Bitter Eden: A Novel (5 page)

And always, then, that horror in me of a whole flesh that sleeps, then wakes to a rotting in a sudden leper’s skin.

Truth is, I do not
want
to think about that ship, anytime, anywhere. But, however briefly, I
have
to because it is a link in a sequence of events that I sense is rushing me to an end that is as unpredictable yet ordained as that of a car whose brakes have failed on a long hill. With each thinking back, the aversion grows and the details become less, the conscious me beavering the easily movable items such as the days at sea, faces that crowded us, guards that yelled, into the lumber-room of the subconscious where, hopefully, everything will one day lie mumbling but chained.

At the moment, though, it is as I said – the operative words are still vividly ‘shit’ and ‘piss’ and I was of the very many who had the shits the day we boarded the ship. Not Douglas, though – male nurses being exempt from indignities such as a runny gut. We thought we were being clever when we battled our way to the front of the queue. Would this not, then, ensure us a choice space on deck? Instead, we found ourselves at the bottom of the booming, cavernous hull, beside us a single iron ladder that reared up past the encircling higher decks to a hatchway that was closed most of the time but which, when not, held a circlet of sky as distant and surreal as the mouth of a well. Up this, by day and at night when the hull was lit by the minimum of naked bulbs that cast more shadows than light, passed the despairing, embattled sufferers of dysentery or diarrhoea. The hatchway would open and close, open and close, and the number of times that I managed to win through and, as in the case of the trucks in the desert, jut cock and arse over the swaying ship’s rail and try to shit out the porcupine of pain that was the cramp in my gut while the guard shrieked at me to have done, is one of the details that my mind mercifully no longer yields.

Most of the time, though, we never made it to the top and would hang like shot birds from the ladder’s rungs as we let slip our shit and the accompanying piss, not, for that brief moment, caring about the profanities below, but shamelessly, as in an orgasm, revelling in the collapse of the anus’ clench, its bestial abandonment to the bowel’s need. Being at the foot of the ladder, we would have been hardest hit, but Douglas, with something of the ruthlessness that had so shamed him on the flats but which now did him proud, nagged for and found a more distant space for us and there, each time I shat my pants, took them from me and, with the remote impassiveness of the nurse, washed them as best he could in the pool of sea water that mysteriously sloshed in the deepest part of the ship’s hull.

At night, we would lie, sleepless, the sea writhing beneath us like some monstrous serpent that at any moment would break through the ship’s frail hide, the meagre rations and as little water they had issued us before we embarked dwindling and unceasingly tempting us to finish them off at one go, and, all about us, even now sneaking from every pore of our skins, shit and piss, and piss and shit, and only Douglas’ face, and his hands washing my pants, worth time’s sparing of them and the reason for my remembering anything at all.

But now the Now is reaching through to me like the sun to a diver cleaving up to the top strata of the pool, and the images that are the links I seek are fewer and scattered as we move up from the first southern squat to this far northern camp ringed by hills and clangorous with bells.

Still in the south, the Ites discover – or did he somehow leak it to them? – that Douglas was a clerk at Div., and he swings it so that I become his assistant and we sit sorting prisoners’ records at the old infirmary amongst the olives and oleanders, and Douglas, with admirable and patriotic amorality, insists that we do next to nothing for our double ration of macaroni and rolls.

And there is the time at the stop halfway to here when the Ite guard holds me down on the stout-legged wooden stool and the Ite doctor, scorning anaesthetics, yanks out the last of my lower back teeth, abscess and all, and leaves it to Douglas to stop me bleeding to death and deaden my pain with tablets he says he filched from the infirmary down south; and there is the night at the same place when we catch the ou who has been stealing our boots and flogging them to the Ites, and we dunk him up to over his head in the pit latrine that’s full to the brink with shit, and he crawls out of there with only his white eyes and red tongue showing, and I feel an irrational pity and something of his guilt, but, this time, morality wins and Douglas – the prim Douglas of old – says, ‘Serves him right,’ and, for a moment, seems almost ready to say, ‘Serves him
fucking
well right.’

Then it is that I sleep, an illusion of stability enfolding me in this, at last, established camp – and something of a domesticity too as my thoughts stay focused on Douglas who has grown on me from the so-small seed of my tolerance and for whom I have come to feel an affection that may not be passionate, but is rooted in the respect due to a solid and honourable man.

*   *   *

‘Hey! Wake up!’
says the voice, loudly, in my left ear and I start up out of a scattering of dream, my mind snatching at the dwindling fragments till they whimper and are gone.

The eyes so close to mine are black and intense though, I suspect, normally lazy with smile, and they are very slightly squint which lends them a mischievousness that may or may not be only in my own mind.

‘Why?’ I ask of them, my tone oafish and irritable and the irritability tilting towards open anger at this ou’s breaking into me time after time.

‘You were talking in your sleep.’

‘So? What’s it to you if I do or I don’t?’

‘You were talking
loud.
Lots could hear.’ Then he waits, but I don’t respond.

‘You were also crying,’ he adds, a note of triumph in his voice as of one who’s played an ace.

‘Don’t talk shit,’ I say, but it might just be true and I’m not as certain as I sound.

‘Is so. Look,’ and I flinch as a finger touches my cheek and he holds it up, shining wet.

‘It’s sweat!’ I snap, but I’m uncomfortably aware that the rest of me – which means all save my privates that are lost somewhere in one of the hulk’s long short pants – would wet no finger eager to prove a point.

That he is aware of this I do not doubt, his eyes almost tangibly travelling my body’s length, and I ready myself to slap away any further violations of my private space. But he merely grins, not nastily or mockingly, but good-naturedly, almost approvingly, as though he applauded me for so stoutly carrying on lying in the face of truth.

‘OK, have it your own way,’ he says with no suggestion of petulance or spite, and links his hands behind his neck, his elbow nagging my shoulder, and stares up at a small, slow cloud forming and dissolving in an otherwise empty sky, his face distant and inward as though I am no longer there.

But now I am intrigued by his unexpectedly conceding me victory, even though the issue could not have been a more niggling one. Or am I wrong? Is this, in fact, a gesture of some grace on his part? Is he not so much conceding me victory as respecting my wish – macho adult male that supposedly I am – to not be caught snivelling, even in my sleep, like some little kid who still thinks it’s just for pissing through?

Covertly, I study him, slewing only my eyes. His hair is black, springy, tightly curled, capping his head like a Renaissance cherub’s or an old Greek bust of a beautiful boy. Blessedly, though, his face is neither beautiful nor a boy’s. The nose is pug, the chin a shade pushy, the lips yielding and mobile, yet wholly male, the brow low – which last, I have long since learned, has nothing to do with intelligence or the lack of it, is merely the reverse of high.

Lower down is the body of a man who works at it – the breasts at the apex before masculinity becomes womanishness, the nipples pert and clear, the hair in the armpits tufting and lush, as lush a body-hair flowing with the flat belly down into the generous crotch, the tautly powerful thighs.

It is only then that I articulate it to myself that he has been lying beside me in the nude. Christ! I think, wanker No 2; and think it again with a quite puzzling and personal disappointment when he reaches down and scratches in the thick thatch of the pubic hair. But, seeming to sense what I am thinking, he suddenly turns his head, catching me unawares, and asks, ‘Is this worrying you?’

I play it dumb. ‘Is what worrying me?’

‘Me lying here with nothing on.’

Now I turn my earlier answer round. ‘What’s it to me what you wear or don’t?’

His lips twist, but tolerantly as though he has been through it all before. ‘OK. So it worries you,’ and he gropes beneath his buttocks and drags out a quite astonishingly clean pair of underpants and wriggles himself in. Then he turns to me and his eyes seem blacker than when first seen, and brighter, and yet impenetrable as shades. ‘Don’t get any wrong ideas. I’m married though no kid yet. But lots of time still, me reckoning I’m about your age. I was a boxer and I was good and I aim to go on being good when I get home. So I got a nice body –
got
to have – so I got to
keep
it nice. Even in a shit dump like this. Run, do P.T., get the sun on me –
all
of me. Sun’s good for the body. But I don’t
walk around
like I just been born, and nobody gets to touch me down there,’ and he gestures at his crotch. ‘Only my wife.’

I say to myself that I don’t believe this; then I explode. ‘Who the hell are you to talk to me about getting wrong ideas? Why don’t you say straight out what you mean? Just now you just about called my mate a queer because he’s funny with his hands, and he a married man like you and
with
a kid, if you please! Maybe it’s
you
that’s the queer – you with your body that turns you on like it’s your whore and don’t touch it there or … What makes you think I want to touch it anywhere? Why don’t you haul your fucking body some place else and have it off with it where it’s all yours?’ And nearly I add, ‘And I hate poms,’ but somehow I just don’t get that far.

There is a long silence then in which I wait – a tension in me that I am loath to admit – for him to do what I ill-temperedly certainly would, but he at last merely turns his head to me and says with a directness that disarms, ‘I’m sorry about your mate. I was wrong.’

Again I am nonplussed by a yielding I did not expect, and I mumble an awkward something and turn my back on him, seeking refuge in a withdrawal of sorts. But there is still a question that has to be asked and answered and I ask it, feeling more than a little guilty and defensively annoyed: ‘What did I say in my sleep?’

‘Enough,’ he says, the one word neither taunting nor amused, and I wait for more, but nothing comes.

‘Well, what was it?’ I prod, getting edgy now at having to so beg.

For a moment I think he has not heard me, then he thrashes round to face my back and says, his voice low, ‘Not saying.’

‘But why?’ I burst out. ‘Don’t I have a right to my own words?’

‘Not saying,’ he repeats. Then adds, ‘Not saying because what you said is why I am still lying here after you bad-mouthed me like you did; so now if I tell you what it is, I’ll be telling you more about
myself
than I’d like.’

His tone leaves me in no doubt that, this time, he will not yield, and I am perversely pleased by that and, indeed, suddenly and startlingly aware that if he had again given way, he would now have confronted more than my merely physical spine. However, I cannot resist still saying, ‘You are weird,’ but the words hold no barb and, with the intuitiveness of the dead gypsy in my genes, I sense that he knows that and is drawn.

‘No weirder than you,’ he retorts, then, switching tracks, adds, ‘They call me Danny. What do they grab you by?’ and I tell him and he says ‘Tom’ as though savouring it, then asks where I’m from, and I tell him, and he says he’s from a village that’s a nothing and he and his wife and his mum live in an on-its-last-legs cottage that was all that his dad left when he died.

‘How long you been in this dump?’ I tell him six months and forestall him by saying that he must be one of the rookie prisoners they sent up from down south last week.

He looks at me like I’m clairvoyant and, for the first time, I laugh. ‘It’s easy. Your hair needs trimming but it’s still not a nest and your beard’s only begun.’

‘Now wait a minute! You bulling me now? OK, so your mate looks like he’s a guru come down from his squat, but you look like my kind. That’s why I came to lie by you. The rest of them here look like all the granddads I ever seen. Real creepy, them.’

‘Watch it! You will be just as creepy soon. Anyway, Douglas – that’s my mate –
wants
to grow a beard.’ Abruptly – and with an acuteness that disturbs – I am asking myself why?
He one of the funnies?
The words resonate in me as though I am hearing them for the first time. Does he think a beard will make him look more of a man? Determinedly I wrestle the thought away. ‘But I feel like you. I don’t want to look like a granddad before my time.’

‘You got a razor then?’

‘Hell, no. This is just like
any
fucking jail. You die how, when,
they
want you to. Not by you cutting your – or someone else’s – throat. So once a week I go to the shed alongside the gate where you come in and get the worst of it taken off. The theatre crowd hang out there. Stage musicals, plays. The Ites smaak musicals and plays. Opening nights, all the front seats must be reserved for the commandant and the other Ite brass. They get almost human then. Shout, clap, carry on like little kids. So when the producer asks for the cutthroat and shears, the commandant lets him have them because he understands
all
the actors on the stage can’t have beards or heads that look like that old guy’s that slept a hundred years,’ and I’m about to add – big joke, this! – what about the guys that must shave their legs and arms and truss up their balls so’s they can play the parts of the women we do not have, but a red light flashes on, loud as a scream, and I simply say, ‘So Tony, the producer, lets me pretty up there free of charge.’