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.
Shaken from sleep at five in the morning of a day before Archie could call on him again, he was told that a signal ordered him home. ‘Blighty, that’s what, lucky swine. I’ll give you a hand with your clobber.’
An ambulance screamed all the way to Akrotiri, a fine fresh day beginning, though Herbert within his deadness knew he was glad to leave. Helped up steps into a capacious York transport plane the smell of pear drops, furniture polish and petrol had a touch of civilization about it. Four engines roared at the end of the runway, and soon the nearest silver wing floated by the mountains. His face burned at the memory of his passion for the unknown woman of Omodhos, who had killed Pemberton in mistake for him, the goddess-madonna who seemed to be shadowing him even as a coastline was left behind which he hoped never to see again.
A few bumps before getting to twenty thousand feet caused an RAF bloke behind to use his sickbag. Herbert supposed they were far over the sea when weird snowy continents of cloud spread below, an antarctica of topographical complexity looking cool to walk upon — with the nightmare sensation of falling through and down to annihilation on the earth. Wanting to tell Pemberton (he couldn’t for some reason think of him as Ashley any more) to put his bloody book away and look at such marvellous and fantastic scenery, the pang struck that he no longer existed — except in memory. Immortality was a confidence trick of the church, because you only lived as long as anyone alive could remember you. But Ashley, an unexplainable image, was close because Herbert still lived. Maybe I’ll write to his folks and tell them what a good chap he was, either to twist the knife, or make them grateful.