The Long Green Shore (8 page)

You could sit for hour after hour in the mechanic oblivion and mechanic excitement of the falling cards—even the cramped and aching muscles from uncomfortable positions became part of the pattern—you became reluctant to ease your aching back and legs because that meant leaving the security, the refuge, of this cave of cards—and outside the night is empty.

Soldiers' talk is casually blasphemous and obscene but there's no real offence in it—it doesn't mean what it says, mostly.

They talk about women, of course. They tell lies about their conquests and amorous adventures in Alexandria and Athens—some rapacious Egyptian trollop can become a Cleopatra in retrospect, and an Athenian shop girl is touched with the immortal fire of Helen—or are you sure she was not your Helen? They sacked and plundered more than Troy to tear her from your arms, and she wept when you were leaving, and I doubt if Helen's ancient tears made such bright and bitter rain.

But the fierce sexual torments that the popular novelists attribute to the soldier on the tropic isle are not for us. You don't find them so much in the infantry—not when there's a blue brewing anyway. Those placid, safe and deadly monotonous base jobs are where such fiery worms breed in the brain and bowels.

In the infantry there is the compensation of that strong comradeship that you never get in a base job. There is the simple animal necessity for subjugating all other desires and instincts to the track—the earth is our lover; its dangers and its refuge. There is the strong emotional and physical catharsis of fear and battle.

We think of women, sure; we talk of women; we desire them; but of way back and of way ahead.

The Laird spoke nearer the truth than the novelists when he stretched back from the lantern one night, tossed aside the letter he had been reading, and sighed prodigiously: ‘Ah, I wish I was back home with Mumma—I wouldn't complain, even if she put her cold feet on my back.'

There was the usual outburst of bawdy clichés and variations on the theme.

‘It's a great sport,' said Whispering John, licking his lips in lascivious travesty. ‘The old indoor sport, the horizontal game.'

‘Don't tell me you still indulge, John?' said Deacon.

‘Why,' said Fluffy with delight, ‘a good sweat and a green apple would just about finish you, John.'

‘Don't you worry,' sniggered John confidentially. ‘I've had my days—I've done the stations of the cross in Paris and had my nose rubbed in the Bowery. I'll warn you: if ever you get to the Bowery don't go putting your head through any trapdoors you might see—you'll get your nose rubbed if you do.'

‘Were you ever married, John?' asked Fluffy seriously. ‘If you don't object to a personal question, like?'

‘I've got an Irish wife in Liverpool,' said John. ‘And that's why I've never gone back. I've got a fat white wench in Panama who looks for me still. And I'd have married a brown girl in Manila—but her husband turned up first.'

The Laird stretched back on his bed and boomed to the world at large: ‘Time for a brew! Who's putting the brew on?'

‘I'll light the fire,' said Bishie. He swung his feet down off the bed, tossed his paper-backed thriller,
Death in the Dog House
, into the appropriate trash box in the middle of the tent and yawned.

‘Best go up and scrounge some petrol from transport,' said the Laird. ‘Scorp will give you some—say I sent you.'

‘Is there any wood?' Bishie wanted to know.

‘No wood,' said the Laird. ‘We'll get some petrol and make a dirt fire.'

‘Someone get the water,' said Bishie as he went out. He tripped, as he always did, over the fly rope of the tent, and his good-natured curses faded down the line.

Dick the Barber looked up for a moment from the poker hand he was studying in the corner of the poker game: ‘I've got the supper: tinned snags from the Yanks and Selby gave me a loaf of bread—you'll just have to cut the mildew away from the edges.'

‘I'll get the water,' said Regan. He laid down a letter he had been writing, crouched over a stump of candle on a box in the middle of the tent. ‘Where's the billy?'

‘The william can,' directed the Laird from his relaxed position on the bed, ‘is under Pez's bed. There's no water here, but there's a bucketful under the flap of the first Mortar tent at this end—if you go up quietly they'll never know you took it.

‘And now,' said the Laird. ‘We want someone to make the toast and heat the snags—a reliable man we want. What about you, Cairo?'

Cairo left the card game he was watching in the corner: ‘Yeah, I'll make it,' he said. ‘Where's the stuff?'

‘Outside in the box the bread and snags,' the Laird issued his communiqué. ‘And there's some margarine in the tent next door—ask Ocker for it if you can't get it without him seeing you.'

Cairo paused at the flap of the tent and looked at the Laird: ‘What the hell are you doing in all this?' he asked.

‘Me?' boomed the Laird. ‘Good God, if it wasn't for me there wouldn't be any supper—I organised it.' He settled back on his pillow.

The card game went on. The table was a blanket spread on two cases of .303 ammunition. The lamps were two empty jam tins filled with rifle oil scrounged from the Q store, with pieces of tent rope threaded through the centre of the lids for wicks. They had been made under the Laird's directions and gave a fitful yellow light and a thick curling tongue of black smoke. All the card players spat black for a month after they got rid of those lanterns of the Laird's.

Notes and silver were scattered on the blanket in front of the players and they sat crouched on boxes and buckets. Dick the Barber shuffled the cards with swift, neat flicking movements of his well-kept fingers so that they whispered and rippled as he ran them. It was a smooth shuffle, of long practice—a gambler's shuffle, a cardsharp shuffle—and pretty to watch.

Not that Dick the Barber ever cheated at cards, but he'd learned the art when he was a young bloke and used to play with the crowd from Clancy's gym out in the old back room behind the stadium. Banker Orville taught him, and Banker knew more about shuffling cards, but Banker never took money from a sucker—unless the sucker thought he was smart, and then he took it off him just for the good of his soul and to teach him a lesson.

Old John had left the game once already tonight after being beaten three good hands running by young Griffo. He had taken himself for a walk up around the orderly room. His stomach and back were aching from the discomfort of his box seat and his mouth was stale and bitter with nicotine from the constant, nervous smoking.

He had felt an impotent fury at himself, for losing the bets and for showing his anger. Old John wanted to be liked—he had a great hunger for friendship and affection. But his small soul could only ape the words and gestures of it.

They were probably talking about him now. ‘Old John always squeals when he loses,' they'd be saying.

Young Griffo would be counting his winnings and saying in that calmly sarcastic voice of his: ‘Hell! If I'd known he was going to whinge so much I'd have given him a quid to stop the game from breaking up. I've a good mind not to play with him again. I don't like a man that can't lose.'

Old John couldn't stay away long. He wandered back to where the remnants of the game were playing cribbage. He wandered up, carefully casual, and watched their play for a while with a small slavey grin. The brown leather of his face was drawn tight over the gaunt bone and his forehead was bald to the top of his head—a skull face.

There came a break in the play and old John moved back into his seat and sat grinning in what he meant to be a pleasant fashion but which had something of the quality of a dog that has been kicked but still wants to be friendly.

He grinned, showing dirty teeth, and said in a hurried, confidential whisper: ‘I borrowed a few shilling up the road—what about we go back to poker again, eh?'

‘I'll run 'em round for deal,' says young Griffo, flicking the broad around face up to each player. ‘First jack.'

The Laird finished his last bite of toast and rich, greasy pork sausage.

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘This bloke had gone away and here's this orchard heavy with fruit. Well, we think. It's a pity to see those poor citizens in the city deprived of their vitamins. So we borrow a horse and dray and slave for a fortnight—taking the stuff by night and casing it up and freighting it away.

‘About ten days later we get a letter from the Market Board. There's no cheque, but a little note that says, “Dear Sir,” it says, “We have disposed of your consignment of apples but the return was insufficient to cover the cost of freight and we enclose a bill for ninepence which represents the balance of the freight charge. Trusting you will forward this amount by return mail, we remain, yours faithfully…”

‘Yeah, we worked for a fortnight for less ninepence.'

The Laird was remembering that shed at Ginty's place where they stacked the fruit—working by the flickering yellow light of a hurricane lamp which stained the warm, sweet darkness of the shed.

He sank gently, and aware, into the warm flood of memory…the thin, sappy smell of sawn pine from the boxes and the mellow, ripe smell of the apples, and Ginty giving them a hand—his slow, amorous voice, a voice that licked its lips and savoured the words with earthy lasciviousness—as he told the story, the long anatomically detailed story of a generous-bodied French prostitute he had lived with for a week in Paris during the last war. It was Ginty's only story and he had been telling it every night—any time Ginty talked for more than five minutes he started to tell the story or else started to complain about his wife who was tall and thin and mean with herself.

Ginty was dead now—a tree had fallen too soon under his axe.

Regan held up his book but he wasn't reading.

This would be his first time in action. It had always been the same for him—this fear of being hurt and fear of people knowing…

When he was only a kid, his father was trying to teach him to swim out to the reef where it ringed out about fifty yards from the shore, making a smooth pool in the surf. The ‘Blue Hole' they used to call it.

‘I'm going to teach you to swim, son,' he said. ‘The same way as my old man taught me.'

He picked young Regan up and threw him as far as he could out into the smooth water. And when the child came to the surface choking and crying:

‘Go on! Swim! Swim!'

But the child floundered in terror, choking and crying, and was half-drowned when the father finally dragged him in. And later, when they got home, old Regan gave the kid a thrashing, a cold-blooded thrashing, for being a coward. Old man Regan had fear in his heart, too.

So Regan lay very still and thought of all tomorrows. Desperately he wanted to be accepted as one of these casual, hard-bitten men—as they appeared to him. But all the time the fear was gnawing at his bowels and he was afraid it must show in his face.

That was why he gambled and lost all his money. He wanted them to say: ‘He's a good gambler, Regan!' And he talked big and casual about rackets and brawls. He wanted them to say: ‘Regan knows how to take care of himself—he's been around.'

He tried to imagine himself in action—tried to imagine what it would be like from what he'd heard…

‘We're cut off,' the Captain says. ‘Someone's got to try and get back through the valley, but I'll say it straight—it's a hundred to one shot if you get through. Anyone take it?'

No one in the battered little group stirs. Then Regan gets slowly to his feet and settles the sling of his Owen on his shoulder. He draws deep on the stub of his cigarette and flicks it away deliberately. He rubs the back of his hand across his bristly chin.

‘I'll go,' he says casually.

He tried to imagine himself on a lone patrol…or leading a bayonet charge on a hill…

But always in these imaginings there came the moment of pain. And although he couldn't conjure the feel of lead or steel biting into his flesh, he felt the numbing terror in his bowels—the same dazed, blind terror he had felt when he was a child smothering in the smooth water.

And he thought desperately: ‘What will I do? How will I know what to do?'

He tried to wipe the dreams away and concentrate on his book. But after he had read a few lines the print blurred again and the pattern began to weave over.

An odd line kept turning in his brain: ‘That was a long time ago and in another country…'

It was a line he had read somewhere, or a line Deacon had used, but he couldn't remember—at school, maybe…

Young Snowy from the orderly room stuck his head in the tent. He was wearing a large mysterious grin. ‘Sergeant Pennyquick, your presence is requested at the Company orderly room…but quickly.'

There was a babble of questioning: ‘What's on? What's doing, Snowy? What the hell is it this time? Is it the move?'

Whispering John tossed down his hand: ‘Deal me out until I find out what's up.'

Snowy lingered a moment after John was gone: ‘This is it,' he said, grinning significantly. ‘I'll drum you—pack your bags—this is it—that's all I'm at liberty to divulge.'

‘This is it—this'll be it,' said Bishie. ‘Now's the time to say your prayers.'

‘Praying'll do you no good,' said the Laird. ‘If your number's up, it's up—that's all there is to it.'

‘Oh, I wouldn't altogether disbelieve in the power of prayer,' said Dick the Barber.

‘I remember a lass called Bertha—a big lass, beef to the ankles, but a hell of a nice kid. Her father used to run the Four Square pub down the 'Gong. “Big Bertha” we used to call her.

‘She was always good for a round of drinks on the cuff if you ran short of change and she was always good for a bite if you were short of a quid. Her old man had a couple of dogs and used to train them down on the back track where we ran ours.