Banks found another 'Overdose Death' and skipped on. Better, so much better, 'Citizenship Classes' were fully subscribed: 'New Citizens Queue Up to Take Oath of Allegiance'. The football team was challenging for promotion, 'The Hatters March On'. Most of what he knew of two dozen towns and a dozen cities had come from sitting in cars reading local newspapers. He'd gone through the misery of the first handful of grim news pages, and it was like the sunlit uplands beckoned him. A 'New Crèche Opens', three bloody cheers. An 'Extra Budget Available for Town Square Clean-up', hip, hip bloody hurray. 'All Welcome at Saturday Town History Walk'—worth throwing a cap into the air. Couldn't abide the small ads — dating agencies, televisions going cheap, rooms to let — and scrambled through them. Last was the two-page spread: 'Bargains, Give-Away Prices, Monster Sale, Come Early, Doors Opening At Nine, Shopping Centre Bonanza'. It did not affect David Banks, but it humoured him as he sat in the car and the dark closed round his windows. He thought, at last, he had found a trifle of cheerfulness, and he pictured crowds gathering on a warm morning, tomorrow, with the forecast optimistic, and a lightening of the dreariness imposed by muggers, zealots and junkies.
The trouble with having the warrant card was that it placed a man outside the loop of normal life, and the Glock, 9mm calibre, in a pancake holster, at his hip was even further outside it. When the letter was in, with the card and the firearms authorization, and most of his possessions from the bedsit were gone to a skip or a charity shop, the rest to his mother's garage, and he was at the airport for the flight to Auckland, Sydney or Toronto, with a rucksack on his back, he would need nothing that a shopping centre, Prices Slashed, could offer him. He seemed to see those valleys and the tumbling streams, the endless expanses of desert, great inland seas, and he chucked the newspaper behind him. There, somewhere, he might find peace.
He reached into his jacket pocket, where it hung loose over the holster. His hand fastened on the notebook.
He lifted it out, felt the worn, roughened leather of its cover in his fingers. Only three pages remained to be read. He turned one.
David Banks, the streetlight spilling inside the car, saw that the writing was looser, a tiny scrawl — as if more laboured — and that the paper was tainted with a dried dark stain.
The newspaper had been an excuse, a diversion, a palliative as temporary as an aspirin. He was drawn to the page, a moth to a damned flame.
He read.
27 July 1938
I have been shot by a sniper.
I knew nothing.
I felt a weight hit me. A hammer blow. I was lifted up, then thrown down. There was no pain, not at first, only numbness.
Our officer had warned of the sniper three days ago. Then the sniper shot and killed a boy from Wolverhampton. He was not a friend — I have none left — but a good lad, and had been a factory machinist before he came to join the International Brigade volunteers, was always cheerful. He was going back to the latrine from the front-line trench when he was hit in the back of his head. But the sniper had not fired for three days. I had forgotten him. I was sent back to the rear to bring forward food, and there was a place where the parapet was lower, where I should have ducked to my knees, but then it would have been hard to carry all the food for our platoon. I did not duck.
I was hit in the chest.
Dear Enid, other men — some I have never spoken to, all to whom I have given no love — risked their own lives to come and carry me back to the second and third trenches, and safety.
I have been taken to a field hospital. At first, I was carried by two men, one holding my arms and one my legs. That was when the pain came.
Further back, I was put on to a cart that a donkey pulled. If I had been an officer, or a commissar, I would have been brought to the field hospital by lorry. I went all the way, several miles, on the cart.
This is a charnel house, it is a place of Hades. I think it was a place like this where Ralph died.
I must be thankful that I am able to write.
I am waiting to be examined. The doctors, one is Austrian and another is Polish, have a process that is called triage. Ralph told me about triage when the wounded were taken back from Suicide Hill. When the doctors come to me they will make an assessment of my condition. They decide, in triage. if I will live, or might live, or not. The priority goes to those who will live, and if they have the time and opportunity they will treat those who might live, and they put a black spot of dye on the forehead of those who will not live. There are many casualties here, and I believe it will be a long time before they reach me. A nurse — I think she was French — has put a new field dressing on my wound.
It is difficult to write. I am weaker, and breathing is harder. The effort of moving the pencil on the page is almost beyond me.
I think of the sniper. He did not choose me. It was an opportunity, my chest visible for two or three seconds where the parapet was low. I chose him, presented myself. But for those two or three seconds he would have seen my face, magnified in the lens of his rifle sight. When he saw me go down, did he rejoice? Or was shooting me meaningless to him? I do not know.
I cannot hate him.
He is a soldier, as am I. I do not think that, with my rifle, I have ever harmed an enemy, but I have tried.
I have thought of him…Perhaps he is a good man, perhaps he has a family, perhaps he has no hate for me…Perhaps, already, he has forgotten the image of my face.
Our officer said — when the boy from Wolverhampton was hit. — that the sniper was likely to be German. I think of him as being as far from home as lam.
For now, dear Enid, I cannot write more.
There was one page remaining. He closed the notebook, slid it back into his pocket.
Stunned and quiet, not moving, David Banks was not aware that the outer door of the block had opened. He did not see the wash of light on the step and the pavement.
The window was rapped. He was jolted. His hand, instinct, dropped to the pistol's butt and he had half drawn it.
'Steady, you silly bugger, don't bloody shoot me.'
He loosed his grip.
'You hardly need that damn thing here. Where were you — Never-never Land?'
He shrugged.
'Put it down to my lady. She says it's ridiculous having you sat out here in the bollocks-numbing cold. She says you're to eat with us.'
'My thanks to her and to you, Mr Wright, but I'm fine.'
'She won't have any of that. And I'm to tell you that there's enough cooked for an extra plate.'
'I get an allowance for food, and I buy it.'
'God, Mr Banks, you make a virtue out of awkwardness. She also says that I'm not permitted back in her bed if you're stuck outside in a bloody car. Come on, shift yourself.'
'I suppose that tilts the argument. Just remember what I've said. I'm not a friend.'
'Made a good imitation of one this evening. I'm grateful.'
He checked his pockets, then the holster. Thought of the yob gangs of the News/Gazette. Climbed out and went to the boot, lifted out the holdall with the kit in it — magazines, the thunderclap grenades, the ballistic blanket and the first aid…Not making it easy for the yob kids to get a bonus from a stolen joy-ride vehicle. He crossed the pavement, went up the steps and inside, heard soft music and felt the warmth.