Bitter Eden: A Novel (11 page)

Fists raised, Danny waits for Camel to get up so that he can give him another go, but Camel, quick to learn now that it is too late, stays where he is, and Danny turns to me, his face inward as a stone. ‘I made a mistake,’ he says, his voice matching his face. ‘If this is the kind of friends you keep, then you are not one of mine,’ and goes.

A gravity of misery settles in me, anchoring me to where I stand, then one of my flashy rages seizes me and I yell, ‘Who said I was one of your friends, anyway?’ and turn back to Camel, not knowing whether I am going to help him up or let him lie.

But he is already up, swaying a little, spitting out blood, reaching for my arm. ‘Christ, Tom,’ he mumbles through the ruin of his mouth. ‘I’m sorry, man. So
sorry.
I never meant it to be like this.’

‘Fuck off,’ I mumble back, wrenching loose, but there is no spirit in that and I go into the hut, dragging my misery with me like a busted leg.

Sitting on his bunk, Douglas is watching his hands as though they might at any moment cut and run. But I take no notice of him, only struggle my way up onto my own bunk and flop down on it, face to the light, arm over my eyes.

But Douglas is not one to leave well alone. ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ he asks in a voice as distant as the wrong side of the moon.

‘Don’t
you
start now!’ I seethe and turn onto my side, spine to the aisle.

‘I’m not starting anything,’ he persists. ‘I’m just asking why you didn’t wake me up?’

‘Why should I have woken you up when I didn’t know what was going on till I got outside?’

‘Well, why didn’t you wake me up
then
?’

‘You
heard
, didn’t you?’ I say, and need to say no more because, despite my deviousness and distress, there is a resurgence in me, as in my voice, of the just past wonderment and awe.

Then I wait for him to ask the really awkward questions, but he skirts around them as though they were a poisoned bait, and later, when everyone is asleep, I go out and sit on the step, waiting for the bird to sing again, though knowing with a knowing that is not of the mind that silence is all I am going to hear.

*   *   *

I am thinking
that it is Danny who said something that meant, ‘Take away the Red Cross cigarette and our economy is dead.’ As then, inevitably, we also will be.

I am remembering this – while I am trying to not remember
him
– because this is no longer a postulate but a fact. The deliveries of Red Cross cigarettes and food have become so erratic and scarce that starvation is a spectre no further than my neighbour’s face and his breath is the corruption that is death’s. The stalls run out of stocks, which means the cigarette’s buying power nosedives and you might as well smoke it yourself and so anaesthetize your mind into believing that you are not as hungry as you are. So not only the stalls close down, but the gambling kings, most of whom are heavy smokers, choose to smoke rather than gamble and the laundrymen like Douglas and me no longer have a trade. The gamblers embarrassedly start washing their own underpants, and Douglas and I, neither of us being smokers, stash away whatever cigarettes we still have in the hope that they will still be of use someday, then join the noonday swill queue with increasingly the same avidity as the common herd. The great leveller that is indigence is amongst us and the only truly classless society begins to grow independently of our volition as a cancer or age.

We crack the irreverent jokes of the cast-out and the condemned, only they are not jokes – more like little kids’ shouting at the bogeyman in the hope that that will make him go away. Each day there are events of minor horror that we know will stay with us longer than slaughter for the very reason that they
are
so minor, even hilarious, like when our hut boss, weak with incipient dysentery, sits too long on one of the seats over the shit pit and a rat, from those swarming down there, jumps up and bites him in the balls. For days afterwards, we howl with laughter about that; or about the one of us with the usually outsized eyes that now have grown huge, who looks over the edge of his bunk and despairingly gapes, but only contrives to look more like a nestling waiting to be fed a worm; or about the no longer portly and pontificating ex-magistrate who, for hours on end, will sit on his bunk with his trademark tiny wooden spoon and scoop out margarine that is no longer there from an old Red Cross margarine can, then smack his lips with a relish that is ghoulishly unfeigned.

But there is a wildness to the howling, a whimpering in its ebbing, that have nothing to do with laughter and everything to do with the hollow-flanked beast with its red bat’s-eyes that has become our familiar and follows us with the passion of a predator its prey. Camel, who each day prepares his easel and paints, then sits staring at them as though stricken by a curse, tells me that the beast has finally caught up with the one man in their hut who could still make them laugh on an empty gut.

‘Real clown, he was,’ he says. ‘Should have been on the stage. Now he’s stashed away in the Ites’ loony bin.’ I ask him what happened and he asks if I remember the lone tap beside the theatre where you can stop for a quick drink, and I nod and he says they caught him there, hiding round a corner of the theatre and shaking like a jelly because of the funniness of what, it turned out, he had been doing for a long time. ‘He would take some shit from the shit pit,’ Camel explains. ‘How he got it from down there, don’t ask me. Or maybe he just sat himself down anywhere and had a shit and used some of his own stuff. Whatever, he would then roll the shit into little balls and line them up behind the theatre so’s he could keep popping them up the tap and watch while the drinkers took a suck at the tap like it’s a titty and out comes the crap,’ and he can’t help snickering a little himself, but my flesh crawls.

Sometimes I go down to the theatre, but no one is interested in plays any more, and Tony is as listlessly idle as Camel and the old shed booms like a cavern of despair. I will touch the props or the band’s still valiantly glittering brass, but the dust on my fingers is a weeping and the air whispers of irreclaimable dreams. Occasionally, Tony’s eyes behind the pince-nez will light up with a ghost of the old enthusiasm and he will speak of London and its theatres before the war, but it is all only an exercise in nostalgia and soon there is a turning inwards again, and a switching-off of the light as after a show, and I know that it is time for me to go.

Douglas and I, of course, are the most graphic mirrors, each to the other, of how we change – the sharpening features, the eyes’ remotenesses alternating with anxious immediacies, the sagging skins of belly and dugs, the hands now comatose, now breaking into the transient, frenzied life of leaves whipped by a gusting wind. There are also changes of
habit
that leave as telling a spoor – my innate untidiness’ sliding into slovenliness, Douglas’ still cleaning the dixies but no longer scouring them till they shine, and, most poignantly of all, his grown laboured reading with its long pauses for staring into nothing at all.

As I watch Douglas so change, what do I feel? Grief? Grief is a very
heavy
word. Regret, certainly, and a measure of pain. Pity, too, although that, with typical selfishness, is as much for me as for him. Perhaps I could have reacted more expansively had there not been other changes in him which have nothing whatever to do with hunger and merely irritate me in much the manner of the bugs, which have not ceased to feed on us though we must, by now, be proffering them a far from fortifying blood. That very next morning, at the latest, he must have heard about Danny’s fight with Camel and the ensuing bust-up between Danny and me, which will explain why, ever since, he has treated me with a mixture of compassion and triumphalism that cannot but arouse in me an endemic if suppressed annoyance that seriously tempers any feelings of pity I may now be having for
him.

Now that I have told myself that I am finished with Danny, that I never want to see him again, I seem destined to see him nearly every day – on the toilet, at the taps, startlingly rounding a corner as I kill time on my occasional slow prowlings round the camp. Should I happen – or so I put it to myself – to walk past the grass patch with its warming sun, I will invariably see him lying there, though no longer where we used to lie with touching sides, and his body fully clothed as if he would conceal the shaming insurgencies of its bones. Emotion never fails to seize me then, shake me like a puppy a ball or doll, and I try to tell myself that it is anger that I feel, though I know it is pain, otherwise why is there in me such a clear relief that he has, seemingly, stopped his daily shambling round the fence and so spared me the turning away that anger surely should have reversed? Also, and more subtly, why should I then always be comparing that emotion, its intensity and intractability, with the lacklustre concern I have for Douglas’ slide into the skeletal and, by so doing, realize anew that I am entrapped in a limbo whose name I am not yet ready to hear?

Sometimes I try to face up to the amorphous beast of how I feel, lend it shape, substance, of which I can ask questions, have hope of a reply. Already my mind, recalcitrant rebel that it is, has framed such unspeakable questions as, ‘Am I one of
them
? Am I in love with a
man
?’ But I beat these questions back with the desperateness of one under siege, then with a deliberate crudeness dwell on the mechanics of sex between males. ‘Comes out all covered with shit!’ I think and shudder with a quite genuine disgust, yet am none the less still uncomfortably aware that the question of love itself stays unresolved, is being linked by me to the sexual act in the simplistic and grubby-minded manner of adolescents in order that I may frighten myself back into the cosy straitjacket into which I was born and raised. From there it is an easy step to the usual acrimonious diversions, such as, ‘Who does the little fart think he is, anyway?’ and, ‘Fuck him! Why should I worry about a fucking pom?’ But, again, there is no real anger in me – only a far echo of a child’s longing for a taken-away toy.

But then there is a diversion of quite another kind as the long fuse of the hungry and powerless at last flares to its end and ignites us into rising up in a cause that has a far from lofty aim. Or is loftiness as frailly relative as are space and time? Whatever, the hut bosses put out the word that we are all to gather at the main gate at the next day’s dawn, then start marching in ranks of ten, arms linked, round and round the fence, demanding that our huts be debugged and vowing to not stop, no matter what, until the Ites have agreed to our demand. Which is not as crazy as it sounds because the Ites have a very real dread of inspections by Red Cross officials – thus carefully papering over all cracks before each visit – and a mass murder of legitimately protesting prisoners is hardly the scenario they would choose. But we are more than a little jittery, all the same, and lie awake till late, chirruping like bats and alternating between bravado and fear.

In the morning, the still half-asleep guards do not at first grasp what is going on as we noiselessly muster, then begin to march with a sudden challenging roar that we had not guessed we still had the breath to sustain. Then the guards are very much awake, lancing us with searchlights from the raised-up sentry boxes and, on the ground, scampering beside us, fence between, in a ludicrous parallel march that would make us laugh were we not so shit-scared inside. But our nerves steady as we sense that the Ites’ shrieks are tinged with as much of our fear as their rage, and we grow positively cocky as the bullets continue to whine well clear of our heads and we see the commandant is coming out, still buttoning his tunic as he mounts the steps to a sentry box, loudhailer in his hand.

He bellows for silence, and the hut bosses signal for that, so we give him silence, and he rages on and on, rising onto his toes, sinking back onto his heels, huffing himself up like a pigeon with the hots, clawing at the heavens with quivering hands. Then he passes the loudhailer to the interpreter siding him, clumps down from the box, struts back to the barracks, buttocks jiggling like a whore’s, and the interpreter, in a single sentence of staccato but otherwise impeccable English, tells us that the commandant has agreed to our request – carefully he sidesteps ‘demand’ – and will we now fuck off back to our huts before he changes his mind? The sun is now well up and we wilt, the adrenalin, that we had thought to be energy, gone as though it had never been, and, in us, a hollowness as though a cosmic breath had sucked the very marrow from our bones, and we begin to dawdle our way back to the huts and the torpor that infests them with a malevolence that even the bugs cannot match.

They are upon us before we can run, shield, rebuff. Clubbing at us with their rifle-butts, yelling as though the once wild hills had resurrected their barbarous hordes, the Ite guards are clearly out to reassert their hold over us, beat us back into the necessary submissiveness and fear, which, strangely enough, I can understand, although that does not help me any as a rifle-butt crashes into the side of my head and a carnival of lights explodes in my brain.

Looking up at the bow legs straddling me, I see that they belong to a more than usually runty Ite whose face is neither brutish nor innocent, merely peasant and dull, and, above the stolid set of the lips, is a thin smudge of a moustache that suggests that he has a way with women and devotes himself to that with a simple passion that could have endeared him to me at some other time and in some other place. I also notice that there is a dark stain in the crotch of his blue-grey uniform’s pants that could be a sweat of the fear that he is wishing for me, and there is a pathos to that that still does not dissuade me from wanting to grab at and crush his testicles with all the strength of the enemy that I am, but my head is spinning as if the threads of the anchoring neck have stripped and I close my eyes and steel myself for the butt’s follow-up blow.

But then Douglas is yelling at him with a sassiness that is strange, that reaches to me through the swaddling pain, and the Ite, as strangely, leaves us alone, and Douglas is helping me to my feet and steadying me with a mothering hand. ‘You poor man!’ he is saying, a phrase, this, which he has used before and which I loathe as much now as I did then, but, after what he has done, I am not so boorish as to let it show and even let him drape my arm about his neck so that he can more easily half-drag me along. And it is then that I look up and Danny is standing in the doorway of his hut and watching us pass with eyes that say he is as disinterested in my bludgeoned and blundering state as he would be in a stray dog struck down by a car, and, at last, the true anger for which I have been searching possesses me and I stare back at him with a hatred no words can hold, and would know a catharsis, then, were it not for a slyness in me that asks, ‘Why so
violent
a hate if nothing is there?’