Thomas and Denis in the Field

I strain to lift my backside off the ground and the weight on my shifts a little, so I settle back down onto the ground and push at the rags with my hands.

The rags are slippery wet, with something spongy inside them, but I get some purchase on them and they start sliding down my legs, the backs of which are aching with the effort and the use of unaccustomed muscles. I manage to get my knees up a bit, and give the rags an extra hard shove with my hands: my right palm goes through the gap between two folded edges, and my hand goes up to the wrist into something soft and gooey that feels like thick, warm engine grease. It feels horrible, and I jerk my hand back out, instinctively shaking it to get the gooey stuff off it. I feel some of the stuff spatter on my cheek and forehead. The weight’s off me, and I wriggle through the mud past the rags and out into the fresh air. I look down at my hand and it’s stained with red and brownish green slime: bringing it up to my face I can smell the iron smell of blood and a smell like shit.

There’s a mist of blood and muck sprayed across the snow and mud and up the back of the tank.

“Tommy.”

The rags and weight are his legs: I can see the nail heads in the soles of his boots gleaming whitely in the snow-reflected light. There’s bone and reddish-purple [?] flesh showing at the torn ends of his overalls, and bits of muck and skin in the snow and mud.

The shelling has all stopped, and the cold, snowy wind sound is audible again, brushing across the delicate surfaces of my ears. My cheeks feel very hot, and I’m dizzy. The air is swirling past me, and I’m swaying.

I lift my head up and turn around, looking back towards the road. There are some dark shapes on the snow within ten yards of me, but I don’t want to see them, so I look at the road in the middle distance. The second half-track has been hit; smoke is boiling off the burning engine compartment and the wood and canvas, and there are flames flickering underneath the chassis. There’s debris and dark shapes on the road.

There are a couple of men moving across the field towards me, but they’re blurry and they waver as I look. I shut my eyes and sit down in the wet snow.

When I open my eyes again the men are nearer, and I can see that it’s Albert and Franz from my crew. They’re carrying blankets. They crouch down beside me and put a blanket over my shoulders and one over my legs. They’re saying things, but my head is swimming and I can’t concentrate on the noise they’re making, and I just hear a gargling swirl, like the last water draining out of a bath.

I just nod to them. I’m all right. I’m not hurt.

I shut my eyes again and feel Franz and Albert’s masses move away from me. The sky wavers and sways.

They’re putting blankets over things.

Tommy resting the nape of his neck on the seatback as our truck raced along a dust-parched road during the exhilarating summer offensive in [France…]

They’re putting blankets over the dark shapes.

Twisted snakes and chunks of meat.

Thomas wrinkling his nose and screwing up his face as the man in the bar was sick, sick, sick with the striptease girls’ lights shining through it.

The stump of his spine sticking out of the meat of his [hips and thighs], and the gaping red-orange and black cavern of his viscera-emptied [ribcage], with the sheared-off ends of the ribs all white, like the nuggets of bone in a pork chop [a spare rib chop, in fact].
Helping Thomas walk home from the Henkel Works’ Christmas party, that first winter they’d worked there during their apprenticeship; Thomas had had too much to drink and was within one more word of getting into a fight with the older man who had danced with Thomas’ girl, and who had ended up with her on his arm later in the evening. Thomas’ legs working away automatically like a puppet’s while Denis had his fingers around the back of Thomas’ neck, half-holding him up and half-guiding him towards home.

Thomas’ dark hair flittering in the breeze, brushing against the powdery snow. One eye open and still, the other lost in a mess of blood and torn flesh where head has been sliced in two diagonally and the jaw, cheek, teeth and gums have been smashed and shredded, mangled into pulp and ribbons of flesh and skin and seared into a half-burned mask of hideous intricacy.

Thomas’ mother putting a coffee cup down on the unfamiliar dark wood nightstand next to the bed in the spare bedroom. The rain-filtered daylight breaking into the room when she draws back the curtain: illuminating the steam rising from the coffee a foot from his face and shining through the stretched fabric of her blouse where she’s reaching up to the curtain, so that, just for a moment, he can see her arm in dark silhouette, the white gauzey space under her arm, and the start of the shape of her breast.

He’s in the back of one of the half-tracks, stretched out across the bench seat, propped up with a rolled tarpaulin that someone has stuck down in the footwell. He’s cold. The sound of the engine, the rolling rhythm of the tracks and the thick, oily smell of the [doped/treated?] tarpaulin is making him feel sick. He shuts his eyes.

When he opens them again, it’s darker. He can see the sky through the crenellated cut-out shape of the half-track’s body [the metal pressing?]: there’s dark snow cloud blowing in, below whiter, higher cloud and the glimpses of blue beyond the white. The half-track has stopped, and the engine is stopped. He can smell cigarette smoke nearby, and he thinks he hears the sound of someone moaning or being sick. He’s cold, and the smell of the tarpaulin is rich in his nostrils; he can feel a growing soreness there where the chemicals are irritating the soft membranes.

I wonder what they have done with Tommy? Poor Tommy.

Denis: his aside about memory…{placement?}

It’s funny how I can remember so much from that time, and yet I can barely remember what I did yesterday. Whenever I watch a detective thing on the TV and the police officers ask somebody what they were doing on a particular day six months ago, I realise how far-fetched these whole things are, they way that they always ask the same questions. It’s not like real life.

I can remember things best from when I was a boy – less than ten – and then again when I was a young man, starting to go to work, from fourteen [?] to eighteen. And then some things from the war, and the early times with Julianne, and when we lived in the attic rooms after we got married. There’s lots of things from there that are very clear and fresh for me.

But then there are whole stretches of time when it’s all grey and blurred together, when nothing stands out. Things from the clearer times come back when I smell a smell or see a colour, of hear a sound or a piece of music maybe. And if one little memory starts off, sometimes a whole stream of others will follow straight along with it, like a line of dominoes all falling down when you click the first one over. That’s nice. Sometimes it happens at night, when Julianne is asleep and there’s just me awake, with the green light from the electric clock-radio glowing on the wallpaper by my bedside table, and the old alarm clock with the metal bells on top ticking away on the chest of drawers by the window. All it might take is for the edge of the eiderdown or the scratchy woollen blanket to tickle my cheek in a particular way when I pull it up to cover myself, and in my head I’ll be back in my childhood bed or lying next to Julianne or out in the field somewhere in my army days.

Sometimes it will happen that I’ll start thinking about the old days and I will just keep thinking about things and they’ll be going round and round in my head, and then I’ll get that horrible feeling when I know that I’m not going to be able to get back to sleep for ages, so I’ll stop trying and get out of bed and go downstairs and make myself a cup of hot chocolate and sit in the kitchen, on the high stool, facing the wall and listening to radio, turned down very low so that it won’t wake Julianne or Jos and [daughter’s name], so low that most of the time I can’t even hear the words that the presenter is saying between the music. But you have to have it low, otherwise the music blares out. (Years ago, there wasn’t even any music on the proper radio in the small hours – all the radio programmes closed down, and all you could hear if you listened in the dark was hissing and whistling and pops and crackles, and, if you were lucky, you might catch the sound of some foreign station for a while, and try and make out what someone was saying in English, or French, or Russian, or maybe even Chinese or whatnot. Nowadays there are all sorts of different stations on at night, but none of them ever seem to play the kind of music that our generation like; things with proper tunes and words that you can hear, and not all sung by singers who sound like they’re trying to sound like an American. The music’s all sex now, for the young people.)

It’s good when we go to a wedding and meet up with the old families – mine and Julianne’s. More likely it will be a funeral now, though. All those people that we grew up with…nearly all of our aunts and uncles have gone now. We’ve seen them when we were children, all smart in their suits that they only wore twice a year, the men with their hair all oiled down, and the women with earrings shaped like the middle of fried eggs (but a different colour) and pearls around their necks. And we’ve seen them get older and disappear…some in the war, when the city was bombed, others moved away for jobs, some we just drifted away from and didn’t get to see for years and then we heard that they were dead and it was too late, and we’d worry about whether we should go to the funeral as we hadn’t seen them or even sent a Christmas card for years, but in the end we’d usually go and there would be the old faces, with whiter hair or no hair, and grown fatter or all gaunt, and the older ones bent over or deaf, with the brown spots creeping down the skin on the back of their hands that was thin and greasy so that you could see the tendons through it, and the veins all ridged and blue. But even the youngsters – the dead one’s children – would be pleased to see you always, and after the funeral you’d all get together at the house or at the church hall or the Soldier’s Union, and after the sandwiches and the pies and a couple of drinks, people would start to reminisce about the dead one and the old stories would come out and people would start to get over their sadness a bit and start to laugh, which seemed wrong at first, but gradually the laughter would seem all right, and the talk and the food and the laughter would all seem to be more about the people who were left, and not about the dead one (though you’d mention their name in the story you were telling, and everyone in your little circle near the bar would stop talking and look down at the floor for a little while, and then someone would say, “Ah well,” and you’d go on.

And it was at these get-togethers that you could start talking about some little thing that you remembered from the old days – a certain shop, or a relative who died long ago, or a place that you all used to go to on a charabanc trip one day in the summer when all the factories were shut for the holiday week – and that one little thing would remind you of something else, and that would jog someone else’s memory, and all these “yes, and what about…” and “I remember that!” memories would all merge into each other and you’d all end up wiping your eyes with laughter, remembering all that shared history and the all the lost colours and places and friends that you’d known. All those things that you wouldn't have been able to remember on your own, as if they only exist when all of you are trying to think about them at once.

And at the end of the evening, when you’d been to the toilet for the last time so that you wouldn’t be too uncomfortable on the bus home, you’d step out of the warmth of the hall and into the night (usually it would have been raining, and the air would be starting to get colder), and the smell of the men’s beer and the ladies’ face powder and eau de cologne would be on your face and clothes from the round of kisses and handshakes that you’d made just before you left. Just you and your wife, facing the journey home in the dark, in the city that now belonged to younger, ruder, noisier people, and as you walked down the tarmac path between the wet bushes and down to the road, leaving behind the glow of your shared memories and the yellow electric lights, you’d pull you coats closed and take each other’s hands for comfort and security as the cars sloosh past on the hard black tarmac and the shouts of yobboes echo around the streets.

Denis and Thomas

Thomas leads me right around to the far end of the bar and through a door into another room, where there are more seats, but where it’s quieter and darker: the ceiling lights are all turned off, and the tables and chairs are only illuminated by the light spilling from the bar; beyond the bright bar lights and the scurrying figures of the barmaids I can see the throng of men that we’ve just passed through. On this side of the bar, there are just a couple of young women in dark coats, talking to each other at the bar, drinking little glasses of green drink that looks thick and sweet with the light shining through it. They look over at Thomas and me, but barely seem to see us, and they turn back to each other and carry on talking in voices that are too quiet to hear.

Thomas climbs up on one of the fat [banquettes?] that line the walls and pulls on a cord to turn on one of the wall lights. Then he moves around the room collecting all of the cardboard beer mats, eventually coming back with a stack about a foot high. He spills them out on the table and sits down before leaning across the table towards me. His eye sockets fall into shadows like a picture of a skull. He whispers, “Those are the lady dancers,” and nods a slow, exaggerated nod.

Most of the beer mats are distorted and corrugated like the furrows in a picture of a ploughed field. When we play trying to stack them up in colour-coded piles, they fall over when the pile reaches three or four mats in height. It’s frustrating. Next we try and make a kind of house of cards, but the edges of the mats are too buckled and irregular, so we start trying to spin them across the table to each other and catch them. We don’t say much.

The fat barman comes into the room and talks to the lady dancers; all three of them leave by a dark wooden door that’s in shadow at the end of the bar.

Thomas says, “Come on, they’ll start in a minute. Let’s watch.”

I nod, wondering how he knows so much about what goes on in this grown-up place, and feeling jealous because I know so little about anything outside of my mama and pappi and my story books. I want to be Thomas’ friend so that I can learn about the grown-up things without having to be with grown-ups and getting laughed at.

The lights in the main bar go off as we try and make our way through the crowd in the other bar. Blue and red lights are shining above the curtains above the little stage, and these and the lights and mirrors reflecting behind the bar create a funny atmosphere, like Christmas lights or a fairy grotto, glinting on beer glasses and men’s teeth and eyes, painting little bits of the darkened world in unusual colours and casting strange shadows.

The men are gradually moving towards the stage end of the bar, and some are climbing up on stools or chairs so that they can get above the rest of the crowd. The crush is too solid for Thomas and I to get through (and it’s a bit scary down here in the dark at our low level, with the men all moving carelessly), so we move to the wall where the windows are and climb up onto one of the well-padded [banquettes?]; from here, we can see, now and again, between the constantly moving silhouettes of the grown-ups’ heads and shoulders, the top third of the curtains and the lights above. There’s a spotlight shining on the curtains, and they now have a rich, bright blue look, the colour of a kingfisher in my story book. The men are talking loudly and laughing, and when they turn their heads sideways to talk to each other we can see their mouths open and close in silhouette and their heads nod up and down.

A burst of applause, whistling and shouting as the curtains open, something joyous and animal about the sound, and it fades down and there’s somebody playing the piano [need to establish its placement earlier…], a bouncy, comical rhythm that makes me think of a camel trying to walk downstairs with big slippers on. The roaring men quieten down, but there’s still a background noise of whistling and isolated shouts and laughs that go along with the piano.
The music changes to something a bit slower, with long repeated phrases that have a lazier, swinging rhythm, like the rhythm of girls twirling a skipping rope in the street. Every now and again the men cheer. Sometimes we see one of the dancing lady’s dark-haired heads moving, spotlit, across the space between the men’s silhouettes, or her white hands in the air above the men’s heads. The lady’s hands and arms look pale, pasty white.

Thomas shakes my shoulder and points towards the bar; one of the men has peeled off from the back of the crowd and is bent over with his hands above his head on the edge of the bar. His back is heaving and hollowing, and slivers of light sparkle and glisten on the strings of stuff that are pouring out his mouth onto the shadow-hidden floor.

Denis and Tommy in the field

Tommy’s swearing as we run, and I’m laughing with the gulping, breathless excitement of the [adrenalin rush] and his characteristic string of profanities, the standard sing-song rhythms of his conversation: “Shit, fuck, shit, fuck, shit…” Then he must trip, because I hear his sudden intake of breath and the thump as the hits the ground. I stop and look around, and there he is, scrabbling his way to his feet amid the mud and snow, swiping the snow off his face. “Don’t stop!” he shouts, “keep fucking running!” I laugh and do as he says.

When I reach the disabled tank, I half-stumble, half-dive under the Leopard’s big exhaust pipes and into the dark space underneath the hull. Another shell explodes behind us, much closer, and I feel the blast’s pressure wave and hear the earth and snow and stones pinging against metal. Tommy’s weight thuds in against the back of my legs and I lie panting, face down in the dirt and snow, smelling metal and burned paint and ash and wet earth. The backs of my legs are wet. There’s cool bluish snow-reflected light in the spaces between the [road wheels].

“Christ, Tommy, that was close. Another five seconds and I reckon that one would have had us.”
Tommy doesn’t say anything, and I jerk my legs to get him to move off them; “Shift, Tommy – you’re squashing me.”

Shells are still exploding, but they’re getting further away now. The one by the tank must have fallen short: it’s the road that they’re ranging on.

Tommy just lays there, though. I think I can feel him shaking.

I kick out again. “Come on, Tommy, don’t piss about – get the fuck off me.” After the exhilaration of the running and the near-miss, I’m excited and [a bit manic, unconstrained], and I laugh as I twist myself around so I can push him off.

It’s not Tommy that’s resting on me, I realise: it’s a dark bundle of something whose shape I can’t make out in the semi-dark. The field outside is bright with sunlight that’s breaking between the thin clouds, and the whiteness is dazzling/confusing my vision and the contrasts here in this shadowed space. Maybe it’s a tarpaulin or something that’s blown off the back of the tank. Which means that Tommy must still be outside, I realise… “Tommy? Tommy?” I shout, and just hear the wind whispering across the snowfield and the stubble. I struggle to get up, desperate to get outside and see what’s happened.

I’m leaning back now, as there’s not enough clearance under the hull to sit up straight [true? Check ground clearance…], and the bundle’s weight is on me legs up as far as the thighs.

Denis and Thomas

Behind the curtains, the little stage is lit by streaks of light and the reflected pallor of the yellowed ceiling. The other boy pulls the curtains together, and immediately it feels quieter, cut off and private, despite the heave and hum of the drunk men in the bar. Thomas sits down on a fold-up wooden chair; there are others stacked at the back of the stage, as well as a couple of tall stools and a low [chest/ottoman].

“I’m Thomas,” says the boy, “what’s your name?”

“Denis.”

“Is your daddy here?” asks Thomas.

“Yes, he’s here talking to his friends from the tram garage.”

Thomas splutters with laughter.

“ ‘Talking to his friends’, eh? Never heard it called that before!”

I laugh too, not wanting to be left out or to let him see that I don’t know what he means.

Thomas says, “My daddy’s here, too. He’s always here. He just comes here to get pissed,” and he pulls a face, twisting his mouth and looking at the floor.

The sound of the swear word is exciting; I know that adults are allowed to swear, but it’s not something that children are allowed to do in our house. Whenever I’m walking past a group of rough children in the street with mama, she always looks away from them and makes me hold her hand, putting herself between me and them, as if she doesn’t want me to be contaminated; she says that they’re ‘common’ and ‘grubby’ and ‘dirty talkers’. Thomas seems a different kind of boy, though: he’s quite smartly dressed, and his hair is combed over and oiled. The way he uses the swear word – just as description, and not as a way to annoy or upset someone – makes him seem less of a child, and more a part of the grown-up world where these kind of words are part of normal conversation, and not the taboo rarities that mama makes them out to be. Although Thomas looks as if he’s younger than me, he’s already at an advantage, with a kind of adult authority over me.

He swings his feet backwards and forwards under the chair a couple of times, then cocks his head on one side and says, “Would you like to play something?”

When I nod, he gets up and pulls one of the heavy curtains aside, letting the bar light flicker in.

“Come on, then – we can’t stay up here. The lady dancers will be starting soon, I should think.” He speaks with such authority that I’m compelled to follow him, content to wait for the meaning of what he’s saying to become clear. When I climb down from the stage he’s already disappearing into the throng at the bar, the light shining on his oily hair as he insinuates his narrow little body into the gaps between the men’s legs. I hurry, not wanting to be left behind.

Thomas and Denis in the field

Metal and wood scrape together heavily as the crew deploy the [towing ramps] across the verge and the ditch at the field’s edge. Each Leopard weighs over fifty tons, and we’ll need to make a separate trip for each tank if we can’t repair them in situ. We have to hook up the three [Bison/s] with towing rods and combine their pulling power to tow the loaded trailer. We’ll use the combined power of the three winches to drag each tank across the field to the road.

We start back towards the road to help the chaps get things ready. We’ve walked fifty yards before we hear the sudden sound overhead, like a rush of wind, falling in frequency, and then a column of earth fountains up from the edge of the field, twenty yards from the first Bison. The sound of the artillery shell’s detonation cracks and echoes across the field, and Tommy says, “Shitting fuck. Shit, shit, shit.”

He grabs my arm and we turn and run back towards the Leopard to take cover underneath its armoured bulk. The snow and churned earth make it hard to run properly.

More shells come in quick succession, whooshing over our heads and exploding behind us near the road. The third explosion brings the thunk and screech of tearing metal, and someone screams.

Tommy’s swearing as we run, and I’m laughing with the gulping, breathless excitement of the [adrenalin rush] and his characteristic string of profanities, the standard sing-song rhythms of his conversation: “Shit, fuck, shit, fuck, shit…”

I half-stumble, half-dive under the Leopard’s big exhaust pipes and into the dark space underneath the hull. Another shell explodes behind us, much closer, and I feel the blast’s pressure wave and hear the earth and snow and stones pinging against metal. Tommy’s weight thuds in against the back of my legs and I lie panting, face down in the dirt and snow, smelling metal and burned paint and ash and wet earth. The backs of my legs are wet.

“Christ, Tommy, that was close.”

Shells are still exploding, but they’re getting further away now. The one by the tank must have fallen short: it’s the road that they’re ranging on.

Tommy doesn’t say anything, and I jerk my legs to get him to move off them; “Shift, Tommy – you’re squashing me.”

He just lays there, though.

Cacktopia - 1. The opening

She's convinced that everyone's life has an arc, like a line on a graph. Most of the time, when you're in the midst of your life, you might have a sense of the ups and downs of the day, the week, the month, the year. But it's only with distance, with the perspective of the years, that you can see the shape of the arc; and the whole arc can only be plotted when you are dead.

But here she is, still not quite believing that her life could have taken the turn that it has.

Denis: Thomas’ Bloody Death

(…to the soundtrack of Vaughan Williams’ Phantasy Quintet and Yes’ “The Gates of Delerium”?)

Whenever we went to recover vehicles that had been disabled in combat, we couldn’t resist trying to reconstruct the circumstances of the fighting that had taken place. When our convoy of recovery trucks, cranes and trailers slithered to a halt at the edge of the snowy field that morning after a slippery drive along the slush-smeared, pot-holed roads, the woods flanking the field were still burning, a pall of sweet smoke drifting across the road on the edge of the breeze, grey and wispy against the washed-out blue winter sky. There were remnants of orange flame amongst the blown grey ash and the blackened trees, and when the truck engines were cut we could hear the sound of burning wood spitting and crackling.

The two Leopards were in good recovery positions, a hundred yards apart and facing the enemy lines, turrets turned to the baling out position. One of the tanks was a little nose down, with the front half tipped up into a [hollow], but it didn’t look as if we’d have too much difficulty attaching the tow cables and winching them up onto the trailers.

Thomas and I walked carefully across the field towards the tanks, our boots crunching through the top layer of snow and into the melted layer of slush underneath; underneath that was the melt-softened earth and the stiff fibres of the crop stubble left behind after the harvest. Although we knew that the enemy had been driven back from their positions in the trees at the high end of the field, it was hard not to keep looking up there to check that there were no silhouettes of soldiers or tanks or artillery pieces. There were a number of parallel gouges in the snow that lead up to the tree line, torn-up earth and snow and crop remnants from where the remaining tanks in the troop had continued their advance on the enemy positions. There were small patches of disturbed earth where anti-tank or mortar shells had hit the ground.

It was more raw out in the middle of the field, where the breeze travelled unhindered, and I could feel the inside of my mouth getting colder as I breathed in the chilly air. Thomas stopped to light a cigarette, turning his back to the draft and hunching his body around the lighter flame until his cigarette took, and I saw the smoke sweep around the shoulder of his black overalls, which looked inkily dark and monotone against the dazzling white of the snow. After being in barracks for a few days while the snow and fog had curtailed the fighting, I’d half-forgotten that strange snow effect, whereby the snow’s brightness and lack of contrast makes the light flicker in your eyes, and you feel disoriented and anxious because it seems, just for a moment, as if you can’t focus on anything or see any edges or shapes, and you have to look up at the sky or the horizon to restore your sense of perspective and balance.

As we reach the nearest Leopard, we can see that the right-hand track has been thrown, spooling out twenty feet in front of the tank. There’s a smoky smear above the main driving wheel, presumably where the anti-tank shell hit. Around at the front, it looks as if another shell hit the driver’s vision port: the horizontal slit of glass is shattered, and there’s ash and melted rubber and leather spilled out around the driver’s hatch on the decking above. Up close, the chemical-rich smell of these burned materials is obvious in the winter air. There are blackish bloodstains on the decking too. This happened late yesterday afternoon.

“The anti-tankers must have been over in the woods,” says Thomas, nodding in the direction of the smoking trees. “Bloody lucky shot to hit the vision port dead on.”

“And bloody bad luck for the driver,” I say.

“Poor bastard.” He pulls hard on the cigarette while I do a circuit of the tank, checking that all of the tow-hooks are [unencumbered] and that there’s nothing else to complicate the recovery. As I walk around behind the rear of the tank, planting my footsteps carefully in the churned-up earth, I can see the rest of the recovery crew standing on the trailer at the edge of the field. I wave and give them the thumbs up, and the drivers restart the truck engines so that they can manoeuvre the winches and trailers into position.

Thomas is crouched down by the right driving wheel, poking around with the big screwdriver that he always carries around with him. I stand a little way off, and when I hear him grunt as he straightens up, I say:
“Our fighter-bombers must have fire-bombed the woods, I’d say.”

“Mm,” says Thomas. “The [Ivans] must have got the hell kicked out of them after that. Look at all the crows flitting about in that treeline – they’re not going to be hungry for the next few days.”

I smile and nod. Metal and wood scrape together heavily as the crew deploy the [towing ramps] across the verge and the ditch at the field’s edge.

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My lovely new digital radio: it's a beaut!
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Denis at the door

Luckily, someone inside the door starts pulling on it. The hinges squeak and the bottom of the door grates on something and gets stuck, so the person inside shoves the door towards me and then tries again, with the same result. I hear the man inside muttering and huffing, and he kicks at the bottom of the door and then tries pushing and pulling it some more. I look over my shoulder, expecting the boys to be almost upon me, but I’m surprised to see that they have changed their minds and are walking away from me again, back towards the streetlamp.

The man inside stops battering away at the door, and, through the gap at the edge of the door, I can hear him breathing heavily. I knock on the door with my knuckles to let him know that I am here and so that he won’t be angry with me when he eventually gets the door open [just in case he thinks that it was something that I had done that had made the door jam].

“Who the fucking hell is that?” he shouts, “What are you fucking doing out there? Get this fucking door open!”

“I can’t,” I say, “I haven’t done anything, sir.”

He’s silent for a moment, then I hear him muttering, “A kid, a fucking kid. For Christ’s sake.”

He grunts, like a fat man bending over to tie up his bootlace, and I hear a scraping sound, and then he kicks the door a couple more times and it swings towards me and slams against the frame, then the man opens it fully so that he can come outside. I step back, but as he passes me (smelling of beer and onions and hot fat) he tries to clip me around the side of the head and says, “Get out of the fucking way, you little bastard. Little bastard,” and he waves his hand at me. “Fuck off out of the way. Fuck off,” he says to himself more quietly, and then he laughs.

I stand in the doorway, watching him lurch off, swaying from side to side, off towards the main street.

When I push the inner door open, the atmosphere of the bar is completely different from when pappi sent me to wait outside [bugger, I’d forgotten that he said he’d be ‘out in a minute’ – need to cover that off while he’s waiting outside: annoyance, fear, frustration, impotence]. The air is sickeningly thick with cigarette and pipe smoke, and the sound of the men’s voices all talking and laughing at once is a confused, frightening roar that sweeps around my head and makes me frown and blink.

It’s almost completely dark down at my head level, and when I move in among the drinkers I have to step carefully over the beer-slick floor, gently feeling my way with my fingertips against the rough trousers and jackets of the men, who [lurch] aside at my touch, and by the time I reach the part of the bar where I’d last seen pappi, my head and shoulders have been splashed with cold beer and sprinkled with ash.

Pappi has moved, but there’s a stool free where he was standing, so I use its [footrests] as a ladder and climb up so that I can try and look around and find him. The smoke is so thick that I can hardly see the other end of the bar, but I do recognise the fat man who walked me here; he’s sitting on a stool with his elbows on the bar, and between his elbows there’s a small glass with a clear liquid in it. His eyes are open, but his top eyelids keep drooping slowly down, and his head tips forward in dozy synchrony. When the lids close fully, his chin hits his chest and he jerks his head back up, eyes fully open again. The men standing around him are shouting and waving their hands around, jogging him periodically, but he looks completely oblivious to it all.

Somebody prods me in the side, where the softest skin is, under the bottom rib, and I twist around, expecting to see pappi. Instead, I find myself having to look down at the face of a boy about the same age as me. He’s got a purplish-red birthmark that sweeps down from his forehead, all across one eye, and halfway down his cheek. He smiles up at me, and his teeth on the birthmark side of his face look white against the skin there.

He says something, but I can’t hear him because of the noise and heat [earlier…the heat…]. I shout, “What?” but he shakes his head and turns away, cocking his head to indicate that I should go with him. When he reaches the curtained-off [stage], he parts the curtains and clambers up before looking back at me with his head between the curtains and raising his eyebrows. ‘Come on!’ he mouths.

Denis outside the bar

Outside, the day is tipping over into evening; the sky between the buildings, overcast all day, is flattened into a uniform grey. The building frontages have lost all possibility of detailed contrast now that the invisible sun has dipped below the taller [city financial district] buildings to the West. Already there’s a faint damp, smoky smell in the air as the temperature starts to dip.

Up the street, the huddles of men with their cigarettes have gone, but there are boys there now, boys my age and older, kicking a heavy, half-inflated leather football across the street and back again. Now and again the ball hits the kerb and leaps high into the air, and while it’s up there in the air I am suspended/stilled with anticipation, waiting to see if the ball will hit a door or a window: at home, boys who play with footballs in the street are inevitably chased off by an irate adult as soon as the ball bashes against someone’s wall or wooden door; broken glass elicits an even higher degree of anger, with slaps and bunches administered if the culprit is apprehended by the red-faced householder. The bruised, snivelling miscreant then has their name and address bullied out of them and is escorted home, where their parents will administer a second round of corporal punishment, never even trying to elicit the child’s side of the story.

Here, though, the boys don’t seem concerned about the possibility of property damage or resultant adult intervention. They laughed loudly and swore at each other, and once in a while the biggest boy would grip one of the others in a headlock and rub his knuckles in the smaller boy’s eyes or ears. I hung back as far as I could against the outside wall of the bar, in the lee of one of the window frames, because I knew that I didn’t want the big boys to see me and see that I was a stranger here. I would have stood in the recessed doorway, but there seemed to be an increasing traffic of overalled or donkey-jacketed [?] men coming into the bar as the afternoon faded and the lamplighter started his work on the main street at the end of the side road.

Soon, it would be getting fully dark, and the lit lamps already had their dusty haloes of smoke and light. It starts to drizzle, and the pavements and building frontages take on the same oily grey aspect. There’s a glow of yellow light from above the bar’s curtained windows, but I’m standing in a shadowed pool of gloom. I button up my jacket and wish that I had a cap, but have to make do with turning up my collar and wrapping my arms around myself. The next time someone enters the bar, a great rush of laughter surfs out on the splash of light that glitters for a moment on the paving stones, and then the warmth and light of inside the bar is cut off as the door swings shut. The hollow thud of the football on the roadway is more intermittent now, and the boys’ voices echo between the buildings; some of the boys have left, leaving bigger spaces between the shouts and the talk.

Eventually the lamplighter passes by the front of the bar his [technical name of the lighting pole thingy] slanted on his shoulder like a rifle [check how this worked]. He sees me huddled against the wall in the dark and stops.

“Hello, son,” he says, holding the [lighting thing] up so that it lights up my face, “all on your own? ’Spose your daddy’s inside, is he?”

I nod, biting the inside of my bottom lip.

“Shall I light up the lamp for you?”

I shake my head, trying to push my back further into the brick wall, and think about the big boys down the street and how the lamplighter will be attracting their attention.

“No, thank you,” I say, “it’s all right, thank you.”

“Suit yourself, son,” he says, annoyed, and heads off the street towards the footballers. He lights the lamp closest to the boys, and the four remaining boys move into the pallid arc of its flickering light, where the white drizzle drifts. The lamplighter walks on, then stops and turns back towards the boys: I can see his lips moving, but I’m too far away to hear what he says. When he’s finished, he laughs, and the four boys all turn around and look back towards the bar, and towards me.

As they start walking towards me, I feel my heart sinking, and I want pappi and I want to go home and I want be in the warmth and familiarity of our home, with mama at the sink and pappi at the table with his evening paper and his sausages and onions on his dinner plate. I want to be able to look at their absent faces as they talk to each other, not looking at me, and I want to be able to lay my head down on my arm stretched out across the table and look at mama sideways as I sink into an end-of-the-day drowsiness.

[…?]

The door to the bar feels heavier than earlier, and I can only get it open a few inches before it jams; I strain and pull and push, but it won’t open far enough for me to get through and into the bar, where pappi will look after me (if I can find him). The four boys are twenty yards away. With the chill [??] and the fear and frustration and the effort of trying to get the door open and knowing that it’s unfair and that I can’t escape, I know that I will start to wet myself in a minute.

Denis Again Again

“Denis! Oi, Denis!” – it’s pappi’s voice, but I have to wait until he shouts again before I can find out the direction that his voice came from. But there he is, off to the left, around by the wall where the bar curves inwards towards a door next to the bottles. I find my way around the legs of the men, which make me think of the forest of tree trunks I’ve seen in one of the pictures in my story book. These tree trunks sway and smell, though, and the wooden floor is slippery with spilled beer, and it smells too – the whole place smells of sour beer and cigarettes and dust and fried onions. [care re: sensory/atmospheric similarity to Jan’s barrack drinking den…] Looking up form time to time, I see men tipping back glasses, and the white foam floating on the top of the amber liquid that’s shot through with the whitish light from the window. There are flushed faces and sweaty faces, faces set with stupid grins and faces animated with laughter, bright eyes and fishy-looking eyes, and cigarettes and pipes and bread rolls with meat and onions in them. Nearly everyone seems to be enjoying themselves.

Pappi is leaning on the little folding hatch in the bar, and as I come up to him he has to step aside and let a little man with a twisted, smiling face lift the hatch and come out into the body of the bar. He’s got a cloth folded over his arm, and he nods exaggeratedly at everyone who catches his eye.

“Aye aye, Denis!” says Pappi, and he reaches down and lifts me up, then plonks half of my bottom down on one of the high stools, and I have to grab his arm to prevent myself falling sideways as he lets me go.

“Don’t fuss, son, don’t fuss,” he says, irritation thickening his already drink-thickened voice. I notice that his cheeks are brick red.

“I’m not,” I say, “You didn’t put me on the seat properly.”

“Oo-ooo!” says one of the men pappi is standing with, “He’s a fighter, is he, your Denis?”

Pappi sort of smiles, but not a happy smile, and brushes my hand away and steps back. I can see I’ve made him look silly, and that he’ll be angry with me when we get home. It feels as if all of my body is draining out through my bottom, and I want to sigh and cry.

Pappi looks at me, pretending that he’s not annoyed, and he says, “So, Denis, what have you been up to while I’ve been talking with the boys?”

“Nothing,” I say, looking past his ear, and thinking about the picture of the naked lady in my pocket and the way that I’d jumped all over the tram seats and run around and tried to get into the driver’s cabin. [make sure he did this too – the shiny metal and the mechanisms; precursors of his apprenticeship and his technical aptitude] Pappi says something else, but I’m still staring past his ear, at the smoke-blotched plaster ceiling, and at the ruffled tops of some dusty blue curtains that cordon off the corner of the bar. There’s a gap where the two curtains almost meet, and in the gap a bright white light is being turned on and off, on and off. One of the curtains is brushed against from the other side, and a man on that side of the curtain says, “That’s fine,” and the light goes off and stays off. There’s the sound of a chair scraping on a wooden floor.

“Oi!” says pappi, “if you’re not going to listen to me I’m not going to talk to you. You might as well sling your hook.”

I stick out my bottom lip and look at him. The bar is full of men talking and laughing, and I hear a hollow rush of air and the sound of the street for a moment as someone opens the door and comes in.

Pappi says, “Look…” and fishes in his pocket for a couple of coins, which he gives to me, “go and wait outside. I’ll be out in a while and we’ll go home. All right?”

I nod mutely.

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Originally uploaded by andycorsham.