The Absolutist (22 page)

There’s a sense of fireworks about the planes’ shelling and I think back five years ago to the only time I ever saw such a display in real life. It was June of 1911, the evening of George V’s coronation. My sister, Laura, was ill at the time, laid low by a fever of some description, so my mother was forced to stay at home and tend her while my father and I walked through London towards Buckingham Palace, waiting in the heart of the crowds for the King and Queen Mary to drive past on their
return from Westminster Abbey. I didn’t like it there. I was still shy of my twelfth birthday and small for my age, and stuck as I was in the centre of the throng I couldn’t see anything except the overcoats of men and women pushing me on either side. I found it hard to breathe and tried to explain this to my father, but he let go of my hand when he started a conversation with whoever was standing next to him. The carriages began to pass and I ran after them in my excitement at seeing the royal couple, and soon I was lost entirely and unable to find my way back.

I didn’t lose heart but searched for my father and called his name, and when he finally found me an hour later, he slapped me so hard and so unexpectedly across the face that I didn’t even have the wherewithal to cry. Instead, I simply stood blinking at him as a woman leaped forward, shouting at my father and punching him in the arm in retaliation, a blow he ignored as he dragged me through the gathering, all the while telling me that I was never to run off on him again or there’d be worse in store for me. Soon we were standing near the Victoria memorial and as the light grew dark and the fireworks began, and the tenderness on my cheek began to rise into a purple bruise, my father took me quite by surprise, lifting me on to his shoulders and holding me there so that I was above the crowd for once, staring down at the heads of the other revellers. The sparks, rockets and colours exploded in the sky, and I looked around at the sea of men and women that stretched as far as my eyes could see and at all the other children perched on the shoulders of their fathers, looking at each other, grinning in the ecstasy of the moment.

“Sadler!” shouts Potter, six-foot-eight-in-his-boots-and-helmet Potter, pulling at my shoulder and dragging me down deeper into the trench. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Get your fucking head out of the clouds.”

“Sorry,” I say, returning my box-periscope to its proper position and scanning the terrain ahead. I have a panic that, having lost my concentration for a few minutes, I will be suddenly faced with a group of twenty Germans on their bellies advancing towards me like snakes and it will be too late for me to raise the alarm, but no, it’s peaceful out there, even if it is hellish in the heavens, and the gulf of terrain that separates two groups of terrified young men from opposite sides of the North Sea remains empty.

“Don’t let the old man catch you daydreaming,” Potter says, lighting a tab and taking a deep drag before rubbing his arms against the cold. “And poke your head out there like that one more time and I promise you that Fritz will have no hesitation in blowing it off.”

“They couldn’t get me from this distance.”

“Want to test that theory, do you?”

I let out an exasperated sigh. Potter and I are not close; his popularity expanded as his mimicry became more accomplished and now he never listens to any voice but his own. He doesn’t outrank me but seems to think he does on account of having some displaced duke somewhere on his family tree while mine, as he mentions often, are in trade.

“All right, Potter,” I say. “I’ll keep my head down, but your infernal shouting isn’t helping matters either, is it?”

I turn back to scan the horizon, sure that I can hear something out there, but all seems to be still. I have a sense of unease, though; it doesn’t feel right even if it looks clean.

“I’ll speak when I want to speak, Sadler,” Potter snaps. “And won’t be told not to by the likes of you.”

“The likes of me?” I ask, turning on him, for I am in no humour for this nonsense tonight.

“Well, you’re all the same, aren’t you? Haven’t got the sense you were born with, any of you.”

“Your father’s a carpenter, Potter,” I say, for I heard somewhere that he ran his own lumberyard in Hammersmith. “That doesn’t make you Jesus Christ.”

“Watch your blasphemy, Sadler,” he says angrily, standing to his full height now so his own head is peeping out over the top, exactly as he told me not to. He holds his cigarette in the air as he does so, the red-flamed tip just visible above the parapet, and I gasp in horror.

“Potter, your tab—”

He turns, notices what he’s doing, and I am immediately rendered blind by what feels like a bucket of hot mucus being chucked in my face. I spit and blink, retching against the side of the trench as I throw myself to the ground, wiping whatever filth this is away from my eyes, and look across to see Potter’s body lying at my feet, a great hole in his head from where the bullet entered, one eye completely gone—somewhere on my person, I suspect—the other hanging uselessly from its socket.

The sound of the shelling thirty miles away appears to grow louder, and for a moment I close my eyes, imagining myself elsewhere, and then I hear the voice of the woman who remonstrated with my father for hitting me, five years ago on the night of the coronation. “The lad’s done nothing wrong,” she’d said. “You should learn to show a little kindness towards the boy.”

The weeks pass, we advance, we stop, we entrench, we fire our Smilers and throw our grenades, and nothing ever seems to change. One day we are told that the line across Europe is pressing forward and it won’t be long now, and the next we hear that things look grim and we should prepare for the worst. My body is not my own any more: the lice have offered joint tenancy to the rats and vermin, for whom I am a chew-toy. I console myself by thinking that this is their natural
terrain, after all, and I am the intruder. When I wake now to find a parasite nibbling at my upper body, its nose and whiskers twitching as it considers an attack, I no longer jump about and shout but merely brush it away with the palm of my hand, the way I would a fly buzzing around my head in St James’s Park. These are the new normalities and I give them little thought, but follow instead my routine of standing at my post, holding the line, going over the top when it is my turn to risk death, eating when I can, closing my eyes and trying to sleep, letting the days pass, believing that one day either it will all be over or I will.

It is weeks now since Potter’s brains were spattered over my uniform and it has been washed since, of course, but the dark red and grey stains around the lapels bother me. I’ve asked others about them but they shake their heads and tell me there’s nothing there. They’re wrong, of course. The marks are most definitely there. I can smell them.

I finish a shift of more than ten hours and am dead on my feet when I make my way to the reverse. It’s late and we expect to be shelled later tonight; on account of this the candles are mostly out, but I see someone sitting alone in the corner of the mess and advance towards him, eager for a little conversation before sleep. But I hesitate when, upon getting closer, I see that it’s Will. He’s hunched over some sheets of paper, a pen twisted in an unusual way in his fist, and for the first time I realize that he is left-handed. I stare at him, desperate to speak, but turn around, my boots sounding in the dirt as I walk away, and then he says my name quietly.

“Tristan.”

“Sorry,” I say, turning back but not stepping forward. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“You’re not,” he says, smiling. “Off duty, then?”

“Just this minute. I’d better get some sleep, I suppose.”

“Sleep is that way,” he says, indicating the direction from which I have come. “What are you doing over here?”

I open my mouth to respond but can’t think of an answer. I don’t want to tell him that I needed company. He smiles at me again and nods at the seat next to his. “Why don’t you sit down for a few minutes?” he asks me. “It’s ages since we’ve talked.”

I walk over, trying not to feel irritated by his implication that this has been a mutual decision. There’s no point in being angry with him, though; he’s offered me the gift of his company and there’s not much more that I want from life. Perhaps there will be an end to hostilities after all.

“Writing home?” I ask, nodding at the papers set out before him.

“Trying to,” he says, gathering them up and shuffling them on the table before stuffing them into his pocket. “My sister, Marian. I’m always uncertain about what to say, though, aren’t you? If I tell her the truth about how things are going out here, she’ll only worry. And if I lie, then there seems to be no point in writing at all. It’s a bit of a puzzle, isn’t it?”

“So what do you do?” I ask.

“I talk about other things. I ask questions about home. It’s small talk but it fills the pages and she always replies to me. I’d go bloody mad if I didn’t have her letters to look forward to.”

I nod and look away. The mess tent is completely empty, which surprises me. There are almost always people here, eating, drinking tea, their heads bowed over their settings.

“You don’t write home?” he asks me.

“How do you know I don’t?”

“No, I only meant I’ve never seen you write. Your parents, surely they’d like to hear from you?”

I shake my head. “I don’t think they would,” I tell him. “I got thrown out, you see.”

“Yes, I know. But you’ve never told me why.”

“Haven’t I?” I ask, and leave it at that.

He says nothing more for a few minutes, takes a sip of his tea, then looks up again as if he’s just remembered something. “What about your sister?” he asks. “Laura, isn’t it?”

I shake my head again and look down, closing my eyes for a moment, wanting to tell him about Laura but unable to; it would require longer than we probably have.

“You’ve heard about Rigby, I suppose?” he asks after a while, and I nod.

“Yes,” I say. “I was sorry to hear it.”

“He was a sound chap,” says Will gravely. “But really, every time they send a feather man out into no-man’s-land, they’re just praying that he’ll be picked off. They don’t care about the poor bastard they’ve gone out to retrieve, either.”

“Who was that, anyway?” I ask, turning to him. “I never heard.”

“Not sure,” he replies. “Tell, I think? Shields? One of those.”

“Another one of ours,” I say, picturing the boys in their beds in Aldershot barrack.

“Yes. Only eleven of us left now. Nine gone.”

“Nine?” I ask, looking up and frowning. “I counted eight.”

“You heard about Henley?”

“Yes, but I included him,” I reply, my heart sinking at the idea that another one has gone; I keep a close track of the boys from the barracks, of who is still with us and who has been killed. “Yates and Potter. Tell, Shields and Parks.”

“Denchley,” says Will.

“Yes, Denchley, that makes six. Rich and Henley. That’s eight.”

“You’re forgetting Wolf,” says Will quietly.

“Oh yes,” I say, feeling my face flush a little. “Of course. Wolf.”

“Wolf makes nine.”

“He does, yes,” I agree. “Sorry.”

“Anyway, Rigby is still out there, I think. They might send a team out later tonight to collect him, although they probably won’t. What a waste of bloody time, eh? Sending a stretcher-bearer to collect a stretcher-bearer. Then he most likely gets killed and we have to send another out to retrieve him. It’s an endless bloody cycle, isn’t it?”

“Corporal Moody says there are eighty more men marching our way so we should have reinforcements in a day or two.”

“For all the good they’ll do,” he says grimly. “Bloody Clayton. And I mean that literally, Tris. Bloody Sergeant James Bloody Clayton.”

Tris
. One single syllable of intimacy and the world is put to rights.

“It’s hardly his fault,” I say. “He’s only following orders.”

“Ha!” He snorts, shaking his head. “Don’t you see how he sends the ones he doesn’t like over the sandbags? Poor Rigby, I don’t know how he survived as long as he did, the number of times he went out there. Clayton had it in for him from the start.”

“The chaps don’t like a feather man,” I say half-heartedly.

“We’re all feather men at heart,” he replies. He extends his hand towards the candle that is burning before him. There’s not much life left in it and he hovers his index finger in the air, passing it through the flame quickly, then slower, then slower again.

“Stop it, Will,” I say.

“Why?” he asks, half smiling as he looks at me, his finger holding steady for longer and longer in the flame.

“You’ll burn yourself,” I say, but he shrugs it off.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Stop it!” I insist, grabbing his hand now, pulling it away from the candle, which flickers for a moment, casting shadows on our faces as I hold his hand in mine, feeling the rough, calloused skin that we’ve all developed. He looks down at my hand and then
looks up, his eyes meeting mine. I notice that his face, which is filthy, is caked in mud beneath both eyes. He smiles slowly and the dimples appear—neither war nor trenches can do for them—and he pulls his hand back slowly, very slowly, leaving me unsettled, confused and, above all else, aroused.

“How are yours?” he asks, nodding at my hands. I place them flat in the air and every finger is motionless, as if they have been paralysed. It’s become something of a party piece for me now among the men; my record is eight minutes without a single movement. He laughs. “Still steady as a rock. I don’t know how you do it.”

“Nerves of steel,” I say, smiling at him.

“Do you believe in heaven, Tristan?” he asks in a quiet voice, and I shake my head.

“No.”

“Really?” he asks, surprised. “Why not?”

“Because it’s a human invention,” I tell him. “It astonishes me when people talk of heaven and hell and where they will end up when their lives are over. Nobody claims to understand why we are given life in the first place, that would be a heresy, and yet so many purport to be completely sure about what will happen after they die. It’s absurd.”

“Don’t let my father hear you say that,” he says, smiling.