Bitter Eden: A Novel (8 page)

‘I went running first,’ he says, not apologetically but merely as though it is a matter of some gravity that needs to be, at least, explained. But I am flowing with the current again and there is space for playing games. So I shrug my shoulders as though it is of no importance to me that he be early or late, or even not come at all, and he looks at me with a speculativeness that is as penetrating as it is calm.

‘I didn’t know we had a date,’ I say with a facetiousness I at once detest, and see that he is dressed in only a boxer’s shorts, and sweat is sheening him like a water, and the bare, demanding feet are gripping the earth with the tenacity of a tree.

But, apart from the level stare, he does not react, simply says, ‘I must shower,’ and goes; then turns back, groping down the front of the shorts, and takes out a tightly folded square of cloth black as the shorts, and tosses it at me, it as wet with sweat as the hand. ‘Doesn’t fit me any more. Will you, though,’ and ducks in under a tap, shorts and all.

I flap out what he has tossed and it is a replica of his shorts, clearly no longer his size and as clearly mine, and a tenderness as powerful as only tenderness is shakes me for an instant snatched from an Eden time. Then he’s back, scattering water like a hosed-down hound, no towel for the drying of him, the sun to be doing that as he flops down on his back beside me, legs scissoring at some ghostly bicycle of the mind.

‘Thanks for the shorts,’ I say, my tongue difficult from long disuse when it comes to acknowledging favours done, my spirit equally recoiling from the debasement inherent in kissing the giving hand. ‘But why
me
? Why not to anyone else you happened to talk to in the shithouse or under the taps?’

‘You fishing?’ he asks, his tone lazy, but his eyes alert. ‘Maybe it’s just because it embarrasses me when you look like you do and people think you’re my mate. So do me a favour and don’t grumble. Or do you want me to go and lie somewhere else?’

Again I shrug, a last of pride impelling me to the brink. ‘It’s up to you. I’m not your boss.’

‘Nor me yours,’ he snaps back. ‘So shove the shorts up your arse if you want!’ As quickly his anger dies. ‘But why are you sitting here like some old biddy under her shawl? You hurt your head?’

For answer, drawing back now from the brink, I remove the towel.

‘Jesus!’ he yelps, pitiless with mirth. ‘
Have
you been
fried
!’

‘Ja, go on! Laugh!’ I complain, but beginning now to also laugh. ‘The show I’m in is on next week and the producer’s having pups because of the way I look. I’m not supposed to be sitting out here at all.’

All at once it is so quiet I can hear a gang of Italian sparrows bickering in the brewing site tree, and I dimly sense that I have said that which exposes me beyond recall.

‘Then why
are
you sitting here, Tom?’ and his voice is as triumphantly possessive of me as the gift of the shorts, and I draw the towel back over my head, confirming without words what he already knows and only then realizing that, for the first time, he has called me by my name.

‘You married?’ I shake my head, letting the towel hang. ‘Tough. A man only gets to be his whole self when the old dick finds the right hole.’

I grab at the irritation that takes me out from under the towel. ‘Come off it! You think I don’t know what it’s for? Maybe I been around more than you before we got in here.’

‘Maybe,’ and now he’s doing the shrugging. ‘But you’re not listening. I said the
right
hole, not
any
hole. The right hole’s when it’s not just about getting the dick down.’

He has me by the balls and I know it and reach out to the sparrows, but, like all sparrows, particularly Ite sparrows, they don’t stay in one place for long. Rumour has it that the Ites are so hard up for meat that they hunt even the wild birds and that is why the mornings have no morning sound.

Then he’s off on another track. Or so it seems. ‘Your mum and dad still around? I told you about mine.’

I look at him sharply, but nothing stirs. So I give him what I gave Douglas and he does not say anything disbelieving, just stares at me from the black silence of his eyes.

‘You left something out,’ he says when I finish, his tone accusatory, and something close to alarm moves in me because I know that I have. Then he adds, his eyes still meeting mine with an almost stubborn openness, ‘I did too.’

The confessing of a complicity foxes me, and I look it and he says, ‘You hated your dad like I did mine.’

I try to bluff, rearing back from an again threatening brink. ‘What gives you the right to say that?’

‘What you said in your dream.’

Now I am mortally afraid. ‘
What
did I say in that dream? Why must you be so secretive about the fucking thing?’

‘I told you why, but maybe I must flash you a card now because it’s getting to be not right for me to know so much about you and you still seeing only my skin.’ For the drawing of a breath, he pauses, then he jumps, ‘In your dream, you were telling your dad to stop doing something to you that mine used to do to me. And you’re hating him for it though he’s dead because he’s mashed you all up inside. OK?’

An ant is struggling through the grass at my feet and I study it as though it is the most significant sighting of my life, then a wholly alien voice says, ‘OK,’ and I hear a snick as of a bonding leather’s tightening one more notch, and he touches my knee with his hand and I start as at a reaching from another time, another flesh, and am ashamed.

Glancing aside, I see that his shorts have dried and at once know what I must say. ‘You can take them off if you want.’

He does not pretend to not understand. ‘You not minding any more?’

‘
You
said I minded, not me. Maybe it’s my potty training, but it’s just not something
I
would do. That’s all.’

‘But you flash the old gonads every time you get under the tap. What’s the difference then?’

‘There
is
a difference then. It’s like all of us sitting on that long seat over the shit pit. You sit down, maybe whistling a little to show you don’t care, try not to fart too loud,
definitely
don’t look at what the next guy’s doing, just concentrate on being an animal all on your own.’

‘Well, thank
you
!’ and he grins, but the grin is plainly narked, as plainly pained. ‘So I’m being an animal like I’m in a
show
just because I want to be brown all the way down?’

There is a silence in which still unsaid words jostle behind our tongues like surplus passengers trying to cram into an already-crowded train. What do I
really
want of him? Desperately, racing against the silence, against his quickening drawing away, I fling aside layer after layer of conservatism and pretentiousness, even downright lies, come at last to a kernel of ultimate mass that drags me to it, forces me to face it, though I would not have it so. Covertly I study him – sensing that he senses that I am – see, not the black boxer shorts, but a leprous whiteness of pampered skin, see a wildness of true innocence chained and tamed, say, ‘Danny,’ and he turns to me and I say, ‘Take off the shorts,’ and his eyes flicker out of focus as at a blow, and then a blackness beyond their blackness is gathering in them and he is raging as at the touch of a defiling hand.

‘No!’ I insist. ‘
No!
You do not understand,’ and our eyes clash with the passionate intensity of the dumb and I shake a little as he slips out of the shorts, casually as though they were but a shirt or vest, and laughs, ‘Jesus! I nearly clobbered you there!’ but there is a brokenness to the laugh that wakes an echo in me that stays.

I am thinking I must leave now because I’m beginning to feel like a real rookie under the towel, but I fear that to summarily break off after the just past wordless crisis would give the impression of a fleeing as from a scream, and I cast around for a way to return to the mundane. It is then that I remember my concern about a blower-stove. ‘You made you a blower yet?’ I ask, reining my tone in as best I know how.

‘You mean those things like fire engines without wheels that you guys wank around with all day?’

‘None other,’ I affirm, his description easing me into an easy laugh.

‘Wouldn’t know where to start,’ he confesses without shame. ‘Where do I get tools and stuff?’

‘Have you got empty Red Cross tins?’

‘Some. I shoved them under my bunk. I got a bottom bunk, thank Christ.’

‘You give me your hut number and I’ll come tomorrow after chow and show you how to hammer out the tins and fix them together to make you a stove.’

He looks at me with an unexpected hesitancy and I think, ‘What
now
?’ Then he says, ‘Maybe I should tell you I’m only a one-striper, but you, I’m guessing, are a sergeant or a staff.’

‘A sergeant. But what’s that got to do with me making you a stove?’

‘Well, we poms have got iron up our arse when it comes to ranks and my hut’s all poms. Sergeants and above, which means I get to eat a lot of shit most times. So they might think you’re a one-striper too or, if they find out the truth, that you’re a traitor to your rank, and either way you’re not going to feel much like you’re home from home.’

But I say, ‘Fuck them!’ and he tells me the number of the hut and I leave him with the conscious unceremoniousness of old friends, then have to hurry back to pick up my shorts, and Danny is already deeply asleep, his breathing light and even as an untroubled child’s.

There is nothing of the child about the genitals, though. Adult, aggressive, shrewd, they lie sprawled as though scattered by a heedless hand and I am considering them fully for the first time. But they do not add to any intimacy between us, alienate, rather, because they are the forbiddenness in even this sad Eden, the ultimately untouchable zone before which our shared maleness wields as ultimate a blade. Does the sun, as the sun will, already bloat the listless penis, persuading it to that other shape that will shame him when he wakes, arouse a laughter in those who see? Should I lay the shorts beside him over his loins, act the possessive – jealous? – male, risk his anger for a meddling that may not be needed, is motivated by impulses I would prefer stayed unnamed?

I leave him as he is, face a second crisis of the absurd as I near our hut, the shorts he has given me in my hand. What will
Douglas
think of such a gift? Save for his hostility towards the interloper between our bunks, he has always seemed magnanimous and tolerant, one who, to myself, I have summarized as
big
, but now I am no longer sure and the shorts hang heavily as infidelity from my hand. Should I throw them away? The thought is obscene and I sleepwalk into the hut, still not knowing what to say.

‘What have we there?’ Douglas asks with an immediacy that does not reassure, long nose hoping for a surprising, voice singsong with the chirpiness that can either aggravate or sustain.

Infamously, my tongue finds a lie. ‘A pair of shorts. Found them lying near the taps. Just my size, too.’

‘But you are not going to
keep
them, are you?’ Douglas is all set to moralize.

‘Well, why not? I asked all around where I picked them up, but everybody was being honest john and said they weren’t theirs. What more can I do?’

Douglas ponders this. ‘Not much, I suppose. We can hardly ask
everybody
in the camp, can we now?’ Never before has the plural ‘we’ worked such havoc with my nerves.

Grunting, not trusting myself with more, I stash the shorts, noting that they are still damp with his sweat, thinking of him sleeping out there in the sun.

*   *   *

It is as
Danny had warned. All the heads seem to swing as one when I enter his hut to start work on the stove. ‘Like a cockless ox wandered in amongst the bulls,’ I think, and note with satisfaction that – the spit-and-polish reputation notwithstanding – their hut is no better than my own. Less pleasingly, it also smells as I would have expected a pom hut to smell – airless, incestuous and mean. As I have said before, I don’t like poms, Danny being the exception that still doesn’t change the way I feel.

Then he takes out the tins and I get down to showing him how. Also, I’m making like I’m a single-striper like him and enjoying the added intimacy this brings, and we hammer and chatter with a deliberate obnoxiousness and I sense an aloneness slipping out of him and standing aside a little as is the way of the shadow in every man. He is quick to learn and his hands, unlike Douglas’, are cunning and sure and, in the end, it is me that is sitting back spouting the shit while he carries on, his face absorbed as a watchmaker tweezering springs.

Late in the afternoon of the second day, the blower is ready to blow. A motley beast of various strains of tin, its lines are none the less racy and proud, and it gusts up a fine dust from the hut’s floor when we crank the fan round, and Danny cannot wait for us to try it out, so I ask him if he still has any tea, and he drags out the Red Cross box and I see that the still unopened packets of tea and sugar and a tin of condensed milk are all that is left and think, a heavy pity unsettling me, ‘Christ! a
pom
that has not had any tea all this time!’

He had also stashed his dixie in the box and I note that it has been washed, although not as obsessively and shinily so as Douglas does his and, more often than not, mine, and this earns him full marks because Douglas’ fussiness is sometimes funniness and sometimes an irritation that drives me into a not always silent walking up the walls. So we go down to the brewing site and brew us a dixie of tea, adding sugar and milk and drinking in turn from the dixie until only the leaves are left and they to be saved for a second brewing and maybe even a third, and Danny is whooping it up with that sometimes boyishness that is most luminously him, but the tea is tasting like piss to me because I am remembering that all but empty Red Cross food box and knowing with a pitiless clarity that his ability to keep his flesh on his bones is so much less than Douglas’ and mine. What, I am asking myself, can I do to help him stave off the surfacing skull? But there is no answer to that. Only the certainty that the question, rowelling me like a demon, is on my back to stay.