Bitter Eden: A Novel (10 page)

‘Have I served like an officer and a man?’ I am asking as the lights go up and the curtain sags down, and Tom Smith, taking back what is his, is thinking, ‘Pure fucking corn!’ but the audience has swallowed it, turds and all, and though I cannot say there is a standing ovation because half the audience has been standing anyway, the clapping goes on long enough and the Ites are doing their bit like the good guys I suddenly think they are. Then we are lining up in front of the curtain and Tony is pumping hands and slapping backs and bounding around like a satyr chasing nymphs – or whatever it is queer satyrs chase – and the commandant is also doing his duty round, but sharing with me a sharp glance as well as his hand, and I am seeing that the hated face is basically an old man’s with tired eyes and maybe there is a buxom wife with bambinos somewhere far away who is binding him to us with a measure of common pain.

Again Danny is brashly he, not waiting for us to leave the stage, but coming down the line to only me, proffering first a distancing hand, then briefly, determinedly embracing me, saying, ‘
Better
than any film, mate,’ and I sense that he is making a move of sorts in a game that has barely begun.

‘Who was that cocky little chap who went up and’ – is there a hesitancy before the word? – ‘hugged you after the show?’ Douglas asks when we are back in the hut. ‘Isn’t it the one who was tanning alongside you a few days ago?’

‘Could be,’ I casually carefully say, wondering what is to come.

‘Why only “could be”? Don’t you
know
?’

‘After a show like that, Douglas, I hardly know who
I
still am. Try it and see.’

‘Poor man,’ he at once concedes. ‘Let me make us some tea.’ And we drink our tea and everything seems fine, but, now and again, glancing at him unexpectedly, I trap a speculativeness in his eyes that I have not before seen and almost I again hear the drummer dropping those single beats between my lines.

*   *   *

It is on
a night some weeks after the show has completed its run, that Danny makes his second unmistakably intrusive move.

During the day, it being a Monday, Douglas and I slog our way through the week’s accumulation of laundry handed to us at sparrow-fart by our still sleepily grumbling dice-and-poker kings. At such a penitent’s hour, we are no less fretful, but it is necessary to be amongst the first three of the score or so laundrymen that each Monday bolt with gritting teeth down to the ablution block with its matching only three waist-high scrubbing slabs. The alternative is to spend a day of backbreaking gymnastics at the more general purpose taps and the struggle for turf is often as pitiless as the drive for the top of the heap of the mini-mobsters we serve. Douglas, however, loves the challenge, rises to it as though it is some bizarre new sport, and, in the process, has developed an awesome capacity for anticipating our rivals’ awakenings, jolting me out of sleep at the oddest moments as his antennae warn him of a blanket sliding from cunning flesh.

So we rarely lose out on the slabs and we happily do not lose out today, but that is about the only cause for jubilation because our customers, like the benevolent godfathers that they are not, seem to have decided that we need to earn more ‘cash’ now that the Red Cross food deliveries are becoming ever more irregular for a reason that the Ites are choosing to not disclose. Thus, the week’s wash has never been bulkier and this is, indeed, welcome because it
will
earn us more, but the apparent charitableness is offset by the fact that the wash has also never been filthier, the man-size handkerchiefs, in particular, crackling with dried mucus that reverts back to slime when wetted and clings to the linen like a hibernating snail.

Handkerchiefs? Here? Why not? The stalls may be selling only foodstuffs but there are also occasional markets that start up with the suddenness of dust devils and, like them, whirl out amongst the huts, growing as they go into a milling mass of shouting touters that cause new guards to fiddle with their rifle-bolts and call out to the long-suffering Virgin for her aid. There is no buying and selling in the conventional sense of such words, rather a swapping of an article for an article, the unwanted for the wanted, and the transactions vary from the relatively major blanket for a coat to the humble handkerchief’s enticing as humble a sock.

Not everybody there is a swapper, though. Many, myself and Douglas included, go there for the one commodity that is for the taking, namely, the reverse of the tedium that is the very essence – and curse – of our purposeless lives. Now and again, we may go hunting for soap – not the latherless Ite soap that smells like a whore and bites like a snake that our mafia clients get for us from the guards, then deduct the price from our fee, but that genuine
soap
that, like so much that was once commonplace, now glows with the luminance of myth or dream.

Like the Ite soap which is the most necessary element of it, the laundering process is very far removed from myth and dream. It is, instead, one of those ultimately harsh and demeaning realities from which, had it not been for Douglas’ pacing me with his clinical attitude of the male nurse, I would long since have fled. My hands no longer blister from the scrubbing, but, at day’s end, their skin is pallid and puffy as that of a waterlogged corpse, and I keep smelling my fingers as though I expect to find on them the lingering miasmas of all the snot, shit and even sperm that they have wrung – as though they wrung the neck of loathesomeness itself – from the most intimate garments of those from whom I could not be more estranged. Or have I, through such handling of their pitiful effluents, subtly and irreversibly grown closer to them than even the most passionate of lovers could?

But there is more. Mondays, if we have won the race for the slabs, as today we did, we have to arrange with the hut boss for him to fetch our midday swill and hold it in the hut till we return, there being no question of our leaving our slab for anything more than a quick piss, let alone to have a leisurely lunch or brew ourselves a mug of tea. To do so would be to find ourselves deprived of our slab with no hope of its return, that being the law of the camp and the name of the game, besides which the washing must be hung, dried, folded and delivered before sunset, there being no space in the huts for working with washing and any attempt to retrieve washing still on the fences after dark liable to be construed as a break-out and met by a bullet in the brain. Even the hanging of washing on the fences in daylight caused the commandant to, at first, squeal like a slaughterhouse hog, but, eventually, we wore him down.

So the upshot of it all is that, this Monday, the last foldings of laundry delivered, Douglas and I return to the hut to count the day’s takings and eat lunchtime’s hardening shit with a relish that is nought on a scale of that to ten, and we consider brewing tea to wash down the accompanying rolls, but tiredly decide to drink water instead, and, from my bunk, I watch Douglas readying himself for sleep and there is a resurgence in me of liking and respect whose very fullness illustrates how severe the ebbing had lately become. Then the Ites cut the old-bone yellow of the lights and Douglas sets out on his litany of prayers, but I plunge straight away into sleep, still fully clothed and, for once, oblivious of the bugs.

And it seems as though I had only just closed my eyes, when someone is calling my name, and I start up as from a dream, but it is no dream, but Danny standing in the doorway of the hut and crying out in a low yet carrying voice, ‘Tom! Wake up! Wake up!’ and I am out and hurrying, driven not only by the urgency of his tone but by the fact that this is the first time that Danny has ever come to our hut – a strangeness, this, which he and I have never discussed, tacitly agreeing that to do so would be to precipitate a crisis in a three-way relationship which none of us was as yet prepared to confront. Or was
he
now so prepared?

Descending from my bunk, I see that Douglas is still asleep in his, but the rest of the bunks – even the interloper’s – seem empty and there is a hollowness to the hut as a whole that smacks of abandonment in the face of some peril of a fearsome shape. I reach the door and Danny seizes my arm, almost dragging me out, and I am about to irritably break free, when I see that a host of thousands of us are standing between the huts, motionlessly and silently as though bewitched, faces upturned under the full moon to the flank of the nearby hill, eyes staring as before the advent of a presence of a celestial kind.

‘What is it?’ I instinctively whisper, but Danny does not answer, only grips my arm the harder, secretively smiles.

Then it again sounds and my hairs are hackles and my flesh crawls.

‘A nightingale,’ Danny now whispers back, hand not loosing my arm. ‘Bet you never heard one before. Even in Blighty you don’t hear them so much any more.’

But I am barely aware of him now, hear only ‘nightingale’, am of these spellbound under the witches’ moon. ‘So small a throat!’ I am thinking.
‘So small a throat!’
as the soaring gusts of sound, pitched a note’s breadth this side of sense, flood, copiously as the moon’s light, effortlessly as that which needs no struggling breath nor fiddling hand, out over hills, churches, shrines, our ragbag selves. There is no pattern to the song, yet it holds the whole of melody and the totality of an endlessness of form, and it runs a thread of molten yet cool-as-water silver through my every artery, sinew, vein, and I search for a humanness in it, but there is nothing, and now I am thinking, ‘An
angel
! Strayed from Eden’s gates without its sword!’ and for a moment I am near again to the child that so easily believed.

‘Douglas must hear this, too,’ I say and make to go, caution overturned, meanness yielding its ground in the face of that pure sound.

But he does not loose my arm. ‘I came to wake
you
, not
him
,’ he says, his voice challenging and cold, and I stand, irresolute, a choosing come upon me that I had not planned.

‘Anyway,’ he adds, ‘he’s already awake,’ and he jerks his head and I see Douglas is standing a few paces to the right of us, his own head turning even as I turn mine and the three of us playing one of those seemingly silly games with a sting in the tail, Russian roulette being
the
one.

Covertly, I try to glean from Douglas’ profile whether he has, indeed, seen us and, if so, what his reaction is likely to be, but he is now staring steadfastly and apparently raptly at the hill, and continues to do so until the singing again stops and there is an almost audible draining of earth and sky – and an almost tangible quality to the ensuing void – that tell us that the bird has flown, and Douglas turns, quietly but decisively, and goes back into the hut without once glancing our way, and it is only then that I notice that Danny is no longer holding my arm.

‘Ah, young Tom,’ says Camel as though the earth beside me had opened to let him out. Then, belatedly, ‘And friend. But why so pensive? It was only a bird, you know.’

‘All the more reason to be humble, Camel,’ I lash back, nerves frayed, and he winces, getting what I mean.

‘Subtle, young Tom. But not nice. Nor you. Are we not, then, still friends?’

I decide it is to be peace, not war. ‘Come
on
, Camel. I thought you knew me by now.’

‘Oh, I do. I do. Though not in the way I would prefer.’ Then, looking at Danny but addressing me, ‘Did you ever pass on my message to your friend?’

I’m cornered and know it, so can but bluster as best I know how. ‘Christ, no. What with the play being on and the Red Cross not coming through like it should, it’s as if I’ve been in another world. But, in any case, you haven’t finished doing me yet, so why do you want him as well?’

‘But I
have
finished you. Only I’m not giving you what I have done. Do you expect me to after all the shitty things you had to say? And what makes you think I can’t do more than one painting at a time? I have got two hands, haven’t I?’ and he gives his little cackle that sounds like dry leaves blowing over sand.

‘Who’s this goon?’ Danny chips in, his tone warning me that another crisis is heading my way. ‘And what’s the gab about a message I didn’t get?’

‘This,’ and I try to keep my voice casual, though a quake is beginning in me somewhere deep down, ‘is Camel. He paints. Portraits, not walls. Those who are supposed to know about these things say he has got class.
I
wouldn’t know. All I know is that he’s done a picture of me and I look like a steak that’s looking for an eye. He says that’s because he paints people without their skins. Paints them the way they really
are
, not the way they
think
they are. So,’ and I breathe deep before I leap, ‘just before the play, he asked me to tell you that he wants to paint you too.’

‘So? Why didn’t you tell me, then?’

My mind scuttles round like a rat in a cellar with the door closed. ‘Because I was sure he would make as big a mess of you as he did of me.’

‘Not quite true, young Tom,’ Camel chides. ‘Are you and Douglas still sharing the chow?’ and it takes me far too long to work out what this apparent non sequitur means.

But Danny again breaks in, turning to Camel for the first time, a tautness to him that evokes an equal tautness in me. ‘So how, then, would you be seeing
me
if I said OK?’

And Camel laughs his rustling, dry laugh and I am thinking he may or may not be a good painter, but he most certainly is going to be one helluva fool. ‘Naked!’ he crows, clearly remembering that ‘goon’, raddled eyes alight with perceptiveness and the laugh a meaningless noise. ‘Naked and playing with your prissy little balls.’

There is also no doubt that Danny is every bit as good a boxer as he claims. Now Camel is still standing, not grinning with his slash of a mouth, then he is crashing back against the side of our hut, mouth chewing on a rose of his blood, and probably a tooth or two, and some from the hut, Douglas not among them, are cluttering up the step and wondering what the fuck is going on.