Charlie went over.
‘Need help?’
‘I can still just about open a door, cheers.’ He rubbed his scarred face where the door had hit him. The nose was crooked from an old fracture and coarse knobbly tissue welded together the left side of his face from his temple to his cheek. The scarring pulled at his left eye and lips and it looked as if he was sneering. Or perhaps he was sneering.
‘I remember you,’ he said. ‘Charles.’
‘Jack. Good to see you.’
‘Don’t lie.’
‘Let me get you a drink.’
‘I’ll come with you.’ He dumped his folder on the table and confidently selected two, three bottles. ‘Will you have one? I invented this one myself. The Flaming Gladiator. The key is not to go overboard with the ingredients.’ He shook spirits into a tall glass. ‘Watch the flambé effect right at the end. I used to torture my wife with this. She winced every time I set another one on fire. Evil of me, but what can I do? I’m very fond of it.’
‘You’re married?’
‘Sort of. They sent me home after I crashed, but the wife and I didn’t get on too well once I was there all the time. She loved me better when I was in the desert. We got married when I was on home leave, you see, so she thought that was the deal she was getting. Then a friend got me a job at a paper, and here I am.’ He mixed a second cocktail and handed it to Charlie. Then he struck a match and watched the flames dance over the surface of their drinks. ‘Satisfying.’
‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’ Jack downed his drink and mixed himself another. ‘So here we are, the cripple and the fighter ace. Who would have thought. Have you heard from any of the others?’
‘I saw Marx in Rhodesia, of all places. He was playing the great agitator at some mine or other . . . No, thanks. I think I’ll switch back to beer.’
‘Well, it’s easy to lose touch. You may have noticed, for example, that my right leg has vanished. Or perhaps you haven’t noticed. They did a nice job with the peg leg, though I still miss the real thing. My big toe is believed to be in Abu Sueir, and the knee, somewhere behind enemy lines. I hope the Italians appreciated it. It was a good knee. Un bel ginocchio.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault. Or your ginocchio, for that matter.’ Jack’s glass was empty again. ‘If that’s the price for never having to fly again, I’d pay it twice over. I’d throw in my arms as well. Anything to never get into another bloody Gladiator, flaming or otherwise.’
Charlie glanced over his shoulder. The other chaps were out of earshot.
‘I know what you mean,’ he said.
‘You do?’
‘Oh, in the beginning it was all right. I threw up every time I flew a loop, but then I’d see an impala or a herd of elephant or one of those snowy mountains and I’d tell myself I was the luckiest chap in the world. Now I just want it to be over.’ He glanced over his shoulder again. ‘To be honest, these last few days have felt like . . . well, one of the chaps called it a death vomit.’
‘But you’ve done pretty well. I’ve heard all about you.’
‘Well, I loathe it. Even in the beginning I loathed it. You know what happened the very first time I climbed into a Tiger Moth? I’m there on an airfield in Bulawayo, kites roaring overhead, and the instructor shows me how to take her up, and all I can think is, oh fuck.’ He poured himself another beer. ‘Those were my exact thoughts. Oh fuck. And that feeling’s pretty much remained with me. If anything, it’s got worse.’
‘Well, good luck for tomorrow.’ Jack grinned and slapped him on the shoulder. ‘If you crash, I know a good plastic surgeon in Alexandria. He used to do all the society belles.’
‘Perfect. I’ll come out of the war with better cheekbones than before.’
*
He wrote a letter to Georgina and told her about Jack. Then he went to bed. At midnight he woke up and could not fall asleep again. He tossed and turned, and eventually got up and made his way over to Hayes’s room.
‘Hayes.’
‘Huh?’
‘Sorry. I’ve got to ask you something.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Late. Early. Sorry. I’ll let you get back to sleep in a minute. It’s just . . . listen. When they send you home, do they send you home in uniform?’
‘Not if you take it off.’
‘I mean, when they send you home in a box.’
‘Hmm. Yeah, I suppose they do.’
He kneeled down and put his hand on Hayes’s shoulder. ‘Would you do me a favour?’
Hayes grunted vague assent.
‘If they send me home . . . in a box . . . do you think you could switch my uniform for civilian clothes? Not all of it, just the jacket and the trousers.’
‘Jesus!’ Hayes sat up.
‘Only the jacket and the trousers. It’s for my old man. It would make an awfully big difference to him.’
‘But he won’t see you. It’s not as if they go and show your body to your parents. At least I don’t think they do.’
‘Still. It would make a difference to me, I suppose.’
‘You don’t want to be buried in your uniform?’
Charlie looked away. ‘Sorry, it must sound odd. But that’s how it is. And also – if you don’t mind – if you could give them this.’ He placed a wooden box at the foot of the bed.
‘What’s gone into you? This is about to be over. Even if they hit you, you’ll be fine. Look at me, I was shot down and here I am.’
‘It’s just a feeling I have.’ Charlie didn’t want to tell him about Jack, about what it had been like to see Jack and see himself in Jack. He lifted the lid off the box. ‘If you want to know what’s in it . . .’
‘No need to tell me.’
‘Well, I’ve got nothing to hide. It’s just some bits and bobs, pictures and things. There’s an envelope with a white feather in it, if you could give that to my old man. And an old sort of postcard, that one’s for my brother. Or just give the whole wooden box to my parents.’ He carefully replaced the lid. ‘And if they ask, or even if they don’t ask, if you could tell them about the uniform, that would be good.’
‘Hang on, they wouldn’t send us home in a box, though. They’d bury us here. Jesus! Now you’ve made me think about it too. Go back to bed, will you? We’ll be fine. The war’s over.’
Hayes was right. The war was as good as over. A few more days in his Typhoon. Then home. But still, better to be safe. In all likelihood, he’d take the wooden box to Highgate himself. But there was nothing wrong with a bit of precaution. It made him feel safer to have given all that stuff to Hayes, as if he’d tricked fate. Like carrying an umbrella to make sure it stayed dry.
He went back to bed, lay on his back and pressed his palms to his face. To be alive. Unlike the poor buggers in the lorries, the locomotive, the ships. To be alive. To have all of life before him. All the poems he would write. All the cities he would see. All the mountains, all the jungles.
And perhaps, perhaps he and Georgina would even buy a farm.
My Own
It was almost over: Grace could smell it. Every day now stretched out painfully, to be endured with her last ounce of strength, for when the war was over, she could finally start looking for Max. She would find Max, and together they would find Max’s mother.
In Holland, in the deep winter, she had built a snowman with some local children. They ran around looking for sticks to turn into arms. ‘Here, here!’ the smallest boy cried, and pulled a branch out of the snow. A long, straight branch, with a shorter branch laid across and tied into place with wilted grass. ‘And there’s another one – wait – and over there . . . and there—’
‘Let’s put them back,’ Grace said as calmly as she could. She took the crosses from the boys and drove them back into the snow. Three neat lines. They walked back to the camp and built another snowman closer to the barracks.
Now she pictured all those crosses amid the molten snow. Pools of muddy water. That would be the end of the war: pools of muddy water divided by brittle brown crosses.
*
Grace and Paul sat in the back of their ambulance. Paul kept his back against the metal frame and a sketchbook on his knees, his pencil jumping about because of the potholes. Children spotted them from afar and came racing across the fields. They crowded around the back and drummed on the metal platform with begging hands. Barefoot, picking at scabs, scratching arms red with scabies. The dull blond hair so thin he could see lice crawl between the follicles.
One evening Grace gathered the men in her unit around for Silent Meeting. She looked up to see Paul standing there. He did not join in their worship but stood outside the circle until it was over, as if he wanted to tell her something. When she asked him what was up, he shook his head and slouched off to his unit.
She would have asked him again the next day, for she was sure that something was eating away at him. But the following day brought strange rumours, the strangest she had yet heard during her service. They were driving through northern Germany, on their way to a newly liberated concentration camp near the bay of Lübeck. The war was not yet over and they heard gunfire every night, crossed pontoon bridges, bomb craters hastily filled with rubble. Then a rumour reached them that the RAF had sunk two ships in a nearby bay. The pilots had apparently thought the ships were carrying fleeing SS officers. In truth, the passengers were thousands of prisoners being transferred from several camps to an unknown destination. It was mayhem in the bay, utter chaos: survivors and bodies, and far too few ambulances to deal with them all.
She ran over to Paul and told him the news.
‘I’m going to try and get them to send me there.’ She seized the collar of his uniform and dragged him closer. ‘Do you understand? Thousands!’
‘Terrible.’
‘That’s not what I mean. Thousands. That means there’s a possibility that Max might be there.’
‘If he is in a camp.’
‘Well, if he’s still alive, he’s in a camp.’
‘He could be in the one we’re heading towards. The one they just liberated.’
She could see that he did not want her to go to the bay. He had heard the same rumours, and he did not want her to stand before a thousand drowned men and look for Max’s face. She was still holding on to his collar.
‘He could be. But I’m going to go to the bay and help those men there, and I’m going to stay until I’ve seen every single victim. The drowned ones, too. If it’s thousands, well, I’m going to look at thousands. And you, you’re going to the liberated camp. And when you enter it, I want you to look at every single man in there, dead or alive, no matter how ill, no matter how . . .’ she let go of the collar ‘. . . repulsive. Even if it’s horrible in there and you don’t want to go near them. Just throw on more de-lousing powder and get close enough to see their faces. Or to let them see yours, because, well, Max might look different now. Will you do that for me? Please. Don’t let them chuck Max into a mass grave.’
He looked at her with the sympathy and kindness reserved for the slightly unhinged.
‘I’ll do my best,’ he said.
She gave him a quick pat on the back and ran back to her unit.
*
There were hundreds of bodies on the beach and in the sea. Blood had dyed the water red. Striped jackets floated up and ballooned in the waves. She bent over and checked for a breath, a pulse, but they were all dead. She walked on, stepping over bodies, trying to find signs of life. She began talking to them, nonsensical nothings in a friendly voice, just in case there was one who heard her voice and answered.
The sea crashed in and brought more bodies. She checked them too, then went back to those on the beach. When she straightened up she saw that she had hardly advanced ten yards, and there was still the entire beach stretching out before her, covered with bodies.
There was some movement ahead. A group of survivors clustered around a shop front on the promenade above the beach. One of them was wrapped in a sheet. She spotted ordinary townspeople, too. Women dressed in cotton dresses with buttons down the front. Boys in short trousers. Grace shouted up to them to come and help, but the women hurried away and ushered the boys into low brick houses with washing lines strung across the front.
Grace wished then that she had a gun and could force them to assist her.
A couple of survivors came out of the shop carrying loaves of bread. The one in the sheet was now wrapped in a large coat. Grace walked up to them. They had deep red burn marks on their limbs and faces. She opened her bag, applied some cream and bandaged their wounds. She told them more ambulances were on the way. They should rest by the shop.
Two, three more groups of survivors staggered towards her. Soon her supplies were used up and she had to fetch more.
She paused and surveyed the beach. An emaciated figure with a shaved, scarred head moved towards her. The gaunt wizened face bore no burn marks, but he moved with a heavy limp. Broken ankle, probably. She took a step towards him and offered him her arm. He stopped. Licked his cracked lips. He mumbled something, the pitiful creature. She looked up from his broken ankle and tried to focus on his mouth, which moved helplessly until the tongue found enough strength to shape the sound. His eyes met hers. She held his gaze and could do nothing but nod, and nod again, and again, and nod through the tears, and keep nodding, before she even made out the word he was trying to form.
‘Grace,’ he said at last. ‘Grace.’
When All London Sparkles
In the dark damp hall of a medieval convent in Holland, a tiny withered nun had approached Paul with a boil up her nose that needed to be lanced. I’ve had it since before the war, dear, and there was never a chance to have it seen to. God bless. By the time he was done, the cup of camomile tea another nun served him had frozen over.
So much of his service had been spent either uselessly waiting, or patching up men so they could be sent into battle again. And then there was the German soldier who haunted his dreams. In his dreams he saw a tank in the night and a creature inside that was reaching through the hole at the top and trying to climb out and towards him.
When he sat in the back of his ambulance with his pencil jumping up and down on the pages of his notebook, it seemed to him that the only genuine good he had done during the war, or in his life, was lancing that old nun’s boil.
*
They reached a stretch of heathland. Sandy paths curled through the heather. There was a large compound surrounded by barbed wire, and a gate with a sign that said, ‘Danger: Typhus’.
They put up their tents and spoke to the men who were already there.
‘Go on in,’ one of them said, and pointed his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Just make sure you get a good dusting of de-lousing powder first. And whatever you do, don’t let them touch you.’
Paul covered his nose and mouth, and then he entered the camp.
*
The smell hit Paul as soon as he walked through the gate. He pushed his collar over his mouth and followed the straight sand road past a series of empty huts, as low and wide as barns, to the end of the camp.
The first bodies he saw lay close to the pools, as if they had tried to claw their way to the water; half-naked, with limbs contorted by rigor mortis.
He paused and entered one of the huts. Three silent creatures crouched in the dark, ape-like, with hollow eyes and bared teeth. There was no expression of joy or relief at his presence. Only this cowering, snarling, diseased, hungry watchfulness.
A kind of hysteria gripped him. He heard a noise behind him and whipped around. Something shuffled in the dark. If it tried to touch him, he would kill it. When he turned back to the cowering group, he thought they had edged closer.
He went outside to calm himself.
In the next hut, two inmates huddled in a corner with their emaciated arms around each othe
r. One opened his mouth in a gargle. The other slowly stood up and staggered towards Paul, held out his skeletal hand. Paul raised his own hand and forced himself to smile. The man moved his hand up and down, still making that awful gargling sound. Paul hesitated. Then he took the man’s hand and shook it. The bones felt loose under the papery skin.
When he left the camp and walked back to the ambulance, he noticed a small red bite on his right hand, between his index finger and his thumb.
He squatted down and washed his hands in a puddle.
*
There was a system they called the human laundry. It allowed Paul to carry out his tasks mechanically without having to pause and reflect. An inmate was brought in at one end of the human laundry tent, stripped and shaved of the hair on his head, his chest, in his armpits, his groin, carried to the next station where he was washed, dried, dusted with DDT, wrapped in a blanket, carried out to the hospital tent.
In the hospital tent, every bed shook with ceaseless cries for water. However much the helpers filled and refilled the cups, they could not quench the cries.
Paul was carrying a stretcher in from the human laundry when he saw one man get up from his bed. He tottered over to his neighbour, who was being fed intravenously with saline solution. The man unhooked the bottle with the saline solution, drank the contents and put it back on the hook.
Paul thought then that they might as well all give up. Ask God to wipe them all out and start afresh.
*
It was not retribution exactly, roping in local girls to bury the dead and help run the human laundry, more of a practical decision. There were thousands of inmates who had to be washed and fed, and only a hundred or so soldiers and the ambulance crew. At first the girls were sullen. They knew about the typhus risk. They reported for work every morning, leaning on their shovels while they waited to be de-loused. Some joker insisted on spraying powder down their blouses.
The German nurses slept in a tent that Paul entered once when he was looking for the sister. The space was extraordinarily neat and cool, a white cube lined with parallel white camp beds and white sheets folded into squares. It was because of this white sparseness that the photographs stood out. One over every bed. There they all were, smiling out of their studio portraits. Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, SS. Side partings and shaved necks. Blond and handsome, blond and ugly, boyfriends, brothers, sons and husbands . . . Paul thought, what on earth do you do with a country like this one?
Of Love and Other Wars Page 26
