Black Diamonds (19 page)

Good God: what do I look like? I peer into the mirror. I look like a very young bookkeeper with my short hair and my new spectacles. I take the specs off, but I can't do anything about my hair. I laugh, really laugh, for the first time in months. He loves my hair — I can't possibly let him know what I've done to it.

Takes my mind off the Western Front as Louise helps me solve the problem with a hairpiece that doesn't quite match the colour, but won't matter. It does the trick as I pose for Mr Grissom in town. Daniel will see that I've cut a fringe, that's all. And it is a peachy photo: my face is plump and I really do look as if I'm about to burst out in giggles.

I post it off to him saying:
Sorry about the fringe — it'll grow back. Been doing all sorts of odd experiments in your absence. You really shouldn't go away again — I shouldn't be left unsupervised. I've made a new friend though, her name is Louise and she's staying with me at Josie's, trying to keep me in check. Everyone's well, especially me. I'm fattening by the second. Don't worry about that! And I love you. I love you. I love you. Knock knock. More importantly, hope you get this cake. Might be a case of too much brandy in this instance, but I wanted to make sure it survives the trip.

Crossed letters again and I really am a porker when another one arrives from him; there's no place name or date, it simply says:

My France,

Heading off on the long march to the proper job today. Please don't worry if you don't hear from me all that often — might be a bit busy and I'd rather not send you one of these field cards we have that look like an inoculation form and say ‘I am quite well'. There is a fair bit more than that I want to say now, what I haven't said to you and should have. For a start I should never have left you, and I should not have compromised my beliefs to follow the sheep into this paddock. I can tell you now, not that you need to be told, that it won't be worth it, whatever happens, but since I am here I'll get on with it — no choice. While I don't believe any of us should be here (hope this gets past censoring) I still don't want to leave the others to it. Promises for you, for the future — I will never leave you out of it again, and I will never leave you again. I don't know how you put up with my behaviour — you should have whacked me harder. That you are my wife is a fact that still amazes me. How I feel about everything you are can't be called love. I set out to tell you today that I do love you, just because I've never told you plainly, but it doesn't even come close to say that. Every time I think about you, which is just about three times a second, the knowledge that you love me sustains me. I can do anything and I will do anything to get home in one piece, because I just have to, to see you, to hear your voice, that bell that comes out of you when you laugh, to smell you, to hold our baby, to touch you, and to behave myself for the rest of my life. Never let you or my beliefs go again. Well, that's about as much as I've ever put to paper in one go. Hope you appreciate the trouble I've gone to.

Your stupid husband,

x Daniel

There's another drawing behind the letter: a strange but no less beautiful one. Of me; one straight line of my long hair dissecting my face right down the middle, between my closed eyes. He says at the bottom:
PS: Did this in the dark a few weeks ago — thought you'd see the accidental point of it, in the circumstances. Says it all, really, doesn't it?

It does: split emotions, tearing his heart and my heart in two. I'm so moved by the
trouble
that I can't move for a long time. There's a small package on my bed; it's from Daniel too. I can't bear to open it just now. Louise walks past my bedroom door with an armful of clean sheets that I was coming out to help her with before the post boy came; she says: ‘What is it?'

I say: ‘He's on his way to the front, I think.'

She says: ‘Oh.'

Enough said. We press and fold the sheets and I start praying, harder.
Holy Mary, Mother of God
, the words don't need to be spoken or even thought; the lilac glitter of amethyst rosary comes to me from somewhere wrapped in long-ago fresh-linen perfume and I don't blink it away:
pray for us sinners now.
It's the end of May: I don't know how old the letter is, but he'd probably have moved all the way there by now.

I wonder if Sarah knows. I'm not even sure if Daniel's written to his mother, at all; if he has, she certainly hasn't ever mentioned it. Of course I haven't asked her directly. I usually drop round on Sarah going backwards and forwards with the motor, or she walks round to me with a load of cheese, which she insists is essential, or some delicious thing she's made to help me with my fatness, but we haven't talked about anything really other than baby business, and news from the naughty brood, and the other wicked one in Newcastle. On the few occasions I have mentioned Daniel, she's found some way to avoid talking, but that look of grief crosses her face before she pulls back from it to change the subject, or put the kettle on, or get home to milk Beatrice. So I've tried to avoid mentioning him. I should give her this news, though, but I'm not sure how to broach it with her. She'll be here sometime this afternoon, to watch over me, since Louise has to go out and I'm too fat now to be left on my own. Louise has taken over our little transport service because I am too much of an alarming sight behind the wheel and probably shouldn't be doing it anyway, and she is taking Chris Templeton out to Bathurst overnight. He needs to have more X-rays and tests, to see if he can have an operation to fix his spine a bit, fusing it or something, to stop the painful spasms that make walking difficult for him; Louise will bring Chris and his mother back in the morning. So Sarah and I will be alone together all evening. Whether or not she knows, I have to share this with her. How can I not?

The baby kicks, or rather seems to roll around like I'm carrying a trapped salmon inside me. It'll be all right. I can bear that look of hers I know I'm going to see. But I'm not going to grieve for him in silence with her. Pine, cry, dream, wallow: yes. Grief: no. He has to come home, and I've decided this minute that I'm not going to think of any other possibility. If I could, I'd bring him back by the force of my will alone. And maybe I can.

 

DANIEL

I have to expand my understanding of disgusting to account for the trenches. To think that I laughed back in Egypt when we were told that dentists would be touring with the military for the first time in history: bad breath is not an issue any more. You could follow your nose through the maze here and the stronger the smell of shit and rotting corpses becomes, the closer you know you are to the real picnic. Everyone wants to chuck on their first visit, but you try not to: you don't really want to add to it.

In this particular stretch, at the very front of the lines, the corpses are imbedded in the walls that have been rebuilt and rebuilt, grey bits of men, Fritz and Tommy together forever, sticking out of grey mud, and a river of shit banks up from the latrines when it's flooded. And in such a flood the walls widen and weaken at the bottom, so that when shells start hitting the ground above, the walls start to collapse or if you're unlucky, fall inwards on top of you. Which is why I'm here this, for once, fine morning, with my mates Foley and Anderson, to sheer back the forward wall a bit, and then try to encourage Tommy infantry to help sandbag it for more stability, as well as to cover up the stinking corpses. There's not a lot going on here at the minute, apart from our futile attempt and my horror at having to shovel through death and empty it into sandbags. Don't think I'm alone there. This shift of infantry have been sitting here for five days, propping themselves up with whatever they can find to keep out of the six or so inches of what I'm standing in above the duckboards; Stratho and others have already been through trying to drain the place: this is as far down as the shit level will go. You'd think the infantry would appreciate at least the gesture we're making, but they'd rather sit quietly in the sewer, I think, without this disturbance, before they have to look lively again. There's a lot of ‘Watch where you're going', ‘No, I'm not moving,' and good old-fashioned ‘Fuck off ' being voiced up and down the firing line. Rats and lice are very happy, though, as they ought to be in the circumstances. We'll leave them to it shortly and move on. Next job is to excavate some more kipping dugouts behind this line, in such a way that the sewage won't seep down the back of them when the floodwaters rise again. That'll be a feat of engineering. Especially if we can get it all done before Fritz wakes up, which will probably be about five o'clock this afternoon if he's sticking to the schedule.

Maybe I seem a bit too calm about all this, but it's not like there's a choice, and it's not like you don't get a few decent clues along the road to the hub of destruction either. As we marched beyond the village of Bac St Maur it was fairly clear that we were in a French place with little sense of humour in its shell craters, and here and there the wrecks of stone and plaster and metal that used to be people's homes, and the sound of very big guns going off in the distance, black clouds drifting up at the horizon, indicating that there's only one type of industry going on here. This is where we're billeted when we're away from the sewer: rank and file in an old mill, higher orders in a few farmhouses. I sleep in one of the farmhouses, the back half of which has been blown away. And I doss down with none other than my very best mate, Dunc, since I've been promoted to corporal and he needs me handy to have a word in my ear when he thinks to. No bumbrushing involved either; he doesn't have me running around as his dingbat. This is not normal, very not normal, but nothing about him is.

The new title doesn't mean much, and I've relaxed my understanding of authority a bit recently too, to account for the brutal equality that's going on here. Not among Tommies so much, who might well tell me to go jump but would ask one of their own corporals, how high, sir, can I jump for you and would you like a cup of tea while I'm at it? But with us, there's barely distinction between the lower ranks; just one distinction really: how much and how long you can make yourself believe you are not totally horrified and disgusted. Even the Australian infantry are appalled, and old hands have been known to say: ‘If it rains again tomorrow I will send myself west.' But obviously the most brutal fact of it is that there's no distinction whatsoever when it comes to being killed, and without that fact there wouldn't have been a need for my promotion.

On our second trip in, a mile or so out from the lines, we got shot at out of the blue by an escaped Fritz who must have snavelled a rifle then set himself up behind the rubble of a house. Rain must have got to him too, for him to have decided at that exact moment that it was AIF engineers' day and open fire into the middle of us. Life might be a game of chance, but how chancy is that? At the time I was at the rear carrying a roll of wire with Foley, since he's about the same height as me, and he drops the pole the second he hears the shots. There's nothing quite like having a hundredweight of barbed wire smash into the side of you, but that had to wait a minute while I frigged around for my own rifle, shitting myself. I hadn't got there yet when Duncan, who was up the front, shot the self-appointed sniper as he stood up like he wanted the bullet. Last stand maybe. Fritz fell down in a grey heap behind the rubble about fifty yards off, but not before he'd killed two of us and wounded another. The two that were killed were corps: Murchison, the private-school teacher, and a stonemason called Carter. Long way to come for a very short war, pleasant chaps pay today, and it woke me up to myself quick smart.

Everyone'd fallen out, all over the shop, while Duncan was shouting orders to get the bodies taken back and to help the wounded bloke who'd been shot in the neck and was screaming so we knew about it. Duncan was wearing half of Murchison's brain across the back of his overcoat as Watkins, the sergeant, behind him was yelling, ‘Fall in! Fall in!' sounding a lot more rattled than I'd have preferred him to.

Foley was still on the ground, and for a moment I thought he must have been shot too, but he started to get up. Brown's bloody cows, everyone, and Duncan had started stalking off already. Very dark at our performance. I said to Foley: ‘Fall in, you fucker.' And he did. But the blokes in between were moving so slow that we were going to lose Duncan before we got there. Great show turning up to spend the day looking for our CO. ‘For Christ's sake, fall in!' the words were out of me and above their heads before I knew I'd said them; not very Noisy about it either. Stratho was further up the front and echoing me, with a few choicer words, and we caught up again.

We were nearly there when Foley saw the blood coming out of the rip on my shoulder, put two and two together and said: ‘Sorry, mate.'

I said: ‘You drop that frigging pole again and I will shoot you myself.' But I didn't mean it; didn't let him know I didn't mean it either: still too busy reining myself in. I'd marked him down for one who's not going to
bear up
too well, but since then he's been all right.

Anyway, that's how I got promoted; and Stratho got promoted too. Vacancies needing to be filled at very short notice. Hooray for us. Only consolation is we won't be going underground, for all my expertise; Tommy doesn't want this Australian rabble anywhere near his mine tunnels, which I can understand, in that Tommy actually does have whole companies of miners doing the job. There is one company of AIF miners out here somewhere and for five minutes I think I might ask if I can get in with them, just for some sort of familiarity; I look down at Shit River now, and up at the slimy, shattered state of no-man's land above the top of the trench and think better of it. I remember a very strange interview with a Tommy major back in Egypt and wonder, for five seconds, what he might have wanted to pinch me for and forget it: I don't want to blow anyone up and I don't want to drown in sewage. So for me, us, for now, the job is one of assisting
proper
soldiers in their attempts to live in this place. Flaming hell. I look at the miserable Tommies up and down the line: it'll be over the top and take your chances, lads, on a trench raid sometime tonight for them, a random raid; wouldn't put money on Fritz not knowing they're coming, sometime.

‘Watch it!' one of them says as I splash past; as if another drop of shit is going to make a difference to the state of him.

‘Right-o. Keep your hair on.' We're off.

Stratho and I get demoted again a few weeks later.

It's late, on a night off, in the mill that's become a temporary pub serving only one kind of drink: Instant Plastering Don't Ask What's In It But Thank God. I've wandered in, just for something to do; don't know where Dunc is, probably playing bridge somewhere with his own kind, and I can't sleep. The others are having a singalong and it's gone well beyond dreadful, one too many trips to Tipperary with Matilda and her Old Kit Bag, and one bloke starts singing ‘Abide With Me'. Sergeant Watkins is so rotten on the snake juice, he's sliding down the back wall, slowly, and not attempting to stop. Jesus. I suppose it's one disadvantage of not being a drinker, that you get bored easily with others when they're at it. I've just received France's new photo too, and she looks so … I don't know, but I can't lie, sit or stand still. Not helped by the jumper she sent along with it: I can still smell her in it, even over the stench in here. Stratho's had a skinful, of course, probably assisted by the consumption of France's cake this afternoon. She wasn't joking about the brandy; it might have been able to survive a trip over the moon on a donkey, but I couldn't eat a crumb of it. When Stratho says: ‘Oi, DT. Want a race on the bikes to the gas sign and back?' which is a decent distance up to the rear communication trenches at the front, I can only say: ‘You're on.'

We're not supposed to take the bikes, obviously, since someone might need to use them for a better purpose. But they are for officer use only, and we're officers now, sort of, very noncommissioned ones, and there are a dozen of them, so who's going to miss two for an hour or so? And it's all fairly quiet out there, a big fat moon is shining and it's just too irresistible: proving to Stratho once and for all the major advantage of abstinence.

I win of course, since Stratho falls off, twice, the second time down the ditch that runs along the side of the road. And buggers his ankle. I don't need to be told that this was idiotic, but Duncan's waiting to tell us all about it as we walk the bikes back, slowly, on account of Stratho who's sobered up enough to feel it now.

Dunc doesn't raise his voice. ‘Strathlyn, you are a disgrace. But, Ackerman, you've got no excuse.'

That's true, and that's the end of it. My one act of stupidity, one lapse of discipline. Out of my system.

Stratho's off for a week while I cart sandbags and ammunition, or run rations up to the shooting gallery, a job that cops you more verbal abuse than any other, for the quality and variety the infantry have come to expect of what could well be their last meal. But we're corporals again within five minutes because there's not a lot of choice for Dunc, who hands me his pistol and says to me now in another special private moment out the back of the billet: ‘You can shoot yourself if you like, in the head, in the foot, however you'd like to leave us.' And looks at me.

I give him back the pistol; I've got the point. There's a piper playing somewhere, sending off today's dead, just in case I missed it.

‘You have a responsibility to others before yourself from now on, Ackerman, and if you fail again on this issue I'll have you sent home with a brand on your fucking forehead to that effect. You don't want to end it like that, do you?'

‘No.' Obviously not, but for Christ's sake it was only a bike ride and I'm not going to do it again.

He hasn't finished. ‘Would you like your wife to know that you came all the way here to be killed skylarking about on a bicycle in the middle of the night, or would you prefer her to know that you were doing something a little more useful?'

I don't need to answer that. Wish that fucking piper would shut it off. He does.

Dunc still hasn't finished, though. ‘You haven't seen anything yet. Think about how all those corpses in the trenches might have got there: that's just a fraction. Do you know how many are lying out there up and down between the lines? Hundreds and hundreds of thousands. We've just arrived and it's not going to stay nice and quiet like this forever. Are you frightened?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good.'

He sits down and starts unlacing his boots to clean them and dry out his lice-dipped socks; that's why I'm here too, so I do the same, not mourning the recent death of several colonies of vermin off the rest of me. While we're being so chatty, I just have to change the subject: ‘You've got the smallest feet I've ever seen.'

He snorts and looks across at me. ‘You've got more nerve than is good for you.'

‘I meant for a big bloke, you know, like you were given the wrong pair.'

‘They do the job,' he says, scraping out his toenails.

‘I know — it's bloody amazing. From an engineering point of view.'

First proper laugh out of him, not that lazy chuckle, and we're back to normal. He says: ‘So, how are we?'

He means how are we all today, or at least those I've been with and seen about. I say: ‘Tiptop chaps we all are.' And we are, I think, for now. It occurs to me that whether I want to know these blokes or not, I should make more of an effort to not be so
aloof
while I'm telling people what to do, so maybe I'll be more useful when things get worse. Not sure how to go about that but, like everything else, I suppose it'll come.

Dunc says: ‘Glad to hear it.'

I'm about to get up to go inside, to go to sleep. I'm that bloody tired. I haven't had a proper sleep for three days, but I can feel another little word about to come on, like my knees have picked it up before he's thought it.