Bitter Eden: A Novel (9 page)

At one stage, a plan born of desperation comes to me and I put it to Douglas that we broaden the infrastructure of our laundry business by taking in an extra partner or two. That way, I am thinking,
Danny’s
survival base will be widened, if not ours, and I couch the proposal in the plural rather than the singular so as to lend it an aura of objectiveness that will allay any suspicions Douglas may come to harbour that I have a particular individual in mind. Why I should so fear that Douglas will turn the proposal down should I play open cards is clearly due to a sense of guilt which, in its turn, is by
no
means so clear, and I am equally at a loss as to why I should now, in effect, be suspecting the usually generous and jovial Douglas of a jealousy and possessiveness he has never so far betrayed? Or has he, only I chose to not see?

Whatever the case, I am honest enough to admit to the naked cynicism of my approach – a cynicism that is compounded by my choosing to speak to Douglas while he is counting his beads and is, presumably, on some kind of a spiritual high. Should I feel shame? Of course I should, but this vision I have of a half-starved Danny circling the camp with a condemned man’s leaden tread, underpants or boxer shorts flabbily about his grown-bony thighs, overrides all else, turns our jazzed-up camp swill into an abomination on my tongue.

I am, indeed, the manger under Douglas’ dog. ‘What do we want more partners for?’ he demands with a sharpness, almost dread, that is totally unlike the Douglas I thought I knew. ‘Aren’t we doing well enough on our own? Why drag in someone we don’t even know and, ten to one, have him muck up our whole routine? Or have you already
found
some wonderboy who’s going to show us how it’s done?’

The single word, ‘wonderboy’, is the key to the true nature of the passion confronting me in the guise of a drab economic rebuke, and I watch as the fingers fondling the beads accelerate their fingering as though in response to that passion’s quickening beat. Anger rises in me then, blindly, blunderingly, seeking words, and Douglas is suddenly, shockingly, other – stares, smells, differently as a dead man, and the blade of my tongue wants to sever him from me beyond all recall. But the past months of shared suffering, his grappling with my shit in the belly of the boat, the innumerable lesser kindnesses that were hardly less, cry out to me with something of the chill remonstrance of birds in the deep night, of the night’s as-chiding wind; and the clicking beads have us back gathering wood on the abutting hill, and, guard in the rear, we are passing the tiny church with its peeling pink walls, and a straw-stuffed Madonna is sprawled out on the ground for repairs, throat slit, head lolling and loose, glass eyes glaring in mindless pain, and, in a flash of sight beyond sight, I am seeing Douglas and the doll as one.

‘Forget it,’ I say and go out, wanting sun, a long shadow reaching to me in the shadowless hut, but Douglas follows me, taking my arm, and I shake off his hand, but with something of fear rather than the rage that it seems.

‘I’m sorry, Tom,’ he is pleading with an abjectness that shames, and I am as shocked as I am discomforted to see that his lips are quivering and his eyes are struggling against tears. ‘I
don’t
like your idea and I wish you would see it my way, but I didn’t have to be quite that catty back there.’

‘I’ll survive,’ I say, trying for humour, which is hard because the ‘catty’ is as unsettling as ‘wonderboy’ – or am I loading these words with connotations that exist only in my own mind?

Desperately now I want to get away, extricate myself from the mire of my own puddling, but Douglas has that orderliness of mind that does not tolerate loose ends. ‘You said I must forget it. Do you mean you agree now that I was right, that the subject is closed?’

‘For now,’ I dodge around the trap. ‘Surely you don’t expect me to see further than that? These are lying times, mate. Any morning we can wake up to a different fence. Even to a different Douglas and Tom. Who can say?’ which could be cruel, but is also a
try
for honesty on my part, and I am hoping that the philosophical fuzziness of what I have said will bamboozle Douglas a shade, but I have my doubts as his eyes follow my walking away from what sounds like a silence of discontent.

I go straight across to Danny’s hut – where else? – thinking, ‘Christ! all this drama now and tomorrow that other drama when the curtain goes up,’ that is if six stitched-together blankets can be called that, and grapple with a fresh pang of the stage fright that has been growing in me like a foetus all week.

‘You walked in somebody’s shit?’ Danny asks as I slump down beside him on his bunk and he looks up from spooning out a tin of Red Cross Spam that he must have bought from his small stock of cigarettes, which unpremeditated spectacle seriously aggravates my mood.

‘You should mash that into the swill,’ I almost rebuke, forgetting that he’s a one-man show and the dixie couldn’t take it all, which imbalance he at once points out and I am abashed.

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ he reminds and I say, ‘Ja, it is something like that,’ and he wants to know more and I prevaricate, telling him only about tomorrow night and the stage fright, and he says I’ll be all right, but offhandedly, as though he couldn’t care all that much either way.

‘Are you coming to the show?’ I ask, not really sure whether I want him to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.

‘Nah. I like films. Cowboys, gangsters, that kind of stuff. My mum and the wife say that’s for kids, but I don’t care. A man likes what he likes and, to me, stage shows are just goons playing games that don’t make me
believe.
’

I don’t stay as long as I had planned, leave with the unwelcome feeling that although I earlier
almost
– how that sticks in my throat! – battled for Danny, this afternoon we seem a little further from each other than before. Is it perhaps still because of the play and my association through it with Tony and the queer elements of the theatre world as a whole? Or is it because I have not dared to share the no holds barred tanning sessions with him, but have had to crouch in uneasy communication in the hip-high space that the bunks allow?

Whatever the case, and although I return to Douglas’ customary self, it has been, for me more than for most, a not very satisfying day, and I heave and groan under the swarming of the bugs and the as-harassing dreams of failure in the play, and in the morning and at lunch, and almost to the last moment before I robot out, Douglas begs me to eat, predicts my catastrophic collapse if I don’t, but I don’t, save for one small bread roll and a gutful of sugarless tea.

At the theatre, the staff are setting out whatever seating there is, which is not much, tardy patrons having to stand. Shouts, whistles, snatches of song – the staff get double rations and it shows – clatter and slap of boots, benches, chairs, echo under the high roof like a parallel other world, and I stare out over what is still so rawly only a shed and quail at the thought of the full house of four hundred pairs of sceptical eyes before which, soon now, we are to evoke an illusion as unlikely as the descent of a heavenly host. That the house
will
be full is hardly to be doubted because opening night is, as I told Danny, for the Ite brass, as also for the friends of the staff and cast (which means Douglas will be fussing over me any minute now if I don’t haul arse), and any still empty seats or standing space will be quickly snapped up by the curious not so few who can’t wait for their hut to take its turn at the subsequent shows, but must even now bay for the blood of Tom Smith’s me ‘playing games’.

‘Come, Tom, let’s do you now,’ and Tony is beside me, talking quietly as to a condemned man, and I follow him to the barber’s chair behind the stage and sit in it as though it were quite some other chair, and he looks at me as at a piece of meat and sets to work turning me into what, I am sure, I am never going to be inside.

‘You’re scared,’ he states, does not ask, and I nod.

‘I’m going to shit myself. Right there on stage.’

He laughs, gently, as one dealing with the insane. ‘No, don’t do that. Vomit before you go on, if that is what you feel you must do. That I won’t mind because an actor who walks out there like it isn’t the Last Day, is not and never will be worth a damn.’ Then suddenly, passionately, ‘I’m depending on you, kid. You’re not the lead, but you have the lines by which the play stands or falls. I’m not forgetting it’s your first time and how first-timers always feel. Like, for instance, you looking at that lot there,’ and he jerks his head at the rest of the cast who have already been ‘done’ and are now slouching around as though this was just another boring chore, ‘and thinking you’re way down in the scale from ape to man. Forget them, kid. They are just a bunch of bloody queens like me who know I know why they’re here, but I had to take them, partly because they are all there is and partly because they are, at least, experienced enough and sassy enough to hold the show on the road. But they are not the ones who will make this thing more than a fairy tale with moves. That, as I said,
you
have to do for me.’

‘But why did you pick on
me
?’ I ask and flinch at my voice’s coming out like a cawing crow’s.

He grins his more familiar savage grin. ‘Because you are the meat that fits the bill. You
look
like that still fresh-faced more-lamb-than sheep that’s wandered from the no longer so green fields of England into the shit that is the Somme. What is more, you don’t even have to
try
for his awkwardness of the boy amongst the men. Just say your lines the way I taught you and the peasants will be eating out of your hand.’

‘Like I have out of yours?’ I hit back, a quick bitterness curing the caw. ‘Is that the way you have always seen me? Just another gormless pommy clown?’

‘Come now, you know that is not true,’ and he pinches my cheek with a vicious twist of his finger and thumb.

Freed, I sit on the box for the prompt in a corner of the stage and twitch the curtain aside. The camp band arrives with a ringing clangour of brass and hollownesses of drums, and goes to the back of the stage where it will have fun making like war while flashing lights simulate bursting shells. Most of the seats already host their bums and I see Douglas is in his, right behind the still vacant row for the Ites, and he is laughing and chattering to the total strangers about him as though he has known them a million years. It is, I am feeling, like watching the countdown to the guillotine, and I am about to break and run when there is a sound like wind or waves, and I look out again and the now packed auditorium is rising as the camp commandant struts in with his as glittering boots-and-buttons brigade, faces fugitive under the seemingly never-the-right-size-caps and an aura about them of vino, cognac and pomade that I am swearing I am smelling all the way from here. Then the overhead lights are dimming into darkness until only the footlights still illumine the Ites, and Tony is saying, ‘To the wings!’ in a low but urgent voice, and the prompt is diving for his box, script in hand, and Tony is going down to his seat in the auditorium, and the curtain is cranking up even as we rustle like the cockroaches in the huts into the darkened sides of the stage.

Now at last alone, beyond help or flight, I try to kick-start myself out of the paralysis of my fear by remembering Tony’s final words, but it is his stressing of the importance of my role that most clearly returns, and the weight of that, far from challenging me, sinks me like a stone. Is there, indeed, no way out? For a feverish moment I really do consider flight, but the suck of the blood is too fierce and the lot of the outcast too dire, and I am back to poising like a sprinter for the starter-gun of my cue.

I am also back to chasing after shreds of dialogue I am thinking I have forgotten – a practice, this, which Tony warned us could affect the spontaneity of our lines – and I am still doing that when my cue sounds and I am on stage as suddenly and involuntarily as though a hand had shoved me there, and I commit the ultimate offence of glancing aside into Tony’s furious frown, and the single, silent breath of the audience is coming at me over the footlights as though I had, after all, decided to cut and run.

My recall of my lines proves to be total, but the damage is done. I am a robot reporting for duty in a stage setting of a dugout that is a small masterpiece of innovation, but to me is no more than a painted mishmash of hardboard and cardboard making like wood. I am Thomas Aloysius Smythe, sometimes known as Tom Smith, and I am that and nothing more as my scene ends and I quit the stage, not daring to again glance aside, but sensing, none the less, that Tony is sitting there, his head bowed and his eyes closed.

Unnerved, telling myself I do not care, yet most deeply caring, I wait for my second entrance and it comes and I have blessedly nothing to say while the other officers talk about home, family, friends, the loneliness of war. Then I move to the front of the stage, facing out over the audience, and the always half-cut captain asks me if the cat has my tongue, and I am gathering up what little is left of me before I launch into the long monologue that is a pivotal part of the play, when I look down and see that three of the Ite officers have quit their seats on the left-hand end of their row and Danny, with the audaciousness that is Danny, is sitting in one of them and watching me with not-saying eyes.

Neither encouragement nor challenge passes from him to me, yet suddenly, joyously, I am challenged and, as suddenly, I am no longer Tom Smith, but the homesick hardly more than a boy telling how it is against a background of phoney shells and candles guttering in as phoney a dugout turned real. Tony’s face lifts to me in a blaze of interest, but I am talking, primarily, to Danny and, through him, to every other listening heart, and I know they
are
listening because their stillness tells me so, and I know Danny is listening because his eyes are no longer watching people playing games.

The play ends with me lying dying in what is left of the dugout when a shell hits it, which means I get to speak the last few lines, which is great but also no easy ride because I have to deliver in a whisper that must be heard by every ear in the house. I lost count of how many times Tony shouted, ‘Jesus Christ!’ when, in rehearsal, I could not get it right, but now I’m
going
to get it right because the persona is about me like a second skin – I was going to say like an FL round a wally, but now is hardly the time – and there is a great gnashing of instruments by the band at the back of the stage, and Tony’s stagehands let slip the set’s staying ropes and the whole painted trickery is sliding down over me, and my whisper is ghosting out, as effortless as it is clear, and the drummer, inspired, is dropping a single beat between the lines.