Chapter Twenty
Twenty
The Somme. It used to call to mind a river, not a battlefield.
In its new guise, it was a relentless bully and we were all its victims. Some of us were broken completely, sent to the sisters’ rest home in Le Touquet or discharged and returned to England.
I began to pretend even more than was habit.
I was irreverent when I should have been obedient.
I joked when I wanted to cry. I moved towards the things I wanted to run from, and when I tasted bile I swallowed it and refused to look away.
I denied every instinct and there were days when I failed to care, when the boys were just bodies and I, some sort of automaton.
For a while I had felt more, but now I felt less than ever.
The muscle-weary fatigue, the stifling heat, the sting of antiseptic on the scrubbed raw skin of my hands.
They were all one and the same. Wanting Hugo was no match for that season of slaughter.
I’d think of him and touch myself, but I’d come too quickly or not at all.
If I came it was never the thing I desired.
It was a whisper when I wanted it to shout. It was gentle when I wanted it to hurt.
The tingling at my edges spread. And there were times when I felt numb.
No sensation at all in my little toe, the top of my right thigh, the back of my hand, my forearm, an earlobe.
It was as if I had misplaced a piece of myself.
And so I would retrace my steps, try to work out the last time I could feel that part of me.
I was rarely sure and I would miss it for a few hours, then become accustomed to the loss, or distracted by all the other losses from all the other bodies.
The days and nights, the waking and dreaming – it was all so hard to live through, and it is hard to recall, but I need to.
Iso comes in and out of these memories. Always there and never, a bright spot whenever I catch her.
I remember she made me coffee and a sandwich – how often she must have done that.
But one time she drew me while I ate. I asked to see it and she slid the sketch across the table.
I was barely there and I began to shake.
She hadn’t finished, but I didn’t know that.
I began pinching myself. At first it was a way of gauging the loss – the extent of it – but as I moved beyond numb flesh I would feel the sharp edge of pain and it was reassuring.
Pain meant I was still there and it reminded me of why.
Sometimes sensation would return, and the bodies would become boys again.
It was always a relief, but often short-lived.
Some other part of me would soon go missing.
We were in the surgery. Hugo was still in his surgical gown, the last boy’s blood sprayed across it from an arterial bleed.
He had taken over when the younger surgeon hesitated.
That is not how it was recorded but it is what Alison told me before sending me in to clean up.
I had wiped down the operating table and now we both stood at the trough, scrubbing our hands, suds up to our elbows.
‘What is this?’ Hugo asked.
I didn’t know what he was talking about.
‘This,’ he said, taking my wrist and wiping away the suds. ‘What is this?’
He cradled my arm in one hand and touched the mottled palette of colour with his fingertips. I watched as they moved along the underside of my forearm. I felt nothing.
‘An alternative to drink,’ I joked, but he didn’t find it funny. And it wasn’t entirely true; I was quite capable of juggling multiple vices.
‘You did this?’
It was concern and disapproval and I didn’t want either from him. What I wanted was for his fingertips to press hard into the bruises so I might feel something.
‘They’ll fade,’ I said. ‘That’s the beauty of them.’
‘There is no beauty here,’ he said, more gently. Then he took a towel and dried my skin.
He cradled my arm and stared at the bruises.
His fringe fell forward and I wanted to push it back.
I wanted to rake my fingers through it and find the knots and pull his hair from his scalp.
Then he kissed them, the bruises, so gently it nearly killed me.
I could see the pink of his lips against the purpling from the previous day and the insipid yellow from the week before, but I felt nothing.
‘I think I’m disappearing,’ I whispered, and I remember how fragile I felt. How ashamed.
He continued kissing, a little more firmly, pushing up my sleeve and following the trail of bruises along the inside of my upper arm, but still there was nothing.
Then the brush of lips and the warmth of breath on unblemished skin.
‘Bite me,’ I breathed.
But he wouldn’t.
I lay in my cot and recalled the brush of his lips as an exquisite kind of pain. Like the tickle of a sneeze that never comes. I played it over and over and imagined him biting me.
Desire, I realised, could be an antidote to grief.
It pushed aside the very worst of my thoughts and replaced them with a craving.
Though maybe I craved the craving, the distracting absence of that bite, the painful pleasure of being close to the thing that I wanted but not being able to have it. Not yet. But maybe.
It was the first time in months that I slept without dread.
‘What will happen after?’ Hugo asked.
‘After what?’
‘This war.’
There was a silence. Too long, but not long enough to contain everything the question entailed.
‘There is no after,’ I said. ‘There is only now.’
This is the memory I have, but it is not how it happened. In the journal I wrote it true but all these years I have remembered it false.
I was the one who asked the question. What will happen after?
He was the one to answer. There is only now.
I remember his face became terribly sad and words flowed like blood from a wound; they were hard to stop.
He spoke of his wife, his son. He’d had no word for over a year.
He imagined many reasons. I tried not to care.
He had a backstory and an after story and I was part of neither.
‘Filthy Hun,’ I whispered into his neck as he held me.