  ‘Second from the end,’ Wally murmured.

  They arrived and stood close to the wall while Wally rapped softly on the door. A few seconds’ delay — just enough for Colin to wonder, apprehensively, if something had gone wrong — before the lock clicked, the sound loud in the darkness, and the door opened a crack to reveal the pale shadow of a face peering out at them.

  Wally leant forward. ‘It’s us,’ he said in a low voice. ‘How yer goin’?’

  There was a soft giggle, breath-deep, and the door was pulled wide. A gust of heat came out to greet them, a warm, womanly smell, welcoming and as strange as magic, and the woman said something softly, beckoning them with a pallid glint of her hand. In a blink, they were inside the house.

  With the door shut securely behind them, she led the way into an inner room where, amid the soft play of shadows, a lamp flowered in a flicker of golden light. Colin looked about him, taking in the sudden revelation of a world, unremarkable in itself, that brought back images he had long forgotten: of a warmth and seeming security he would have said no longer existed anywhere on earth.

  It was only then — almost, it seemed, as an afterthought — that he saw that there was indeed, as Wally had promised, another girl in the small and lamp-warmed room. In some ways the two were much alike. Both women: that, above all. Both young and slender and smiling, both bearing within themselves and in the air about them the scent and sense of youth and joy. They represented everything in the world and in himself that stood in proud defiance of the killing and brute ugliness of the war. Yet on another plane they were not like each other at all. The woman who had let them into the house, who had closed the door against the darkness and the world of fear, was pliant as grass, slender, with long pale limbs and hair the gold of early sunshine. Behind her, in the shadows, her friend’s chestnut-brown eyes smiled beneath a close-fitting cap of dark brown hair, glossy and shining in the light. She was not tall; her body was smoothly rounded, warm with the promise of peace.

  Colin thought they were the most beautiful creatures he had seen in his life.

  Wally was speaking. ‘This ’ere’s me mate. The one I told you about. His name’s Colin. Colin,’ he repeated, mouthing the word with patient and careful precision, presenting it to the two women as though it and therefore Colin himself were as fragile and wonderful as a piece of precious glass. ‘He’s my mate,’ he said with quiet insistence. ‘A good bloke. Like I am.’ And smiled, seemingly confident that, without a common word between them, they would nevertheless understand at least the essence of what he was telling them.

  A good bloke, like I am: as though such a conglomeration of sounds could mean anything to them. Yet, as Colin watched in slowly awakening wonder, he saw that something in Wally’s dogged speech must indeed have broken through the barrier of incomprehension that separated them, for the softly smiling brown girl came forward and took his hand in fingers that were at once cool and warm and, in a voice that by contrast contained only warmth, repeated what Wally had said.

  ‘Colin. A good boke.’ She laughed, sharing with him her pleasure in sounds that should have meant nothing to her yet that it seemed she had understood as soon as she had heard them. ‘A good boke …’ and laughed again, mischievously, inviting him to share her delight in having got the sounds almost right, aware yet uncaring that she had somehow slipped up over her pronunciation and laughing at that, too.

  Wally was talking to the tall blonde girl who was laughing, jabbering back at him in a tangle of incomprehensible sounds. Neither understood a word the other was saying yet Colin saw that it didn’t matter, that what was important was what lay behind the words: the smiles, shared glances and warmth.

  The girl who Colin was already thinking of as his girl took his hand and led him to a small double sofa in a corner of the room, beneath a framed picture of a bunch of flowers in a vase. The vase was golden, the flower heads a gay orange that stood out as warm as fire against a background of tan and pale green shadows. The girl sat and smiled up at him, patting the plush velvet seat to indicate that he should sit beside her.

  ‘Viens,’ she said. ‘Viens …’

  Vee-an. Or something like that, patting the seat softly with her sun-browned hand, her smile as bright and beautiful as the picture of the flowers above her head.

  The blonde girl spoke to her in the same tongue and she nodded. ‘Mon pauvre garçon,’ smiling more broadly than ever, her voice as soft and caressing as the lamplight. ‘Viens ici.’

  Colin discovered that he, too, could understand what she was saying without knowing the words she used to say it. He sat beside her and she took his hand in hers, caressing his fingers, one by one, her touch silk-tender, her expression at once grave a
nd gently smiling. ‘Pauvre garçon …’ repeating over and over the sounds mysterious yet comforting. Her fingers stroked his own so that all — the warm smile, the sun-browned face, the silk-soft fingers — became a unified and overwhelming gesture of sharing and gentleness that brought tears pricking foolishly to his eyes.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.

  It seemed that she understood this, too, because she laughed and placed her fingers upon her own breast. ‘Sanette …’ She repeated the gesture with her fingers now on his breast. ‘Colin …’

  He took her fingers and raised them to his lips and kissed them, while his eyes watched her above her outstretched arm. Her eyes were soft, her fingers extricated themselves from his, she cupped the side of his face with a gesture of infinite tenderness, before leaning forward and kissing him gently on his lips.

  9

  ‘In with a chance there,’ Wally said.

  It was nearly dawn: a sky cloud free, for once, and soft with the pearly glow of the still invisible sun. In front of them the river flowed beneath a thin scarf of mist that swirled silently above the dark and rippling surface of the rushing water.

  ‘It’s gunna be bloody cold,’ Wally said cheerfully. ‘Let’s get it over with, before those bastard MPs spot us.’ He clambered gingerly down the bank. ‘Bloody hell!’

  He started to flail his way across, gasping, splashing and groaning in a medley of sounds that would have had every MP in the district on their backs at once had they been awake to hear him.

  Colin followed more cautiously, the river’s freezing grasp brutal after the warmth of the room and the woman he had just left.

  Sanette. The memory of the name warmed him as he reached the other side of the stream and hauled himself dripping and shivering onto the bank, yet there had been a great deal more to the evening than the sharing of names.

  Wally’s girl had put out the light almost at once. She and Wally had squeezed themselves together into a chair barely big enough to accept their entwined bodies. In the tiny room they had been so close that Colin could have reached out his hand and touched them without shifting from his place on the sofa. Not that he had — he’d had preoccupations of his own — but the discreet darkness had at once been heated by a mounting threnody of sighs and groans and gasps, while Colin’s own fingers had caressed first Sanette’s face, then her throat, and finally the warm smoothness of breasts that she seemed only too willing to offer him.

  Pauvre garçon …

  Over and over she said it, until the tenderness of the sound, softly repeated, was made more vehement by the mounting heat of passion and Sanette and Colin joined the others in gasps and sighs and the furtive realignment of bodies that touched and opened and thrust in the shared moisture and yearning of desire. At last the fleshly rituals of eagerness, striving and fulfilment drove out, if only for the moment, the world of fear and aching hopelessness that was the war.

  In with a chance, indeed.

  Wally stood waiting for him, teeth chattering with cold, water streaming from him, yet with his lips wreathed in a knowing smile. ‘You got there, eh?’

  While Colin, astonished, found he did not want to talk about it.

  ‘Sounded like you was doin’ all right, anyway.’

  ‘Too bloody true.’

  Colin led the way through the stealthy gathering of light towards their tent and the prospect, in an hour or two’s time, of a well-deserved breakfast.

  In what seemed no time at all, they were back in the line. They were moved a few miles south, to an area where real trenches took the place of breastworks. Both Colin and Wally hated the move — it made it a lot harder to see the two girls — but, apart from the trenches and the interruption to their love life, nothing had changed. They were still surrounded by the grim atrocity of war, and the time in the warm and shadowed room with Sanette and the long-boned, blonde girl whose name, Colin had by now learnt, was Jeannine, seemed as though it had never been. Yet the memory of that night’s happiness and desire, the unspoken but emphatic repudiation of the war, remained, like the recurrent image of the Cloud Forest itself, to sustain him through the months that followed.

  10

  A night like other nights, which in retrospect would be indistinguishable from all the nights that followed or preceded it, yet at the time carried its individual imprint of horror and degradation.

  It was eleven o’clock and fully dark when they left the breastwork and made their way out through the opening in the wire in the direction of the German trenches. From somewhere to the north came the ripped-silk malevolence of a machine gun, far enough away to be ignored. Flares rose, painting long black shadows across the open ground. They froze at once; then, darkness restored, went on. The black expanse of open ground, the black future, swallowed them.

  All around him, Colin could sense the watchful eyes of the living and the dead. How many times had he seen the dead lying out in the open, after an attack had gone in? Germans or Australian: it was all one in the end. They lay like children who had thrown themselves down, abandoning themselves to sleep. In the mornings, the early mist that came with the dawn to hug the ground in these parts lay upon them like a coverlet. Beneath the mist they lay, limbs spread in abandon, bodies at rest. But their skins were already tinged green, and the blood, if anyone chose to look closely, was black. Not that anyone did. What was the point? The novelty of the dead had worn off months before. Now they outnumbered the living, who often shared their trenches, the jagged hollows of shell holes, with the bodies of those who had been killed.

  Colin felt their eyes on him. There was nothing unusual in that either; several of his mates had talked of feeling the same thing. Worse than the eyes of the dead were the weapons clutched in their hands. These turned towards him now as he made his way forward through the darkness; they presented the muzzles of their rifles to him, their bayonets gleamed dully in the half-light of his imagination. That was bad. It was these visions, rather than the eyes themselves, that preyed upon his mind; he could not rid himself of the idea that at any moment those spectral weapons would open up, that bullets, suddenly real, would smash into him, pulverising bone, skin, heart, lungs, life itself, that he, too, would join the teeming millions of the dead.

  It was all he could do to go on, yet somehow he managed it.

  At length they came to the wire. Now was the instant of life, or death. If the Germans saw them …

  The tiniest chink as the wire cutters gripped. The sound rang like a tocsin. For a moment, everybody froze, expecting shouts of alarm from the trenches in front of them, but nothing happened. A click as the jaws of the cutters cut through the wire. And again silence, heart pounding. Again nothing. They had all done this before, a dozen times. Soon the gap in the wire was wide enough to admit them. The trench lay open in front of them. The Germans must all be asleep, or vanished.

  ‘Let’s do it then.’

  Out of the darkness the command was passed from man to man, soft yet as implacable as steel. Colin barely had time to gather his wits before, all around him, men surged to their feet and flung themselves over the lip of the trench into whatever might be waiting for them. They were in luck; this section of the enemy line was unmanned; yet perhaps they were not so lucky, after all. Certainly they were still alive and undetected, but the purpose of the raid was to take back prisoners so that the Intelligence boys could find out how strong the enemy was in this sector. If they found no one in the forward positions, they would have to go on until they did find someone. The further they advanced, the further it would be to come back. The only way they would be able to manage it was by switching off their minds, forcing their bodies to move without regard to the terror that pounded in their hearts.

  Scrambling, Colin followed a group of his mates as they ran flat out along the trench. They reached a place where it turned back further into the German lines.

  I want to go to Berlin …

  At this rate they might just about manage it.

&n
bsp; Someone eased an eyebrow around the corner of the trench.

  ‘Come on!’

  Still nothing. Blood heavy in their bursting veins, hearts pounding, battle frenzy like a red tide in their heads, they ran forward; as one man, they hurled themselves around the corner; as one man they went flat on their bellies as, somewhere immediately in front of them …

  … A machine gun opened up.

  At all costs the impetus must not be lost. Already an arm was going back to hurl a grenade, to clear the trench ahead of them. A rifle shot crashed in their ears. The grenade thrower froze in midthrow and slid forward gently, wearily, onto his face. The grenade, released by nerveless fingers, fell, bounced, and came to rest immediately in front of Colin’s horrified eyes.

  The ghostly gun muzzles focused on his body.

  There was no time for fear or even disbelief. He scrambled to his feet, hand swooping; he snatched the grenade, his arm went back and forward in a single scything movement, the grenade flew. Again he flung himself down. Like the rest of them, he began counting.

  One, two …

  Eyes shut, face and clutching hands pressed in frenzy into the muddy trench floor.

  Three …

  The grenade exploded with a shattering roar. Shrapnel whistled. But the grenade had landed on the open ground outside the trench. No one was killed, or even scratched. Pounding hearts, pouring sweat, eyes glaring from mud-crusted faces, they had once again come through.

  ‘Come on!’

  They knew they had to do it, but this time it was much harder to get up, to hurl themselves once again into the face of waiting death. No choice; stay here and they would be dead anyway, as soon as the Germans worked out what was going on. They had to catch a prisoner or two and get back to their own lines before the inevitable counterattack came through. Trampling on the dead grenade-thrower in their haste, they once again went on. Another rifle shot rang out but no one was hurt. Perhaps it had never been firing at them at all, and the dead man had been killed by a stray round. It was quite possible; in a battle, even in a patrol like this, there was always a lot of junk flying around.