Famished Lover (15 page)

And since we are in our heads and not reality, for your part you won't be an idiot about loving Boulton (and you will forgive me for saying it. In hell one says what one feels like saying)
.

Damn the consequences. And damn my jealousy. It is before all that. It is just a sunny day in late May and we are walking in Hyde Park and the war is somewhere else
.

Yours, Ramsay

wandered by myself down St. Catherine Street, lugging my work like some necessary burden. The cold winds of early spring knifed through me and through all the other unemployed men with no particular place to go, their hats pulled down, defeat etched on their faces. I'd seen too many of them for too long and felt as if I were re-entering a dream in which the trap I thought I'd escaped was closing in again and again.

On a back street a crowd of men lined up for free haircuts sponsored by a good works committee. Those who weren't in the chair with a sheet around their necks stood against a brick wall, sullenly smoking. For a moment I thought of joining the line. Maybe if I'd had a fresh haircut the gallery fool would have agreed to take on some of my work.

Then again, perhaps he'd have shown more pity if I'd looked as ragged as some of these sods.

Around another corner men were playing pitch and toss in a vacant lot. The board with the target rings was hung on a wooden fence, and I watched as two lads took turns and ten or twelve others bet on the outcome.

“Are you in for a dime?” someone asked me, and I shook my head. “I never bet,” I said, but I stayed to watch for a while until I began to cough. Ever since my father had left for Boston my lungs seemed to be tearing themselves to shreds.

I ended up in a bar on St. Denis, one of the last to still give credit to regulars. I stood with my foot on the rail, not looking into the mirror. The whisky was bitter and slow, and the others in the place did not bother me.

Sometime in the late afternoon I gathered my hat and made a show of checking through my pockets to see what could be offered against my debt. I left some coins on the counter behind me and turned to leave, but I fell into another fit of wretched coughing. When I straightened up again I saw someone I knew but couldn't quite place. He'd changed utterly, whoever he was, but he knew my name, at least.

“Well!” I said, and shook the man's hand. “Fancy seeing you. How have you been?”

“Yes, it's been ages,” he said. It was Gil Jenkins from my old office. So we sat back at the bar. I collected my change since the keep hadn't yet noticed it, and another whisky slid down my ragged and impoverished throat. Jenkins nodded at my portfolio.

“Trying to raise a little interest?”

He'd been keeping busy, he said, and had quite a few leads, and everyone knew the downturn wouldn't last.

“The government won't allow it,” he said. “I mean, we can't just leave all these men on the streets with nothing to do. There'll be work camps, I'm sure.”

I shuddered at the thought.

“You fought in the war,” he said. He was younger than me, much better looking even in this down-in-the-mouth, somewhat drunken state. “A lot of men fought, and now look at the way you're being treated!”

Some of the others stopped to peer at us through their own hazy eyes.

Gil Jenkins lurched to his feet. He fumbled in his pockets, then thrust a much-folded piece of paper at me. “This is a job I heard about. They need a great bloody artist. I was going
to go myself but you need it more than me. You're married. And you've got a kid.”

I took out a small notebook that I carried with me and copied out the address, then handed him back his slip of paper.

“We'll both go,” I said. “How old is this job, anyway?”

He pushed his slip back to me.

“Look, I've made a note,” I said, but he wouldn't touch the paper. I took out my few coins once more to lay on the counter. As I turned to leave I felt him pulling on the bottom of my jacket.

“I haven't worked all year,” Gil said, “and when I sit down to do anything now my hands won't stay steady.” I watched them quiver as he held them out for me.

“It's just the drink,” I said, and steadied them with my own hands.

“I can't draw a bloody thing,” Gil Jenkins said.

“Crome has money,” Collins says. It is late and I am huddled under my filthy blankets, turned away from the glare of the lone light bulb hanging from the barracks ceiling.

“Crome has everything,” someone else says.

“Crome! Ramsay!”

I try to ignore them.

“Come on — we're having a fucking contest and you're the only rich one in the room. You be the bank, all right?”

I've been working days in the adjacent officers' camp, painting the scenery for the production of
Hamlet
they are trying to mount. They are not made to work, of course, being
officers, and are fed somewhat properly, and I have missed several days now of ditch duty to work on the flats and fill in at the officers' kitchen.

Witherspoon shakes my shoulder. One side of his face has hardened into a squint, as if he is perpetually bracing himself to be punched. On the other side a scar stretches from the jaw hinge across to the front of his throat — an altercation with Sergeant Blasphemy that I didn't see.

“I have very little money,” I say.

“Too good for us now? Going to move in with the officers and leave the likes of us to shovel frozen shit for the Fatherland?”

“Calm down,” Collins says to Witherspoon. “We
want
a man in the officers' kitchen.” I've been bringing them what I can — bits of sausage sometimes, apples and potatoes, nearly edible bread. “Besides, you are going to join in, aren't you, Crome?”

Reluctantly, I roll onto my feet. I haven't been out in the bitter wind like they have. The relative warmth of the kitchen has made our ice-locker barracks that much harder to take.

Wilkens's bed has been cleared. In the centre is a plate with a small round blue design in the middle. Already men are combing the seams of their filthy clothes for chatts — lice — to find the liveliest ones.

“If you don't have cash, the ante is at least five cigarettes,” Collins announces. “We'll accept almost anything: books, combs, chocolate, biscuits. Hurry up! Agony's going to be here soon. Baldwin, are you in? I covet your mirror! Two chatts for Baldwin if he wagers his mirror.”

“How much for my wristwatch?” Findlay asks.

“Three! Three chatts for a wristwatch! Winner takes all.

Come on, Crome, you're the rich man here. What can you put in?”

I rummage up some cigarettes to make the ante.

“Not good enough. Spread the wealth, man, give us all hope!”

“How about that jackknife the captain gave you?” Witherspoon presses. “Give us all a shot at that, won't you?”

It's a bone-handled beauty and perfectly illegal, and I'm happy to put it up for others to take off my hands.

“Three chatts for the jackknife,” Collins says. “Come on, who else is in? We're starting in two minutes. Two minutes!”

I pull the knife out of a hiding spot I've devised in the floorboards. Others flood in now with their marks, their spare bits of food, their woollies from home. I am allowed three chatts to work with but can only get two from the seams of my shirt onto the central blue spot in time for Collins to start them off.

“That's it! Bidding's closed! They're off, gentlemen, all hands away! You cannot touch the plate or anything on the bed. You cannot blow or —”

Collins is soon drowned out by the yelling. These German chatts are tiny, red, slow-crawling monsters that spit blood — and not their own — when cracked between fingers. But now they're our racehorses, confused little beasts at whom we scream our hopes and agonies. About twelve begin in the centre, while three times their number in men crowd around to view the spectacle.

“Come on, you bastard! Move your fucking body!”

“Roll over, for Christ''s sake! Get away from him! Get away!”

“That's Crome's chatt! Bite him! Bite him!”

The first to make its way off the edge of the plate wins the entire jackpot for its owner.

“Bleed a little! Run! Get going!”

The early leader is one of Findlay's chatts, which seems frightened of all the noise. We scream, as if the sheer volume will force the chatts to flee in the desired direction. But Findlay's chatt turns around, and two or three others edge slowly outwards past it. One of them is mine.

“Bite that bastard! We can't let Crome win!” Witherspoon leans over the mattress and elbows me out of the way.

“No interference!” I scream.

Others too lean over, the plate is jostled, then straightened, and Collins hoarsely calls on everyone to move back.

“Fucking Crome is going to win,” Witherspoon moans.

But my lead chatt starts to turn back and someone else's on the other side seems to have decided to move off the plate. More screams and urgings. We are completely mad with it. All the months of bitterness and deprivation are packed into this one small, capricious, arbitrary competition that none of us can win. Not really.

“It's Crome's again! Stop him! Stop!”

My chatt tumbles off the edge of the plate and all the winnings suddenly fall to me.

“He's a fucking dago cheat!” Witherspoon spits, and in a second the plate is hurled across the room. The chatts spin off to find new homes amongst the crowd.

“Calm down!” Collins says.

“He's a fucking bloody dago cheat!” Witherspoon's fists are doubled now and he looms above me.

I gather up the eccentric winnings in my arms. “Take it all,” I say.

“Why is a fucking dago allowed in our barracks anyway?” Witherspoon says.

“Shut your mouth. Take the goddamn stuff. I don't want it.”

“Why do we have to put up with a dago?”

Collins separates us. “Cool heads, lads,” he says. “Nobody cheated. Now Agony's on his way and —”

“You have no right —”

“He smells like a dago, he's got a dago fucking nose —”

I drop the loot, go for his head and miss with a right. Collins ducks out of the way just as Witherspoon's fist ploughs into my stomach. I stagger back, my breath gone. Witherspoon crashes me once on the side of the face and again in the belly.

“Ten fags on Witherspoon!” someone yells.

I get in a few blows of my own, then am stopped again by a hard punch in the side. I fall to the floor. Suddenly everyone is stepping back to make way for black boots. Blasphemy and Agony. They haul me to my feet and I lunge once again at Witherspoon, who looks for all the world as if he wants to get hit, and harder than I can manage.

“Fucking puny dago artist.” He holds the knife, which looks like an odd extension of the ragged bones poking beneath his prisoner clothes. When Agony knocks him on the shoulder from behind he folds like a tent.

I see the blur of a rifle butt move towards me but can't quite get out of the way. It smashes my bad elbow. I fall to the floor with the pain but am immediately returned to my
feet, Agony yelling in my face as if the world has come to an end.

“Fucking dago bastard,” Witherspoon mutters to the floor as we are both dragged out into the bitter night.