Bitter Eden

by Tatamkhulu Afrika

  It is a good try, but, deep down, a niggling doubt as to the truth of it is fluttering like a raven trapped in a well, and the staff is coming with his clipboard and shouting, ‘Brits form up!’ and Danny is hurrying to obey, his hand hardly having touched mine, the lights going out one by one as I watch the distance between us lengthening, when he suddenly turns round, yells, ‘You don’t visit me, I’ll bash you! You hear?’

  ‘Up you!’ I yell back and I’m not sure, but I think he grins.

  From the beginning, it is as though some exotic flower has been uprooted from its habitat and transplanted to an alien climate and soil. Without Danny, I am like a man from whom an essential part has been hacked, but, as the days, then weeks, pass, it becomes clear that an almost ritual nostalgia is deadening the first, intolerable pain. Why ‘days and weeks’? Why don’t I just up and go to that small village with the slip of paper with his address on it inquiringly in my hand? The answer is as simple as it is frustrating and sad: there is just no way that I can.

  The ‘camp’ of which the staff spoke is not that in the usual sense of the word, but a street of vacated cottages in a seaside town where the sea is more often grey than blue, the rain coming down without warning and frequently, though it is supposed to be spring. It is true that I can go where I want, provided that I report to the repatriation office each morning to find out if I have not perhaps been allocated a seat on a plane. Then there are the sessions with a psychiatrist and dietician who mostly tell me what I already know, namely, that I am a little crazy and I must take up to an hour to eat a plate of food because my stomach is as shrunken as a punctured balloon.

  So I take to walking beside the sea on the bright days, envying the gregarious gulls, but inwardly emulating their contradictorily solitary cries, and sometimes I sit on the edge of the nearby downs, watching the white woolly sheep latch onto as woolly a green sward. I also take the train to London now and then, it being but a whisker away, and pay the mandatory visits to the Tower and Tussaud’s, but spend most of my daily stipend from the repatriation office on tickets for plays which do take me out of myself to the degree that I need.

  Once I even accept the invitation of a whore who could have been my mother, but only manage to get it fully up when it is already in. ‘You been a prisoner of war?’ she asks, not unkindly, when I have paid her and am buttoning up my pants, and I nod and she adds, ‘Cunt is still too rich for you, lad. Get your boyfriend out of your system and try me again,’ and I don’t even expostulate at that, just slink out of there with my sullenly slack tail literally between my legs.

  Then I have been there a month and I go into the office to check on the planes and the guy there, who knows me by now, asks, ‘Would there be some who are calling you just plain “Tom Smith” instead of these fancy names I’m looking at here?’ I say, ‘Could be,’ and stiffen up, somehow sensing what’s coming next. ‘Would this be for you?’ and he hands me one of those message slips that these red tape types leave next to their phones, and I can see it is dated the day before and it reads, ‘From Danny to Tom Smith – where are you, mate? Is one kick in the arse not enough?’

  ‘It is for me,’ I say, trying for calm.

  ‘And you understand what he’s saying there?’ and I see that this guy is looking at me like I’m bad news that will liven up his day.

  ‘I understand. What I don’t understand is how he managed to get through to me here.’

  ‘No problem. If he knows you are waiting to be repatriated, he’ll know where to look in the book for a number that’ll put him through. You want to answer him?’ and I see there are figures on the slip which I had thought were just bureaucratic crap. ‘You can use this phone if you want.’

  ‘No hurry,’ I say, and fold the slip and put it in a pocket, and get out of there, deeply troubled that I didn’t accept the offer of the phone and wondering why. Back in the room that I share with three other guys, but they are all out now on this dead town, I work it out that I am afraid, that it is as if Danny has gone in behind a closed door to change his gear and, if I open the door, he will be standing there looking like nobody I know, and I stripped, then, of a dream that I cannot afford to lose, that I want should stay a dream. Linked to that is a growing longing to be back under a sky where the sun wheels forever before going down, to walk through a wideness whose very bleakness is purity of a kind, to be freed from this incestuous, pretty island that makes me stoop as though I’m walking in under a never high enough door.

  Four days later, the Repat guy says, ‘Come again. Round about five. I may have something for you.’ So I have an uneasy lunch, my appetite – for once – well below par, try to sleep, to read, most of the time nibble at my nails, then, at five, call again and he says, ‘Tomorrow night, ten p.m., a seat for you,’ and I yell and wring his hand, then go out and at once – my separation from him now certain – a renewed longing to see Danny, to convert what was becoming a myth back into a reality of flesh and breath, overwhelms me, and I know that I can still do it – will still do it – and almost run back to the room for money for a ticket and to exchange my usual shirt and slacks for something fancier, cursing myself and flinging things about with the abandon of one whom the devil drives.

  The sun is setting by the time I make it to the station and buy a ticket to the little village where Danny lives. There are few passengers on the platform at this late hour on a weekday and a timetable on a hoarding tells me that it is fifty minutes yet before the train leaves, so I stride up and down the platform, willing the minutes to pass, then suddenly realize that Danny does not even know I am coming and head for a telephone box, rummaging in my pockets for the expat’s message slip with Danny’s phone number on it, but, of course, it is not there, but in the slacks I have just taken off and flung across the bed, and no time left now still to go back to the room. ‘Jesus!’ I think, panic stirring in me, ‘What if he’s not there? Gone to a pub, perhaps, to whoop it up with all his other pals?’ and something cruelly like jealousy thrusts through me at the latter half of that thought, but it does not put a damper on my desire to be there – does, in fact, fuel that desire till I unthinkingly grab at its terminal spasm in my crotch.

  When the train draws out, it is already full night, which means I will not be seeing anything of the intervening countryside as I will not be seeing anything of it coming back, which thought oddly depresses me, facing me, as it does, with this strange, blind hiatus in my life. My reflection in the window stares back at me like an ectoplasmic second self the glass has snared, and I eventually jerk down the sash, that relentless scrutiny unnerving me more than I care to admit, but the looming night, with its interruptively meaningless lights, is little better than my looming face, and the alternating of darkness and light so mesmerizes me that I nearly don’t see the signboard as it hurtles past and the train crashes to a halt.

  Only I get off, onto cinders – the train having overshot the platform through, conceivably, not expecting anyone to alight at such an hour in such a place – which, in my case, is as well because, just across the line from me, is a signpost pointing the way to ‘High Street’, which is the street I want and I am thus saved the trouble of having to make inquiries at the ‘station’ that consists of little more than a sheltered bench and a ticket office no bigger than a booth.

  ‘High Street’ seems as little deserving of its status as the station, it clearly being the only street and more a rural lane than a street, frogs sounding in a distant pond or stream, a cricket screeching like a rusty hinge nearer at hand and the clean, green smell of meadows, spiced with a faint pepperiness of cowpats, crowding in on me like memories of an innocence that – as in the case of Danny? – died at the first thrust that so oddly no longer thrusts in the screaming of my dreams. As once before, I ask myself why is it that I have not dreamt of that since the day in the sun when Danny said I cried in my sleep, and stop, bemused – by what? – a coming to terms? – a hastening to a consummation that, through its subsuming all else, will
finally heal?

  A dark excitement possesses me and I hurry on past the first signs of a communal life – a post office, a tearoom, a shop, all three closed, then a pub bright with light, murmurous with the muted revelry of respectable men – and pause, then, to glance at my watch and am amazed that my entire journeying up to here has taken up less than half an hour of my time. All these weeks, Danny only half an hour away and only now do I come? Ashamed – too late – I start checking on the cottages set well back from the road, know the one that is Danny’s even before I see the number on its gate, it being as beat-up as he had always described it to me, the garden as interestingly unkempt as the growing-tatty thatch, a shed to one side minus most of its panes. Warily, feeling like a wraith strayed back into a world where it no longer belongs, I pace up the cracking paving of the path, lift, let fall, the knocker on the door.

  By the bossiness of her stance, the challenging sharpness of her ‘Yes?’ I know that she must be Danny’s mum, but, otherwise, she is not at all what I expect. What did I expect? A little old lady with withered but still rosy cheeks, iron-grey hair tied in a bun, dumpy body redolent of lavender and bread-dough, faded blue eyes about to break into a smile? Instead, she is thin as a string, face smooth and old ivory as a china doll’s, tinted-blue hair tightly permed, black eyes snapping as they rake me from head to toe, no sign of the fragrances my mind supposed.

  She is little, though, so much so that her head tilts as she looks up at me and again asks, ‘Yes?’ her voice a perceptible shade higher than before.

  I find my tongue then. ‘Good evening. Could I see Danny please?’

  ‘You’re not from here,’ she counters, flatly, as though that would be reason enough for her to slam the door.

  ‘No, but I was in the prisoner of war camps with your son.’

  ‘How do you know he’s my son?’

  ‘You look like the way he described you to me. He spoke of you all the time,’ I lie, laying it on.

  ‘Oh.’ Then, ‘Well, come in then,’ and she lets me into a very large, all-purpose room, comfortably but shabbily furnished in no particular style, two doors, closed, opening off it and a steep, abrupt stair – more a ladder than a stair – leading up to a landing with two more doors, which surprises me because the cottage, when I viewed it from the gate, and even from closer up, had not seemed to me to be all that high.

  ‘Danny! Someone to see you!’ she calls from the foot of the stair, her voice unfaltering and strong, and we stand around in an uncomfortable awareness of each other till one of the doors slams open and he is hastening down the stair, tightening the cord of an old but oddly opulent dressing-gown that makes him look as if I’m meeting up with the wrong guy and sets me to thinking that, it being the hot and clear night that it is, he is not wearing anything underneath, that being his way.

  ‘Tom!’ he exclaims, his face briefly lit by the delight in his voice, then again carefully controlled, and I expect him to embrace me, but his eyes flick aside to his mother and he merely shakes my hand, though holding it in both of his, and says to his mother, his voice now as studiedly on an even keel as his face, ‘Mum, this is Tom Smith. The one I am always telling you about.’

  ‘Oh, that one,’ she says as though the cat I have not seen has brought me in, and she does not extend her hand or smile.

  ‘Yes, that one,’ he clearly mocks, then looks at his watch. ‘Time still to celebrate at the pub. Wait here till I get some duds on my skin,’ and I watch him going up the stair, the step of his slippered feet – slippers? – him? – as nimble as when I first met him, the muscles of his calves moving with a fluid clarity and grace.

  ‘I nearly didn’t know him in the dressing-gown,’ I try to joke as we wait. ‘It’s a far cry from the camps!’

  ‘It was his father’s. He’s very fond of it. And, yes, it is a far cry from the camps, Mr Smith. So much so that I hope you have not come to remind him of them, I being the one that has to cope with what is still a very sick boy. He has, I suppose, told you about his wife?’ and she says ‘suppose’ as though we are two snotty kids who have been telling each other dirty stories behind her back.

  ‘Yes, he has. And about his father too, if it comes to that,’ and I feel smug at my tone’s implying that there’s a lot more to be said about him than about the wife.

  She seems to catch it because she snaps right back, ‘Well, there’s nothing to say about his father except that he’s dead. It’s what his wife has done to him that’s killing him now. God knows I have done my best to get him interested in some other girl – one in particular – but he just sits around, here or in the pub, and, to be quite frank, Mr Smith,’ and she looks at me with an emotion so akin to hatred that a chill hits my spine, ‘I have the feeling that your visit is going to be the worst thing to happen to him since the war.’

  Then he’s coming back, still uncharacteristically dressed in stylish slacks, a not inexpensive open-neck shirt and slip-on, low-heeled shoes that make me feel like a soldier in hobnail boots all over again.

  ‘By the way,’ he asks, as he comes off the bottom step, ‘why didn’t you phone before you came? Didn’t the repat office give you my message with the phone number and all?’

  ‘No,’ I say, looking surprised as I lie without shame, instinctively knowing where telling the truth will lead. ‘Not a word from anyone there.’

  ‘Bastards,’ he says, but without rage. ‘And your gear? You didn’t bring any gear?’

  ‘It’s only half an hour to here,’ I now desperately evade, beginning to feel boxed-in, the incompleteness of what I am saying hanging out like a rebellious shirt-tail, but he does not seem to see anything wrong.

  ‘Tom can sleep with me,’ he says, turning to his mother. ‘I’ll lend him what he needs.’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense, Danny! Yours is only a three-quarter bed and you’re two grown men. You can’t both sleep on that!’

  ‘In camp, we both slept on one bunk not much bigger than that.’

  ‘Well, you’re not doing that here! You can lend Mr Smith a pair of your pyjamas, but he’s sleeping down here in the spare room.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ he says, his mouth tightening, his hand gripping my arm.

  ‘And don’t stay out all night and don’t come back drunk,’ she nags at his back as we reach the door, and he looses my arm and strides back to her, and she draws back a pace when she sees his eyes.

  ‘Listen!’ he hisses, his hands on her shoulders, his face thrusting so close to hers that she jerks her head aside. ‘I have had enough of you telling me what to do! This Mr Smith, as you keep calling him, is my mate and we are going to stay out as long as we feel like it, and we are going to go on boozing till the piss runs down our legs if we want it that way. Understand?’ and she begins to weep, and he leaves her and we go out, he, strangely, not slamming the door.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he says, his fists moodily rammed into the pockets of his slacks as we march – unconsciously in step – down the road. ‘She’s changed. Like you and I have changed,’ and he pauses for a long moment in which I sense that a nothing that is everything is continuing to be said. ‘She was never like this before I went away. Always fitted in with my moods, would advise me if I needed it, but not doing that if she saw I wanted to work something out by myself, and, what was the greatest, growing old nicely, like every bloke wants that his mum should. But now? Well, you’ve seen her – do this, don’t do that, shove it up this or that bint’s cunt, even though I am not even thinking that way right now, and, shittiest of all, treating any bloke that visits me the way she did you tonight and doing herself over like she wants to be a girl again instead of my mum.’ We walk in silence a while, then he sighs and shakes his head with a hopelessness that is not him at all, ‘I would leave her – she’s got her pension and all – but the trouble is I understand her. She nearly lost me with the war, so now she knows how that feels and she’s doing all she can to not have to face it again. Christ alone knows how it will all end.’ />
  Then we turn into the pub with its willing spigots, gleaming tankards, as gleaming copperware on the walls, and, oblivious to all else about us, drink quietly and slowly but thoroughly, as men do when besieged by intimations of deprivation and pain. At one stage, he asks me how long I am staying and I dart away from that like a shot-at bird, saying, ‘Let’s not worry about that now,’ and go to fetch us another two beers, and we return to our clothing of dead men, spent events, in the ephemeral skins of our words, but not being honest about it, sneaking round Douglas’ name as though it is a black hole and he has never been.

  Then the publican warns of a closing and still we have not achieved what we really set out to do, which was to again see, to know, each other as we were then – to see and know despite the distorting glass between us of the now’s new ambiences, changed circumstances, grown alien strictures and codes. The beer, however, has seduced us into a bleary joyousness that we know is fake even as we spread our legs for it, and we leave the pub as once we left an inn in another place and time, singing the same song as then, singing it all the way down the road, arms encircling necks, till we stop at the right gate and copiously piss, song winding down in us like a nickelodeon running out of coins.

  The door is locked, but Danny has his own key and we go in to a single light’s burning in the communal room, but there is no sign of Danny’s mother and he points upstairs and pulls a face, then checks on the room where I’m supposed to sleep and grunts that she has ‘fixed’ it and do I want to eat, and I say, no, I have had enough chips and pasties at the pub. Then he says he knows I don’t want any fucking pyjamas, it being this hot, and I say of course I don’t, and he looks at me, teetering a little from the booze, and says, very gently, possessively, ‘My mate,’ then adds, turning round at the door as he leaves, ‘I am sorry. But I’ve hurt her enough for one night,’ and I lie awake for a long time, not because I don’t understand what he said, but because I understand it unsettlingly too well.