The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy (40 page)

This leech-like habit marked the entire commerce of the city. Anyone with anything to sell, from a bangle to a sister, could be relied on to follow potential customers for half-a-mile, arguing and pleading all the way. Many shops and
most restaurants hired their own tenacious leech, chosen perhaps for a breath foul enough to drive you to take refuge in carpets or curry. These leeches were desperate. It was useless to pretend you did not want a carpet; he knew you did, and would hector you all the way up Chowringhee to prove it, throwing in desolating scraps of family history with each step of his argument.

Even among the beggars, competition was intense. The more cunning, not content with exposing whole battlefields of flesh given over to leprosy and syphilis (as we supposed the combatants to be), or amputated limbs, or scrotums inflated ten times life-size by elephantiasis, adopted a semi-official approach. They carried notebooks in which one was invited – implored – to enter one's name, together with the amount of donation. Here one could read of the extraordinary stinginess of world-famous figures who had contributed – sometimes frequently, never generously: Marie Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, Adolf Hitler, Bing Crosby, Al Capone, Churchill, and Mickey Mouse.

Other beggars adopted a governmental approach, presenting their victims with a post card on which was written, in several curly languages, a brief history of their ill-luck, testified to by obscure officials.

Sir,

This unfortunate idiot is a lunatic from the malayli states. He has not escaped. He asks you to be excused. This is not his fault. The bearer was always dumb. He cannot speak since after birth. The foolish fellow and his brothers are also speechless and without voice. He lost his parent. They early departed their sense. His younger sister is also blind and demented.

These three depend on this one. He laboured by the railway. Their mother was never known. His auntie died in the prime. His father was serving longwhile in South Indian Railway Co. Ltd., so Railway Officers have excused this imbecile and so kindly pay him charity and God help you.

Signed: A.R.M. Shoramanor Madras Dorosani Cristian.

Mrs. Pandambai, B.A. (Oxen) Principal Theosophical Ladies' College, Lucknow.

Please to Re-Turn This Notice After The Execution

In this teeming world, nothing was what it seemed to be.
The miseries of the idiot and his dependants were pissingly funny. The shit-
bibis
had the carriage and beauty of princesses. The humble tattooist on the street-corner, who would execute a red-and-blue cross entwined with thorns on your biceps for five chips, lifted a loin cloth to reveal a devil fucking a fat woman on his upper thigh. The chaps that robbed you in the bazaar had the world's most beautiful manners. The proud showed awesome humility. The humble could show an unassailable serenity. The religious mutilated themselves to demonstrate their wholeness. Calcutta was a welter of paradox.

Everyone seemed to possess a strict personal integrity. Even the most derelict or corrupt manifested it – yet they clearly hadn't a moral scruple among the whole variegated pack!

So I saw it then, for then it was less apparent to me that soldiers, like whores, have more business with rogues than with priests.

Whores were distributed all round the city. They stayed in their fetid little boxes while male pimps went out to comb the byways for customers; this was unlike the arrangement in the great whoring cities farther east – Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macao, where you see what you are getting – and, indeed, where what you are getting comes provocatively to get you. The Indian whore keeps to her bed.

This kennelled mode of whoring lends her an indoor aspect, an aspect of being inferior, of being merely marketable goods, a hole with flesh round it priced not by the pound but by the year, with maximum prices at about sixteen; by twenty, they tend to drop. Not only do the prices shrink, the rooms get smaller, the beds dirtier, and the purchasing penises more inclined to shrivel at the sight of monster cockroaches hurrying up the wall to break the news to kith and kin.

All this Horatio Stubbs, aged twenty, young and hopeful, gleaned from personal experience over the next few days – that being the period he spent in the world's most dreadful and inexhaustible city. To pack into those closed little rooms with those open little whores – that was well enough! But to hope (as I secretly did!) to find
love
there – that was just madness!

I can hardly recall now what I expected to happen. I suppose I hoped that the barrier of cash-for-flesh could be
broken, that one day I would confront a girl who was genuinely down on her luck, and that we would both recognize in each other someone who was looking for a better life … You believe many things, aged twenty.

Some girls told hard luck stories in their brittle little collection of English words. I was never content merely to fuck; I always wanted to hear from them as well. How stereotyped their stories were! They all came from good homes, most were daughters of maharajahs. One day when they were very small, playing on the steps of the palace or the big house, a bad man had come along (on horseback or bicycle) and stolen them away. They had grown up in much misery, locked away from human eyesight. And only yesterday – or last week, or this very same evening, sir – they had been sold to the terrible man who owned this brothel, and two picture-palaces as well.

Among the items in this much-told story, the picture-palace was rarely missing. All the whores, poor things, were cinema-goers. Which is not to suggest that their fantasies of kidnapping did not have some sound basis in the griefs of their real lives.

Some of the women immediately made their personality felt, even if they did not say a word. Sometimes I would be haunted by the expression with which one had regarded me, or by the quality of her embrace, or by some gesture that betrayed personal feeling. Then I would try to seek her out again. Often I could never find her – could never get back to the pokey street, could never identify the pokey building, or, having found street and building, could never find the girl again. She had gone: gone next door or a mile away: lost among the storm of dark and beautiful flesh that comprised Calcutta's entrails.

Terrible sensations of desolation would overawe me. A woman and a city! These sensations were hard to bear because I imagined that they would be laughed at by my fellows and because I was haunted by a feeling that I had undergone the same loss before. Yet it was not even a loss! – Just one more bit of cunt shuffling on her way! It was all irrational, and from the irrational there is no redress.

The first evening's brothel-going in Calcutta with Dave Feather was not a success. Mainly because we could not
resist the tide of pimps, whose ranks thickened up considerably as we got to Chowringhee, the grand and overtaxed heart of Calcutta. It was impossible to walk ten yards without being offered someone's nearest and dearest.

We gave in to a villain with a limp and a turban, wasting our money and semen in an offensive back-street, two floors up, where the whores were crowded five to a room. I was landed with a girl whose doss was actually out on a balcony, and had to bare my bum to the mosquitoes. While I worked away, her face would occasionally turn green, as a tram trundled by. We were virtually grinding on the street.

Feather and I got drunk after that. ‘Here's to jungle warfare!' he said.

We arrived back in the Howrah transit camp at some unearthly hour, without a penny in our pockets, only to awaken everyone in the tent with our dreadful curses as we stumbled about. Finally, I flung myself under the mosquito net and fell into a sodden sleep.

I woke with a fearful headache. It took me a long while to stir myself. Only the pain of hearing eating irons clang against mess-tins, as chaps went to breakfast, forced me to move. I put some weight on my right ann. Pain immediately shot up my muscles and knobkerried my skull into a dozen distinct bits. I yelled with anguish.

‘Get out of that fucking wanking-pit, ye drunken bugger!' McGuffie called cheerily. ‘Soya-links for breakfast, just like Mither makes!'

I did get out, although my arm and hand never stopped hurting. My right leg was not too good either. I limped into the mess tent just in time to get the last cold ladleful of bergoo, and then could not eat it. For me, that was unheard of. After the meal, I had to lie on my
charpoy.
Everyone else was getting ready for parade. They came over and tried to persuade me to move. Eventually, aided by Carter the Farter and Aylmer, I rose and got my kit together.

Fortunately, parade was a farce, taken by a full corporal in the Pioneer Corps. We dismissed and I hobbled with my buddies to a nearby SSAFA canteen, where I soon began to feel a little better.

Carter and I put our names down for a game of football that afternoon, not knowing whether we would still be there to play. We had the word down from Gor-Blimey via Dutt that some minor hitch had arisen, and that we would be
stuck in the camp for another night. So we had our game of football.

By the time we got out on the field, my hangover had gone, although I was still limping slightly. My hand hurt, but on the wing I should have been able to keep it out of harm's way.

It was dazzlingly hot – our squalid tents rippled in the heat.

We had only been going about five minutes when the inside right passed the ball out. I was off down the field with the ball at my feet. The winger marking me was nowhere in sight. As the back charged me, I flipped the ball back to the inside right, who was where he should be – it was quite a good forward movement for a scratch team. The back hit me hard, crashing into my right side. Tremendous agony ran through my wrist. The only relief came from walking round in circles, which I did. Or I thought I did.

Faces clustered round me. They all seemed to be insisting that I was helped off the field. Although I swore at them, it did no good. They carted me off and in due course I found myself being examined by a medical orderly.

‘Are you all right, mate?'

‘Let me get back on the field – that fucking sod of a back fouled me.'

‘What have you been up to? You've got a broken bone in your hand.'

‘It doesn't feel too good.'

‘It's all swollen – look at it! There's a broken bone there and you must get it seen to. You'll have to go into Number Five Ambulance Unit on the racecourse. Get your kit together!'

‘What do I need my kit for?'

‘They may have to keep you in for observation – overnight, like. Pack your night things in a small pack and get weaving, while I lay on transport.'

‘Sod my fucking luck!'

‘It's no good you fucking and blinding, mate. You'll just have to stop bashing the old bishop, won't you, now your right hand's out of action!'

So I found myself on the racecourse in the centre of Calcutta, where a medical unit had been set up. After I had checked in, I was examined by a captain in the Medical Corps, a bald man whose face bore a sceptical expression
common to Army doctors. As I explained about my fall from the top of the train, his scepticism escalated until it wore deep grooves on either side of his nose.

‘That may be, but you've broken a phalange or two, and probably a metacarpal. You may have torn a muscle as well.'

‘So what do I do now?'

‘You stop “falling off trains”, for one thing.'

‘Yes, but what do I
do
?'

The grooves bit a little deeper. ‘You don't
do
anything, Private Stubbs! You have been done to. You are a casualty. We have an X-ray unit here, and you will be X-rayed in the morning. Your leg seems merely bruised.'

‘I came down on some old rails and lumps of iron.'

‘Very likely.'

I was established in a marquee tent which served as a ward. A few battered relics of the Forgotten Army lay about, exchanging long horror stories about Maungdaw and Razabil, or how their mules had sunk out of sight in the Arakan mud during the last monsoon. With their broken hairy shoulders, faded green vests, and identity discs dangling round their necks from dirty string, they did not even look like Mendips – in whom I always imagined I saw a family resemblance. These old sweats wanted to know how long I had been abroad, whether I'd ever heard a shot fired in anger, and whether I'd ever had to wear a french letter tied to my prick so that the leeches did not get up my pipe. When I disappointed them on all counts, they returned to the discussion of exactly how unreliable the Chinese were in battle.

I passed the time by feeling ill and feverish, and watching the bluebottles swarm up at the apex of the canvas above my head.

Delight filled me when, at about nine-thirty, a flow of angry lament reached my ears from outside. Jock McGuffie entered the tent and stood there surveying the scene. The Forgotten Army surveyed him. Instant hostility blossomed on both sides.

‘What, are you fuckers all dying of something or other?' he asked the ward in general.

‘Jock!' I called. ‘Over here!'

‘Christ, man, there's nae hope for ye, stuck in here wi' this lot!' McGuffie exclaimed, as he came across to my bed.
‘They might as well bury the lot of ye and have done! Could they no' put a bit lighting in this pox-eaten dump? Yon sergeant on the gate's a right one, too, I'm telling you! Bloody big sandy-haired loon! He said to me, “You've no got a bottle of drink on ye, have ye?” Sassenach cunt! – What fucking business is it of his? “No, sarge,” I says. “Now what would I be doing carrying around booze at this time of evening?” So he says to me, “There are some seriously sick men here. No drink's allowed in camp.” No booze, I ask you! So I says, “If they're a bit down, surely it's a wee snort they need?” “These men have come straight out of Burma,” he says. “Many of them's dying.” “Ay, well, it does look a wee bit of a graveyard,” I says.'

As he spoke, he pulled a bottle of beer from under his bush jacket and handed it to me. I thanked him and he opened it for me with the hook on the knife he always carried. We took it in turns to swig.