Bitter Eden: A Novel (21 page)

The anticipated sex scene is as I had foreseen. The remittance man, in shorts and vest – this is Africa where the playwright thinks it’s never cold and everyone sleeps in the raw – is inviting the ‘girl’ to a canoodling and she dressed only in a sarong – what else? – and a strip of flowered material she has knotted across the simulated breasts. But she keeps on shaking her head, and at last he rips the sarong from her and, momentarily, it is bared – the ultimate illusion of a vagina – the penis twisted back and somehow secured between the thighs and the splayed testicles suggesting the soft cushioning of a cunt. ‘Jesus!’ I involuntarily whisper, ‘what if the poor sod wants to piss?’ but Danny does not hear me, as massively intent now as he was massively aloof, and the remittance character flings the girl across a table – conveniently placed – and, back to us, drops his shorts and begins to ‘rape’ the girl, his buttocks thrusting in his finest stab at acting so far. Oddly, there are no catcalls or whistlings throughout this scene and the almost respectful silence continues till, in the end, the girl – how else? – stabs the guy and there is gore all around in the manner of Tony’s Macbeth’, and the curtain falls and there is a standing ovation and curtain calls, during the last of which the camp’s one-time biggest gambler whisks the ‘girl’ away, she turning out to be his real-life moll.

We slosh back to the barracks through the snow, the wind even sharper than when we came, and I glance aside at Danny walking silently beside me, but the little I can see of his face tells me nothing at all and I begin to fear that I have a problem on my hands. ‘Well, I
did
warn you,’ I defensively begin, but he says, ‘It’s OK,’ as though accepting an apology from me and wriggles his chin deeper into his scarf.

‘Yes – well – it shouldn’t worry you and me all that much, this guy doing it to another guy. After all, we had it done to us as kids, so it’s nothing new.’

For a moment he looks at me in bewilderment, then he seems to remember and says, ‘Oh,
that
,’ and says nothing more, which could be odd, but not more so than
my
relatively phlegmatic witnessing of that which once had me crying out in dreams. Has there been a catharsis somewhere along the line?

So we walk on in a silence that again grows too long and again I try: ‘She was the best of the lot, though I never forgot that the “she” was a “he”.’

Startlingly, he explodes, ‘She should have carved the bastard up slow! Not just stick him once dead!’ and I realize that
he
is remembering a ‘she’, not a ‘he’, and it is the ‘she’ that is walking beside him through the fake African sun en route to his bunk, and an emotion that refuses to be acknowledged as anything but jealousy stirs in me like a viper coming out of sleep.

‘It was only a show!’ I laugh, spite’s forked tongue flickering under the laugh, and he looks at me with something close to distaste and refuses to again be drawn.

At the barracks, we ready ourselves for bed, which means kicking off the clogs from our double-socked feet, and I climb into my bunk and wait for him to follow, this being too cold a night for sleeping alone, but then I hear him rooting around in his own bunk and alarm seizes me and I ask, anxiety thinning my voice, ‘You not coming up?’ He does not answer, lies still, listening, and at last I plead, ‘Come
on
, Danny! It’s fucking cold up here!’ and he grunts, ‘All right,’ and comes up then, but turning his back to me so that we lie back-to-back, he seeming to fall at once asleep but I lying a while, disgruntled and more than a little hurt.

I wake and he’s fidgeting beside me as though he’s got ants or a rash, and I’m about to ask him what’s wrong, when I hear him breathing in a way that I know but too well. The rhythmic movements of his buttocks are no less a giveaway and I’m shouting to myself, ‘The bastard’s wanking! That’s why he wanted to sleep alone!’ and I go on listening, my bitterness spawning more bitterness as
he
goes on – as I pettishly put it – ‘fucking that whore!’ But then I realize that his grappling with himself is carrying on inordinately long, that he is stopping ever more frequently and starting up again ever more desperately and his breath is verging on a muted groan. ‘He can’t come,’ I decide. ‘He’s got it up like he said he couldn’t and now he can’t come,’ and, when he again pauses, I reach out as though compelled by a force outside of myself – is it compassion or simply triumphalism that I am about to do for him what the phantom woman never can? – and take his penis into my hand, gently sliding it in and out of the curve of my palm, sometimes rubbing its tip between my finger and thumb as so many lusting women have done for me in my once upon a time, and, at first, he resists, his back stiffening, iron and long, but then his buttocks begin to move to the rhythm of my hand, and I quicken the play and he quickens the response and, at last, he gathers himself and a small sad fluid is wetting my skin. I keep on a little, hoping for more, but hunger has taken its toll and I loose the already retracting penis and close my palm over the pitiful yield that, somehow, does not disgust me as much as would my own.

In the morning, I wake first, my hand still clenched and my own thighs now wet from an unremembered dream, and I go out to the taps and wash myself as best I can without stripping down, and, when I get back to the bunks, Danny is also up, but his eyes are not meeting mine and his whistling is brash and loud as some little kid just come back from a mischief that could earn him the belt. ‘What now?’ I think, embarrassed as he. ‘How do we get back to where we were?’ and the swill comes and we eat it, and we are talking to each other, but looking past each other like we’ve both gone cross-eyed overnight. And then we are sitting staring into our empty dixies as though we have never before seen their bottoms bared of swill and I say to myself, ‘Sod this!’ and tackle the issue head-on. ‘You feeling better now?’ I ask, matter-of-factly as though he’s had a headache and I’m hoping the pill helped, and for the first time we look at each other squarely and he blurts out, ‘Why did you do it?’ and I’m ready for that and grin, forcing him to hesitantly grin back, ‘Well, I could tell you something fancy like it was for friendship’s sake, but the truth is it looked like you were going to be at it all night and I wanted some sleep, so I gave you a push,’ and his grin widens and, unusually for him, he takes my dixie and goes to wash it together with his under the taps.

Back, he fusses around in his bunk, then asks, carefully casually, not looking round, ‘Did I come all right?’

‘Just about blew my hand off,’ I say, feeling expansive, knowing I have beaten the phantom woman this time round, and he laughs and I breathe out, slowly and long, feeling my flesh cringe at the closeness of my skidding round the bend.

Tony doesn’t quite make it with his show. It is only about a quarter of the way through its projected run of a month when the Krauts warn us that we have four days in which to ready ourselves for a march to a new camp in the far south. They quote ‘tactical redeployment of prisoners’ as the reason for this, but we still remember our own armies’ tricky jargon when it comes to not saying what dare not be said, and we immediately pounce on ‘tactical’ and ‘redeployment’ as proof positive that the Krauts are shitting in their pants. The
absolute
clincher, of course, is that we are to ‘
march
’ – ‘They haven’t even got
transport
any more!’ somebody gloats – and we go around jeering at the guards and the better of them stare at us with pitying eyes that should have warned but don’t.

Convinced that we will not be marching to any new camp, but to some airport/harbour/station where bands will be playing and the requisite planes/ships/trains waiting to carry us back to our lost loves and the sweeter Edens that this one so mockingly apes, we embark on an orgy of chucking-out or using-up, right down to the last of the raisin wine which the cherishers of it summarily gulp, then cast up again as the outraged bellies rebel. Sombrely in step, the Krauts trundle barrowloads of files and other administrative bumf from the main office block to a wooden shed closer to the gates, where they stash them with an insane meticulousness before drenching the shed with petrol and setting it alight. It goes up in a great gush of flame that would delight any child and we, grown that child again, foolishly acclaim, waltzing one another round, yelling as at a celebration of a setting-free – ‘Or an expunging,’ comes the sobering thought as I watch our names, heights, colours of eyes, shrivel into the nothingness that we now are.

Through what quirk of kindness – or is it subtle sadism? – do the Krauts spare our still-to-be-censored letters, dumping ten potato sacks of them on our side of the fence, inviting us to do with them what we will? The more dutiful amongst us drag the sacks out of the snow into the theatre and empty them onto the auditorium floor, but there is no scramble for them, many of us, Danny included, so confident that they are going home that they could not be bothered pawing over letters whose news is probably now as irrelevant as it is old.

Those that do still care are to be seen picking over the increasingly muddied letters like crows picking bits out of the cadavers of murdered men, and Camel is one of them and, gaunt and more than ever lurching like his irritable namesake, comes to where Danny and I are sitting on Danny’s bunk and nibbling at the last of our boiled potatoes and, handing Danny a letter, says, ‘Hey, you nearly missed out on this one!’ and Danny thanks him and he says, ‘Not so fast. Letters are sneaky shits. I never trust the fuckers before I know what it is that they have to say,’ and shambles off again, and Danny looks at the letter and says, ‘From my mum,’ then laughs as he adds, ‘Can’t be much in there I still want to hear, me going to surprise her any day now,’ and he lays the letter down beside him and finishes his potato before he again takes it up, fumbles open the envelope and starts to read.

I watch him and it is like watching one of those movies where this character drinks some shit or other and begins to change – but slowly – so slowly that you hardly realize it till there he’s sitting looking at you like nobody you have ever seen or known. ‘What is it, Danny?’ I ask, and he must be hearing me because he lifts that alien face and stares at me, but his eyes are wholly blind. ‘What
is
it, man?’ I again ask, the concern in my tone veering now towards fear, and I reach out my hand to touch him, to return him from where he is now, but he strikes my hand aside and, surging to his feet, eyes still staring at his private rage, makes to go, and again I put out my hand, but to restrain him now, and his fist crashes between my eyes, flinging me against the bunks, and the barracks, not understanding, is roaring at us to ‘cut out that crap’ and, when I again can see, he is gone and only the letter, crumpled and flung to the floor, is evidencing that this is for real.

Imagining all eyes are on me, I slink out and hold the cold snow to my aching face, convinced that my eyes are already beginning to puff shut, then go back and the letter is crackling under my feet, and I pick it up and unfold it, the hurt and bewilderment in me overpowering any guilt I might otherwise have felt. Dated three months later than the letter from his wife which he allowed me to read, this is a boring recital of unfamiliar and mundane events which I skim through in search of the serpent in the brush and, near the end, there it is. ‘Son,’ she says, ‘I have to tell you this, but
how
? Night after night, I have lain awake,
wondering
how, and I have decided that I must just tell you all at once, the way I used to give you your medicine when you were still small and had the flu. Son, Bessie’s gone. Gone off with another man. Says she can’t take it any more. I would like to lie to you and tell you that that is the
whole
of this thing because that would save you a little pain
now.
But you will find out more when you come home and be hurt all over again, so know now, and pray to the Good Lord to give you the strength to hold on, that she went with him carrying his child. She is nothing but a whore, son, and you must not – ’ but now shame at my prying
does
stir in me and I crumple the letter up again, but, this time, lay it on his bunk, not wishing anybody to pick it up from the floor as did I and so be privy to his pain.

It is snowing again and I am wondering where he is and, knowing him, worrying that he will do something rash. So I walk the length of our barracks, but he is not to be seen, and I look through windows at Tony and Camel and staff, but they are alone, and I walk all the way round the camp, but see only guards slapping their sides, and, the whole time, thoughts are circling in my mind like flies flocking to a still fresh turd. So
I
am privy to his pain, but do I
share
in it? – and I insist that I do, am
certain
that I do, it being monstrously impossible for me to react in any other way. But do I share in his grief at his having been betrayed by his
wife
; do I, like him, wish with a frantic heart that the perfidious Bessie had been less dismissive of her churchly vows? ‘Jesus!’ I protest – to what? ‘She was not
my
wife!’ and uncomfortably know that my clumsy side step has not freed me from the snare.

Finally, I check on all the toilets, but none of the buttocks are his, and I stand outside the last toilet, pain from the blow growing restless as a trapped animal in my skull and my anxiety competing with irritation as the chill settles ever more solidly in my bones, and, at last, a logic perfidious as Bessie persuades me that I could walk about the camp all night and remain one step behind wherever Danny happens to be. ‘What more
can
I do?’ I whine and my devil, weaving, comes in through my pain-weakened defences and, with the deadly reasonableness that is his, warns that Danny is quite capable of bashing me again if I don’t let up and leave him alone.

So I do just that and head for our barracks, a last shred of guilt trailing me like a nagging child, and he is standing outside the door, watching me come, and I stop, uncertain what to do – uncertain of what
he
is going to do – and he comes to me, shaking his head as I move back a step, and touches my wincing, now all-but-shut eyes with hesitant hands, then burrows his face into my neck and begins to weep, soundlessly, the sobs racking him till I’m thinking they will tear him in two.