Chapter 29
After the armistice was announced, there were dark days when he couldn’t get out of bed.
He couldn’t summon the will to speak to anyone—not even Eve.
For days and days, he uttered no words at all.
Then one morning, Eve brought a gramophone onto the ward, along with a selection of ragtime records.
Many of Thomas’s favourite songs were there, and hearing the music his friend had loved so much filling the air around him was a torment to begin with.
A couple of times, Max saw him standing beside the gramophone, rifling through the box of records.
“ ‘Frog Legs Rag’ next, I think…”
And then Thomas was sitting on the edge of the bed, the record on his lap, a lit cigarette dangling between his fingers.
“So?” Thomas prompted. “What do you think?”
“About what?” Max asked. His thoughts were sluggish and as sticky as the mud in the trenches all around him. A rat scuttled over his pillow, and he felt the flick of its tail as he batted it away.
“Keep up, Everly.” Thomas rolled his eyes. “The dinner? For John? Might help cheer him up a bit. There’s still no word about Herbert, you know.”
“Oh, that.”
The tortoise had escaped or something. That’s what the letter from his mother had said. God knew why she’d thought to share this news with him in the first place. Max swore that John fretted more over that tortoise than some of the other men did about their sweethearts and children.
“Can you organise something?” Thomas prompted.
“I’ll get William onto it,” Max replied.
“Good man. Here, take this.”
Thomas held out the ragtime record. Max went to take it, but when he raised his hand, there was suddenly a pistol in it, aiming right at Thomas’s head.
Before he could stop himself, he’d pulled the trigger.
There was the BANG and the echo and the slimy warmth of blood splattering over his skin in a dark, sticky rain.
He jerked upright in bed, an anguished sound escaping from his lips.
For long moments, he was completely unable to work out where he was or what was happening.
He was still there, lost in the trenches, but then he felt Eve’s hand holding tightly on to his and it all came back—the White Octopus Hotel and his fellow occupants on the ward, who were trying to pretend they hadn’t been woken up by another one of his episodes.
And even though the dream was over, and he was now awake, he couldn’t stop trembling as he heard one of his dead captains over in the corner of the room, discussing with another officer whether or not they ought to set up some neurological wards to deal with the effects of shell shock.
“Bad idea,” the captain said at once. “You realise they’d be magnets. Attracting all those officers with insufficient stoutness of heart. As surely as flies are drawn to shit.”
Fear was icy cold, but shame was a thing that burned so hot it was a miracle it didn’t incinerate him on the spot.