The Ballroom (22 page)

It was Fuller. He knew it was.

He thought of her, of the men she would dance with tonight. The greasy hands she would have to pass through. A wasp buzzed, furious against the windowpane. Somewhere behind him, Dan slammed his fist repeatedly into the wall. John looked over towards the door. The attendant on duty was one of the older men, slumped in his chair, arms clasped over his chest, face puffy and nodding in the heat. It wouldn’t take much to knock him sideways. Take the man’s keys. Free himself from this stinking room. Open the doors all the way to the ballroom and lead a troop of the poor benighted fuckers out of here.

Then what?

Then he would be put downstairs until the wintertime.

So he stayed there, taut and unmoving, hemmed between the canary and the wasp, until the men returned from the ballroom. And when they did he searched their faces, greedy for a glimpse of her, as though she might have gilded those she danced with by her touch.

It was a sour, stagnant weekend. They weren’t allowed out for recreation either, so John spent his days pacing the day room, with the windows that hardly opened, and the foul stench simmering, staring out at the sun-bleached grass.

He wished they had put him downstairs. At least it would be cool there, and quiet, and he would be left alone with his thoughts.

He waited for Fuller to come and play the piano on Monday. He wanted to see him – have the doctor look him in the eye and know the shame would be too great for him to speak a word about what John had done. There would be satisfaction in that at least. But Fuller did not appear, and so his anger brewed, strong and dark.

Then, Tuesday morning early, they were woken and hustled outside.

A ragged collection of men out there – he counted sixty or so huddled in the yard. He and Dan, some of the other stronger men from the ward, and others he did not know, faces he could hardly make out in the early blue light.

Even at this time it was already warm, with only a small freshness to the air, the heavy heat of the previous day just giving way to the heat of the day to come. But it was a freshness John gulped, taking great lungfuls after three days locked in that foetid ward. They were doled out a bowlful of porridge and a mug of tea, while a clutch of farmers stood before them, faces tight, dogs yapping by their heels, impatient for the men to finish. When they were done, they were led out to the fields while the sun cast a pale thin line across the sky. They were each handed sickles: bowed knives with small, serrated blades.

‘So the bastards are not so proud they won’t have us work for them then,’ said Dan, turning his blade round in his hand. ‘Not so proud not to give us these.’

‘Aye.’ The weight of the sickle was good in his palms. ‘Not so proud as that.’

The first of the swallows were out, skimming the ears of wheat, their forms grey against the slowly lightening sky. The farmers hastened them into their rows, John and Dan in the first of them, as the sun rose and the dawn became streaked with blue.

‘All right there.’ Dan reached out, speaking softly, touching the crop, which shivered in the dawn air. ‘All right there.’

A shout came from the farmers, the signal to move.

‘Low and clean,
chavo
,’ said Dan. ‘Low and clean to the living earth.’

John bent, grasped his first fistful of the crop, and cut low and clean. At first he was awkward, but then found his stride, working out anger, working up a rhythm of hate.

By eleven the heat was raging and they were allowed to rest, and sought what shade they could beneath thorn trees that marked the borders of the fields out here. The farmers sat apart and watchful, faces creased with worry for the crop.

‘They need us.’ Dan nodded over towards them. ‘We are more than we were to them. There’ll be no shit from them for a while now.’

A strange sort of truce hung over them all, as birds of prey coasted in the high, arcing currents overhead.

The farmers brought them water to drink; cups were filled and passed around the men. Dan called for more, for a bucket, and not one of them said a word as he took off his shirt, dunked it in the water, and then wrapped the sodden garment around his neck. John followed, twisting his shirt to wring the wet from it and tying it in a blessedly cool crown around his head.

As the day passed, John’s hate was swung out of him and gave way to something else in which there was only breath and the movement of his body, only the blue-gold dazzle of the light. Only walking forwards, one foot before the other across the field.

She was there before him, hand trailing through the ears of corn. Hair unbound. Sun glimmering on her skin.

She was there when all the other thoughts had fallen away.

A letter. He needed to get a letter to her somehow.

This became the pattern of their days: woken before dawn and led to the fields before the heat began to rage.

The farmers would stand by, shouting at the men to get them to work faster, but Dan was the one who kept them going. In the afternoons, when the heat was at its raging worst and the men were beginning to lag, he would start up a song: a sea shanty, lewd and salty in the mouth, with a chorus that everyone, even the men who forgot their own names, could learn. John joined in. At first his voice was parched and cracked, like the earth they walked upon, but it soon found itself again in the ripe and yeasty songs.

When he lay down to sleep, she was there, wound around his thoughts. He imagined her wound around his body. Her length of black hair. The weight of it. The paleness of her. Her sharp scent. He felt himself stir in response.

When he slept though, he slept dreamlessly, his body heavy, skull scraped clean by work.

Another Friday passed. Another Friday he and Dan were left behind while the others went off to dance. Another weekend locked in the day room.

John took paper and wrote to her – letters in which he poured out words he did not know that he would ever dare to send.

And then – another week of rising before dawn.

Even so, even working at the pace they were, they did not cut the crop quickly enough. The farmers cast dark faces to the sky and muttered to one another, and they were woken even earlier, and there was no respite and no rain. The fields were a torment of dust. At the end of the day they were all covered in it, strange creatures: eyes swollen, lids weeping and raw.

Once, in the dry, cracking afternoon, smoke rose from the rise of the moor ahead, a thin wisp of purple, and then the gorse and heather raging. The men downed their tools and watched, laughing at first, before standing in silence and awe: the burning enough to scorch your skin even at that distance, the fire moving quickly, leaping from bush to bush, roaring into the still afternoon, the moor shivering in rising waves of heat.

The farmers, panicked, scuttled to and fro, shouting uselessly, attendants clustered around the pump house while the old red fire engine was filled up and wheeled out and strapped to four horses, then clanked its way up on to the moor. But there were no roads up there, and the fire engine got stuck, and the hoses did not reach.

John watched it rage, glad it had not been tamed, since it answered the raw burning in himself. It seemed to him the heat had become a living thing with its own hungers now.

It was hours before they controlled it, hours in which the men lolled in the shade, as black gorse snow scattered and settled on their hair and skin. John lay back, felt the pull of the hot earth beneath him. Above, the leaves of the oak filtered the sun. They were hardly watched by the attendants at all. If he had wanted to, he could have just walked away. But he could not walk and leave her here.

Where was she now? How was she faring in this heat?

There was still no sign of Fuller. No more appearances in the day room on a Monday. The piano remained stubbornly unplayed. It was as though a combatant had retired early from a fight.

There was a movement beside him, and John turned his head to see Dan, squatting, his face filmed with black flakes, frowning with concentration as he fiddled with an ear of wheat.

‘Here.’ His eyes were gleaming.

‘What?’

‘Hold out your hand.’

John leant towards him, and Dan dropped the thing he had made into his palm.

A tiny corn doll. It was Fuller. There was no mistaking it; by some strange skill of his battered hands Dan had caught his likeness, the way he had been when they last saw him, riding his ass.

‘You want him out of the way?’ Dan edged closer, his voice low. Danger plucked the air around them.

‘Who?’

‘You know who.’ Dan sat back on his haunches, nodding to the tiny figure. ‘I can keep him out of the way. If you like.’

John looked around him; the men were all lying down, snoring, most of them, asleep. ‘How?’ he said.

‘Easy.’ Dan spoke in a soft, coaxing voice. ‘Easy now, lad.’ It was as though he was talking to an animal. Soothing it. But John did not want to be soothed. His blood was fired. Jumping.

‘No. Tell me, Riley. How? What would you do?’

‘There are some things that can’t be spoke of. But I’ll do it for you, lad. I’ll do it for me too. I’ll make him burn.’

John looked at Dan, at his face smeared in black gorse snow. Clear rivulets where the sweat had coursed through.

He nodded, slowly, once, and Dan grinned, grasping him by the shoulder. ‘That’s it, lad. That’s it.’

Then Dan plucked the figure between finger and thumb, slid his box of matches from his pocket, struck one and touched it to the edge of his effigy. He held it as it burnt, first slowly, and then grinning as the tiny man was licked and swallowed by flames. When the fire reached his fingertips, Dan tossed the corn to the earth and ground it out. ‘Burn, boy, burn,’ he said.

Then he spat on it. Then he laughed. Then he took the ashes and smeared them on his cheeks.

S
HE SCANNED THE
ballroom with spiralling unease for his shape, but he was gone.

‘Where’s John?’ said Clem, when they gathered at the end of the evening. ‘He wasn’t there. Where is he?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know any more than you.’

Clem’s face was naked in its wanting, peeled raw. Ella didn’t like to look at it; it looked like she felt.

As the week passed, she avoided Clem’s gaze, which was half desperate, half accusing, as though it were her fault John had disappeared.

Her thoughts circled the moment she had seen him last: he had been coming towards her over the field, the doctor behind him in that daft costume, throwing out his arm with one ungainly blow and stopping John in his tracks. She had seen little more after that, moving back through the trees to safety and then losing herself in the crowd. But there had been the feel of trouble out there, the doctor furious, his arms flailing in the air.

And now John was gone. And she might have asked his friend, Dan Riley, where he was, but he was gone too.

Illness was rife on the wards: perhaps it was that?

Old Germany had been taken to the infirmary, coughing and shivering, her eyes huge in her head. There was talk of deaths. In the laundry, as Ella went about her work, the air was so hot it was hard to breathe without burning your lungs. You had to take small sips of it. Women fainted all the time, especially the older ones; last week one had slipped and cracked open her head, blood puddling with soapy water on the laundry floor.

What if he should die? Die in the same building as her, and she not know it? What if he were dead already and had been taken out and buried in one of those graves? Buried along with people he did not know, and she did not know, in a hole she might never find?

The next Friday he was not there either. Panic swirled as she danced, the men were more visible to her now, and she to them it seemed, their wants more greasy, their hands more restless than before.

‘Give me the letter,’ said Clem in a tight voice the next morning at recreation. ‘The last one he wrote. The one about the trees.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want to
read
it. I want to remember it. Because I’m forgetting it already.’

‘But … it’s mine.’ Ella heard her own voice, high like a child’s.

Clem stared at her for a long moment, then took her book out from under her arm and flicked through the pages with quick, angry fingers. Ella’s heart rattled. Clem wasn’t really reading though, because her eyes didn’t move, just stayed staring at the same spot, until she blew out her breath and looked up again. ‘What’s the point of walking beside me,’ she said, ‘if you’re not going to share your letter?’

The question was like a slap.

‘If you don’t let me read it again,’ said Clem quietly, ‘next time, I won’t help you write back.’

They walked in silence, but it was a silence noisy with unnamed, dangerous things. After one turn of the yard, Ella reached into her dress. ‘Here.’

Clem snatched for it, almost tearing it from her hand and reading it with ravenous eyes. She did not read it aloud. When she handed it back, she seemed calmer, restored to herself. ‘I’m sure there’s an explanation,’ she said with a smile. ‘I’m sure he’ll be back soon.’

But as Ella folded it into her dress the letter felt sullied.

The sky above was blue, deep blue, but it hummed and buzzed, as if the blue were only a sheet and behind it, waiting to be rent free, lay black and boiling weather.

And the doctor still came every Monday and chose the women to be taken off. And the dog men still came. The doctor still played the piano, and Old Germany still danced while the women were carried away. And whenever the doctor was close, Clem’s cheeks were red and scalding in the heat.

Sometimes one of the women would beg the nurses to open the windows – just a little more. But the Irish nurse just laughed and shook her head. ‘What do you think this is?’

One sweltering afternoon, an old woman died. Her neighbour began poking and prodding her and then screaming, and Ella looked over and saw the woman’s sunken face, the mouth open, the flies crawling in and around it and doing what they liked. The nurses came and tried to wake her, and when she wouldn’t wake, she was carried out by the dog men too.