He spat the brandy taste out, a strange stillness, no man visible. He was alone, facing a wind hundreds of miles across. It brought no panic, didn’t frighten him. Bravery was something he’d never thought about, like so much else. Overcoming the pain of sun and thirst brought back memories that were sweetened by solitude. Three hours were three days, three months, three years, three decades. He no longer felt a new man. The old man who had gone through his tether and was about to become the new man, perhaps. That was more like it, the old man doing violence to himself and others without knowing it, but the new man knowing it, already committing violence against nature by wanting to overpower the wild stallion of nature that must be held down, gelded, hobbled, and put to use. He remembered the factory vividly, more so than the layout at home, than wife, kids, or furniture. The factory was a permanent set-up in the back rooms of his brain, the violence and rationality of machinery, its benevolence when kept full-tilt at its proper use.
The day would drag on — that was as far as he wanted to see ahead, teeth locked like the fixed bolt of his machine-gun. A headache rolled vibrations of the parched wilderness through him, but a grid of clarity before his eyes drew in memories that his brain tried to reject because he hadn’t been able to control them, none at all except the one that had landed him here. His heart beat like a flower bomb fixed in the culvert of his own life’s iron road, waiting for some long predestined train or convoy to come along. His body lay upon the stillness, stones hot against his fingers.
He had lived most of his life on the assumption that whatever he wanted was unattainable. That bastard, William Posters, had to die, even if Frank had to snuff it with him, leap that cliff with his ten-ton immortal shadow still gripping his back. Posters was too English for this world. He laughed to himself, could afford to out here where it only bounced back in his face. That sponge-man who’d gobbled up his life and fantasy didn’t mean a thing any more, that telly-rat and dope-peddler who hammered the nails into hands and brain to stop you moving, whispered that since something in life was unattainable you had to stop reaching for it, that it was better to rot among the slums and ruins of a played-out way of life, persecuted and prosecuted, flitting from wall to shadow whither your own demons pursued you in an ever narrowing maze with misery and failure at the middle. It was about time that crane-ball stunned him into the wickedest oblivion of all — oblivion deserved.
Even in his own pure dreams Frank had felt something in life he might never get, though mulling now in clear daylight, there’d been no reason why he shouldn’t. He didn’t know at all what it was. Maybe it wasn’t attainable in this life (and that was that) but would form the unearned reward of lives coming after him. Perhaps that also was for the birds, for the desert hawk circling and cawing above. But if he led his life to the greatest extent of which he was capable and disregarded this premonition of dreams, then he would break beyond this horizon wall, sensed all his life, whether it was of brick or cloud or ultimately nothing at all.
His dreams and thoughts were ancient and similar: to dissect them would be like chucking a fag into the latrines and pissing it to bits; nothing gained. All he wanted to do was fire a single shot, finish off the shite-hawk or corpse-gosling that went on circling their hideaway.
He pressed a stone-edge onto a scorpion, and the insect’s tail, animating like an aerial gone mad, hovered and twisted for the suicide stab. It came. Frank watched it turn grey, and the tiny ants patrolling for it. In half an hour exactly it had gone, his private desert clock wherein six of them made a three-hour guard period. William Posters, his body swinging over that cliff and down through space, wouldn’t leave him alone, that snivelling muffle-capped man on the eternal run who’d never had a Bren at his shoulder, and whose fall was followed by the wide-winged bird swooping along the ravine for a quick look and to drop its napalm shit.
A plane flew over at midday, a Mystère jet playing west and south from Colomb Bechar. Frank was edging towards his second round of guard when the hollow, continual boom of its approach rolled like a barrel along the stony earth. When the noise leapt into the sky, he flattened. Shelley had told them there would be no danger. Only the slow ones mattered, and a battle was splintering around the Monts des Ksour, north-east of Colomb, so maybe they were chewing away up there. Head down, Frank felt the sound go over, stayed a half minute before latching himself to his Bren, his fingers on it before the Moroccan took his away and slid back to the ravine.
More sweat piled out than if he’d been walking, certainly not less than when shovelling sand from under the chassis of the stranded lorry. The sun was no longer overhead, and he waited for its decline so that they could move through the cold and more preferable night. Having controlled his body for so many hours between the sun and stones, in perfect stillness and silence, he felt that he had become harder, craftier, and more subtle as a soldier than any who might belong to a national and conscript army.
If only the long day would fall and break its back, get killed like that finished and shared-put scorpion. He poured water on the back of his hand and licked it off. He hadn’t eaten, not even in the ravine, felt no hunger left in him. He fed on eighteen months of thought, chewed through and thrown aside like the rammel of sucked-out bones, like the oil-rag Bill Posters didn’t get a smell of. But he was dead now, like the past. Bill Posters my vanishing brother, my colossus amigo turning to stone and sinking in quicksand, the multiple dream-deaths that a hero deserves; maybe caught by swarming napalm in the final barbaric ritual of Promethean fire, or edged out by old age after a lifetime of work and wisdom. Who is to say, and who is to care? There was nothing left except the brown paper of himself filling up out of the fertile desert.
That shite-hawk spun into twins now. An aeroplane, birds, the sun — only the sky had life. The twelve men were dead until they got up and walked, moved, or fired a shot. In the ravine Shelley had sat huddled in a shallow cave, Arab music playing low on a transistor small as his hand, saying to Frank that this was always the worst day of the trip, when he felt cut off from mankind and needed proof that the world hadn’t been obliterated. Frank smiled. He didn’t need proof. If it had been obliterated he would have felt it without any proof.
‘Not me,’ Shelley said. ‘I want to know when to get up and shout for joy.’ He looked thin and tense, though no one could call him worried because he was incapable of it.
The sun was on its way down. Frank rubbed his eyes, scraped grit from the corners with his fingernail. Once in Tangier, after a night’s booze-up with Shelley on straight red plonk, black specks had jumped before his eyes all next day, as if the midges of summer had taken over the winter air. At the worst it was like walking near a dead paperfire when the wind played on it — specks of all shapes that he actually believed were there and tried to brush away. Shelley laughed that it was his liver acting up because of too much wine.