I
MUST HAVE
slept again,” says Gregory, “because I was awoken by a hand on my shoulder and a pith helmet near my face, muttering something about an advance. He scurried down the trenches we had dug and woke them one by one. It wasn’t daybreak yet but there was enough light in the sky to show the battleships, the
Queen Elizabeth
like a black cardboard cut-out against the palest dark behind it. Then the guns began to roar and I must have had my hearing back, because the sound seemed all around me, like a giant bell, booming, circular, whirling from one ear to the other. We stared up from the sandbags and over the next twenty or so minutes saw the fort above us disintegrate. It seemed to become its own volcano, spewing clouds of dust and smoke from within its bowels, geysers of red flame shooting upwards as each new shell hit, eventually wrapping itself in a shroud of black through which we could see nothing. Then the firing stopped and the cloud stilled and there were no answering crackles of yellow, as if everyone inside it must be dead. There were feet then, clambering over the top, and I followed them, and was amazed to see, all over the beach, squirming figures like our own emerging from invisible dug-outs. We were everywhere, like ants gone to ground, scurrying into the sunlight. How, I wondered, do these pockets of battered humanity become an army again? But that’s what they were, an infantry of thousands of feet making for the cloud that twenty minutes before had been the castle. We staggered up the rise and into the cloud-fogged piles of ancient masonry. There were bodies fused into the shattered stone, pulverised with the dust, bits of bone and khaki mixed with the shattered brick, but no resistance.
“We made it through the pall of smoke into the village behind, and there it was a different matter, they let us plough down streets then emerged from broken doorways to fire from behind. I fired blindly and jerked that bayonet four times into resistant flesh and became amazed again, this time at how simple savagery was and how long it took the recipients of it to die. Then, I felt a thud in my arm and went over through an open doorway, and lay there staring at a pot bubbling in an empty room, a wood fire beneath it. I got the smell of vegetables and spices and felt a hunger like I’d never felt, realised it was a day since I’d eaten. I heard the sounds of the cleaning out in the street behind me, the dulled cries and the pop of rifles, saw the low embers beneath the bubbling pot and realised somebody had left
it,
a meal interrupted. I edged myself forwards on my good arm and used a blackened piece of wood as a ladle and began to eat, the scalding liquid dribbling down my chin but the taste so good after that I didn’t care.
Taajin,
I learnt to call it later, a rough broth of vegetables and lamb. And my eyes must have become accustomed to the dark because then I saw her, a girl, huddled, almost part of the shadows, as if she’d been there for ever and would never move again, braided hair and a ring of medallions round her sweating forehead. She stared at me as I continued to eat, and I tried to smile to reassure her that I meant no harm. She smiled back, a flash of white teeth from the shadows.
“I got to my knees and felt in my pockets for a coin, a trinket, anything to pay for what I’d eaten, and I found one, a penny, covered in my own warm blood. I flicked it across the floor to her, and her hand spun out, and she caught it neatly. She bit it with her teeth, hoping, probably, that it was gold.”
~
I dreamed of the pearl, I remember, as large as the moon itself, lying in the round concentric mulch of the oyster’s flesh, I was inside the shell and the pearl was as big as
it
could possibly have been. The swathes of colour, pink and delicately purple and white, shifted as I shifted my head. The oyster’s flesh was around me like wet seaweed, shifting groggily the way seaweed does when the tide is turning, and I stretched my hand down to touch the pulpy mass and it parted to reveal the face of Isobel Shawcross with pearls in her open eyes.
I saw myself dreaming then, the enormous pearl outside the window sitting placidly in the purpling sky, and I saw my face below, my naked body under the sheets which were turning red, and I realised my body had a certain kind of beauty, although it still didn’t want me in it. I could have left that body, I felt, left that body to its own devices, but as it had that certain kind of beauty I decided it might as well be put to use, as if it was suddenly someone else’s body, not mine. And it went on that way, me dreaming of me dreaming, the pearl outside the window slowly vanishing in the reddening sky.
I awoke properly when the sun was going down, and the sheets were caked with sweat around me, or with something of more consistency than sweat. I felt I should wash but couldn’t face the corridor, the silence that would be in the house for ever now, and so I lay quite still, thinking of this body, no longer really mine, and the uses to which it could be put. I heard the sounds of the house going about its business in the silence, and when the silence became unbearable I put on the clothes I had worn last night, the stiff clothes, soiled below. I waited until the silence around was quite complete, and then wrapped the shawl around me and walked down the stairs, outside.
~
“The bullet had nicked my shoulder, there was more blood than damage, and as I lay back and tried to undo the gory buttons, I heard a scuffling on the floor behind me. I turned and saw her crawling towards me, the coin between her teeth. It must have reassured her because she helped me bind the wound, undid my buttons, smiling all the time, whispering in that language she seemed to assume I understood. I ripped strips off my shirt and wrapped them round, her hennaed fingers held the knot while I tied it. The words were guttural and vowel-less, but seemed infinitely kind, coming from her childish mouth.
“ ‘Thank you,’ I said, which seemed the only suitable response. Then I backed out into the street and saw her in the darkness of the room, huddling back into those shadows as if she would stay there for ever.
“The fury was dying. There were bodies again in the street, like ritual petals scattered wherever we went, mainly Turkish ones this time, bootless, mounds of wadding wrapped round their pitifully scarred feet. Sallow-skinned faces, covered in a fine blowing dust. Some of them were living, not bodies at all, they were moaning and an officer walked down bayoneting the live ones as he went.
“I was put to cleaning Turkish trenches outside the village, while the thing progressed towards a hill beyond, small figures running towards the distant barbed wire, lines of them that became gap-toothed as they went. Whatever the outcome was I was beyond caring, tired beyond belief. The dead here had been caught
in situ,
there was a horrible domesticity to the cooking utensils beside empty ammunition boxes, stale bread and olives. We grabbed each corpse and rolled it towards an outer trench which we filled with sand after we had filled it with bodies. We dug latrines and cleared the piles of faeces out since they seemed to have shat close to where they stood. By the time the moon came out, a white empty thing, we had the trenches fit for a new set of British corpses. And I watched them fill with live men who knew they could be dead tomorrow.
“I was sent back then, to the beach from which I’d come, told to find my unit of the Dubliners, a fruitless task since it had been obliterated in the first ten minutes. What was left of the moonlit fort was crowded now with mules and transports, huge towers of supply crates growing arbitrarily. On the beach beyond I could see the boats unloading, there were jetties built, a whole ramshackle city growing on the tiny beach, men naked in the water washing themselves. And the shoreline was cleared of corpses, there were barges piled high with them, chugging out towards the hospital ships. Where are you George, I asked myself, where are you?”
T
HE MOON WAS
coming up again and the haystacks sat in the fields as if they would always be there, but I knew of course that come September they’d be gone. I walked down the road, along by the river in the direction of Janie’s, I would tell her, tell her it all I thought, and then it, whatever I was going to tell her, shifted inside me like a wallop and I sat on a bank of grass above the mudflats of Mozambique and felt my dress getting wet again. A horse and cart clipped by and I wrapped myself in my shawl like a travelling woman, and when the figure on it with the stove-pipe hat said grand night, I returned, the way Mary Dagge would have, grand night indeed.
I got up and staggered on towards Janie’s, I felt I had to tell her. And outside Mabel Hatch’s barn another wallop happened, and rather than fall on the road like an animal thing I made my way into the dark inside. I heard the owl hoot and then go still as I entered the dark, and the dark came clearer to my eyes, I could see the shadows of mounds of straw and the irregular ascent they made high up towards the broken wall. I was aware a passer-by on the road, by the river, could have seen a figure lying on the lower straw, and so I climbed up, out of sight of the road, slowly. Every step was another slow wallop.
~
“I found my trench, the trench we had dug the morning of that day, and pushed aside the dozing bodies to make room. I settled my pack down and my shovel and rifle and felt my left-hand sleeve stiff with the dried blood. I climbed out again and made my way to the bloodied shore, and was wading in the water when I saw a figure out there among the others, naked like them, but bigger, much bigger, bending with a pith helmet in his giant hands, filling it with seawater, pouring it over his cropped hair. I recognised the hands, I couldn’t have mistaken them.
“ ‘George!’ I shouted, and he turned, the moon and battleships behind him, the water dripping off his naked body, and he walked towards me then, held the pith helmet over his privates, then let it go again to embrace me, and said, with that crushing simplicity of his, ‘No larks here, Pip.’ And the salt water ran down his face like tears.”
~
I lay on the upper straw in the barn and waited for the owl to hoot one more time. One more time would do it I felt, would draw the thing out, would stop whatever was staining the shawl beneath my knees, the bale of hay below that. The yellow straw was silver in the moonlight and was turning a dull sea green below me, spreading all the time. And then I heard the low purr of wings and the brown thing flew over me once more and out of the triangular aperture where the moon was. That did it, I felt, whatever animal thing was happening was over now, and I remembered the stone woman in the circular passageway with her hands pulling her knees apart and me guiding George’s hand to mine. And I thought, that’s what her knees were open for. It wasn’t the birth of the river, it was the birth of this.
It was in my wet shawl, it had been inside me, it had a shape I didn’t want to see, a tiny form I didn’t want to feel, and so I wrapped the shawl around it. But I knew even then the less I saw of it, the more I would remember.
I got to my knees slowly and felt the bale beneath me shift and slide, and I slid down with it on to the bales below. I fell on my back and it fell on top of me, the wet shawl with the part of me inside it, a pearl, I told myself, a precious, bloody, dead pearl, and I wrapped it, getting wetter all of the time. I slid down then on my wet bum, down bale after bale to the strawy floor. I wanted to be back, for some reason, in some place I had felt happier, by the chestnut tree or near the glasshouse. And so I walked back down the empty road along the riverside through the copse of trees, out past the glasshouse to the orchard wall.
And there, in the orchard, Dan had left his spade by the rusty gate. I took the spade and went to where the earth was soft and I dug. I dug the deepest hole that I could dig in what I would call my weakened state and put my shawl in there for ever and filled it up again. And then I walked down the long field to the river, and underneath the chestnut tree I entered the water and swam. Not so much swam as floated. I would happily have been found there in the morning with the stains of death all over me, but the water did something, the river always did something as I was to find through the years, it washed me clean, and the pull of the tide left me back eventually where I had started, underneath the swing and the chestnut tree.
So I climbed out again and walked to the house, and if anybody met me and asked why I was wet, I was swimming, of course, just swimming, and if they asked why, in your clothes, I would have asked back, what, you think a girl should swim naked?
~
“I stripped by the rancid beach while George put his clothes on.
“ ‘I’ll mind them for you, Greg,’ he said, as if we were at a bathing spot in Bettys town.
I waded out into the hot sea and washed the grime off what used to be me in the pink foam. I knew nothing would ever be the same again, watching those huge plates of black metal out against the horizon waiting to spew their fire once more. I felt the dull pain as the salt seeped through the bandage, into the hole in my arm.
“ ‘Are you hurt?’ I asked him.
“ ‘No,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t hurt much.’
“ ‘What doesn’t hurt?’ I asked, and turned and saw his hand come up to his face and realised he was missing one finger.
“ ‘Don’t laugh,’ he said.
“ ‘How could I laugh, George?’ I asked him.
“ ‘I don’t know how,’ he said, ‘but it does seem funny.’ And he reached into the pocket of his tunic and drew something out, something small and pink that curled like a radish. ‘My finger,’ he said, with a dulled bemusement. ‘We were moving up the cliff-face, I reached up to grab a ledge and a bullet took it. It landed at my feet.’
“ ‘You need to sleep, George,’ I said.
“ ‘I know,’ he said, ‘and so does my finger.’ And he laughed, and I laughed too because I knew he wanted me to.
“ ‘Shall we bury it?’ he said, as I walked back towards him, shaking the drops from my naked body.
“ ‘Why not,’ I said. I dressed then, pulling my rancid trousers over my wet legs, buttoning my shirt that was stiff with blood and sweat, and George found a discarded bayonet, stabbed at the sand with it, gouging out a hole with his good hand. He placed the pink radish-like thing carefully inside, then covered it up, stamped the sand with his feet and stabbed in the bayonet once more so it protruded like a cross.