Shelley rubbed his greying, close-cropped head. ‘No, it’s just getting jammed in a patch of lousy no-good sand when you’re not expecting it, and at me most god-awful time.’
Everyone worked, with rakes, planks and shovels. Rubber burned from wheels uselessly spinning, and the futile grind of the motor seemed to broadcast its trouble across the blackness. Shelley tried again, but every attempt to get it out by engine-power dug the wheels further in. He raged at the unexpected: ‘We’ll have to race for that ravine now, to drop in safe before dawn.’
The fire they were playing with was beginning to burn their fingers. Frank wanted to get at the wind and throttle it — in spite of the fact that, as Shelley said, it would obliterate their tracks. Its erratic moaning made him sweat. The sky was an owl’s eye they were crawling around in. Stuck fast in the sand, the whole dawn world of the wilderness was hooting softly over them — until totally drowned by a raving lorry engine like a massive dum-dum drill dividing his life with the maximum pain and clumsiness.
Four planks were under the tyres, sand spaded clear. They were a team of horses and, all their goods scattered as if to start a market where one had never been before, the wheels gripped and climbed along the wood. Frank felt like cheering. The sand was grey grit, bone dry, and once off the planks they were in it again. The pool had turned into a lake, a morass of dust. This was the raw, real sweat of life, plagued by a burning cold wind and empty stomachs, tindermouths opening from the extreme backbone of life, trials and hazards before dawn where everything is impregnated with the total discouragement of universal past happenings. If the spirit can recognize this feeling and laugh at it, boot it down and go back to hope and work, then the book is closed and the trek without print or maps can begin.
Frank pushed, lifted, heaved with all his strength. He lay on his back shovelling sand from the oily stinking undergut of the lorry, with danger of it subsiding, pressing him down into suffocation and death. ‘I’ve done some rum work in my time,’ he said to the uncomprehending Moroccan working the same seam nearby, ‘shifted all sorts o’ rammel, but this lot takes the bleddy cake, mate.’
Shelley knelt by, a half-knowing glance at the overall situation. Frank was becoming an unknown man to him: the broadening of his accent back to a deeper Midland Limey made him intimidating, a stranger, lying there at his ferocious and vital work. But the mood passed when the lorry was clear again.
Frank lit a cigarette. While working he had forgotten the wind. Now it was back in his ears, functional at least in that it dried his sweat, stiffened the dishrags of his clothes. He saw himself in the oblong mirror of the lorry as he climbed in, conscious of his increasing strength. His short hair was grey from ash and sand, face pallid showing a wide grin with even teeth, arms apart as he heaved himself in, ready for the death-grip of whatever might get at him. But in his face and frame, subtlety was on the march, infiltrating, penetrating, ignoring his parapets, swarming into the desert of himself.
Dawn was breaking, free-associating ink spreading into daylight: black, blue, green and red. The land was uneven to the east, but still fairly level. Shelley drove, and the lorry went like a rhinoceros in panic. They held on, wishing long life to their bones. Some rocks were hit as if the lorry would split in two, send guns flying, bullets spitting and grenades coughing over humps and hollows. Was it like this on the moon? Even the grey dust in saucers of earth looked cosmic in the spreading light. Yesterday had no connection with this.
One case of rifles had been given out. ‘If any point of doubtful return exists on the trip,’ Shelley said, ‘this is it.’ French planes flew from airfields at Colomb Bechar, eighty miles east, and patrols operated now and again from Meridja. F L N scouts in the area would warn of any approaching danger. But nothing would be seen if all went as it normally did, quietly. The only people met would be those of the F L N waiting to come for the supplies.
24
‘We stay here all day,’ Shelley said when they reached the ravine, ‘and tonight trundle fifteen dark miles east and hope to meet up with the boys coming to get the stuff.’ It was easily said, and to move your finger a few inches here and there on an empty map. The ravine was a narrow cutting in a country of many similar concealments. They covered the lorry with cloths, sand and thornbush to make it invisible from the air, and from land unless someone stumbled right into the hiding place. ‘If that happens,’ Shelley grinned, ‘he’ll never see mom or pop again.’
Out of the twelve, six were continually deployed among clefts and boulders surrounding the ravine. Warning signals would not only bring the rest up to reinforce them, but a further system of ankle-trips set out by Shelley with great skill and patience ensured all twelve firing at once without any voice being heard — though this was elaborate precaution rather than seriously intended defence. However, Frank couldn’t see how a more skilful ambush could have been set, a perfect trap in the middle of nowhere. It was a combination of guard and ambush, a magnetized web of defence known in the Chinese manual as the ‘spider layout’. Of the two Brens, Frank manned one, and a Moroccan held the other. The rest had rifles and grenades.
Frank was flattened beside a rock, an enfiladed view of the plain matched to the Moroccans strung around to the right whom he knew to be there but could not see. The half conscious workings of his brain were muzzled by the uncannily sharp alertness with which his eyes registered the landscape they were to watch. He felt like a boat out in this grey and beige wilderness, rocky plateau in front, ravine behind. The sun burned, his ears still filled with the sound of the engine racing as, towards the last dawn, its tyres had spun to escape the rut they’d sunk into, as his own mind and body had formerly and likewise crazed him in the thousand useless revolutions of his own spirit. The land turned a dim red, then purple, the horizon shimmering, a line beyond which the remains of a man’s soul might find final rest, or the ways and means of change that he had always deserved.
The last time he’d held a loaded Bren was on an army range eleven years ago, and not hoping to kill anyone. To wait was theatrical, because waiting meant thought, a continual monologue of destruction and fulfilment. I’m waiting in case the French show up, when I’d give a lot for it to be the British, because they are the ones I should be doing my nut against. Each to his own, and the rest will look after itself. If Kenya was still on I’d make my way there — or somewhere else if I get safe out of this. The past wouldn’t come to him, and he didn’t know whether to be glad or not. It seemed good that it wouldn’t, that it skulked beyond some horizon he’d left behind. His grey eyes glazed the rocks and dips for signs of life. Nothing. Even William Posters blended with the landscape, ghost of the bleak steppe toting a gun, on a level of equality with those who would persecute and prosecute. He hadn’t thought of him for months, in any case — William Posters, that soul-anchor stuck in your craw, those dim jerking pictures flickering on the screen behind your eyes when closed, working bewildering renegade rebel magic on the sentimental layers of your caked heart asking for pity and understanding as he flitted, half butterfly, half oil-rag, between the changing shadows of the past. He had lost his cap, dismantled his face, outspanned his forever nebulous cause, and walked over the bottomless cliff towards which you — Frank — had been leading him, not quite without knowing it, from the days of consciousness, whenever that was.
Bill Posters, thank God, had died at last in the ruins of Radford-Stalingrad. Frank had seen it, or pictured it as if he had: poor Bill sitting by the wall eating his bread, having given his persecutors the ten-minute slip, relaxed and rested at this small victory, smiling to himself at the peace, and at the good taste of bread, thinking so devoutly how good-looking was that gorgonzola moon above chimney pots he hadn’t noticed weren’t smoking any more. O Bill, you go off the boil for ten minutes, and the game is up! A crane starts working and smashes an ironball down against the wall he’s leaning against (men on night-work because they can’t clear this slum-land quick enough) and William Posters is crushed to death under the slabs and bricks, beams and fireplaces. Undernourished and hunted, he never stood a chance. They found him dead after digging him out, and nobody recognized him as the William Posters whose legendary name had been on so many walls for a hundred years. So he died, unidentified. He hoped he’d died, but who could tell? Such unknown great men sometimes become ghosts and haunt you long enough for it to last the rest of your life. Unless of course you had a hand in their killing. That would be treachery, but what the hell — you not only had to live but you had to survive as well.