Field Study (13 page)

__

– It’s like he’s afraid of something.

– In the alley?

The boy is in bed. His mother has called her friend, apologised, and now she phones her husband at work.

– It was that same screaming again.

– But maybe it’s about something else now.

– No. I don’t know. Can’t you just come home? Please?

They argue and she hangs up. Stands at the living-room window, closes the curtains against their second-storey dog-leg view.

__

– What is it, sweetheart? Can’t you tell me? Nothing will happen to you. I’ll be with you and it will be fine.

But it is the same every time now. Whenever she tries to go beyond the lane, he cries. She reads books, calls family, friends, helplines for advice. If they walk, his limbs become rigid. In the pushchair he throws his weight from side to side. She tries reason, bribery, authority, pleading. They battle, mother and son, and he always wins. She can’t bear his stiff body when she carries him. Can’t put him through it. Is afraid of the screams.

Her husband listens to her crying when she phones. In the evening, she shows him the marks left by their son’s fingers on her arms.

– He wouldn’t turn the corner with me. I couldn’t make him. He was doing that. He was holding my arms like that, see?

He watches his son sleeping, then picks him up, carries him into their bedroom, and the parents lie down in the street-light dark with their boy between them.

– You could get your old job back. I’m sure they would give it to you.

– I thought of that Clare. I thought it, too. But it’s not a solution.

– No, not long term. But maybe he just needs another six months or something. If we just told him we’d be staying then maybe he’d be alright.

– We don’t know that, love. Do we?

She doesn’t say anything, knows he is right. It wouldn’t be a solution either, it would just be lying.

__

The boy is thin, so is his mother. They have had concerned looks from the other parents, gentle questions from the nursery teacher.

– You know. Anything we can do.

She tells her husband.

– I could have cried. I said thank you.

They go back to the doctor, together this time, and she listens more attentively, looks at the bruises, the rings under their eyes.

– I have a colleague who can perhaps help you.

She writes the phone number down, the address. They leave it one more week, still hoping for a change, and then they phone him. His practice is on the outskirts of the city.

__

Her husband borrows a car, from a colleague. A child seat from another. He straps it in to the back, and his wife watches him from their second-floor window. The way
he stands by the parked car a moment, murmuring, lips moving. The frown-lines cut into his forehead.

They drive along the street away from the dog-leg dead-end. The boy’s mother in front with her husband at the wheel, son in the back, high and upright in the bright padding of the child seat. He can see out of all the windows and she worries, wonders whether they shouldn’t shield off at least some of the view. Midday traffic, red lights, red buses and roadworks. They make their way slowly through the city streets and his mother watches for a reaction, a flicker. He moves his lips gently, but her son seems calm.

She turns forward, checks where they are, looks at the map. Whispers to her husband.

– Third left.

And her husband says:

– He’s got his eyes shut. His eyes are shut, love.

He is looking in the rear-view mirror. She looks round at her son. A minute ago his eyes were open and he was looking, but now he is pale and his eyes are firmly closed. She looks at her husband. He has slowed to a crawl, head bent low over the steering wheel. She thinks he might cry.

– Park the car.

– There’s nowhere here to park it.

– Park the car.

– We’re on a red-route, Clare. We can’t.

The cars beep behind them. Drivers hanging on to their horns. The streets running off to the left are blocked by concrete bollards. A high metal barricade runs along the centre of the road to their right. The boy sits silent in the back of the car, face ashen, fingers and feet trembling. His father swears and his mother takes off her safety-belt, turns and touches him, his cold hands and legs. His eyes dance under his eyelids, but he does not respond. She pulls herself up and over the seat, and her husband drives on. The people in the cars beep and overtake. They drive slowly past them in the fast lane, watching the mother make her clumsy way into the back seat to be with her panic-stricken son.

She undoes his straps, pulls her boy into her lap, holds his head under her chin, small body in her arms and sits. Eyes closed in sympathy.

Her husband watches them in the rear-view mirror, watches the road ahead for a place to turn.

__

Christmas comes, and they make their excuses. Don’t invite family, don’t invite friends, decline invitations. The holidays fall between weekends that year, and so the father is home for twelve full days.

It is claustrophobic at first, just the three of them. In the
flat, mostly, but they also go to the café when it’s open and, when it’s not raining, the swings. And then they get used to this. Talking about nothing much. Cooking, eating, walking, swinging, sleeping, sitting. Heating turned up, carols on the radio, toys on the floor, condensation on the kitchen window.

The lane is quieter than usual. Families away, shops and restaurants closed even after Boxing Day. They walk past the tinsel window displays together, boy between his parents, hand in hand in hand. On the wet pavement dotted with chewing gum and across the empty market place with its cigarette butts and puddles. The weather turns cold and they wear heavy coats, scarves, hats, feel the grip of each other’s fingers through layers of mitten and glove.

They wake together in the mornings, the three of them, lie blinking at each other. Too warm under the duvet, but none of them thinking about getting up.

__

Some time around New Year they run out of bread and milk. Think the shop by the swings might be open, but when they get round the dog-leg they see that the shutters are down.

– What about the one opposite the station? Just at the end of the alley.

– You stay with him then? Play on the swings with Daddy, sweetheart, I’ll be back in a sec.

His father swings the boy high, but he is watching his mother walk down the alley. Only one eye showing, face turned into his anorak hood.

– She’ll be back before you know it.

His dad catches the swing, and the boy slides off, runs to the start of the alley and stops. His mother has turned the corner, out of sight. He turns back to his father.

– She’s fine. She’s just gone into the shop.

The boy turns away again. Takes two, three steps into the alley, and his father stands ready. Waiting for him to stop and scream but he doesn’t, he just keeps slowly walking. And when his mother comes back round the corner with the bag of bread and milk, he is already half-way down the alley. She stops still, is silent for a moment, and then says:

– Hello you.

The parents see each other from opposite ends of the alley. White faces above dark coats, under hats.

Their son has stopped walking now. He looks from mother to father, one to the other, looks frightened, and they both walk towards him, slowly, trying not to run.

__

They cook dinner and eat together, go to bed. The winter day behind them like a small, unexpected gift.

Their son was trembling as they carried him home. They both felt his breathing fast and high, saw the skin around his eyes, blue-white.

But no one asked, or begged or forced him.

The boy sleeps and his parents lie in the dark, afraid to talk, even to think about it. Frightened, grateful, awake.

“My life before I came into the army was uneventful but full of
childish dreams.”

Private H, 1944, in
A War of Nerves: Soldiers and
Psychiatrists, 1914–1994
, Dr Ben Shephard

The story he is going to tell happened in 1944.

– Not a story.

Fran corrects himself. Sitting by the window; looking out of it mostly, rather than at me. Says he’ll tell me about an incident in the summer of that year, the way he sees it. Knows I have heard something of what happened already: a family secret, discussed in loud whispers. A stigma for his daughter: other dads had medals. Less so for her sons: the safer distance of another generation. I work with one of them, and he asked about my PhD in a lunch break a while back, making conversation, said I might find his granddad interesting. Probably thought I would never take him up on it, and I wonder now whether Fran took a lot of persuading. I expected reluctance, belligerence even, but I don’t know how to describe him. Gentle handshake, biscuits and tea laid out on the table.

Fran should have turned twenty in Italy, with his battalion, only he got sick and spent his birthday outside Cairo. In the army hospital, with the wounded, the amputees. Heat like he’d never known: days spent dozing, staring at the ceiling fan. Nights wakeful, listening to the other men dream.

– Frightening sometimes, that noise. Especially when I had the fever.

Jaundice followed. The medical officer said six more
weeks. He would join his battalion late. Further up the line. Couldn’t be helped.

His eyeballs were still yellow when he got to them. Inspected in the small square of shaving mirror that first morning, he could only see fragments of face. Pink forehead, tight with sunburn; sickly tinge of eye laced with fine red veins; upper lip soft with down. He soaped his cheeks, got his razor out.

– Bloody hell Jones, is it worth the effort?

Thorn was the only man there he knew already. Not well: they had got the same transport out of Naples in February. Never spoke much, never had much to say to each other, but it helped to have someone there he recognised. Always unfamiliar faces, new recruits, battalions fused to make up numbers. People came, then they were gone again.

Fran was the last to join his new platoon. Spent the first day struggling to remember names while they called him Titch because he was tall, and Bones because it rhymed with his surname, and you could still see his ribs, despite the pounds he’d gained those last weeks laid up in hospital.

– Fuck’s sake. Look what they’ve sent us.

This is how Fran remembers his first encounter with Butler, who was joking of course.

– After a fashion.

There was always plenty of that kind of thing; you came to expect it. Humour in the war, Fran says, was quick and cold. Still there was a difference to it that summer, in that platoon; something he never got the measure of. The men were not unfriendly with each other, but he never felt they got along.

Fran looks at me a moment, I don’t know why. His fingers move, self-conscious, find his tie, smooth it against his chest. We smile at each other, briefly, and I wonder if it was put on especially for the occasion.

The Leicesters had taken the woods at the southern end of a ridgeway, and Fran’s battalion was sent up the line to relieve them. Over half the men had gone ahead already and the remaining platoons, Fran’s included, were to march north in the morning. These were their orders, swiftly supplemented by a rumour: tanks were just a day behind them, on their way from the coast as back-up.

– They wanted us to break the line, we thought.

All geared up for something. Sicily, Naples, Rome: forcing the Germans north to the border.

Hot, late summer. They came through villages where people lived in rubble. The country between them was mostly empty, only a few farmers still trying to save some of the harvest. The soldiers stripped tomatoes off the vines as they passed. Crossed a field full of melons, big as footballs, heavy as heads. Still moving, they scooped the
seed out with their hands and threw it into the under-growth. Fran remembers passing stringy gobs of it, moons of yellow-green skin gnawed clean, discarded in the dust. The juice got everywhere, gummed his fingers together, his eyelids, mixed with the sweat on his cheeks and neck. Couldn’t escape the sweet stink of it.

At night they heard shelling, but Fran could see nothing in the surrounding dark. They marched on in silent single file, each holding the bayonet scabbard of the man in front.

– I had Thorn ahead of me. But I don’t remember thinking about that at the time, mind.

That is what memory does; it organises. Fran lifts a warning finger. Sifts and turns the events over, he says, and it is extraordinary: how he finds them everywhere now, Thorn and Butler, in all the little details.

Fran knew the names in his platoon by then, and that he was the youngest. One or two had been fighting since the beginning, including Butler, but not their platoon commander. Ash only had six months on Fran, and though he never gave his age, Fran remembers Butler ran a book on it, and most men laid odds that he wasn’t too much older.

– Twenty-two I would say, and in charge of men like Thorn. Twice his age, easy.

The Leicesters had camped in a wood, by a clearing. Tall
silver-brown trunks, the afternoon air among them thick and hot. Fran’s battalion was bigger, bivouacs spread far back into the trees. Sun getting low when they arrived.

– First walking, then waiting.

Thorn brewed tea for them and Butler slept. Curled on his side, eyes hidden in the crook of his elbow. All around him, other men were doing the same and Fran was tired, too. Pain in his legs and his back, from the marching, the heavy pack. The tea was sweet, clumped with milk powder, and he was glad of the sugar; still felt the weeks of his illness. He remembers lying down, his limbs sore and heavy, but his eyes stayed open.

Beyond the trees lay the ridgeway. They were to take it south to north, with the tanks behind them. At the top of the first rise was a village, capturing it their first objective. Two tiers of pale stone houses, farm buildings below. On the slopes leading up to them, vineyards and olive groves; good cover, at least while the sun was low. Fran says he watched the village through field glasses before the light faded: crawling with Germans.