Also I’m thinking that Douglas will be wondering why I’m lying here for so long, but there is a dissatisfaction in me, a feeling that some climactic point has not yet been reached, must still be reached, and I watch for him to, time after time, briefly appear in an arc of the camp’s perimeter nearest to where I am. Of one thing I am certain, however, and that is that, as he rounds the camp with a seemingly unvarying fluidity and grace, he is not conscious of anything save the honed and seamless machine that is his flesh and his driving need to subject it to his will.
But, slowly, as I wait for him to finish and return, a question is forming in me like the cloud that earlier built in a windless air – a question that, unbelievably, I did not at the time ask and that now seems laden with the electricity of meaning of a balance that a breath could swing either way.
And then he is returning, but from a quite different direction from the one in which he left, a smallish glass bottle glinting in his hand, and his breathing is deep but steady and his body sleek as a seal’s with sweat and his step proud. Also, there is a towel about his neck, which means that he must have called in at his hut, and now he stops at the ablution block and lays the bottle down out of reach of the splash of the taps, and strips off his underpants and crouches down under a tap.
Then he dries himself, slips the underpants back on, picks up the bottle and comes across to me. ‘You still here?’ he asks as though he did not expect me to be, and I take my cue from that and say, yes, I wanted to go but I have thought of a question that I should have asked him before and I would like to ask it now.
‘OK,’ he says and sits down flat, uncorking the bottle and shaking a splash of what smells like liniment into a palm. ‘Not much left,’ he mutters more to himself than me and begins to rub the oil into his calves and thighs. Then he starts kneading the small of his back with his oily hands, looking up at me with steady, preoccupied eyes, saying, ‘Need the wife for this’; then adds, ‘What’s the question?’ taking me by surprise.
Certain now that he is listening, I suddenly feel foolish, even reluctant to go on, but there is no question of not going on, so I hear myself say, my voice gruffer than I had planned, ‘Why is it, after you had been here a whole week, that you knew nothing about the way things here are run? Shit, I talked to you like on a guided tour and I could see that, to you, it was all new. Didn’t you or your friends ask around?’
For a long moment, he stares at me, his hands struggling with his back and a new question nagging at me that I am not going to ask because I am not looking for the job, namely, why doesn’t he ask me to rub his back for him like most other guys would? Or did he see me flinch when his finger touched my cheek?
‘I don’t have any friends here,’ he says at last, his voice disinterested and remote.
‘Well, couldn’t you then have asked around?’
Again he takes forever to reply. ‘I’m not a talking man.’
‘Well, you did all right with me today. Was I an exception to the rule?’
‘Depends,’ he says and grins, showing all of his white, square teeth, and I leave, mumbling something fuzzy, fleeing as from a thrashing between trees.
You can lead me blindfolded into our hut at a time when, say, everybody is out and standing in a queue, and whip off the blindfold and I will at once know it is our hut. Big deal? Yes, because the Prussian-grey, dull-windowed prefabs are not only outwardly the same but – to the first glance of the uninitiated – inwardly even more chillingly so. But I am not fazed by every hut’s seemingly uniform debris as from a blast: the scattering of garments, mostly tattered and soiled, the dixies, mugs, spoons, whether washed or unwashed, the desperate substitutes contrived by ingenious or blundering hands, the tumblings of blankets and greatcoats in the three-tiered bunks even long after noon, the kitbags dangling from nails driven into the bunks, the ash, food scraps, mud, trampled into a patina of filth as ineradicable as the grain of the floors, the indefatigable flies.
But there is more, much more, to every hut than that. There is also a spirit, as there is a spirit to every human shape, individual and unique and compounded of the sweat, sperm, blood, fears, hopes, insanities or profundities, of the two hundred of us allotted to each hut’s precisely calculated space, the whole honeycombed with aisles down which only the skeletal sidle with ease. It is this spirit’s embracing me, enticing me into the manifold foetors of its crotch, that enables me to say this is our hut even before the blindfold is removed; and it is hastening to me again now, loud, amoral, yet curiously comforting as even the harshest of homes can be, as I come in from the long lying in the sun.
Douglas is part of this home. Take him away, I think, and there will be a wound that messily bleeds, that nothing heals. What am I trying to defend? Off balance as one in sudden darkness or blinding light, I stand at the bottom of the aisle leading up to our two bunks, watch him furiously flouncing around. In this slough of inertia and decay, he alone finds something with which to murder time, is forever scrubbing utensils with sand till they shine, whisking the broom of useless twigs down our aisle, making and remaking his bed (and sometimes mine), speed-reading the weightiest book the camp library can provide, prowling, eager for bargains, the one-man, one-box food stalls where the non-smokers with a talent for trade set out their Red Cross cans of margarine, jam or Spam.
And, above all, vigorously pestering the old bastard with the belligerent beard and dead-fish eyes who occupies the bunk between my top and Douglas’ bottom one and doggedly refuses to be bludgeoned into exchanging his squat for mine. This disrupter of our familial life distresses Douglas more than he does me, which the latter, I suspect, senses because he communicates when Douglas is not there, telling me – among much else – that he was a staff sergeant in Stores and hinting without provoking that he thinks Douglas is more than a little mad. For which he is not to be too greatly blamed.
This rank business is no minor issue because this is a camp for NCOs who are not allowed to volunteer to work for the enemy on pain of being court-martialled for treason after the war, which means that our interloper can slightly pull rank and probably is already doing just that by staying where he is. Sad, in a way, this senior in every hut becoming hut boss and the most senior of the whole camp becoming our link with the Ite brass, which means he gets to tell us what shit they want us to do next. Like a fowl with its head chopped off doing its shadow dance of life-after-death? What, I wonder, is Danny’s rank, then wonder why I should quite so sharply want to know, and carry on edging up the aisle.
Now Douglas is clambering down from my bunk, deliberately almost treading on the glowering enemy beneath, and I come up close and ask, ‘Hey, what are you doing up there?’
Startled, he hits the floor and turns and says, badly lying as any child, ‘Just tidying up your bunk,’ but I look at him and he looks away and I say, ‘I told you before, let it be. You can’t always have everything your own way.’
He shuffles his feet, then, and I know he is blushing somewhere under the professorial beard and that he will again be pestering the stubborn-as-he, pernicious presence in the middle bunk the moment I am no longer there.
‘What’s for lunch?’ I then ask, and I’m not meaning the once-a-day dixie of camp swill and two buns per man which is just about due, the hut headman already standing ready to give the word when our hut’s number is called and we must nip down to the gate to take our turn.
‘I bought a tin of Spam from that chap with one eye who came over with us on the boat. He’s opened a stall near the toilets with just about nothing to sell and I thought we should give him a hand. OK?’
‘How much did you pay?’
‘Thirty smokes,’ which is expensive, but I don’t moan because the Red Cross parcels are late this month, which means that the stalls’ stocks are running low and it is the sellers who are calling the shots right now.
Then Douglas is looking at me more closely and I know why. ‘But Tommy!’ he exclaims so that half the hut can hear and the litt
le devil of my hatred of such diminutives is right there beside me, slipping his thin blade into my side. ‘Where have you been?’
‘What do you mean where have I been? You saw me lying out there in the sun, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, but for so long? Boy! are you going to peel!’
‘I fell asleep,’ I say, and the little devil with the knife asks why the lie?
Then the headman gives the word and I grab our dixies and fetch the swill, and, when I get back, Douglas has sliced the Spam sliver-thin and separated the slices into two exactly equal shares, and I mash my share into my swill and Douglas does the same with his, and we sit eating, huddled out of sight in his bunk because still so many of us have only the swill, and Douglas is prattling non-stop about trivialities, but I hardly hear him because of the little devil still asking me why the lie?
After lunch, Douglas says that if we are going to have tea, I will have to fix our blower-stove which is acting up, and I examine it and see that the fan that whirls round on a spindle when you crank it and blows air like a bellows in a forge onto the bed of wood-chips that we are sometimes allowed to collect on the surrounding hills – or the undersized, way-below-grade coals that the Ites dump on our side of the fence for us to use – is wobbling and knocking against the casing of the hammered-flat Red Cross food cans, and I fix it and we go out to the brewing site under the camp’s only tree and brew two pinches of the black flakes, scarce as gold, that used to be everyman’s humble tea.
Which is one helluva sentence, I know, but this is one helluva gadget that doesn’t exist anywhere in the still free world. Light, limbless and so portable that you can carry it with one hand, it can boil water, warm up food (or, on a cold day, your hands), as efficiently and quickly as any four-legged, sturdily-planted, civilized stove. And, yes, I did make it myself, Douglas being like a man without hands when it comes to working with wire and tin, but I did not invent – nor do I know who did – this one of uncounted thousands of its kin that whirr and puff under dixies of swill or tea or frying Red Cross Spam and are, to me, the crowning demonstration of how the human slob got to be the smartest bully of them all.
After tea, I stash the blower while Douglas rinses the dixie and mugs, then lie down on my bunk and look down at Douglas flipping through the pages of a hefty tome from the library about chemical fertilizers, and when I ask him how he can be interested in such shit, he says he’s not reading the book because of the fertilizers but because the fertilizers remind him of fields and flowers and stuff, and I think, ‘As fucking weird as him‚’ and get restless and clamber down from the bunk and say I’m going to Tony for a haircut and shave.
‘But you’re only due tomorrow,’ Douglas reminds, dragging himself away from the book.
‘I know, but I don’t think Tony will mind.’
‘Tony will eat you alive when he sees what you’ve done to your face,’ and Douglas aims his long nose back at the page and I think, ‘Why can’t he, just for once, say something coarse like grab you by the balls?’ and take the long way round to the theatre, zigzagging through the blowers at the brewing site – ‘Will somebody show Danny how to make him a blower so that he can brew the tea that no pom can do without?’ – and meander further through the huts’ humming like hives, looking in at each in a manner that is not me at all.
‘I am bored,’ I say to myself, almost in surprise, the theatre now clearly seen, and try to bluff myself that this is just the usual camp malaise, but a more ruthless voice tells the truth and I am deeply shamed because he is a loyal and honourable man who is satisfied with the so very little that I give.
‘Christ! What have you done to your face?’ Tony howls, clever hazel eyes widening under the gold-rimmed pince-nez it is a wonder the Ites have not already swiped for the gold.
‘Fell asleep in the sun,’ I lie for the second time, and Tony shakes his hairless-as-an-egg head and the long melancholy of his face sets into an even more dolorous mould.
‘But, Tom, you know the show’s on in a week’s time. Why the fuck did you have to go lolling around in the sun at all? Have you forgotten that you’re supposed to be a pasty-faced British subaltern in the mud and sleet of France in the Great War, not a Saharan legionnaire who’s lost his way back to the fort? Do you think the Ites dish out greasepaint like they do their macaroni without cheese? How many sticks of the stuff do you think it is going to take before I get you back to looking what you are supposed to be?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I mutter, feeling more than ever like a pissed-off family man with a shrew for a second wife. ‘I will have peeled by then.’
Tony sniffs, twitching the small, fine-as-porcelain nose that complements the dashing smear of the moustache. ‘Better do some praying that you are right.’ Then, ‘But why are you here now? Rehearsal’s only at five.’
‘I was hoping you would give me a shave and a trim.’
‘That, too, is not down in my diary for now. It is for tomorrow if dementia is not already setting in.’
‘I’m still hoping you’ll give me a shave and a trim.’ (‘But why the hurry?’ asks a Tom I flee. ‘Why must it be today?’)
Abruptly Tony smiles, baring his beaver-like front teeth, the dolour momentarily gone. ‘Sit down, you bloody serf,’ he says, and I do so on the rather regal chair with arms that is reserved for this more mundane aspect of his art, and he knots a pleasantly clean cloth about my neck and begins to strop his cutthroat with the furious abandon of an assassin anticipating an enjoyable kill.
Tony – or so it is rumoured, he being as sensitive as women are supposed to be when it comes to his age – is in his late forties, but does not look all that much older than my still very early twenties, his spry, sinewy body possessing the agelessness of those in whom the grinning granddad lies dormant till the bones buckle under the load. In short, I could have been his son, which should be a guarantee of sorts, but I am always still wary of Tony, inwardly shrinking from his touch – as, indeed, though to a lesser extent, I do in the case of even heterosexual fussers with my hair. My reaction – or should that be obsession? – is all the more perverted for my knowing that Tony, being a poof with class, would never, without my asking him – which means never – take advantage of my defencelessness whilst in the chair and grab me where he must not, but no amount of reasoning with myself cures me of my cringe.
But he does take other liberties, such as: ‘How’s the wife?’ he suddenly asks.
‘Cut that, Tony! You know Douglas is not like that.’
‘Like what? Give it a name, man. You are old enough to say the word.’
‘And old enough to take out your teeth if you don’t shut up,’ I say, but there is no earnestness to it, we both knowing that this is only the usual bitter fun.
For a while he works on me as though I am a dummy under his hands. Then, ‘You are such a waste.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Nice body, trying-to-be-nice heart trying to be loyal. Such a waste.’
I know I should be getting angry now, that he is going too far, but his voice is sad.
‘You don’t like him, do you?’ I ask instead, holding my tone steady as I can.
‘It’s not that I don’t like him. I hate him.’
‘But why?’ And now I am too shocked to be annoyed. ‘Because he is my friend?’
Now he again shows his teeth, but they are no longer a smile. ‘Don’t fancy yourself, kid. I don’t care two fucks who is your friend.’
‘Then why?’ I again ask, uncomfortably aware that I have, indeed, fancied myself, made of myself a fool.
‘Because he is like a sister that has left the tribe.’ Then he whips off the cloth, says, ‘Sweetest job in town,’ and turns away, saying ‘Bye,’ and I thank him and make for the door, but he stops me and adds, ‘Camel says to let you know he would like to be working on that portrait again,’ and I nod, knowing what he means.
Camel is called ‘Camel’ because he reminds us of one, rather than actually looks l
ike one – all long, arrhythmical bones that jangle and sway till you almost believe you can see the hump on his back that is not there. Add to that a beaten boxer’s nose, ears that hungrily yearn, an alcoholic’s flush – though no alcohol is to be had – and perennially blood-drenched eyes, and you have something of the ugliness of the circus sideshow that enthrals even as it repels.
So, having nothing better to do, I straight away make for his hut at the other end of the camp and find him sitting on his bunk, sketching heads without bodies and bodies without heads, the latter hung with genitals bursting with lust. Is he hetero or queer? His mannerisms are as unfortunate as Douglas’, but whereas I know for certain that Douglas is straight, he never having made a wrong move, I’m not as certain about Camel who has the habit of looking at my fly as though unbuttoning it and whose sketches, like these, do little to swing the balance the other way.
Also, there is this business of the portrait of me which he offered to do and on which he has been working, off and on, for weeks without making much progress as far as I can see. I first turned down the offer, saying it was nonsensical to paint a portrait of a nothing like me, but then my not so very latent vanity, plus Tony’s telling me that Camel was, of all things, an Aussie and a painter of some repute, seduced me into changing my mind and I have been spending endless hours in improbable postures while Camel paints my face and studies my groin.
I tell him Tony said I must come for another sitting and he stares at me as though I am flotsam from a ruined past, then says ‘Ah!’ as at a revelation and, seemingly irrelevantly, adds, ‘Tony’s changed you again,’ as though that was a heinous crime, and I look at him bewilderedly and he says, ‘Doesn’t matter, though. I only want to do your left eye,’ and angles my head to a hundredth position with his bony, broken-nailed hands, his breath malodorous as a drain.
Bitter Eden Page 5
