8

It happened late on the evening of that same day. Benson was sitting on a low wall in a side street off School Lane talking to a man whose long matted hair hung about his face. It was around ten. He had been on his way to the Commercial in Ranelagh Street for a final beer and whisky chaser and had got lost in this dark, deserted region of warehouses and back premises of offices and shops. He had found this man sitting on the wall holding a bottle and had embarked upon an exchange of views.

“I’m not saying I have been singled out,” he said. “I may even not be the central figure. I may not be getting the full blast of it. Someone else, somewhere else, is probably flooded with revelation and I’m just getting the odd splash. You know what Schopenhauer says, each man is a protagonist in his own drama while playing a supporting role in the drama of others. But how can you tell? At any given moment how do you know which is the principal role and which the supporting one? Or are they simultaneous?”

The man took a drink from the bottle he had been holding with both hands against his chest. He sighed heavily. Noises of traffic came from streets not far away but here in this enclave it was dark and quiet. “You are a talker,” the man said after a moment or two.

“Ten seconds either way I wouldn’t have seen it,” Benson said, “I might have heard it but I wouldn’t have seen it. So it is just a matter of a few pulse beats. The slaves would sometimes jump overboard but of course they didn’t get much of a chance because they were shackled. Then they would sometimes refuse to eat anything, they would starve themselves to death, in spite of floggings and so on, they were so set on it. Then there was what the slavers called fixed melancholy. That seems to have been a great killer. Even when they were in good health they would die one after the other for no apparent reason. It seems that the Ibo were specially prone to this and the food-gathering tribes of what was known then as the Gaboon. I have been reading an account of it by a medical student who shipped on an illegal slaver in 1859. The theory was that negroes, in contrast to the civilised races, so-called, could actually kill themselves by holding their breath.”

“That is impossible,” the man said. “Do you believe that?” He took another drink, holding the bottle with both hands. Benson saw that his hands were shaking.

“No, I don’t.” Benson raised his own hands in repudiation of the idea.

“You must be bloody round the bend if you believe that,” the man said angrily. “Coming here talking about slaves. You are out of order, mate.”

“No, it was shock. Think of it. They were taken from everything they knew. They might have come from a thousand miles in the interior, lived among forest all their lives. They had never seen a ship before, never seen the sea. Think of the shock of it, that terrible surf. No, the point I wanted to make was that they died because of their strength of life somehow. I know it sounds paradoxical. Not like the man who jumped off the building. I could do that. I could jump. You know, one day, just between moments, say it is about three o’clock in the afternoon, bright, blank afternoon, middle of the day more or less, a long way from action or change …”

Benson fell silent, unable to explain now, as he had been unable to explain to Alma and the others in the pub, why the elements of that afternoon had so plagued his imagination, the light, that mild, innocuous sky, the white prison of the railing half-dissolved … “No one sees much wrong with me,” he said after a moment. “Probably didn’t see much wrong with him until he jumped. I mean, it is extraordinary. I don’t sleep, I’m losing weight, my habits have changed, but nobody—”

“People don’t like to say nothing,” the man said. “Not to your face. They see it right enough, ho yes.”

“What do you mean?” Benson peered sideways but the man was leaning forward and his features were obscured by the thick, matted hair. “Ho yes,” he said again, more loudly. “I’ve been there before, mate.”

After a moment or two of courteous waiting, Benson said, “Self-breeding images of sterility and stagnation multiply in my mind. Endless mud flats, halls of mirrors. My own image, my labouring mind externalised, endlessly repeated, to the point of nausea and despair.”

“God gave us breath for more than talking,” the man said. “You could die in front of their eyes.”

“Imagine it, perpetual stimulation, no release. A perpetual tumescence of the imagination. I call it the Albert and Sheila syndrome. That’s a private joke but really one is on the edge, on the absolute edge of the abyss. And the abyss—”

“I could do with one myself,” the man said. He got down, still holding his bottle, turned away and disappeared down a narrow opening that ran at right angles to the wall.

Minutes passed and he did not return. Benson was obscurely puzzled. He could not fathom the intonation of that last remark. The man had spoken as if they both shared some intimate desire. Simple boredom, probably. A pretext for escape. Suddenly it came to him: could he have thought I said ‘piss’?

He was about to proceed on his way when he saw someone move across a piece of open space in front of some lock-up garages opposite where he was sitting. At first he thought this might be the man with the bottle but there was faint lamp light behind him and Benson saw that he was young and that his head was shaved except for a Mohican tuft along the top. He crossed the alley and stood near the wall some yards away. He did not look at Benson, whom instinct urged to move on but who instead stayed where he was and began talking.

“Chap beside me on the wall just disappeared,” he said. “Vanished into thin air. Well, we are such stuff as dreams are made on. You learn to live on your own. My wife used to say I was full of self-love. It’s not love, I told her, I don’t love myself, it is self-absorption. She used to say I couldn’t tell the difference between real people and the products of my own fiction. I don’t know if you are married?”

“Nah,” the youth said. “Why you wanna know?”

“No particular reason. What I mean is, she was accusing me of trying to make people subject to my imagination, to the requirements of a story, instead of seeing them as they really are, with their own needs and so on. It’s a very difficult thing to refute, because you can’t know, can you? She had some burnish about her the day she came to tell me she was leaving. She looked as if she had got herself ready for an important interview. She wanted to impress me, to be regarded as a good candidate. Even at that moment … She had the shine of a lonely decision on her. Like a day-to-day polish or a lustre that people get who are still trying, trying not to go under. I knew someone once, Milne his name was, Alistair Milne, used to play the clarinet, carried it around in a leather case, and the case and the clarinet both had that same lonely shine on them from all the touching and stroking. The polish of loneliness. I think that clarinet was a sexual substitute for Alistair.”

“I know what you are,” the young man said. “You’re a fuckin’ pooftah.” He turned his head and looked across the street. “We’ve got a fuckin’ pooftah here,” he shouted.

Benson was dismayed to see three more youths emerge from behind the row of garages. As they crossed through the lamp light he noted the savagery of their hair. The first youth had been waiting for them – perhaps keeping a look out. “Good God, no,” he said. He smiled broadly. “You’ve got me completely wrong.” He saw the youths look up and down the street and knew that neither denial nor admission would avail him now.

“You’ve got me completely wrong, old chap,” one of the youths said.

“He’s a fuckin’ pooftah,” the first youth said. “He was just working up to it, talking about doing somethink wiv a clarinet.”

“Naughty,” one of the others said. “That’s pooftah lingo for a blow-job.”

The four of them were round him now standing close. The face of the one in front was only a few inches away, close enough for Benson to get the smell of his breath. This youth had small, malignant eyes and a very low forehead – the razed hairline lay just above the bulge of the brows. He seemed to be the leader. “You’re a dirty old bugger then, aren’t you?” he said. “Come on now, what are you? It is people like you what is letting Britain down, not the fans.”

Despite something almost playful in the tone of this, Benson knew that they were getting ready to hit him. He knew too that once he was on the ground he would be in danger of serious injury from their boots. The moment so frequently foreseen had arrived. “Just a minute,” he said keeping his voice steady with an effort. “You are making a big mistake.” The simian face before him seemed to smile slightly as if sensing his fear. In this moment of crisis the resource of fantasy came to Benson, the rehearsed magic of the word. Level glance, slight smile. Still your beating heart. “I suppose you’ve heard of the Banana Split?” he said.

He saw the smile disappear. “You fuckin’ pervert—” Benson lunged sharply against the youth on his right, who was gripping his arm, catching him off balance. The grip relaxed. With a violent movement Benson broke free. He felt a heavy blow in the small of his back. The next moment he was round behind them and into the narrow passage by the wall. The man with the bottle had gone this way. Benson reasoned that there must be an exit and there was: he saw the lights of a street ahead and started running.

He heard no sounds of pursuit but he kept on running, mouth open, lungs labouring, until he was nearly out of the street. Then a sense of dignity slowed him down to a walk. He looked over his shoulder and saw the passage deserted behind him. He came out on to what he recognised as Hanover Street, on the corner opposite Central Station. Here, among traffic and lights and people, he stood still for some moments breathing heavily, open-mouthed still, astonished at this normality, this public indifference to his escape from bodily harm. After a minute or two he crossed in the direction of the station with the idea of making his way home – he was too late for a drink now. As he approached the wide, paved area at the corner of Bold Street, a thin old man in a black top-coat much too large for him moved out of the shadow of the wall. He was crouched slightly, his narrow head cocked and listening. Benson realised that he was about to start singing, he was listening to himself in advance. It was effective, it made you look at him, wait with him, this listening to the silence. Benson stopped and stood on the pavement among a knot of others. His heart was still agitated from his exertions and he felt a dull pain in his back where he had been struck.

The man raised his head. A look of strain and yearning came to his face. Then the words, in a thin, nasal tenor:

“When I survey the wo-o-ondrous cross

On whee-ee-ch the prince of glory died …”

It was quite a performance. He moved as he sang, took several paces away from the lamp light, dragging the right foot as if lame, in what looked like a parody of lameness, almost, Benson thought, as if he wished to illustrate the words of the hymn, to show the human soul halt and lame before that wondrous cross he sang of … Something in this disturbed him, compelled his attention, tired as he was and shaken still by his encounter with the Mohicans. The age and evident poverty of the singer lent him a powerful appeal. But it was not that only. Benson was reminded suddenly of the beggars of his childhood, dragging through the cobbled streets with songs of pathos and piety, faces tilted up to the windows, on the watch for pennies.

The singer turned, began to limp his few paces back, head raised and shuddering slightly in a palsy of devotion.

“My ree-ee-chest gain I count but loss

And pour contempt on all my pride.”

As he drew near the lamp again, light from it fell on the left side of his face and with an inexpressible shock of recognition Benson saw high on his cheek the crimson birthmark, still emblazoned there after forty years, still vivid amidst the decay of all else about him, pristine as when he was twenty, the shape of a cloverleaf or trefoil petal, with the centre lobe stunted and marred; and, exactly as if memory had been loosened by this shock, it seemed to Benson that he knew the voice too and the singing style, the nasal tenor, the trailing notes, that doleful quiver of the head; though the last time it had all been to comic effect and to the notes of a badly tuned piano, rising over laughter and the hubbub of shifting feet and scraping chairs … Lance-corporal Thompson, ‘C’ Company, 2nd Battalion Royal Wiltshires, last seen in 1944, in Italy, in the gashed and riven darkness of a May night. Killer Thompson, shape of death in my mind for forty years. Now this shambling hymn-singer.

Benson stood staring, transfixed by this recognition and by the certainty that came flooding with it, that this was what he had been waiting for, walking the streets for – this was where the signs led. For some moments longer he stayed where he was, watching Thompson go through his act. He saw one or two people put coins in the upturned cap on the pavement near the lamp-post. He might have done the same but terror of being recognised held him back. The fear was irrational – he had himself only known Thompson through the birthmark – but it came with all the force of superstition; and when Thompson swung round under the lamp light, presenting the unblemished side of his face, and it seemed for a moment that their eyes met, Benson drew back and after a brief pause of irresolution began to walk away up the slope towards Lime Street.

After a dozen steps he stopped again. The thought of losing Thompson, thus strangely found, was appalling, intolerable, the sum of all losses at that moment, worse than loss of love. Keeping the singer well in sight he walked into the shadow of the shopping arcade at the entrance to the station. From here he could watch Thompson as he made his few crippled steps away from the lamp and back again. The voice came more distantly now but the words were still quite distinct. He had embarked on another hymn:

“Lead kindly light

Amidst the encircling gloom

Lead thou me on.”

He specialised, it seemed, in the lugubrious. Benson watched the mouth moving, the cocked head listening. Thompson was listening to himself exactly as he had done in the cellar at Anzio, in Slater’s Show, the Beachhead Buddies, singing his lugubrious songs of home and when the bleedin’ war is over and the girl next door; exactly as he had listened on that other stage, the one they called the Wadis, to sounds of movement and change, displacements of earth, clink of weaponry against rock, scrape of boots, signs we learned to interpret – and none learned better than he, than Thompson.

Benson looked away for a moment with an instinct of self-protection. To remember so clearly, so immediately, so helplessly, was like a violation of the will. Easier to doubt one’s present senses … The sight of a birthmark, a puff of devotional breath, and his house had come crashing down – he was amazed to find it so flimsy. Cancelled at a stroke the intervening years, perplexing my brain, marking my face, all the absurdities of my elderly state, this leaf-fall that has drifted silence over me …

He had wondered sometimes about the men he had fought with, whether the survivors were alive still, what had become of them; but in the aftermath of war they had no real existence for him, they belonged to the few square miles of the Beachhead, to those few months of stalemate in 1944. The May breakout from Anzio had put an end to that territory for ever, dissolved the borders in blood. Now wheat and vines grew over it all – he had been back once to see it. The Beachhead was not a place at all now, only a region of trauma, and the men who had been there lived only in the fear of boredom of those days, the jokes and rumours, the wet, slithering clay of the gullies, stench from discarded meat cans, the sicklier smell of death, the demented nightingales singing undeterred through it all. They belonged there really, the living and the dead, he too, hiding here in the shadow of the arcade, and Thompson mouthing and limping for pennies: they had both got loose somehow, wandered off into this No-Man’s Land of the present.

Thompson belonged in the show, one of Slater’s own, one of the Beachhead Buddies. Little, thin-faced man, ferrety and wiry. Ginger hair, blue eyes, angry red mark. He was in the chorus. And he sometimes did solos. Old-fashioned army songs, music hall type of thing. Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty. He did the little man, jaunty, cowardly, shameless. Call out the Boys of the Old Brigade what made Old England free. Call out me muvver, me sister and me bruvver but for Gawd’s sake don’t call me. Piano honking away. Later we had a three-piece band. Subversive or sentimental, the songs he sang, not patriotic, but they liked it – everyone joined in, great roar of voices. You could get five hundred men into one of those cellars. He went on before Walters and me. We would be waiting backstage. Coming on from the dim passage, lights and applause to deafen and blind you and hot with all the cheering men, then a narrow space of silence for Walters and me. Space of the stage exactly known …

Thompson had stopped singing. He was crouched over his cap under the lamp light. Counting his money. No, he shovelled it almost without looking into his overcoat pocket. He was getting ready to go. Preparing to follow, Benson thought of tall Walters with the square-cut sideboards and the small moustache that he kept always neat until the day the blood ran over his face and he could do nothing about it. Brown eyes, deep set. Steady, humorous eyes – Walters saw the funny side, while he saw. Straw boater, blazer, white trousers, the Edwardian gent complete, this debonaire suitor when last seen a bundle of mud and blood and torn khaki.

Thompson had started across the pavement towards him. He moved further into the arcade but the other passed the entrance without a glance and went on towards Lime Street, walking very slowly but with no trace of a limp. The overcoat came almost to his ankles. He stopped to investigate the litter bin on the corner. Benson stopped too, watching the other root among cartons and Coca-Cola tins and find nothing. He crossed the road at the traffic lights, turned left down Lime Street then went up the steps into the station forecourt. Benson was in time to see him enter the cafeteria.

He did not follow immediately. He went some way towards the platform entrances, then stopped, momentarily at a loss. With an obscure instinct of flight he glanced up at the departure schedules. From where he was standing he could see Thompson at the counter getting a hamburger and something hot in a plastic cup.

He could hardly have chosen a more public place for his supper. The cafeteria was lit with appalling plenitude by side lamps and overhead neon and it was walled with glass on three sides. Those inside were as open to view as fish in a frondless, floodlit tank. There was only one way in or out. He could hardly lose Thompson here. Nevertheless, he felt insecure, he wanted to be nearer. After hesitating some moments longer he went through the swing doors. Approaching the counter he saw Thompson in a corner with his back to the entrance. He had never been in here before and he was dazed momentarily by the assault of light. It streamed from walls and ceiling, bounced from the orange and yellow plastic of counters, tables, chairs, was reflected in flat gleams from the silver foil that lined the ceiling. Light in here was the visual equivalent of a prolonged scream. He asked for tea. The girl who served him was languid and pallid, etiolated – as if she needed her roots renewing in the dark.

He took his tea to a table near to the door; from here he could see the back of Thompson’s head and a section of his overcoat; between them was a woman with luggage and two small clambering children. He took one sip at his tea then put it down quickly; he had caught the smell of burning plastic from it; the hot liquid, acting on the spongy, white material of the container, gave off a smell like burning industrial waste. He had not wanted tea in any case. He was content to wait. So long as he could keep the other man in view he felt at peace.

It was a curious place, all the same, for Thompson to choose. Cheap of course – that would be a consideration; but people were too conspicuous in here; it was not natural for human beings to be so exposed to light, or perhaps merely not natural for Thompson …

Far cry from Wadis, he thought. Far cry from that maze of water courses where we squirmed along. There we sought concealment. That was Thompson’s habitat – he had strayed by accident into this terrible realm of light. After forty years. After dwelling clay-coloured there in memory for forty years. He would have dwelt there for ever but for this meeting. Watching Thompson’s motionless shoulder in its shabby black, watching the moving forms of people outside, beyond the glass partitions, he intoned to himself a formal description, something he often did in dreams and states of reverie: Beyond the ridge of Buonriposo, on the Western limits of the Beachhead, lay the upper reaches of the Moletta Stream, a tangled maze of water courses, called Wadis by the British troops from North Africa, because of their resemblance to the dry streambeds there.

He was rather pleased with this as an impromptu effort but of course they hadn’t been dry for most of the time, far from it, and it didn’t convey the real truth of the terrain. One might as well say that the stage in the cellar where we all performed under Slater’s direction, where Walters was Burlington Bertie and I was Velma the Vamp, was a level projection of such and such an area, raised so many feet above ground level. They were both stages, one where we strutted, the other where we crawled. Acres of the mind. Yet be assured we have no need to plot these acres of the mind with tumty-tumty-tumty-tum and monsters such as heroes find …But we do, we do have need. Why otherwise have I been led to Thompson after all these years? He fits the description, he is a monster such as heroes find.

Benson saw the black shoulder move, saw the head tilted back slightly, imagined the motion of Thompson’s thin throat as he drank. Killer Thompson. The Wadis were a murder ground and you were at home in them, hence that name. Men went off their heads there. You, foot-dragging psalmist, found your apotheosis. You were a great success. You were a famous looter. Rings, watches, wallets, cigarette-cases, lighters, sometimes an officer’s binoculars or even a camera sometimes. Sold back at B-echelon or on leave in Naples. And you didn’t get a scratch, or maybe later. Not then, not in the Wadis. Slater too – one knew he would never get hurt.

Some of those channels were shallow, hardly more than a scrape in the ground, hardly deep enough to hide a crawling man. Others went down forty feet or so, gorges dug out by the water. Centuries of gouging. And all interconnected, linked by our excavations and theirs into a complex system. The place was death to anyone with no sense of terrain, no sense of direction. Like the one I shot that day, with Thompson looking on. He is there now, in the open, in the sunshine, combing his hair, which is longish, glinting, colour of soiled gold. He is young, about my age. In the open, in full view. He has made a terrible mistake …

Thompson got up quite suddenly and moved towards the door. He passed by Benson’s table and Benson lowered his head, catching as he did so the other man’s smell, a pungent reek of stale sweat and unwashed clothing.

He rose at once and followed. He could not let the other out of his sight until he knew where he lived, where he could be found again. He followed down the steps, back on to Lime Street, round the corner up Mount Pleasant. He kept his eyes fixed on the form before him in the black overcoat several sizes too large, walking very slowly as though tired or sick, bearer somewhere about him of a vital phial, distillation from the past. Certainly nothing to do, he thought, with the man we killed together. He was a dead man before I pulled the trigger, such grotesque misjudgement carried death with it.

Cardinal crime, Slater would have called it. A blunder like that is a crime. Straight, serious brows, very composed face. Second Lieutenant Hugo Slater. Familiarise yourself with the terrain – that was one of his frequent sayings. He applied it to the stage space too, when we were rehearsing. A real slave-driver – he never let up. Not just a question of knowing the landmarks but an intimate sense of relation between your body and the ground, every little bump and hollow, every scrape and hummock. Until you can move about the stage with confidence. That intimate knowledge will make the show a success and it will save your life in the Wadis. Quality of survivors. Thompson had it. And I? I survived too. My cardinal crime killed Walters instead of killing me …

At the end of Catherine Street Thompson rooted for some moments in the rubbish bin near the bus stop, again found nothing. Then he crossed the road and began to traverse the wide area of waste ground on the other side. It was very dark here, once the street lamps had been left behind, and uneven under foot. Benson stumbled once or twice among weeded-over rubble left from the demolitions of years before. All over the city these areas of wasteland were growing; whole blocks fell into ruin, became hazardous and insanitary, were pulled down and the wounds left to heal themselves with grass and nettle and willowherb.

In the darkness, in his black coat, Thompson was difficult to see; Benson had to keep close so as not to lose him. They came out onto a narrow street of dilapidated terrace houses and boarded shop fronts. Benson glanced at the names in passing: Genevieve’s Hair Styling and Accessories, The Magic Carpet Café, Atkins Family Butcher. Smells of damp and excrement came through the boarded fronts. Monty Carlo’s Fish and Chips. That couldn’t be a real name surely. Heavily gridded post office on the corner. No lights showed, there were no signs of habitation in any of the houses, above any of the shops. Beyond, as if this devastated street were a first line of defence, rose the bastions of the Railton Housing Estate, towards which Thompson seemed to be heading.

Benson was tired now but he followed doggedly. Thompson passed through a set of bollards then a railed gate. They were in the shadow of the Estate now, in a wide concrete courtyard with buildings on three sides and a row of sheds with metal fronts on the other. In an entry off the courtyard Benson saw a rat running. He felt the crunch of glass under his feet. He followed Thompson through another gate, out into another courtyard identical to the first. Some windows were lit up, not many. Once, from an upper floor, he heard voices and later a baby crying somewhere; but for the most part the buildings were silent and dark.

Thompson went diagonally across the courtyard and entered a narrow lane where the buildings were close together. It was now that Benson almost lost him. Emerging from the lane he was just in time to see Thompson disappearing down the basement steps of a building on the corner.

He stood there some moments longer looking across at the place where Thompson lived, at the drainpipe hanging off the wall, the broken railing, the barricaded windows. Then he turned and began to retrace his steps, taking care to follow the same route. It was after one o’clock when he got back. Though physically exhausted he had no desire to sleep. He drank some whisky but it did nothing to relax him. For a long time he lay awake, restless and in some indefinable way alarmed, as if he had been singled out for something. The signs did not culminate in Thompson, he knew that now. They led beyond. From time to time, like a ritual incantation, the words of his own description came back to him. Beyond the ridge of Buonriposo, on the Western limits of the Beachhead, lay the upper reaches of the Moletta Stream.

They lead beyond, he thought, lying on his back, staring up at the dim ceiling. Beyond is all around us, not just in front. Cautiously, as if the act of recollection might put him in the same danger again, Benson spoke to his frightened, twenty-year-old self: I, you, Benson, you are crawling on your belly along a crack in the ground, urged on by the cicadas …