During their enlistment physicals there was a full-size anatomy skeleton in the corner and the bare bones looked wrong in comparison to the naked men in the room, as if a child had drawn them out of scale. Both Harris and Anstey had that sense of disproportion about them now, their emaciated limbs seeming too long for the frames they were attached to.
En route to Singapore, the
Wakefield
had put in at Mombasa to give the troops a few hours shore leave on Christmas Day, 1941. They anchored at the mouth of the Duruma River just before noon and the servicemen were let loose on the city. Open-air restaurants and small taverns overrun by British soldiers and American sailors. Wish and his two buddies wandered around with half a dozen others from their company through the afternoon, drinking and singing Christmas carols, flipping shillings and American nickels to the youngsters following them in packs. Brazen sunlight, the clothes of the men and women in the street red and gold and ocean blue. The heat so close it felt as if the air was wearing a pelt of oil and fur.
They found a deserted hole-in-the-wall restaurant early that evening, the proprietor drunker than they were and unable to get out of his seat to serve them. They poked through the kitchen and cooked up a haunch of meat, goat or some animal native to the place, along with sweet potato and carrots and onion. The owner held out his empty glass periodically and they filled it for him, shouting questions as they ate. He was in no shape to answer with much more than monosyllables but they managed to learn his name (Charles) and age (fifty-two), that he was married but his wife was dead, that he was a Christian. He didn’t drink, he said, holding out his empty glass again. The meat was dark and gamey with just a hint of rot in the flesh and none of them managed to finish what was on their plate. Anstey cleared the table before they left and Harris tucked a two-dollar bill into Charles’ shirt. “Merry Christmas, old man,” he said. And he leaned in drunkenly to kiss his cheek.
It was a sweet gesture, that kiss. Something out of another world altogether, Wish knew. It wasn’t just their bodies that were wasting away in the camp. He didn’t doubt they’d kill Charles for that piece of rotten meat now. They’d turn on any one of the newly arrived prisoners if there was a decent meal to be gained.
Wish didn’t think much of the army in basic. It all came down to charts and grids and rank and formations, which felt childish at the time, a ridiculous little game. But he could map his world in one simple diagram now, a hierarchy of concentric circles with Harris and Anstey in the ring closest to him, then McCarthy and the men in their unit. The other Brits they’d arrived with next and beyond them the Americans and the Dutch. Then Osano and Haruyama and the one or two others who Wish had some sway over. Next, the guards who were decent, followed by those who were hard-line but impersonal. And way out among the farthest planets, somewhere beyond the human, he placed the handful of sadists who seemed to love their work.
Harris had finished his food and lay splayed on the ground, half asleep. Anstey was turning his empty bowl in his hands to lick it clean. Wish’s inner circle. The Brits in their unit made no distinction between the two Canadians and the Newfoundlander, lumping them into one indistinguishable category. They arrived at the same time from somewhere in the colonies. They had the manners of savages. They added milk to their tea after it was poured. They butchered the English language. They were known within the ranks as the Three Stooges. The ragging from their fellow soldiers was mostly good-natured but it created a sense of shared persecution that solidified them as a unit.
They were still hanging on to one another now and Wish felt a surge of affection for them both, though the affection was tainted, already edged with regret. There was a limit, he knew, a breaking point beyond which one of them would turn on or away from the others. It was simply a matter of chance whether they ever reached it.
For weeks, “latrine rumours” in camp suggested the war in Europe was all but over. Two Korean guards were overheard discussing the fall of Iwo Jima and a fight for Okinawa going badly. There were increasingly frequent American bombing raids on the areas around Nagasaki, including the shipyard, where a detail of POWs was deployed as slave labour. The aircraft carrier Wish had spent months working on as a riveter was destroyed in a raid before its keel ever touched water. He spent his days now clearing up the debris. “If the Yanks don’t kill us,” Harris said to him, “we might get home alive yet.”
Wish had nearly given up on that notion. But the possibility of it seemed so certain these days that it was like a new feeling altogether. Like falling in love after a lifetime of feeding simple animal lust.
After they left the restaurant in Mombasa, Harris and Anstey bartered with a man for the favours of a woman he was parading on the street. Harris tried to talk him down to half his asking price but the man refused to budge. She was his wife, the man said, she knew how to take care of a man. Harris shook his head. “She’s
fat,”
he said, using both hands to mime a full moon over his belly.
“Never mind,” Anstey said. He was drunkenly counting the bills in his hand. “I like a bit of meat on a woman.”
“Look at the hips on it, Ants. You’ll fall body and bones into a cunny that size.”
“You in on this, Wish?”
“Count me out.”
“Don’t be such a goddamn saint,” Harris said.
“It’s
Christmas
, Wish.”
Wish had only been with a prostitute once, on leave in London with Harris and Anstey, before Mercedes’ first letter reached him. The three soldiers had spent most of an afternoon drinking and Wish lost his companions on the city streets shortly before dark. He’d spent every cent he brought with him and had no idea how to get back to their hostel. He stopped a woman to ask directions and she looked him up and down. She was wearing so much makeup he found it impossible to guess her age.
“You a soldier, love?” she asked.
Wish was in uniform and simply nodded.
She did another slow measure of him. “You seen any action?”
“On leave from basic,” he said.
The woman smiled at him. Her top teeth leaned in one direction like trees bowed by a prevailing wind. “That’s not the sort of action I meant, dearie,” she said. “You look awful young, is all.”
“I don’t have a cent on me,” he told her.
She tipped her head to one side. “I don’t mind doing my bit,” she said. “For the war effort.”
She took him to a tiny bedsit just large enough for a cot and a coal stove and an ancient loveseat covered with a thin sheet. The woman was on her period, or claimed as much, and she simply removed her blouse and bra, sitting in front of him on the cot to take down his trousers, clamping his half-erect cock in her unshaven armpit. There was a rancid smell of fried sausages in the bedsit
(bangers
, the English called them, which Anstey and Harris found endlessly amusing), grey flowered wallpaper that he stared at while stroking against her. Her head turned demurely to one side as if it was a solitary activity Wish was engaged in and she wanted to avoid invading his privacy. His head ached and he knew he would be bawling drunkenly in some alleyway before the night was through and the evening fell steadily around him in the tiny room. It felt as if he was bringing it down on himself, fucking his way into the dark.
Wish backed away from the ongoing negotiations to lean against the wall of Charlie’s restaurant. He watched the woman standing at her husband’s shoulder with a half smile on her face that could have meant anything. She was wearing a wide collar of roped beads and a dress of patterned cloth, a line of script along the border at her knees. Most of the women he’d seen on the streets had a phrase foreign to him sewn onto the material of their clothing, and he pointed to it, interrupting the negotiations.
“What does that say?” he asked.
The husband looked to see what he was pointing at.
“Usisafirie nyota ya mwenzio,”
he said.
“What does it say in
English?”
“Don’t set sail,” the husband translated, “by someone else’s star.”
He nodded then. He was loaded drunk. And never wavered for a moment.
The light from headquarters was sent around at 6:30 in the evening, and the prisoners sat against the walls of the barracks, smoking their last official cigarette of the day. Wish was keeping a close eye on the truck, which hadn’t moved from the spot where it was parked that afternoon. Osano was off duty and gone.
One of the newcomers strolled across the grounds toward them. “Which one of you is Furey?” he asked.
“Who wants to know?” Harris said.
“Ronnie Matthews,” the soldier said, extending a hand to Harris. “18th Division.”
Harris simply looked at him.
“Sherwood Foresters,” he said. “We shipped out of Halifax on the
Mount Vernon
. Taken in Singapore.”
“Spent some time in Changi prison, I imagine?” Harris said.
“Are you Furey?”
“No,” Wish said. He was sitting several spaces down the wall. “I am.”
“Just the man I’m after.”
He was trying to guess Matthews’s age. The soldier’s hair had gone completely white but the face said early twenties at the most.
“We had a long trip in,” he was saying. “Some of us would welcome a little refreshment. We were told you were the man to speak with.”
“I could be,” Wish said. He lifted himself to his feet, using the barracks wall to hold his weight on the way up. He stood still a moment to let the dizziness pass.
“We’ve put together a few dollars. Some cigarettes.”
“We’re old prison mates,” Wish said. “A special price for you.”
He and Harris and Anstey waited just inside the barracks entrance. Matthews arrived to the minute. McCarthy always said you could count on that in an Englishman, they were punctual. It was part of their formality, it gave them the same satisfaction as wearing the right jacket to dinner, tying a tie just so.
“Right then,” Matthews said. “What do I do?”
Wish pointed out the truck, still sitting near the guardhouse.
“There’s a box in the back, you’ll find a cloth bag inside.”
“You’re not going to get me shot, are you, Furey?”
“They don’t pay much mind to us after dark,” he said.
“Why don’t you go get it yourself, then?”
Harris said, “Do you want the goddamn liquor or not?”
“Right,” Matthews said. “I’m on my way.”
Wish opened one of the bottles he had with him and handed it across. “One for the road,” he said. Matthews drank and passed the bottle back. From the doorway, they watched him skulk along the line of barracks, then scramble over the open ground to the truck. A muffled clinking of bottles all the way back.
“You didn’t tell me it was going to make such a bloody racket.”
Wish held up two corked bottles. “This is good stuff,” he said. “Lots more where it come from.” He handed them to Matthews and then said, “What about the Jap come over with you? The interpreter.”
“We were hoping to be rid of him in the transfer.”
“Hard case?”
“Lefty was strictly by the book when he first showed up at Mushiroda. No messing about. But he pretty much ran the show by the time we left. Owned the Red Cross storeroom. Heavy into the black market.”
“No wonder he smiles so much,” Anstey said.
“We got a ration of Red Cross beef at Mushiroda last year, just a tin per. Someone handed them out without consulting Lefty. As soon as he got wind of it he had them recalled. Don’t know what he had over Sakamoto to get authorization for that. There was one fellow in the camp didn’t return his ration. Lefty had his kit turned out, found the tin. Went at him with a bamboo stick while he lay in bed. Blood all over the place.”
A shock of white hair, Wish was thinking. It had never struck him before, that phrase. Matthews had a shock of white hair. He said, “I had the interpreter pegged as a true believer.”
“Oh he’s all of that and then some,” Matthews said. “Whatever’s good for Japan is good for Lefty. I guess he decided the opposite must also be true.”
“Why do you call him Lefty?” Harris asked.
“Here’s hoping you never have cause to know,” Matthews said. “You’d do well to stay clear of him if you can.”
The camp buildings stood two or three feet off the ground on wooden posts. Their barracks was backed into a corner of the prison fence, as private a spot as the camp offered, and Wish had dug out a shallow trench underneath the far end to house the still and store the liquor. He used anything that came to hand to brew the shine, sweet potatoes and rice too rotten to eat, carrot and turnip tops, yeast that the Dutch soldiers in the cookhouse set aside for him. The unrefined sugar and soybeans and bottles were supplied by Osano, who took half the product to sell in Nagasaki. Left to stand two weeks in the bottle, the liquor was 90 proof. Wish hadn’t tasted anything as foul since his first mouthful of Clive’s shine in the Cove. But it got the job done.
After Matthews left them, they carried the bag to the rear of the barracks and crawled underneath. Along with the bottles, the bag contained a box of matches. The bottles were bad enough, but possessing matches could get a man shot. Harris said, “I think we’d best head back inside tonight. What with the new fellows about.”
Wish was still feeling too contrary to listen to common sense. “I’m having a drink and a smoke before I call it a night,” he said. “Lefty or no.”
“Anstey?”
“I can’t leave him out here alone, now, can I?”
“It’s your funeral,” Harris said. And he left them there.
Wish opened a bottle and lit up two cigarettes. “Miserable bastard,” he said.
“Matthews spooked him. He’s just trying to watch out for us.”
Wish had fallen in with the two men his first evening in Halifax. When he cleared the vessel that afternoon he tried to find his way to an enlistment office, following the partial and contradictory directions of people he approached on the street. Spent hours crossing and recrossing the same intersections, as if there was some vast conspiracy among the citizens of Halifax to keep him from joining up. The office was closed by the time he found it and he carried on wandering the streets awhile. Drifted into a tavern after dark to order a beer. Harris and Anstey were at the bar and already halfways drunk. They got up from their seats periodically to salute one another, march in formation through the tables to the toilets. Boys at the outset of some grand adventure. They saluted Wish and every other drinker in the room as they passed, called them all
soldier
.