Sick of it, he was, sick of the sodding endless green, sick of the heat, sick of the bloody place throbbing with noise the whole time. Sick of the endless walking. A right bellyful of it, he’d had. They let him ride on an elephant the first couple of days, because he was still poorly, but now they’d realised that he was fit they insisted he walked. Monkeys shrieking away in the trees, all manner of creepy crawlies underfoot, nasty insects making all sorts of weird clicks.
He should have stayed in the nick. Things would have been so different for him, if only he hadn’t got caught in the first place. That Jewish bitch. He should have sorted her out, good and proper, when he had had the chance.
Sure, the jungle would be far worse if it weren’t for the elephant men. They’d given him food, clothes, cheroots and even his very own dah, a thick broad knife with a square end. Handy at slicing through bamboo. He was getting on well with them, especially the three lads who looked after the big tusker, Rungdot. They’d seen him puff smoke in the old monster’s mush – that had shown them. And they liked a laugh. He didn’t speak their lingo but he could still make them smile with a gesture or look.
That teacher bitch, beautiful as she was, was pure poison. He’d had no idea there’d been a witness on the bank. Well, he’d have to do something about that. But the schoolgirls were all right. Most of them were just kids, but there were one or two he had his eye on. ‘Miss – could you help me with my bandage?’ That could do the trick. The thin one, about eighteen he was guessing, didn’t know her name. She was a real beauty. He was playing it long with her, but he’d caught her looking at him out of the corner of her eyes. He’d see what he could do with her…
It was the end of another long day’s march, in that precious half an hour before sundown when the jungle seemed to burn with flame. Taking a long drag on his cheroot, he thought back on how he had ended up here, surrounded by elephants and schoolgirls, on the run from the Japanese. And the others.
The strange thing was, he’d ended up doing pretty well in the army. That was the thing about the nick. It trained you to cope with the bullshit.
The old order, an England run by wretched fuddy duddies, was finished, useless when it came to a real fight. He’d always known he had it in him – the ability to command, the guts to take the tough decisions – but, of course, with his eel-pie accent and, the trouble he’d got into when he was a teenager, they’d never have let him be an officer. It was the war that had given him his chance. Gregory had come out East in a troopship, a private straight out of the nick, so low in the pecking order, his bunk so dark and tiny he declared to the others he missed the light and space of his ‘rooms’ back in the Scrubs. And the cuisine in the slammer had been so much better, too: toad-in-the-hole, consommé, rarebit – he had them all in stitches when he cracked that one. The ship his regiment had embarked on had just missed the disaster of Singapore and, at the very last minute, had been re-routed up the Bay of Bengal, to Rangoon.
Gregory didn’t believe in fate. That was rubbish. But even so, he didn’t like it when 100 miles out to sea the ocean turned blood-red. The sailors said it was just the muck from the Irrawaddy. Still, it looked like an omen, or something. The switch to Burma had only meant a delay in being smashed up by the Japanese war machine. The ship hadn’t even docked when the Jap bombers came over, sunk five ships, machine-gunned the coolies, set fire to warehouses, cloaking the sky with smoke, so thick and black you could barely see your hand in front of your face. Most of the coolies had run away – afraid of the Japanese, or, just as likely, willing the end of the British Empire – leaving the wharves a ghost land. No cranes lifted, no tugs moved, nothing was working. The colonel hadn’t even got out of his fancy cabin, let alone off the boat, before he had a heart attack and died. So there they were, anchored in the harbour, a sitting duck for the next wave of bombers, with all the majors and captains running around. Posh twits, clueless. It was Private Gregory, whose first job as a kid had been down the docks, who suggested he could drive a crane, that he could organise the unloading of the lorries, guns, ammo, gelignite and get the regiment off the boat. They made him a lance bombardier for that – on the spot – and sergeant the very next day when the Japanese airmen came back and he stayed in his crane, unloading the gelignite for the demolition of British Burma, doing his duty for King and Emperor, as the bombs rained down.
But for what? They hadn’t even left the ship before all the government nobs, fancy pants and senior officers were bursting up the gangplank, desperate to flee. And behind them a sea of faces, Indians, men, women, children, cattle too, all mooing in terror that they might be left behind.
Once on land, they fought so that the lords and masters could run. When he and the other blokes worked out what the game was really about, they started running too. Back home, the papers had said that the Japanese were ‘yellow men’ with silly stick-out teeth and pebble thick glasses. Well, that was not how he’d seen it. It was the British who were yellow, who ran away, who were unfit for the struggle, who didn’t want to fight. To Sergeant Gregory, the whole thing was a dirty, degrading sham. The British Empire was there to protect the ‘lesser breeds without the law’ – that’s how one of the arty-farty officers on board ship had put it. Tell that to the thousands and thousands of Indians refugees he’d seen with his own eyes, walking, crawling along in the dust, hundreds of miles, getting thinner and sicker all the time, stick-limbed, as the brigadiers flashed by in their staff cars, racing past in a cloud of dust, running away from the Japanese. None of the officers stopped, not once. He’d seen the rich Europeans on the road too, big American cars, followed by lorries loaded with snooker tables and fancy furniture, while the poor bloody Indians had to walk. When the weaker ones could no longer be carried – babies, the old ones, the sick, shitting everywhere – some would be nursed hopelessly, and some would be dumped. They would lie there, in the full heat of the day, covered in flies, stinking to high heaven, for days. It was a strange bloody pong, too: sick, but somehow sugary. It lingered on your clothes.
The moment you saw the great black birds circle in the sky, you knew what you would find below. Tough as he was, Gregory started to gag just at the sight of the vultures in the distance. The crunch they made when their beaks bit into bones, that was the ugliest sound he’d ever heard.
Another eye-opener was the hatred race had for race. Back in the Smoke, you could feel the hate the boys had for Ikey Mo, the Jewish brethren. Gregory had known all about that. It was, after all, why he had ended up in the nick in the first place. The real shocker was the way the Burmese had it in for the Indians. One of the blokes said it was the British who had brought in the Indians to do all the dirty work in Rangoon, cleaning up the filth and all, and the smart ones had become landlords and the Burmese despised them. Now their British protectors were running away, and the Japanese were heading this way, it was time for revenge. You could see the Burmese line up by the side of the road as the Indian refugees passed through their villages, swinging their jungle knives, waiting for the dusk, waiting for the British Army to move on, so they could have their way. You could see the results of their handiwork after sunrise.
One boiling hot morning they had loaded up, lorries trailing the guns, and left camp. Sure enough the vultures were circling above a bend in the road, just before a bridge. Down the embankment of a dried-up paddy field, he had found this Indian woman and her kid. She had been a looker, a big-boned woman, not fat, but curvy, dressed up like a gipsy in a red skirt. Finchy said the gipsies came from India in the first place, but he didn’t know about that. Still, no one would fancy her now. They’d cut her throat from ear to ear. Her blood, still warm, had spurted out and pooled up, congealing in her long black hair. One hand was across her face, protecting her, her top had been pulled down and the bastard that had killed her had left his knife stuck between her breasts. He’d hiked up her skirt, too, above her fanny. The kid was close by. They’d smashed his head in, and gooey grey stuff was dribbling out into the muck. Finchy shouted, pointing to some Burmese men running off in the distance, lifting the skirts they wore – sarongs they called them – so that they could leg it. Gregory had fired a few rounds off but the figures were too fuzzy in the heatwave, and they were gone.
Point was, of course, that they all hated each other. Why stick around? Why get killed by the Japanese if the bloody ‘awficers’ in charge were legging it as fast as their staff cars could go? They were all the same. Apart from that daft captain in charge of them with his la-de-dah public school accent and posh manners. Brave enough – nah, far too brave, acting as though it was the proper thing to get them all killed. He had ended up with a hole in his face. Well, to be strictly accurate, a hole in the back of his head that came out of his face, but that was the captain’s look-out for leading from the front just once too often.
The Japanese had overtaken them, sure enough, and they had cut the only half-decent track out to India. You could fight and die, or think of getting out another way. Well, dying was a mistake that he was not going to make. He’d seen enough of death to know that King and Country wasn’t worth risking your life for.
Dealing with that stupid teacher tart wasn’t going to be easy, as easy as he had hoped. Whenever he looked out for her, she’d catch him watching her, alert, on edge whenever he came within 100 yards of her, and if it wasn’t the bloody school marm then it was that little brat, Molly, they called her, keeping a look-out, staring at him from behind a tree or looking down at him from the top of a bloody elephant. He didn’t think Grace had told the kids who’d shot the nigger – that would be too upsetting for the little darlings – but he couldn’t be entirely sure. The way Molly looked at him made him feel uneasy.
And that Havildar had eyes in the back of his head. You had to watch it with cripples. Of course, the Havildar wasn’t a proper cripple, but you don’t lose that many fingers and not let it get to you.
As soon as they joined the refugee track, they were going their separate ways. He wouldn’t do anything while they were with the elephant men. Once they split up, then he wouldn’t hang about. Creep up on her in the middle of the night and slice her throat, double quick, the old one-two. But perhaps that would be too risky. The children would suspect him straight away. No one else wanted to hurt a hair on her head. The kids would talk and he would be hard placed to wheedle his way out of it. An accident could be arranged, a slip down a ravine or, if the worst came to the worst, a simple disappearance. Much better. They’d wake up, her hammock would be lying empty. No corpse, no proof that he had had anything to do with it. Teacher had got caught short in the dark, lost her way back to the camp in the thick of the jungle. Such a tragedy…
The thing about killing is that once you’ve started, you get a taste for it.
That bloody Jewess. She’d almost done for him.
The funny thing was, he’d almost ended up a Red. When he’d left school at fourteen, there were no jobs to be had in the whole of London docks. The great port of the Empire was just ticking over, the Labour Exchanges packed. You would have to queue for three hours to be told by some toffee-nosed old trout that there were no jobs but put your name down and they would see if anything came up.
‘Next!’
And outside he’d met a Yid who gave him a leaflet about Communism and ending the Depression by sorting out the rich, by putting a boot in the face of the boss class. This bloke could talk the hind legs off a donkey. He was passionate and funny and almost demented about it. Up until then, all that Eddie had cared about was feeling up the girls, if they’d let him, wolfing down good grub and dodging Uncle Stan – though the old bastard was getting very breathless and he fancied his chances at giving Stan one on his jaw. But this Yid, Eli Finkelstein his name was, he could talk, stuff about the playwright George Bernard Shaw going to Russia and all, saying how wonderful it all was. So he took the leaflet and read it and went along to the meeting. They all sat there, quiet as mice, underneath these posters of a Yid with a big beard and some slit-eyed bald bastard and another creepy bloke with a moustache. They listened to old Eli the Yid go on about the science behind Communism and how capitalism was dying naturally, that it was all doomed. He went on for hours and hours. It was hard to concentrate on all of it, but he wasn’t bored. It was interesting being part of something bigger than yourself. Towards the end, the Yid, Eli, started talking about the fascists and how they, too, should be smashed. That sounded all right by Eddie. So, at the end of it, he signed up and they made him a candidate member of the Communist Party and he promised to come along to the next meeting. It was free and he didn’t have any money and after all, he was a member of the working class. No doubt about that. Well, he would have been if there were any jobs going. So he was a Red.
That bloody evening he was hanging around with his mates outside the Bucket of Blood when out popped Sydney, who was going out with his older sister, Beth. A hard man Syd, but a foreman down the docks and he knew people and was doing well for himself. Eddie looked up to him.
‘I’m a Red now. Smash the ruling class,’ he’d told Syd.
‘You don’t want to end up with them Commies, you idiot. You want to be a Fascist, son. The Black Shirts. They’re the ones who know what to do. They’re the ones who are going to take on the Yids. Britain for the British, and Ikey Mo can fuck off.’
‘Ikey Mo?’
‘Isaac Moses, you idiot. The reason why everybody is out of work is the fault of the Jews. You come to one of our meetings. Then you’ll realise what’s really going on.’
It was electrifying, the packed hall, the Leader arriving, surrounded by his biff boys, a gang of toughs, all wearing black shirts and trousers and a black belt with a wide square buckle and a little lightning flash on their lapels, hair slicked down with oil, the whole crowd rising to their feet and roaring out applause. The Leader talked about the Depression, about good people being out of work because of the crisis in international capitalism, why the British must look after their own. A smell in the air, like a boxing match when the big fighter is really hammering a loser, and everyone cheering him on and then Old Mosley hit them with it: ‘The slow soft days are behind us, perhaps forever. Hard days and nights lie ahead, no relaxing of the muscle or the mind…’
Gregory looked around at the others, their shirts swelling with pride and anger. Then Mosley read out a list of Red bastards, people who had beaten up British Fascists: ‘John Feigenbaum, Hyman Goldstein, Barnett Bercow, Michael Goldberg’ – they all laughed at that – and then he had a go at the Little Men in the House of Commons ‘hysterically seeking to protect the negroid savage of Abyssinia… who lisp of China and Timbuctoo, on the rare occasions when their mouths are not stuffed with high living at the luxurious tables of the oppressors of the British people.’
On and on he went, his tone getting darker and more powerful with every word: ‘I am going to tell you who your masters are. Who backs the Conservative Party? Who but international financiers? They are the people who put razor gangs on the streets. Who finances the Labour Party? The Little Jews in Whitechapel who sweat you in the sweat shops.’
He hadn’t finished: ‘Let us bring down our righteous anger against the festering scum who by their cowardice and sloth have reduced the British Empire to a moribund thing, in peril of annihilation.’
How they roared their hate!
Afterwards, when Mosley and his gang had marched off, Syd introduced him to another man, a bantam cock, his face carved by a razor-slash, chain-smoking, wearing a scruffy mac, thin, intense. He had a funny voice, posh, educated but peculiar– high-pitched it was, very nasal. But he was very sure of himself. He would stare at you, mocking like, stern and cruel then he’d flash a sudden smile at you. His whole face would light up. Eddie was only a kid, but even then he found William impressive. They always called him William – not Billy. No one called him Billy. William told him that they knew someone down the docks who would put in a good word for him about getting a job as an assistant on the cranes. ‘But fair’s fair,’ he said. ‘We expect you to do something for us by way of return.’
So that’s how he became a runner for the Black Shirts. The Yids and the Commies were on to him pretty soon. They had people hanging out on the street, outside the offices of the British Union of Fascists, watching who went in and who went out. They clocked him fast. So pretty soon he started carrying a knife with a switchblade seven inches long. He showed it off to Syd and William and the others, and they all went ‘woo’ and acted unimpressed.
But he’d had the last laugh.
Syd gave him a pot of red paint and the two of them went out to the Yid areas of the East End, and started painting Perish Judah on the alley walls. Then this group of about five Yids came for them and they were in real trouble and Syd was about to run for it when Eddie, cool as mustard, flicked his knife out and started slashing the air and all the Yids ran for it, pell-mell. So, pretty soon, Eddie, young as he was, started to get a reputation. Some of the others were afraid of trouble, would run away. But not him.
One night, a lock-in down the Bucket of Blood, they brought in a piglet, squealing its head off it was, and fast as lightning. They blocked off all the exits and then they taunted him to see whether he could use his fancy knife to kill it, taking bets.
He’d never forget it. The boozy atmosphere and the cigarette smoke and the men in their black shirts all shouting and screaming at him and the piglet. They let the piglet go and the men started shouting: ‘Kill Judah, kill Judah,’ and he missed it oh, a dozen times, slashing the air – and then finally he cornered the shrieking pig and he feinted his left fist and the pig ran to the right and he jabbed and sliced a line across the animal’s neck like a knife through bleeding butter. The sawdust on the floor of the pub thickened blood-red. What he liked the most about it was the speed of it, the ease with which he could deny life. Here was this thing, alive and screeching its runty head off, and one slash and the noise stopped and everything went dead quiet. It was – what’s the word? – satisfying. After that the others treated him more like an adult, as if you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. He liked that.
A few days later they were in the Bucket when Syd and William called him over to their table. He was doing well down the docks, not just fetching tea and screwdrivers, but watching how they operated the cranes – he was always a fast learner - and making more money than that bastard Uncle Stan, and he was quite the little mascot of the Black Shirts; even old Mosley would smile at him and he hardly smiled at anyone, being the Leader and all. So the two of them showed him a photograph of a man in a newspaper. It was the same Yid who had spoken at the Communist meeting, the funny one with the gob on him. Eli Finkelstein. They looked at the picture and old Syd grinned and said: ‘You don’t fancy doing what you did to that pig to this pig, do ya?’
‘What’s in it for me?’ Because that was how the world worked. Syd smiled and said, ‘Because you effing love your country.’
So then he started watching out for Eli, but taking pains to do it right. Eddie’s blond hair and his youth made him stand out in the crowd, so he got it cut short and took to wearing a cap and an old man’s overcoat. In the cold weather, you’d have to look twice to recognise him. They’d given him a leaflet advertising the next Commie meeting, place, date, time. Nothing to it really. Long before it started he just hung around on street corners, doing nothing, just watching. A good watcher, young Eddie, that’s what they said about him. It looked as though not that many would turn up, but shortly before the meeting was due to start loads of them arrived, all sorts, Jews, English, posh types with glasses, even a few blackies and Indians. He hung back. There were far too many around to do anything.
Yack, yack, yackety yack. God, they talked. All talk and no action, the Commies. Snowflakes began to fall, not much, but enough. The bitter weather made him want to pack it in, just duck into the Bucket and forget all about it. His hands were gnarled, frozen with the cold. But he knew he couldn’t. He knew that if he didn’t do this for them, there would be trouble; they wouldn’t let him forget it. After hours of it, the meeting finally broke up and they started to dribble out into the fresh air.
There! Eli Rosenthal, walking home. Tall guy, thin, his hair half bald, brain-box he was. He didn’t have far to walk, just a few streets away from the meeting in Poplar, down an alley, underneath the railway arches. Gregory had hung back so much he almost missed Eli going into his house. Number thirteen. This Jewess opened the door. Black dress, hair piled up, gorgeous she was, beautiful body. Meaty. Lucky bloody Eli, but not lucky for long, my son, not lucky for long.
A week later, the same routine, the same meeting. Long before it was over, Gregory ducked away from the place where he could keep watch on the meeting and went to the railway arches. He’d picked his spot very carefully, creeping through a hole in a wire fence, a good 100 yards from the nearest house, sheltered from the weather by the railway above, dark in the shadow of the arch.
But this time Eli came home with his bloody Jewess, didn’t he? He couldn’t do it with a woman around. He just stayed in the shadows, feeling a bit of a sap. But what could he do? If he tried anything, she would have screamed the place down.
William and Syd had a real go at him about it. When he told them that he couldn’t have done it because of the Jewess, Syd looked angry and disappointed, but William seemed to ignore him. It was that coldness that got him down. He liked being useful, he liked being needed.
The following week, as chance would have it, there was no bloody meeting. He took to hanging out underneath the arches, in his favourite shadow spot, waiting for Eli to come home. He had a really loud click-clack footstep. Unmistakeable it was – and that would mean the end of him. But when it came to it, everything went wrong.
Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. It was Eli all right. He held still, intent, listening for another’s footsteps. No, just Eli, no one else.
Eli turned the corner and was now walking under the railway arches. Three, two, one. The Jew passed him hiding in the dark and he began to move but a bloody cat, as black as coal, chose that very moment to wriggle out under his feet and trip him up and he half-fell, half-stumbled and the sound caused Eli to look round to see him come towards him, knife in hand. So Eli started to run. But Gregory was fast, dead fast, so he got a slash in, side on, ripping a slice across the man’s face and eye, blood spurting everywhere, but with that bloody great voice of Eli’s, he started booming, ‘Rebecca, help!’
It was enough to wake the dead. Doors started flying open up the street, light spilling out to the pavement. Eddie raced after him with the knife but Eli was running for his life, running like he’d never run before, still screaming, ‘Rebecca, help, help!’ It was more like a squeal, like that bloody pig. The noise wrong-footed him. He didn’t know whether to go after him and finish the job, or leg it. On reflection – oh, and he had plenty of time for that, later – he should have legged it. But he didn’t. He started running after him but he’d waited far too long and Eli had a good twenty yards on him. Still, he was faster and he made good ground. Eli got to his house and the door opened and he half-fell in the doorway and Gregory stabbed him hard in the back of the neck and curved the knife round his throat.
And then, blackness.
He should have killed her when he had had the chance. She only brained him with a candlestick, one of them funny Jewish ones with seven candles, didn’t she? As heavy as a cosh it was, knocked him clean out. Came to in the police cell, staring at the Old Bill, and they didn’t like the look of him one little bit.
William and Syd had done all right by him. Or they let him think they had, which was not quite the same thing. They got him a la-de-da brief, which was good, but in return they asked for their names to be left out of it. The trial was comical, really. He never mentioned William or Syd, but spoke about some Jewish brethren who had promised him £250 to kill Eli because they wanted him dead. The brethren had fallen out over some gold ring with diamonds on it. No one fell for it. The Jewess did for him. She got up in the witness box and said she had recognised him, hanging around their street. When she had mentioned seeing him to Eli, he had told her: ‘Oh, that’s the little blond Fascist. They like blond boys, the Fascists. The Aryan ideal. Funny thing is, he came to one of our meetings and he seemed very attentive. But next time I saw him he was wearing a black shirt and running errands for William Joyce.’ When the Crown’s brief asked her about the death of Eli, she sobbed and sobbed and the women on the jury cried too and he knew he was a goner. Would he get off? Would he bollocks.
The jury took about five minutes before they came back. ‘Guilty.’ The judge looked as though he would have loved to put the black cap on, but he talked about a new law that had been passed, preventing anyone under the age of eighteen from being sentenced to hanging. So Eddie got life instead, at His Majesty’s Pleasure. The Jewess was crying her eyes out the whole time. Silly bitch. If he had killed her too, then he wouldn’t have been in this mess. When he went down, he started whistling his tune, ‘Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clements’. To show them he didn’t care.
William and Syd visited him in the nick. He’d worked it out by then. They started talking on in their way, but he cut them short: ‘I know why you picked me. It was a set-up. Because I was so young, you knew they couldn’t hang me, and that meant a lot less trouble for you lot. You got rid of Eli, the best Commie speaker in the whole of the East End, and you didn’t get that much bother because it was only a mad kid that did it.’
Syd tried to deny it, to shake his head, but William smiled to himself, sheepish like, as if he had been smoked out. He got up and left. William never came to see him, after that.
Being inside wasn’t as bad as they said it was. He missed the river and the sunshine and the girls. Your skin went grey inside. The rest of it wasn’t too grim. Better than listening to Uncle Stan doing his mum at night. The others kept pretty much away from him. They knew what he’d done and some of them were scared of him.
The Scrubs wasn’t so bad. But you had to look after yourself. They put a fat Yid bastard into his landing, who was gobby and knew that he’d been a fascist who’d knifed old Eli. So this Fat Yid goes yackety-yack about him. Eddie got hold of a fork and he broke off two of the prongs leaving just the one, and cornered him and told him any more from him and he’d be blind in both eyes. Then he shoved the prong in the Fat Yid’s right eye. Fatty howled the bloody nick down. The screws came to take Fatty to hospital, screaming his head off he was, and Eddie just whistled ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and they all knew who’d done it but nobody said a bloody word to the screws.
After that, he overheard one of the screws say that he, Edgar Gregory, was the coldest bastard villain he’d ever met. He liked that. No relaxing of the muscle or the mind.
And then came the war. He was just the right age and he wanted to fight, anything to get out of the nick, and eventually they let him out again, to kill for King and Country. The ship out East was a holiday after the Scrubs. They had a wireless and they tuned into Radio Berlin and there, large as life, was old William, saying, ‘Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling,’ and he told all his shipmates that he’d used to be a painter for Lord Bloody Haw-Haw, touching up the woodwork in the East End. He didn’t tell them the whole story about what he actually painted– Perish Judah and that, and how it all ended up, mind. That would have been stupid.
Even here, in this jungle, they hadn’t found him out. That was the thing about killing. Once you’d done one, there was no point in stopping. Besides, he liked it.
Just before nightfall, a stroke of luck. Not that it felt like it at the time. The sun had gone inside the green bubble of jungle, and he’d put up his hammock and was having a quick snooze, getting in a few moments of shut-eye before dinner. That was when he felt something slide over his ankle, heavy, silken on his skin, and slowly wander up his thigh. Eh up, he thought, but it wasn’t right, didn’t feel like a woman, too slithery or whatever.
Slash.
Something was writhing on top of him, and he took a tumble out of the hammock and hit the ground - and came face to face with the severed head of a Burmese python. A few feet away, on the ground, was the rest of the snake, at its widest as barrel-chested as a small pig, marked with a deep brown zig-zag, longer than a fireman’s hosepipe, it’s tail still moving.
Terror choked him, but only for half a second, and then he smelt a rat. For a start, one of the oozies, standing about ten yards away, was giggling fit to bust. You don’t have a laugh when a man is about to be killed by a snake. Second, the snake stank, of rotting flesh. Thirdly, the blood at the end of its severed neck had dried hard and brown. Fourthly, the neck end had its own thick halo of flies, buzzing this way and that. The flies in the jungle were fast, but not that fast. You had to be dead at least a couple of minutes before they started to feast. Finally, he’d just glimpsed one of his oozie mates hiding behind a bush, jiggling the carcase by its tail to give the impression of a snake still thrashing in its death throes. Dead snakes don’t bite.
Po-faced, when one of the oozies shoved the python’s head towards his mush a second later, impaled on a dah, he didn’t budge an inch.
‘Ha bloody ha. Pull the other one mate. This one’s been dead as long as my Aunt Fanny.’ The oozie didn’t understand English, but the flatness in Eddie’s voice needed no translation.
Later, giggling, the oozies mimed to him they’d found the python as they had set up camp, writhing around a tree trunk, and had hacked off its head there and then. The joke was guaranteed to make a man scream – some victims had, in the past, soiled themselves – so Gregory’s stone-dead lack of reaction was even more remarkable. The incident confirmed his reputation among the elephant men as a man without fear.
No relaxing of the muscle or the mind. That was how he’d made it this far, that was how he was going to make it all the way to India and back to Blighty, and that was how that bitch poppet would end up a rotting carcase in the jungle.
Thing is, he could do something with the oozies’ snake trick, he could use it for his own purposes. ‘I’ll be keeping that head for a bit,’ he said, and levered it off the oozie’s dah with his own knife, ‘as a trophy.’
And he lit up a cheroot and worked up a plan while the oozies gathered fodder for the elephants and cooked dinner, giving the cold-blooded sergeant the widest of berths. The same trick, he thought, could work with one of the schoolgirls, that leggy one. Yeah, he’d plant the head in her hammock, swish it out – and then he’d be her hero for life. No, that wouldn’t work. They kept too tight a watch on where the girls slept. It would have to be when she was going to the toilet in the bush. Yeah, they were all very sheepish about it, their bodily functions, that would be the moment. And no better time to strike than now.
Wrapping the snake’s head in his blanket, he took his dah and sidled into the jungle. They’d stopped in the usual sort of place, heavy jungle overhead, hiding them from prying Japanese eyes in the sky, but with a stream, twenty foot wide, close by, so that the elephants could wash and scrub at the end of their long day’s walk. As usual, he had been at the very head of the main party, with the girls and the schoolmarm some way back, and the Chin at the tail, guarding the entrance to the track they’d beaten through the jungle, such as it was.
He walked about fifty yards into the jungle and then cut and slashed his way downhill, roughly parallel to where the girls would be sleeping, and waited, his eyes adjusting to the growing gloom. If they weren’t snappy, he’d miss dinner. Still, look at it this way, going a bit hungry for one night was better than a hanging.
Sure enough, there she was, wearing a frock that had become muddy brown with jungle dirt, a tear in it giving him a lovely glimpse of thigh, walking towards him into a small glade of trees, on which a little of the dying light to the west cast a red glow.
As she hoisted her dress and bent down to do her business, he curved around the glade, cutting off her retreat to the camp. He unwrapped the snake’s head from the blanket and jammed his dah up through the mouth into the gullet.
A crackle underfoot. Damn his clumsiness. She looked up, uneasy, the very picture of startled innocence. He held still, motionless. Wiping herself with a fern, she stood up and started towards him.
Slash, slash, slash!
The snake’s head, speared by his dah, landed a few feet in front of her. He came blundering out from behind a spread of bamboo and there she was, white-faced, frozen, goggle-eyes at the snake’s head.
‘Sssh,’ said Gregory, ‘it’s all right now. Mr Snakey won’t be causing you or anyone else any trouble, ever again.’ He picked up the handle of his dah, swept the python past her face and lobbed the head into the undergrowth before she could work out the trick he had played on her.
‘Oh sweet Jesus!’ she whispered.
‘It’s all right, love. What’s your name?’
‘Emily.’
He could have her right now… But that would be bloody stupid and besides, play it long, and he could enjoy her night after night.
‘I’m Eddie,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Thank you ever so much. That snake, it could have…’
‘Listen, Emily love, I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone about this. I mean, they might think I’m a Peeping Tom, or somethink, hanging around the girls’ camp.’
‘No, no, you saved my life.’
‘That’s a lovely thing to say, love, thank you very much. You should go back now, lest they start to worry about you. But tomorrow night, love, do you fancy a chat or somethink? This time, just after dinner?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes.’
‘Step out into the jungle, towards the west, where the sun sets, and I’ll find you. And don’t mention this to anyone. Not a soul, just a secret between you and me.’
‘A secret. Yes,’ and she smiled at him, and turned, and walked back towards the camp.
Emily would come to him the following night. And, if she stayed too long, then old Missy Grace would not be too far behind.
Luck of the devil, eh?
Whittling a piece of bamboo with his knife, he whistled his tune: ‘Oranges and Lemons…’