The ground was my ally, and time on my side. The realization that they also can be deceived who have been in the country all their lives gave me confidence. I would not be picked off like a pig in a kampong, or cut to bits one night after I had nodded into an impossibly expensive dream.
With a bayonet in one hand and a revolver in the other, I crouched and waited. The cough of water buffalo, bullfrog noises scraping the sky, and the comforting thump of surf half a mile away were pushed into the background. But my crude ambush would deceive nobody. I went into a potent daydream of the night, under a half moon threatening to light up fronds of grass that rendered my body ambiguous in the scrubby landscape. Part of every hour I waited to kill whoever might be creeping up to kill me, my senses synchronized to the extent that they pushed out anxiety and brought happiness.
The centre of my solar system was the hut, and I shifted clockwise, taking bearings on its glimmer. I felt a tightness at my left leg after standing longer than the intended five minutes. Aches and pains were not my bane, but I had been as still as wood, and should have expected such a seizure. Jumping up and down to bring the limb back to life might have made me a target, so I resisted. The tightness increased as if a rope were applied above the ankle.
The pressure was uneven, and the few seconds while in the grip of the small and I hoped merely playful snake were longer by far than any spiritual trips I had taken in the empty watches of more peaceful nights. Stillness was life, and yet to breathe might mean death. I saw the shadow of the snake’s head but, waiting for the sting, looked at the line of trees. Thought was my worst enemy, but all I wondered, over and over, was: if I touch it, will it turn into a stick? I didn’t, nor counted the minutes, but as they passed I grew calm, until the snake unravelled and went on its way.
I was in no mind to linger anymore on midnight wanderings. Oil tins on a pile of stones acted as alarm bells. Between sticks dug in the ground I set a sharp wire to scrape any ankle. If I had read about such tricks, I had forgotten the books. My enjoyment was total, and I decided that to be mature one must be cunning and unafraid.
6
I was unable to make any decisions except the wrong ones, but since they seemed right I enjoyed making them. Life was good because it didn’t matter what I did. Carry on sending. Everything would be all right as long as you couldn’t care less. Fresh from the troopship, I put on my demob suit and after four years felt very much the jaunty ex-serviceman. I bought a large bunch of carnations and took the train to Mortlake. Anne was in her parlour and, though out of my element, I fell in love again. In three months we were married. I worked in a jeweller’s shop and instead of life speeding up as I had expected, it got slower and one day stopped. I fell down behind the counter, and the tray of engagement rings I was showing to a girl and her young man sprayed over the floor. When I was strong enough to stand I walked out.
I said to Anne that the job had been a stopgap. She asked what my long-term plans were. I had nothing to say. Such a question was unjust, and I could only hope that Fate would not let me down. Life did not seem real.
‘It’s more real than you think,’ she said.
My feet refused to touch ground. ‘I can’t make plans.’
‘Others do.’
Her information was superfluous. I knew they did. But where did that get me? And where were they? Whenever she was right she reduced me to silence. Mostly she was right, so mostly there was silence. For some reason this silence annoyed her more than if she had been wrong and we had gone on talking. Reality was when I twiddled the tuning knob of the radiogram and heard morse chirping from the speaker. Whatever was said spoke only to me: news agency reports, ships’ telegrams, amateur chat, weather messages. The cryptic spheres washed me clean.
‘You seem tense.’
I nodded, and switched off.
‘Put on some Mantovani?’ she asked.
The music soothed her as the morse had calmed me.
‘I’m tired of loving someone who just isn’t there,’ she said.
‘I am here.’
‘You think so, but you’re not. Not to me, anyway.’
I held my hand under her nose. ‘This is me, isn’t it?’
She laughed. ‘I do love you, I suppose.’
I curled my hand into a fist. ‘And I love your nice long ginger hair, and your beautiful neat cunt.’
‘I hate it when you talk like that.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘You’re filthy.’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘You’re still not demobbed, to say such things.’
‘I won’t say it again.’ I was as contrite as could be.
She stood, and pushed my hand away. ‘Why don’t we go to the Feathers for a couple of hours?’
I belonged nowhere and to no one, so how could I claim to be in love? But I was. Being a girl of wit and perspicacity, she sensed my trouble and decided there was no cure. She was wrong, but I couldn’t blame her for not waiting.
She didn’t want to believe in a remedy because her own circuit was already shorting. One evening I found the flat stripped to the floorboards. The fireplace shelf in the living room held me up. Staring into a dusty cupboard I didn’t feel much of an ex-serviceman any more. I tried to dam the tears, but they found new routes down my cheeks. Four years in the mob, and I wasn’t even back where I started. I needed to get on and out and through and up and across and in any direction possible as long as I didn’t stay where I was. I had disappeared up my own arse and got lost.
I clung to the mantelshelf as if it were a plank of wood in the middle of the Atlantic, until I remembered the revolver in my attaché case. I spun a coin, saying heads me, tails her. Heads came three times, so I slammed in six and sucked the steel lollipop. I would have dipped it in jam, but she hadn’t left any food.
I had been drawn into the lobster pot of marriage, totally unprepared for such an investment. No need to apologize, Anne said. But there was, I insisted, wishing there hadn’t been. My face wore a twisted aspect as I looked in the mantelshelf mirror. After setting traps and perambulating the elephant grass to save my life, I had walked into one so obvious that I hadn’t even noticed. The same loaded gun was ready to stop me protesting about fate now that I was in a far less dangerous predicament.
I took the gun from my mouth, feeling older than when the barrel had gone in – though not much. In the mirror, I preferred not to recognize myself. Love won hands down over war when it came to making people miserable. There was much to learn, but I wanted to hide so far inside myself that no one would find me and I would be safe for ever.
I walked out with a suitcase and went to a radio school on the south coast, paying tuition fees from my savings so as to get my service qualifications converted to a certificate which would allow me to work on a ship or in aviation. Instead of being a shop assistant, I preferred listening to the traffic of the spheres. Marriage was for those whose emotional seesaw was properly centred. My spirit wanted to reach space where noises multiplied, in the hope that they would provide me with an answer as to why I was alive. I would stave off death by listening for the last message from ship or aircraft, or even while sending one of my own, and forget that I did not know what life was all about.
Anne, accurate in her knowledge, had seen no hope. I walked to one side of the pier and then the other, wearing two jerseys against the east wind. I would not try to make contact, even supposing I knew where she had gone, but hoped she considered me on the right side of forgiveness for whatever I might have done. For myself, I only forgive those I love, and she is still that person.