I glance at you, my dear, but your eyes are averted now, your gaze cast down. ‘And us?’ I ask our lieutenant. ‘How do you intend to treat us?’
‘You - and your wife?’ she says, then watches keenly. I display, I hope, no reaction. You look away, towards the window. ‘Oh, with respect,’ the lieutenant continues, nodding, expression serious. ‘Why, with honour.’
‘But not to the extent of honouring our desire to leave.’
‘Correct!’ she says. ‘You’re my local knowledge, Abel. You know your way around these parts.’ She gestures upwards and around. ‘And I’ve always had a thing about castles; you can give me a guided tour of the place, if you like. Well, let’s be honest; if I like. And I do like. You wouldn’t mind, though, would you, Abel? No, of course not. I’m sure it would be a treat for you as well. I’m sure you have lots of interesting stories you can tell me about the place; fascinating ancestors, famous visitors, exciting incidents, exotic heirlooms from faraway lands . . . Ha! For all I know the place even has a ghost!’ She sits forward, the fork waved in her fingers like a wand. ‘Does it, Abel? Does the place have a ghost?’
I sit back. ‘Not yet.’
This makes her laugh. ‘There you are. Your real treasures are things the looters weren’t interested in; the place itself, its history, the library, the tapestries, ancient chests, old clothes, statues, great gloomy paintings . . . all still intact, pretty much. Perhaps while we’re here you can educate my men; give them a taste for culture. I’m sure my own aesthetic senses have been heightened already, just talking to you and sitting here.’ She clatters the fork down on the salver. ‘That’s the thing, you see; people like me get so few opportunities to talk to people like you and stay in places like this.’
I nod slowly. ‘Yes, and you know who I am, who we are; there are books in the library listing the generations of our family, and portraits of most of our ancestors on every wall, but we don’t know who you are. Might we inquire?’ I glance at you; your gaze has returned to the lieutenant. ‘Just a name would do,’ I tell her.
She scrapes her seat back, flexing her shoulders, arching her back and stifling the greater part of a yawn. ‘Of course,’ she says, linking her hands and stretching them against each other. ‘What you don’t realise, until you become part of one, is the way that units in the front line - the grunts, the squaddies - take on nicknames. They leave their civilian names behind with their civilised personalities; they become another person, after training. Maybe it’s a sort of shamanistic thing, like a lucky charm.’ She grins. ‘You know; the bullet with your name on it will have your non-com handle printed thereon, not the real one, the one your buddies call you.’ She snorts. ‘You know I’ve forgotten the real name of every man in this squad? Been with some of them two years, too, and that seems like a very long time, in the circumstances?’ She nods. ‘But, their names . . . Well, there’s Mr Cuts--’
‘He alive?’ I suggest.
She looks at me oddly, then continues. ‘He’s kind of my deputy; a sergeant in his old unit. Then there’s Airlock, Deathwish, Victim, Karma, Tootight, Kneecap, Verbal, Ghost - Ah!’ she smiles suddenly. ‘See; we have a ghost already!’ She sits forward, flicking the names off, finger by finger. ‘. . .Ghost, Lovegod, Fender, Dropzone, Grunt, Broadleaf, Poppy, One-track, Dopple, Psycho . . . and . . . that’s all,’ she says, sitting back, closing up, crossing her arms and legs. ‘There was Half-caste, but he’s dead now.’
‘Was he the young man on the road yesterday?’
‘Yes,’ she says quickly. Then is silent for a moment. ‘You know the strange thing?’ She looks at me. I watch. ‘I remembered Half-caste’s name, his old name, civilian name, when I kissed him.’ Another moment’s pause. ‘It was . . . Well, it doesn’t matter now.’
‘Then you killed him.’
She looks at me for a long time. I have out-stared many a man, but those cold grey globes come close to besting me. Eventually, she says, ‘Do you believe in God, Abel?’
‘No.’
What must be one of the lieutenant’s smallest-calibre smiles is dispatched. ‘Then just wish that you aren’t ever dying from a stomach wound when there’s nobody around armed with anything better than a skin plaster and the sort of painkillers you’d use for a mild hangover. And nobody prepared to put you out of your agony.’
‘You have no medic?’
‘Had. Got in the way of some mortar shrapnel two weeks ago. Name was Vet,’ she says, yawning again. ‘Vet,’ she repeats, and puts her arms behind her head, as though in surrender (her gaudy jacket falls open and, within her army shirt, the lieutenant’s breasts press briefly out; I suspect they might be, like her, quite firm). ‘Not because he was long-serving. Still, you take what you can get, you know?’
‘So, at the end of this, what ought we to call you?’ I ask, thinking to break her out of such dreadful sentimentality.
‘You really want to know?’
I nod.
‘Loot,’ she tells me, passing bashful. Another shrug. ‘After a while, you become your function, Abel. I am the lieutenant, so they call me Loot. I have become Loot. It is what I answer to.’
‘Lute, with a U?’
She smiles. ‘No.’
‘And before that?’
‘Before?’
‘What were you called before?’
She shakes her head, snorts. ‘Easy.’
‘Easy?’
‘Yes. I used to say, “Easy, now,” a lot. It got shortened.’ She inspects her nails. ‘I’ll thank you not to use it.’
‘Indeed; the jibes that suggest themselves would be . . . eponymous.’
She regards me, narrow-eyed for a moment, then says, ‘Just so.’ She yawns, then rises. ‘And now I’m going to sleep,’ she announces, stretching her arms. She stoops to gather up her boots. ‘I thought we might - the three of us - take a walk, later on; into the hills,’ she says. ‘Maybe do some hunting, this afternoon.’ She passes me by and pats me on the shoulder. ‘You two make yourselves at home.’
CHAPTER FOUR
I regret I am impressed with our lieutenant, if mildly. She has a sort of uncut grace, and I find her lack of beauty (as she does, not unthinking) beyond the point. I do not like people who make me notice what they fail to find impressive in themselves.
You rise and walk round the table, straightening the flag as you approach, then stand behind me, hands on my shoulders, gently pressing, kneading, massaging. I let you work my tired muscles for a while, my body rocking slightly, my head moving slowly back and forth. I do believe sleep may be coming at last; my eyes half close, and a sleepy focus brings my gaze to the surface of our flag, spread upon the table. Dried mud lies scattered on the flag, a souvenir of the plains delivered courtesy of the lieutenant’s boots. No doubt their soil lies sprinkled over most of our rooms, corridors and rugs by now. My gaze, filtered through the blurring eyelash veil of my half-closed eyes, stays fixed upon that caked dirt lying on our colours, and I recall our second tryst.
I threw you on this same flag once, though not on this table, not in this room. Somewhere higher than here; an old attic, dusty and warm with the day’s soaked-in sunlight. On the other side of those slates we had used as a prop to our pleasure the night before, we crept while the rest of our party, still recovering from the night’s excitement, lunched on the lawns or soaked away hangovers in baths. I wanted you immediately - my desire stoked but smothered, banked for the rest of that night first by your too proper concern for our absence being noticed, then by the sleeping arrangements, which meant we each had to share a room with other relations - but you demurred at first, in some recollected aftermath of shyness.
And so, like the children we no longer were, we investigated old boxes, trunks and chests, our declared pretext become real. We found old clothes, moth-eaten fabrics, ancient uniforms, rusted weapons, empty boxes, whole crates of hard, heavy phonograph records, forgotten urns, vases and bowls and a hundred other discarded pieces of our history, recent and antique, r
isen here like light detritus upon the swirling currents of the castle’s fluid vitality, deposited at its dusty, unused summit like dusty memories in an old man’s head.
We tried on some old clothes; I brandished an age-spotted sword. The flag, unfolded from a trunk, made a carpet for our shoes and discarded clothes, then - after I grew bolder, taking off more, helping you with your assumed attire, letting my hands and fingers linger, then kissing - it became our bed.
Within the arid calm of that dark, abandoned place, our passion took and shook the flag, rumpling and creasing it as though to a slow storm it had been exposed, until I dampened it with a sparse rain more precious than air and storm-clouds ever have to offer.
I recalled those offered moon-pearls of the night before, and on the flag it was as though they now lay returned, memento vivae unstrung upon a sewn-on and now crumpled shield, with swords and some mythic beast shown rampant.
You drained me, sequentially; our pleasure became pain and I discovered that you suffered in silence, and screamed - quiet, hoarse, bitten off - for satisfaction only. We fell asleep eventually in each other’s arms, and on our family’s.
You took your repose like your pleasure, sleeping one eye half-open, above an embroidered, fading unicorn. We slept an hour away, then dressed and - luckily unseen - hurried down apart; you to a bath and I to a hillside walk we each pretended had begun long before.
You continue, working my shoulders, stroking my neck, pressing into the top of my back. My gaze remains fixed upon the mud the lieutenant’s boots have left. When I was young, just a child - and you were away, held from me by that family dispute our mating somehow sought to mend - I remember that for my early years I hated dirt and mud and grime more than anything else I could imagine. I’d wash my hands after every contact with something I thought unclean, running in even from sports and games outside to rinse off under the nearest tap what was no more than honest earth, as though terrified that somehow I might be contaminated by that mundanity.
I blame, of course, my mother, an essentially urban woman; that excess of fastidiousness which she encouraged served me ill for those young years, bringing down upon my head a shower of insults from my friends, peers and relations more filthy than anything I thought I might pick up from wood, ground or park.
It was a horror of the common; something Mother thought was ingrained, indeed genetic, within both our class and particularly our family, but insufficiently so by her strict standards; something which required reinforcement, feeding, bringing on and bringing up, like a carefully trained flower or a well-bred and well-groomed horse.
My fanatical cleanliness was the symbol of my worship of my mother, and the acknowledgement, the very expression of our superiority compared to those beneath us. It was a belief which Mother was perfectly appalled she could not effectively evangelise to others of our station. I knew of people of our kind - as well connected, as ancient in their lineage, as abundant in the extent of their estates - who, as far as my mother was concerned, entirely let down the side by living as meanly - or at least as grubbily - as any peasant with bare feet, an earth floor and a single change of clothes. I knew people who owned half a county who habitually packed more dirt beneath their fingernails than my mother considered decent in a window box, whose breath and person smelled so that it was possible to detect their earlier presence in a room for half a day subsequently and who, save for the most special of occasions, dressed in old clothes so tatty, torn and holed that each new servant brought into their employ had to be carefully instructed, should they come into contact with these rags on the rare circumstance when they were not being worn by their owner, not to pick them up between finger and thumb and at arm’s length take them promptly to the nearest fire or outside bin.
Mother regarded such laxity with disgust; of course it was easy to live as one wanted when there was no one to tell you otherwise and one possessed an income independent of external sanitary sanction, but that was precisely the point; the poor had an excuse for their grubbiness while the better-off had none, and to reveal oneself as being happy to live in conditions which might unnerve a pig was an insult both to those like my mother who clove to the true faith of immaculate hygiene, and indeed to those less fortunate as well.
My thoughts on such matters matched those of Mother perfectly; they were the very image of hers, and I remained her disciplined disciple in all this until one day in early spring, at the age of nine, when I was walking alone in the woods to the north of the castle. I had had an argument with my tutor and my mother and, when my lessons had concluded for the day, had stormed from the house, not noticing the rain that was approaching from the west. The wind surprised me underneath the still bare trees, a loud commotion shaking their tops, and only then did I turn back towards the castle, clutching my thin coat around me, seeking in the pockets for gloves that were not there.
Then the rain came, plunging in a cold fusillade through the near-naked branches of the broad-leaved trees where only the first hints of bright buds broke the brown monotony of bark. I cursed Mother, and my tutor. I cursed myself, for paying too little heed to the weather and for neglecting to ensure I had both cap and gloves with me. The coat - my best, another foolishness born of angry haste - snagged on branches as I made my way back down. My shoes, polished to a gleam, already bore scuffs and were spattered with dirt. I cursed the grasping trees, the whole noisome forest, the dung-shaped hills themselves and the dark, spitting weather (though only, it must be said, in terms that would have made Mother frown a little - I believed as did Mother that my mouth as much as my well-scrubbed skin must stay unsoiled).
The path angled down the side of a hill, beneath the tall, swaying trunks; it zigged and zagged, taking a shallow, easy route towards the castle, but long. The rain, by now tumultuous, stung my cheek, plastered my hair to my head and started to insinuate its way down the back of my neck, icily intimate and crawling like a cold centipede against my skin. I roared at the heedless hills, the witless weather and my own cursed luck. I stopped by the side of the track, looked down and determined to cut out the bends in the path and head straight down the slope.
I skidded twice on a slurry of mud and decaying leaves, and had to clutch at the wet and slimy ground to prevent myself from falling further. Cold muck and the rotted humus of the previous year’s fall squelched between my fingers, gelid, brown and troughed; I wiped my hands on the grass as best I could, leaving smears. My treasured coat was growing heavy with the rain, its surface everywhere darkened by the incessant drops, its cut elegance made loose and incontinent by the lathering rain, probably ruining it for ever.
At the bottom of the route I’d chosen there was a steep bank and a deep ditch to negotiate before I could regain the path; I blinked through the water streaming down my face, looking this way and that, trying to see an easier passage, but the bank and ditch ran on to each side and there was no simpler route. I decided to jump, but even as I stepped back to gather myself for the leap, the bank gave way beneath me, sending me tumbling and flailing down the muddy slope. I collided with exposed roots and was thrown outwards, landing on my back on the far side of the ditch, knocking all the wind out of me and smacking my head back on a stone, and then - winded, dizzy, helplessly disoriented - I could not help myself rebounding, falling forward, into the dark soiled depths of the ditch.
I lay there, hands clawed into the filth on either side, my face stuck into the rank mud. I pulled my head free of the earth’s cloying grip, eructing the muck from out my nose and mouth, gagging as I spat and snorted out its thick, cold mucus. I tried to breathe, swallowing between spits and splutters and attempting to force my lungs to work while a terrible vacuum I could not fill sat within my chest, mocking me.
I rolled over, still wheezing for my breath, thinking in a panic that I might die here, suffocating in the midst of these woods’ frigid excrement; perhaps I had broken something; perhaps this awful sucking inability to take a breath was the onset of a terrible, spreading paralysi
s.
The rain plummeted down at me. It cleaned my face a little, but my neck and back were sinking down into the mud and my shoes were filled with cold, filthy water. Still I laboured for air. I started to see strange lights above me in the trees, even as the totality of the view dimmed, and the air roared at me like an obscene lullaby presaging death.
I forced myself to sit up, kneel, then get on all-fours to cough and hack once more, and finally persuaded some spittle-charged air to whistle down my throat towards my lungs. I gagged and spluttered again and stared down at the brown glue of mulch and soil flowing up around my hands; it rose until the dark tide quite covered them and only my wrists showed, pale against the muddy swirl, while below the scummy surface my hands kneaded the giving, pliant, warming mud that suddenly felt like flesh.
I coughed once more and sneezed, and watched long glutinous strings loop down from my mouth and nose, attaching me to the soil until, with one enmired hand, I brushed them away.
I began to breathe more easily at last, then, believing that I would not now die and had not been seriously injured, I looked about me. I gazed at the lashing drops sprinkling all around, at the slick, swollen curve of the ditch’s flank, bordered by a soaking skirt of heavy, drooping grass, at the darkly towering trees standing imperiously over me, at the thin, gauzy veils of rain still sweeping and drifting through the moistened forest, at the little silky rivulets of water running down over glistening, limb-like roots protruding from the earthy bank and flowing across the surface of the path like some rough, chill sweat of the land.