Island Madness (17 page)

Ned felt his anger rising again. “Including Alderney?” he said. If Guernsey and Jersey could be compared to prisons, Alderney had taken on the mantle of a condemned cell. In the winter Alderney was surrounded by a low and menacing mist, keeping sound and sight at bay, but on the long nights of summer, when they went to bed with Alderney’s still and distant image fading in the closing light, those living near the common claimed they could hear the faint chorus of Alderney’s suffering skimming over the water. Sometimes it was low in tone, like a solitary hymn sung in an empty church; at others it was as the thrashing of tethered beasts caught in a stable fire. Lentsch was unperturbed.

“Even Athens had such places,” he reasoned. “For every Parthenon there is a charnel house and someone to stoke the furnace; for every poet a slave, for every philosopher a captive whore.”

“Is that what your plans are?” Ned asked. “To turn us all into whores and slaves?”

“We are all whores and slaves here, singing for one supper or another, doing as others bid us for want of courage, in the name of greed or expediency. For myself, I do not wish to see Guernsey change at all, though there are others stationed here with different plans. Help me with this and they may not have their chance.”

As they drove past Saumarez Park they came up against a column of Todt workers on their way to work, about thirty of them, boys and old men mostly, shuffling along, feet bare or wrapped in torn rags, hunched against the morning cold, each one carrying a tin bowl in their shackled hands. A Todt official marched alongside them, exhorting them to sing and to piek their feet up.

The group split in two and shuffled past. As he looked out through the windscreen Ned caught sight of a young boy, dressed in a dusty jacket and a pair of red pantaloons. With his dark eyes and his lips blue with cold, he looked more like a lost clown than a conscripted labourer. Where on earth had he got that outfit from? he wondered. Suddenly the boy jumped up on to the bank scrabbling about in the grass. Two others followed. The Todt official, puiling at his belt, sprang forward and began to beat them apart with a home-made whip fashioned out of a stick and four strands of leather. As they clambered back down Ned could see the boy had the best part of a dead rabbit in his hand. He held it triumphantly in the air before sinking his teeth into it. Ned could feel his stomach turn. The boy raised his head and looked into his face. There was no expression. Ned looked to the floor. Lentsch stared straight ahead.

“Animals,” they heard Wedel mutter. The column moved on, out of sight.

Five

Y
ou could barely see it from the surface, though there were plenty of clues to tell you that there were more than moles working away under the soil: the endless supply of trucks moving along the connecting roads, the brute mouths waiting in the woods to swallow you up, the bare-bricked ventilating shafts set in the middle of vacant fields. If you put your head down one of those dark, plummeting holes you could hear the sound of hard-pressed men shouting and grunting behind the grind and clank of wheels, sniffthe dank smell of oil and earth and, yes, the wet slippery scent of fear rising out. Then you would might know that beneath the buttercups and tufts of couch grass lay the largest and most complex structure existing in the whole of the Channel Islands. Ah, the solid rock of Guernsey.

He found that by lying on his back and pressing his feet against the roof of the tunnel he could push the cart along the rails like the old man had suggested. The old man had lived on the canals, and in the early days, when they’d had the will to talk, he had told him of his years working on the coal barges, crisscrossing Europe and the long low tunnels that ran through his working life.

“Me and the wife would lie on the barge roof and walk ‘em through,” the bargee had recalled. “No matter what the weight. Longer than the night itself some of them tunnels. We’d take a rest halfway and lie there in the pitch dark, not a sound around us, except the water dripping and the craft nudging one another. Maybe the splash of a rat somewhere.” He’d poked him in the ribs. “It’s where all our sprats got started. Didn’t matter how dark it was. We knew what we was looking for.”

Walking the wagons was tough on his legs, but it saved his arms for the shovel work at the end. Cement and brick going in, granite going out. Of the two operations, pushing the wagons out was the more dangerous, for the track sloped down towards the entrance and unless checked the wagons could piek up a dangerous momen-tum of their own. Crushed legs, crushed hands, broken ribs, a punctured gut—the wagons had taken their toll. A hospital, that’s what they were building, a hospital with kitchens and laundries and everything, even a cinema, though at the moment it was just rock and soil and the reverberation of a hundred hammers. Two long corridors they had hacked away, and in between, connecting them, a series of long domed rooms looking more like catacombs in a cathedral, where stone plinths covering the crumbling bones of ancient saints should reside, than dormitories built to raise the wounded from their beds. Not that he would ever lie on one of them. There was only one sickbed waiting for him. Collapsed from exhaustion? Sling him in the back of the truck. Back broken by a fallen roof? Sling him in the back of the truck. Blinded by blast fragments, coughing up too much blood, arm wrenched out of its socket? Sling him in the truck. And if he survived the day? Put him on the boat to that other island from where no one returned. They would die here, he knew it, wither and die and be chucked away, tipped out over the cliffs like so much rubble.

He had been working the tunnels for three months now in numbing twelve-hour shifts, twelve hours on, twelve hours off. Up at first light, a hard tear of bread, a bowl of cloudy water speckled with torn cabbage leaves and unwashed potato peelings, perhaps a strip of dog in the bottom, and then out in the half dark, with the overseer alongside them, whipping the air with his little tin pipe, deformed merriment playing down the narrow streets, their uniform a mixed bag of rags, here a long nightshirt hanging down over a municipal trousers, there a string vest behind a railwayman’s jacket, baggy linen trousers and calico shirts and flat caps atop every one, appropriated headgear of the defunct Czech army.

It was cold and weary, marching along with the wind from the coast adding a final chili to their bones. He’d never seen the sea before he’d been sent here. Two years and he still hated the sight of it. Last summer one afternoon they’d been let loose on one of the long beaches past the harbour, but though the rest had run down to the water’s edge, jumping and splashing and pushing each other as if they were on holiday, he had stood on the shore, unable and unwilling to move. It scared him, the sea, so huge and cold and without remorse. Not like the river by his village, and the towpath where he’d gone fishing with his dad, the cows mooching up and down in the meadow behind them. They’d shot them all that second afternoon when the other soldiers came, the dogs, the pigs, the cows, shot the lot of them, casual and laughing, as if they were out for day’s fun at a distant country fair.

So here he marched, with the weight of the sweeping sky calling to a stilled life beyond, no not marched, but shufïled in a frozen shivering sleep, ragged arm to ragged shoulder, ragged shoulder to ragged arm, feet black and raw and wrapped in blood-hardened rags, with the road bright and shiny from the night and the distant sound of the great green water sucking at the island’s heart: up the hill, past houses and cottages and hidden lives which he could guess at all too well. Were these the whitewashed walls behind which he had once lived, this cracked smudged pane of glass the window looking into his own forgotten life? Was this the meadow, this the pond, this the deserted apple grove where once his family’s pigs broke ground? Was that creaking iron pump, so sturdy in its stone casement, the pump under which he pushed his dirty traant face, that the handle, that the gush of water washing away, what, his mother’s ire, his sister’s gibes, his father’s loud lament? As they reached the lip of the hill, and starled down into that deep valley, half running, half stumbling, clanking like a medieval siege machine with the tin cups and billycans hanging from their sides, it seemed to him that the closer they came to the great dark hole the lusher the valley grew, as if God Himself was taunting them, showing them all the green wonder of the world before bidding them to depart. Thick ferns rose up out of the wayside grass, buds of he knew not what had pushed their way through the dark soil, the lattice of bare branches now replaced by a canopy the colour of succulent evergreen. And then, as it appeared that the road was leading them ever deeper into this impenetrable fertility, came the clearing, a bare slice of burnt and flattened ground, announced by black-lettered noticeboards peppered with exclamation marks and protected by wire fencing twelve foot high. Waiting behind the opened double gates, in two long rows, stood the guards, bristling in their brushed uniforms, barking at them as they trotted past, towards the iron grille and the grinding lorries and the great maw of a mouth beyond, ready to swallow and chew and spit them out, digested.

They went in slowly, some directed to the wagons, some to the lines of pickaxes and shovels leaning up against the wall, their handles still greasy from the night shift. The air was chili and damp, and his clothes stuck to his skin almost immediately. Water dripped from the roof, mud slid under his feet. Though electric lights were slung along the walls it took time to appreciate the length and breadth of the gallery and the dark brilliance of the imagination that had created it. Moving along that first long corridor, hewn of granite, the traces of past pickaxe blows pressed like fossils into its slick black walls, the tunnel stretched beyond the limit of light and dark into a stone labyrinth of implacable strength. There was no beginning to be found here, no end, such was its depth and its vast disdain for life. Though he knew that he had been banished to fashion a terrain upon which his life might come to a flickering halt, he felt that unwittingly he had uncovered a land of dim eternity. This was not simply a man-made device. This was a vision of a world to come, beyond man’s calling, God’s gift to a cursed world, a place of unspeakable holiness. He had been driven into this darkness, to fight amongst his brethren, to jostle and squeal like another lost rat, gnawing at the earth’s heart, and here, he had concluded, was where he belonged. Up top he was nothing, a number to call, a mouth to feed, a back to beat. Up top there was air and sun and the sight of the world. It was too bright, there was too much colour, too much light. The day hurt him, hurt him for what he had lost, though he saw only the dawn grey and the blood dusk of it now, and he was glad of that. Down here, with nothing but echoes of his fading memories to remind him of his fairy-tale past, it was easier to dweil. Down here doom and hope mingled like blood and sand, with sudden milky mists rising from the floor to hide him from their most searching gaze. This was of its own. Here he would make his mark, searching for the mystery of it all, and they knew it not.

For the past three weeks he had been engaged in building a connecting passage between the hospital and what would be ammunition stores, with an escape shaft set halfway between, some seventy-five feet high, an iron-rung ladder strapped inside. It was hard work, with falling roofs and unexpected subsidence taking their toll, but despite the danger it was along here, in a dark abandoned recess, now hidden behind one of the giant air filters ranged along the main corridors, that he had fashioned his tiny room, four foot high and three foot square and lined with sacking. To begin with, he did not know what he would do with his invention, nor why he had spent back-breaking minutes furiously hacking at this illegal excavation, for it was not an escape route leading to an outside salvation, it was a cell constructed within a prison. But in the days when he had dug it out, chucking the earth into his wagon, tipping the evidence of his own private domain into the waiting lorries, it came to him that what he had created was not an exit, but an entrance, not a hiding place, but the beginnings of a state of being, and that if he were careful enough and constructed it cleverly, he could expand it, build other rooms, food stores, sleeping quarters, listening posts. He would learn the tunnel’s secrets, its nocturnal habits, and adapt to its calling. He would feed and clothe himself from their provisions, take warmth from their furnaces, run wires from the generators, tap into the air compressors. He would wear a stolen officer’s cap and a pair of good boots and on his leather belt would swing a torch and a dagger and a length of rope. He would fashion a new world, unsuspected and bidden, one which he would command and one which would grow in power. He would take the old man in with him. Others later on. Burrow under the whole island. When they were secure they could bring some of the whores down. Start a new civilization. Rot the other world from the inside.

He’d crept over to the old man as soon as he’d got back, wakened him with broken piece of pie held under his nose, thrusting out his arm to show off his new-found prizes.

“Look,” he had whispered, a touch a pride in his voice. “Trousers too!”

The old man had taken the pie and held it gingerly to his mouth. His teeth, loose in his reddened gums, moved sideways as he bit into it. He worked a piece slowly round his tongue, chewing carefully and swallowing hard.

“How’d you come by all this lot?” he had asked.

“Farmhouse,” the boy had told him. “Off a line.”

Wiping the crumbs back in from the corner of his sore stubbled mouth, the old man reached out and touched it.

“That’s real quality you got there, son. Sticks out a mile on you. They’ll be wanting to know how you’ve come by it. You’d best dirty it up some more or they’ll hang you up on the hooks and beat the shit out of you.”

He’d taken the old man’s advice, pushed the jacket up and down the floor, rubbing sawdust and dirt into the material. Fighting over that dead rabbit had helped.

He looked for the old man in the line of men hacking at the granite wall, but couldn’t see him. Perhaps he’d been sent further in. Peter, that was his name. Same name as his father. Sonya had been his sister’s. And his? He could hardly remember. He hadn’t had a name for such a long time. He was just feet now, feet and arms and runny shits, all wrapped up in a brand-new coat. This would get him through the coming months. Pillow, blanket, coat. He patted it lovingly. What a night that was, the car coming quietly up that wild stretch of path, him crouched underneath the gorse hedge, the rain starting to get up. The car had stopped not a body length from him. Everything foot level. Door open. Black rain on the car’s mudguards and the shine of a cape and a man’s boot, stepping into the squashed wet of the puddles, door swinging open and the light inside shining on the hatted head sleeping in the back. Low mutters from the man, sensing the urgency and the hurry of it. Not hunting cats in the headlights at this hour; nerves and fear afoot, something quick and something bad. Then the man had pulled the door open and out the figure feil. With the hat and the jacket and the way the body rolled on the ground he had thought it another man at first, a stumbling drunk, but then as the hat slipped off and began to roll across the ground he saw the back of her legs and the fall of her hair. Then her face was staring at him along the spongy ground, six foot away, open eyed, bare Ups grinning on her face like blade work on a pumpkin and her dress slapping in the mud like a hooked fish on a river bank. The man had chased the hat and stuffed it in his pocket and then had starled to drag her off, one leg in each great hand, the dress riding up over her arse, bare and moon-white, her arms trailing high above her head, her outstretched fingers leaving trails in the flattened grass, the jacket peeling up over her, like she was one of the jig-a-jig girls, stripping for him even though his back was turned, first one arm and then the other, over her shoulders and head, blown back to the bush where he crouched, his heart tight in the grip of such close danger. Reaching one of the shafts the man picked her up and counting to himself, one, two, three, lifted her clear, her bare feet swinging over the hole, before he lowered her carefully into the deep of it. Down she went, until all he could see was her head and her mouth, luminous and vile, drowning in the night air. Then, not fifty yards away, the boom of a gun went off, and hiding his face he felt the earth recoil. When he looked again the air shaft stood empty and the man was running back to the safety of his car, bumping down the road without lights, the engine gunning out of sight. And as he crept round and tugged the jacket free it seemed to him that she had been brought to her underground tomb, not by chance nor for her captor’s indecent pleasure, but to offer him the means by which he might survive in his. He knew what they had done to her, what she had suffered. He did not feel sorry for her. It was what happened, what the world was made for. All the rest was a delusion. He had seen it before. Seen it with his sister that night. One after the other they came, dropping their trousers round their ankles while their predecessor hopped back into his, laughing coarse encouragement, some queuing up for a second or third time. The officer in charge, a tall, handsome man with not a speek on his uniform, had come round to their cottage that afternoon and ducking through the low doorway, had stepped in, dusting off his cap with determined politeness. There was just him and his father and sister left. Their mother and the baby had been taken into the church, along with Grandmama and all the others. The officer had looked around the room with interest, the only room they had, and picking up a sample of Sonya’s embroidery work had held it out, questioning her with a friendly look. His sister had nodded and, smiling, the officer had replaced it back on the dresser with care. Then, noticing his parents’ bed hidden at the back, he had gone over, drawn back the curtain and patted the snug, high mattress.