The Broken Chariot Read online

  ‘Pay Corps wallahs,’ the driver said. ‘Our money’ll be fucked up for months.’

  Another clandestine gaze through the slit of the door, and Dominic waited in line to board a gharry. His face had hardly altered from what seemed all those years ago, the last person Herbert wanted to see. Take a long time to get his knees brown. ‘Have they finished loading our gear yet?’

  Another twenty minutes,’ Ashley told him.

  The new Pay Corps arrivals sat in their lorry, silent and sweating. ‘Where do you suppose they’re going?’ Herbert asked. ‘Some cushy job at headquarters, I expect.’

  Ashley put his paperback away. ‘Same road as us. I asked their driver. He’s browned off because he waited for them all morning.’

  Dominic must be happy to be on such a ripping adventure, but Herbert thought that if he had to put up with his questions on all that had happened in his life since lighting off from school it would be positively sick-making, at the best tedious. Anyway it was no bloody business of his that he had spent most of the time working in a factory which he, Dominic, would consider a bit of a come down after all that stuff out of Caged Birds.

  Stores loaded and roped on, Pemberton climbed into the cabin of the fifteen-hundredweight. ‘Get going,’ Herbert called. ‘We’ll go back through Omodhos.’

  The driver unfolded his map. ‘Take a bit longer.’

  ‘Why not? I like that road.’

  ‘You’re the corporal.’

  Carob trees flicked by, long brown beans gangling in the sun like withered turds. ‘Turd trees,’ the driver hee-hawed, gunning along the flat and not bothering to slow down, though he almost twitched a sleepy old donkey into a ditch.

  Herbert wouldn’t bump into Dominic, no chance of it, and the Omodhos route attracted him in any case because on an exercise around the village, between urging his section to take cover, and getting on through the vineyards, he had seen a young woman hanging sheets on a line. She wasn’t long in his view, but the picture stayed with the clarity of the design on a postage stamp: a pallid oval face, black hair lengthening behind, dark brown eyes, and white headscarf. An arm reaching up to the clothesline elongated her bosom under a flowered blouse, though it was hard to be sure how much detail his lascivious imagination etched in later. ‘Did you see that woman?’ he asked Pemberton at the time.

  He’d been half-asleep, as had most of the others. ‘What woman?’

  ‘In the vineyard, back there.’

  ‘You must have a touch of the sun.’

  She saw him, and smiled. He settled into his outpost on the hillside for a few hours’ sleep by his well-oiled Bren, and dreamed about her. Heat in the rocks cooled after dusk, aromas of thyme and juniper drifting on the breeze. When on the march, incidents from the factory were his favourite recollection. Faces invaded space without warning, wanting to take over his soul, solidly and forever. He preferred to be colonized by an obsession with the woman than be a victim to anything from the past.

  The sight of her made him wonder what he would do when he left the army, where to go, what caged bird refuge find. In a few months he would be on his way out, and the smile on the woman’s otherwise placid features turned away the thought of going back to Nottingham and immersing himself in the rattling machine music of the factory. Better to make his way around the world on a merchant ship, or try a job in London and know what it was like to be an ant among millions. The idea of having to make up his mind was anguish, and he even considered staying in the army for seven and five, though he preferred the heady uncertainty of not knowing what he was going to do till he did it.

  At the warehouse a piece of grit had forked into his left boot, which helped the next few miles on the road to weary him even more, so that all he ached for was to see the woman and talk to her. Water still ran in the river, though it was June, and the road snaked between taller trees, their driver wrestling the wheel as if with a dragon whose head he had at last got down on the ground. Herbert envied him the combat, anything but sitting still and watching the all too familiar landscape go by, which only another sight of the woman could bring to life.

  The pebble in his boot was easy to ignore the closer they got to the village. Brooding over the girl showed a sickness of the spirit, he was sure, a threat to himself he could do nothing about, a gun to the head. He didn’t want the vision to melt, though wondered whether Pemberton or the driver could detect the thickness of his obsession.

  The undulating scrub of heather and olives, and then scattered tall trees whose shade flickered the windscreen, gave off a dry luxurious scent, fresher than at the coast, deepening his foolishness in love, at chasing a picture which had snared him on to a fateful road. Useless to choose it by hoping to avoid that idiot Dominic, the chances being they would meet in any case. He would have been a bigger fool to think it unlikely. Only the woman – though a cooler voice said such revelations never came twice. Even so, he must be driven through the village to prove it true or false.

  If he saw her he would wave and get the lorry to stop, stroll between the trees and talk to her. She would smile again on seeing him. But how would he talk? His Greek was less than basic. He knew the alphabet from school but not much beyond a few travellers’ phrases, and how to count – a large percentage more than most but hardly fluent enough for courting. On the other hand maybe she was a schoolteacher who knew English, and had come back to be with her family for the weekend.

  He would marshal up words and signs to charm her till she agreed to meet him a few days later. After a few occasions of stumbling communication in the vineyards, or by the house she lived in if he was lucky (perhaps he would meet her like Rebecca at the well) he would take her to the cinema, even though tall moustachioed brothers came as chaperones. Laughing at his gauche mistakes with the language she would teach him, till he could unravel affectionate thoughts for her wondrous approval. He was nineteen, and she maybe a few years beyond, but how could it matter? After a while they would get married in whatever church she named, buy a house for a few hundred pounds and, on his discharge from the army, he would land an easy job in administration so that they could live happily ever after.

  Human intercourse would be difficult at first, on all sorts of levels, but exciting; she will have no preconceptions about my past, he thought; I’ll have no clear notion about hers; therefore we’ll have the romantic experience and even difficulty in getting to know each other, which may take years, but so much the better because it’ll be an adventure, since there’ll be more than a lot to learn.

  Eyes ached at following the descent of one in ten. The road zigzagged up again, terraced vineyards to either side. He gobbed all that was dusty in his throat out of the window, as if to let the bus struggling behind tread down such pathetic ideas. Crumbling stone walls bordered the road, divided groves and terraces. When caged birds weren’t escaping, or preparing to, they were the victims of romantic dreams, he mused.

  Milky cloud covered the descent into Omodhos. A building was marked with an Enosis sign. With such a big difference between ideas, language, race even, no woman would be seen with a British soldier, smile though he might, hope though he would, so he’d have to get used to the impossibility – unless she was Aphrodite or Circe or Oenone, for whom such trivial considerations wouldn’t matter. And yet, if they were made for each other, as he knew they must be, she would come to him in whatever manifestation because she had, after all, smiled at him. She could be married, but he wanted her with an excitement that wouldn’t leave him alone.

  After the large monastery they drove through the packed houses of the village. Men stared from the café, and the lorry had to wait until an ancient geezer on a donkey turned into a side street. Women on stools in the doorways clicked sticks to make lace. Clear of buildings, there was no young woman for him to get down from the lorry and walk towards over the stony soil.

  Chagrined, he looked at the village with the eyes of a soldier: the closely grouped houses on the bend would control the road if f
ortified both ways. Dispositions were noted on his map for artillery and crossfire, the siting of Brens and mortars, so that he momentarily forgot why he had made the driver bring them on this bleeding-heart roundabout track which Archie Bleasby (or even Dominic, had he come this way, or whenever he did) would say was a more than useless carry on.

  He peered at every tree and wall, but the grove had been magicked away, no woman there. Or he couldn’t say where the ground had been. Terracing was at all angles, trees differently spaced. A blackbird flew across the windscreen. Beyond a house-to-house search, or a battue through outlying land, there was nothing to be done. She was gone, never to be found – as he had feared would be the case. A faint whistle of breath indicated marks for trying, and now it was back into himself, though with the certainty that the dream would haunt him forever.

  Swivelling at a bend, the driver swore blind at what only he saw, spun from one side of the road to the other to avoid killing a woman who suddenly appeared carrying a load of wood. Such a hit would bring the population down from the village intent on stringing them up, and who could blame them? Carelessness was unforgivable. The problem was avoided, but Herbert knew they’d had it. Or the lorry had. Something was bound to happen, and he braced himself for the impact. Doors and bumpers hit a bridge, scraping masonry. Pemberton stayed silent and upright. They bounced back across the road.

  All so slow. When was the loony driver going to bring it under control? Herbert called out as much, though didn’t know why. Inevitably the lorry jumped a culvert, slow it seemed, spun through pine trees. You could count them and the seconds it took for each to go by, if the heart let you.

  Heads went down, and he sensed their progress in vivid colours, heard the grazing of sultry trunks, scraping and turning, the driver fighting with the strength and skill of a demon who wouldn’t be cornered. They landed precariously on a ledge lower down and, on thinking they were safe at last, the wheels slipped.

  ‘No!’ Pemberton shouted.

  Herbert’s last hope, a crushing pain in his leg, was that they didn’t have enough petrol in the tank to catch fire – before the lorry went three more somersaults and smashed against rocks by the river.

  He was sure he had been tied up and thrown on to a bed of pebbles. Some were sharper than others, though only when he tried to move. They were cooking him, and he couldn’t understand why. ‘What had he done to be treated thus? If you want to know he’d offended us.’ Bloody silly words streaming again and again through his brain.

  He wasn’t even hot, or uncomfortable in his dream, but would be if he woke up. Would they eat him when they’d finished? Where they were he’d never know, too sleepy to care. One pebble grew to enormous size, and was sliced in two hemispheres, each shining grey as quartz as both parts wheeled off on separate trajectories into space. He hoped he hadn’t screamed, would be ashamed if he had. Every nightmare was only the same in that none lasted forever, though he swore the knives and forks had been real.

  A clown face showed through clouds of disinfectant, recalling the Jewish hut in the refugee camp. Maybe he was sweating the stuff. He’d been knocked about. The bite of gangrene came and went.

  ‘You’ve got a Blighty one, corp. Half a dozen, really. The army won’t want you any more.’

  Nor did he want to see that Beano face again, with its typical RAMC wide-lipped cackle, now that I know I’m not blind or deaf, he added to himself. As for the rest, maybe the MO would enlighten him – if he could get away from putting his hand up the nurses’ skirts. He vomited at the pain when he tried to turn to a better angle of comfort. The needle of the ward sister felt like the cut of a scalpel, and an enormous soft pillow muffled him back into oblivion.

  ‘We thought you was for the black pyjamas,’ the male orderly said, spooning slop into his mouth for supper. ‘Your driver only had a few bruises and a headache.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’ The croak came from inside his armour casing. He had never slept so many aeons. ‘How long have I been here?’

  ‘A week ago it happened. We laid bets when you was brought in.’

  ‘I hope you lost.’

  ‘Nar, I won five akkers. I just knew you was a hard case, though it was hard to read it on your face.’

  All your life was said to pass before you in the moments before death, but it hadn’t with him because he had come out alive. The Technicolor flash-bang of the collision drummed around, and he wondered if he would ever get free of its endless tentacles of flesh and metal.

  ‘The shock’s wearing off,’ he was told.

  His body was shaken to pieces, bombarded by stones, in a barrel corked and locked at both ends. Nightmare was more the name. He dreamed of being sawn in two across the waist, but the fatal separation didn’t happen. The two halves came closer in fact, and he awoke – though still in the dream – into a miracle of flying above mountain peaks that were swathed in snow. A jagged piece of dead wood ripped into his face again and again.

  ‘We had a little old woman from the town stitch your flesh together,’ the MO said. ‘A dab hand with a rusty needle she was. Still, we’ll have you out and about in a few months. You’ll never know it happened.’

  He flew to another world, saw people, everyone he’d ever known but in no order, from all over the place, laughing or warning or commiserating. Hugh and Maud told him they were dead, not him, but he wasn’t to worry. Things would sort themselves out. What others said he couldn’t remember – drugged up to the eyeballs, he thought.

  The major laughed when he came for a look, at the peepshow for the whole battalion. ‘You’ll live, Corporal, but I don’t know whether you’ll like it. Pity about the other chap. Things always happen to my best soldiers.’ A jovial, hard-hat, thinking what were a few wounds to a soldier? The trade had its ups and downs: ribs cracked, leg broken, one arm likewise, head bumped around enough to leave a permanent deep scar down one cheek. ‘What other chap, sir?’

  ‘They haven’t told you? Kind of them, I suppose. Pemberton. Brain-dead when they got him in. Nothing they could do. These bloody roads are a nightmare, though why you took the one through Omodhos I’ll never know. Just as much traffic as on the other. I’ve brought some fruit. We’ve told your next of kin there’s nothing to worry about.’

  Sleep was peace. Those who die will be the lucky ones, he recalled from Treasure Island. Poor old Pemberton had jumped the gun, died the death. His folks will love him now he’s dead. No use worrying about that. He did, and the blackest gloom settled, because if he hadn’t chased that chimera Ashley might at worst only have been in the next bed, a leg equally angled.

  They had both died, but he had been born again, or that’s what it seemed, all he could tell himself, out of action, in traction, and birds beyond the open windows whistling him into a summer mood, a cosy lull that let the days go by as if on casters, all worries of the past drained away in his weakness and sorrow and then, after God alone knew what process, blown back for him to put into their proper slot.

  The ward maid had black hair pulled tightly back, and a comfortable bosom under her white apron, doing things for him no one should have to do for another, in a regime under which pride fragmented, but out of which manhood had to grow again, for what it would turn out to be worth. At least she wouldn’t be following him into civvy street to shout about the baby and booby he had been, which buoyed him up in darker moments.

  He came out of his afternoon nap to see Archie sitting by the bed, and thought the accident was getting to his brain at last. Dominic would have been worse to dream about. It was Archie because the voice was real. ‘You look like an old man of forty. I walked past yer bed, till the sister pointed you out. What a bloody mess, though.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ He wanted no one to witness his downfall, his helplessness, but regretted the harsh tone, and smiled. ‘I’m glad to see you.’

  ‘I asked for you at your camp, and they told me where yer was. Here’s some fags. Me and a gang came down from Blighty a fortnight
ago. We’ve got to wire up on one o’ them new bases for National Servicemen. It was bleddy marvellous coming on the aeroplane. All in one day! I loved it. They even gen us a meal, and it worn’t the usual army slop. We’ll be finished though next month, and I’ll be sorry because I love it here in Cyprus. We get pissed every night. What ’appened, though?’

  Herbert told what he could. ‘And my mate got killed.’

  ‘That’s a bleddy shame. Got his number on it, I suppose. Anyway, I hope you aren’t going to lay on yer back much longer, yer bone-idle bastard.’

  Herbert laughed, the first time since when? – though the pain was no incentive, and he had been told to avoid it for the fear of splitting the stitches in his face. Nor was it easy to talk. ‘I won’t be here a minute longer than I’ve got to.’

  ‘Ar, I know yer won’t. Yer’d better not. Yer was lucky, though, coming out of that. I’ll tek yer for a pint of the local spew when you’re out, to celebrate.’

  Which, Herbert thought, would be one in the eye for the woman of Omodhos. ‘I’ll keep you to it.’

  Archie leaned close. ‘I met a bint the other night in town. Lovely she is, black hair and dark eyes, and very nice tits. Trying to teach me the lingo. I was doing all right, as well. I told ’er I’d come back and marry her when I got demobbed.’

  ‘What an awful lie.’

  ‘Me? A liar? Not me, our Bert. I shan’t marry her, though. She’s too nice for that. I’ll do her a favour. She deserves a lot better than me.’ He stood. ‘But I’ve got to ’op it. The blokes can only cover up for me a couple of hours. I’ll see you in a few days, if you aren’t out by then.’

  ‘I might be. I’m already hobbling to the lavatory.’

  The MO said he would need a few weeks yet, but he willed himself to mend, to become viable by his own effort, walking up and down the ward all day and every day, and wandering the grounds in his hospital blue like a bent old man. A glance of his figure in a shining window forced him to straighten, and go at a faster rate. He drew the pieces of his body bit by bit together. In the evening he sat by his bed, aloof, unwilling to talk to the man next door who was writing poems which read like the worst of Patience Strong. Herbert read one out of politeness, and said it was good, and that he should persevere, which made the man happy. Herbert did all that his brain allowed him to, which was pull the copy of Caged Birds out of his small pack and comfort himself with the same old story.