Bitter Eden

by Tatamkhulu Afrika

  Douglas? Must that, too, be faced? After the shock of watching Danny knock him flat, how had I felt? Well, how was I supposed to have felt? How am I supposed to feel now? Jesus, I was not married to the guy! Did I not make that plain enough when we broke up? Certainly, seeing how he had changed was not the prettiest sight of my life. Still is not. But if it is that I am supposed to feel guilty about what he has done to himself, then no deal! If he had it in him to become a pansy at the drop of a hat – and a black-painted cardboard hat at that – then he would have become it all the sooner had the yukky lover-boy been first on the list.

  So I convince myself that I am convinced that my hands are clean, but it is easier to forget the good, the often deeply moving moments that had lit my now dead friendship for Douglas with a gracious light, than to banish the nagging thought that somewhere in the Bible it says that a man brings upon himself that which he fears, and the one thing that I fear most these days is to be involved with Douglas again. Disturbingly, there seems to be some substance to this warning because although I had only seen Douglas once in the period between the break-up and Danny hitting him after the show, I now see him nearly every day as he darts about the camp in an increasingly manic way, his face seemingly powdered clown-white and his eyes brilliantly restless under the brim of that ludicrous hat.

  I am far from straining at the leash, therefore, when I get a message from Tony that he wants to see me straight away, my first thought being that I could be setting myself up for another awkward meeting with you know who. ‘You want me to come with?’ Danny asks, instantly sensing how I feel, and I laugh, barely holding back from ruffling his hair. ‘No. You start trouble more than you stop it. And, anyway, Tony will see to it that he stays out of my way,’ and I content myself with laying my hand on his shoulder as I leave. ‘You watch it, hey?’ he warns, leaning into my hand without seeming to. ‘That slob’s one heavyweight nut, if you are asking me,’ and I am sure his eyes are watching me go.

  At the theatre, Tony does not lead me over the stage and through the storeroom to his ‘space’, but takes me the long way round through the other half of the barracks where his ‘staff’ – Douglas surely amongst them – are lolling around like a petty elite. They stiffen, though, when we enter, then watch us pass with a tenseness to them for which I can find no cause, and I glance covertly about, checking to see if he really is there, but I do not see him and Tony, more than ever his lugubrious self, makes no reassuring asides.

  Behind the cardboard wall, he seats me, makes tea, and we huddle over the ritual of the brew, and his eyes flick to me, then away, then again so, and I realize with no small surprise that Tony is afraid, that his fingers are straining against a trembling as they grip his mug. The silence drags and there is a silence beyond the wall that is keeping pace, and at last I ask him what is wrong, my own now uneasy hand setting my mug down with a thump that sets the tea to sloshing around.

  ‘Yes,’ he then says, his eyes now steadying on mine with the openness to which I am used. ‘There is something wrong – so wrong that I hardly know how to deal with it and I am still asking myself if I have the right to share such a shittiness with you?’

  ‘Well, you can hardly not tell me, now that I am here. So what is it?’ and I lean to him, both wanting and not wanting to hear, moved more by curiosity than any willingness to, as he puts it, share.

  He sighs, that very exhalation not Tony at all. ‘All right. In a nutshell,’ and somehow I sense the shape of it even as it looms, ‘Douglas is in there,’ and he jerks his head at the nearer door of the storeroom whose further door opens onto the stage. ‘Both doors are locked and we have tied Douglas’ hands behind his back so that he can’t harm himself or anyone else.’

  ‘You mean,’ and I have no difficulty in keeping my voice calm, partly because I am not surprised and partly because I am quite callously relieved that Douglas is, after all, not prowling around, ‘that he is mad?’

  He nods. ‘Yes. Quite mad. Does that mean nothing to you?’

  ‘Frankly, no. Which does not mean that his madness leaves me cold. Madness in any man is not something that would leave me cold. But I am leaning – hard – on the “any man” because today – and you will have to accept this, Tony – Douglas is to me just another man.’

  ‘I do accept that,’ and his tone is emotionless as mine and I am thinking – with no small measure of craziness in myself – that we could just as well be discussing whether or not we should put more sugar in our tea. ‘And I even understand that. But not everybody, particularly those in there,’ and now he nods at the cardboard wall, ‘is going to react in the same way.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What the fuck has it got to do with them?’

  ‘A lot, my friend. One hell of a fucking lot! Let me explain. Last night, late, that little thread that can be strong as a silk or brittle as a hair, and that had been stretching thinner and thinner since that night when Danny knocked Douglas down, could take no more and all the bits and pieces that, when fitted together, answered to the name of “Douglas” and came when you called it and did all the little tricks that you either hated or loved, flew out like the springs and cogs of a clock you have smashed against a wall. But there was still enough sense left in the beast,’ and for a moment he closes his eyes, ‘to do a hatchet job on Tom Smith that – whether true or false – leaves you as splattered all over the walls as Douglas’ mind. In short, you are stinking like a polecat out there right now, but I have agreed to keep the Krauts out of this till you have had a chance to, at least, talk to that poor sod,’ and again he indicates the storeroom door, ‘and maybe – just maybe – get him back on an even keel. So that is what I am asking you to do, but I can’t force you and if you refuse – well, then, don’t blame me if nobody wants to talk to you much from now on.’

  I stare at him, incredulous and enraged. ‘Christ! I have never heard of anything so ridiculous in all my life! Who is it that’s mad – Douglas or you and your tribe of pervs?’

  I regret the insult even as I launch it, but he merely says, ‘Don’t think in caricatures. There are as many straights as not on my staff,’ then adds with a quite genuine pity, ‘And of course it’s ridiculous. But so was Douglas’ performance last night. You were the loser right from the start.’

  It is then that I think of the lover-boy with the face that I would like to crush between my nails. ‘What about the guy that he latched onto when I dropped him back there? Dropped him after one whole year, Tony, when I should have dropped him that very first day he came smarming all over me like a slug. Doesn’t that guy also feature in this somewhere?’

  ‘Uh-uh. That was the other way around. Douglas dropped him when’ – and for a moment he looks vaguely uncomfortable as though he’s seeing something that he had not seen before – ‘when it first came out that you were going to play Lady Macbeth.’

  But I miss the opening, frustration confusing me, and the silence the other side of the stacks of cardboard pressing in on me like an invisible hand, and at last I hear myself whine and am hating myself for that, ‘Would you have liked Douglas for a mate?’

  Again Tony looks at me with a pity that is real. ‘As you said just now – frankly, no. But that does not change the equation between you and him.’ Then he breaks me as the leaning silence cannot. ‘The only equation that is changing, Tom, is the one between you and me, I never thought to see the day when you would be running around like a rat because of such a very simple thing as walking through that door.’

  Almost I hear myself break, but still I try. ‘What do you mean – a simple thing? From what you’ve told me, he’s more likely to jump me than listen to anything I have to say. Which is not saying that I could find anything to say.’

  ‘At the moment he is just sitting on a chair, staring at the wall. You would think he was OK if his hands weren’t tied and his eyes would move,’ and Tony looks at me with eyes as unsettling as those he describes.

  Now I do think I see an opening that is no
t to be missed. ‘So? How can he be bonkers the one moment and OK the next? He’s bullshitting you, man! Playing to the gallery for sympathy and kicks. Stop listening to his crap – slap him around a while if that will help – and he’ll be just fine!’

  ‘It is you that is bullshitting you,’ and now Tony’s voice has an edge to it that warns that his walking this road with me is drawing to an end. ‘Douglas had already slashed his left wrist with a pair of my scissors before we got to him and stopped him from finishing the job. That is bullshitting, Tom?’ and he waits for the frightened fowl in me to shove its head through another hole in the mesh, but the reality – the implacability – of consequence has caught up with me, has clamped its arm about my throat, and I sit, stunned and trapped as a second Douglas on the stool, and Tony gets up and unlocks the door, and I walk through it as to a statutory death, and the door closes behind me, and the lock clicks with the loudness of a tongue against teeth.

  The light in the storeroom is not burning, so I do not at first see him, but then my eyes adjust and suddenly he is there, rigidly upright as an extension of the chair, his eyes acknowledging only the wall. For that I am prepared, but not for the totality of the changes in him, a completeness that so removes him from me that any speaking to him seems an ever more meaningless charade. Fascination heavily in me as an opiate, I stare at him as at a crippled mute or torpid snake – it does not matter which – seeing yet not accepting the sharply-curving-over nose and jutting chin as they merge into an almost saurian snout, blood-loss’s blue-white pallor overlaid with smudging mascara and other goo – for Chrissakes why don’t they clean him up or are they saving this as evidence that he is nuts? – and, most unbelievably of all, the once fussed-with, always washed brown hair become this sudden winter running wild. Only the gritted teeth seem incorruptibly the same, white and square and grinding fine some intangible abomination void of name.

  What, I despairingly ask of myself, do I say to this travesty of the known, this vacated shell which I still tenaciously deny is any design of mine? Why the fuck did I allow myself to be bludgeoned into this most desperate dead end? But a residual practicality comes to my aid and I ask the first and most basic question that I must – ‘Douglas, can you hear me?’ – and, with an unlikeliness that makes me jump, his head bobs, though it does not even fractionally swerve. ‘Christ!’ I think. ‘The lines are not down!’ and am both exultant and dismayed – dismayed because I don’t want any renewal of contact with Douglas, but also exultant in the way of a faith healer when the blind or the deaf respond to a laying on of hands.

  So divided, keeping my voice emotionless and low as though I am being so directed in a play, I try again, ‘That is not you sitting there. We are not friends any more and, when we broke up, I told you why. We were both upset and we said things we should have left unsaid’ – I simply cannot bring myself to say ‘did not mean’ – ‘From my side, I am sorry about that and I’m asking you to feel the same so that, together, we can stash our spooks where they belong and, even if we can’t be the friends we were, at least remember that we were once good friends who had our good times along with the bad. OK?’ and I wait, sweating a little from a spiritual exertion that is harder for me than a long go with a spade. But, this time, there is no bobbing of the head and I edge a step nearer, willing my words to win through: ‘Come on, Douglas! This is not the you that I knew! The Douglas I knew was as gutsy as he had class and, like a rock that doesn’t cat around, was always there. So what is this shitbag I see in that chair?’ – and now anger is rousing in me and I’m wanting to be gone – ‘You proud of the way you are now? You wanting me to remember you the way you are now? For Chrissakes, man, here’s my hand. Take it and stop being a goddam tragedy queen!’ And then I remember – a genuine shame shrivelling me small – that his hands are tied behind his back and I let my own hand swing down to where it belongs.

  ‘Shit!’ I think. ‘What more can I do? How many more half-truths, whole lies, must I tell?’ and I turn to knock on the door so that Tony can let me out of this small lair that reeks of sweat, cosmetics, hatred, pain.

  But then the grinding teeth still and, though the head still does not turn, the mouth opens and he asks, his voice hoarse and labouring as from a terminal dissoluteness or disease, ‘What do you want? Why are you snuffing round me like a dog?’ For a moment I do not get it, then I do and revulsion rears in me with the bitterness of bile, and I make to break in but the oddly disembodied voice cuts me short, ‘I am not deaf. I hear you even though you are so far away. I’m listening even though it’s still the same old lies. All that time you were sleeping with him, you lied. And they say you are still sleeping with him. That the bunk shakes all night the way he is fucking you or you are fucking him. What difference does it make which way round?’ Again I scrabble for something to say, but I am slow, shocked at how obscene ‘fucking’ can sound when it comes from a tongue as prissy as Douglas’ used to be, and he carries on, ‘So what are you doing here? Shoving your nose up my arse like you’re not the same whore as me?’ Frighteningly, his head at last jerks round, thrusts at me with a lizard-like speed, but the eyes are still seeing only the wall. ‘He’s chucked you away like the dirty washing you made me be?’

  It is then that I find my tongue, frantically yell that which I do not believe, ‘Cut the crap, Douglas! Save your play-acting for Tony and his goons! This is me!’

  With an abruptness that overturns the chair, he is on his feet and coming to me, his steps gliding and sure, and I back up against the door, meaning to shout to Tony to let me out, then remember that the hands are tied. Irrelevantly – or is only relevancy possible in a progression that has gained a momentum of its own? – I notice that his feet are bare and the scarlet polish on the toes’ nails is cracking and dulled.

  ‘Keep away from me!’ I whisper, my disgust nakedly plain, but he does not seem to hear – or, hearing, understand – only suddenly is seeing me with a slyness in his eyes.

  ‘Untie me,’ he says, turning round, and now I see that the fingernails are surfacing through the same cracking polish and the left wrist of the pathetically thin arms is strapped by as pathetic a bandage stained with drying blood.

  ‘No!’ I say, remembering the cunning in his eyes. ‘Why do you want to be untied?’ and think, with a bizarre hilarity bordering on hysteria, that that must be the most idiotic question ever asked.

  But he sees it in quite another way. ‘How can I play with you if my hands are tied?’

  ‘What do you mean – play with me?’

  ‘Like women play when there are no men,’ and his shoulders shake with what could be a snigger or a sob, but it does not take me long to decide it’s no sob.

  ‘Get away from me, you filthy perv!’ I yell, not even trying to be placatory now that I have seen how thin he’s grown – which is a very grave mistake, he at once whirling round, butting me with his head till I reel against the door, then pushing his face into mine as for a kiss, and I again yell, as nauseated as I am enraged, and then the rage gives way to a pissing-in-the-pants little kid’s fright as his teeth sink into the soft flesh of my cheek, worrying at it as would a dog’s and the pain of it a flame in my brain. Then the teeth are nuzzling into my neck, seeking its throat, and my body is heaving and thrashing against the door with the mindlessness of a just slaughtered fowl, and Tony at last jerks open the door and I roll, babbling and bloodied, out and away, not once looking back, the torn loose flesh of my cheek flapping on a last shred of retaining skin.

  ‘Fucking bastards!’ Danny roars, rushing me off to the medical hut, hovering over me as a wisecracking orderly stitches up my cheek. ‘There for life,’ says the stitcher. ‘Unless you shell out the bucks for a graft. But why worry? You can always tell your kids that’s where they shot daddy in the war!’ Then, to Danny, having fun, ‘You bite him like that?’ But Danny is in no mood for fun, particularly not that brand of fun. ‘You wanting to eat your teeth?’ he retorts and is still in that mood when he later marches
down to the theatre, invisible six-guns slapping his thighs, and comes back, telling me nothing, but his mood grimly quite gone.

  Late that night, lights are flashing down at the theatre, Krauts are screaming orders as only Krauts chillingly can, and I do not need anyone from the rest of the darkened and tensely watching camp to tell me that they are taking Douglas away. I do not leave my bunk, my cheek beginning to throb to the beat that is peculiarly pain’s, but I can hear Douglas screaming as, towards dawn, I hear myself screaming, Danny holding me down, his eyes torturedly close to mine.

  It is some way into the latter half of winter when we begin to hear nocturnal rumblings and clankings as of heavy metal being dragged across as heavy a glass. Sometimes we hear these sounds on several consecutive nights, sometimes on erratically spaced nights, and sometimes they draw tantalizingly near or remain disappointingly far, but always they come from the other side of the pines and stay in our minds for long after they have gone. Occasionally we ask the friendlier among the guards about these sounds and they then either shrug their shoulders and say it could be their tanks out on manoeuvres or they look at us with inscrutable eyes and say we are dreaming empty dreams.

  Our only Russian prisoner, who looks like a mad poet with his snapping black eyes and lank scrambled hair and spends most of his time chatting to Camel who, for some reason even he seems unable to explain, is the sole ‘scholar’ learning Russian in the camp ‘schools’, says the Krauts are talking balls – or the Russian equivalent of ‘balls’, Camel importantly explains – these are no more their tanks than the Martians’, but are, in fact, Russian tanks and very soon now they will be crumpling down the fences and their crews will be cutting the throats of every fucking Kraut bastard – Russian equivalents, that is – on which they can lay their hands.