Feeding time, p.2
Feeding Time, page 2
‘Yes?’
‘Your watch?’ he whispered.
‘My what?’
‘Your watch. I’m going to need it.’
‘For what?’
‘For nothing. Choking hazard.’
Oh, how Classroom Dot would have roasted this young upstart. Choking hazard, my eye!
‘Here,’ she said, loosing the strap and handing him the watch. What did it matter? It was just a five-pound quartz from the catalogue. Nothing sentimental. He turned it over in his hand then slipped it into his overall pocket.
‘Excuse me?’ Dot said, hoping her cooperation might have lubricated the exchange. ‘I’m sorry to be a bother, but it’s just, my husband…’
He looked away from her, scratched his stubble.
‘What about him?’
‘Well, and as I said, I really don’t mean to be a bother but… well… he’s not here.’
A few seconds passed before he turned his gaze back.
‘What am I?’ he said.
‘It’s just he’s supposed to be… Excuse me?’
‘What. Am. I?’
‘You’re…’
‘Am I the bellboy?’ He took a step closer to Dot.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Am. I. The. Bellboy?’
‘No, you’re…’ Her voice cracked. She cursed herself for the display of weakness.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Because if I was the bellboy I’d have helped you with your cases, wouldn’t I? So try again.’
Dot gathered herself:
‘You’re the…’ Actually, what the hell was he?
‘Am I the manager?’
Classroom Dot saw an opening.
‘Not bloody likely!’
If her barb found its mark, he didn’t flinch.
‘Do I have a shirt with sweat stains under the armpits, a polyester tie, trousers two sizes too small, and a pathological fear of the residents?’
Dot shook her head.
‘No, I don’t. All of which means I’m not Mister Cornish and therefore have no idea concerning the whereabouts of your husband. He could be in Vegas for all I care, getting married to a stripper by a Big Bopper lookalike, because all the Elvises are h’otherwise h’engaged. I know that’s where I’d rather be. But I’m Pat. I’m nobody. I change sheets. I empty bedpans. And my only rule – my only fucking rule – is that when I’m not on duty, I don’t do residents.’ He started walking back to the door, then turned. ‘I mean. Administrative error? Administrative arse! One, two, three, four, five, six…’ – counting off the cots with his pointer – ‘And the Indian made seven… how hard was that?’
Harder than it should have been for a boy of your age, Dot thought.
‘So, for the last time, third cot on the right.’
Dot was trembling. From fear, humiliation or anger, she didn’t know. This – she told herself – is not over. But even though the thought rose up within her, the fight didn’t. She felt hollowed out, a lone matryoshka doll with nothing inside. She told herself it would be better in the morning. Perhaps then she would raise hell until her husband was returned to her.
She walked towards her cot. Of the empty two it was the second on the right, not the third, that looked as if it had been prepped for her arrival. The sheets and blanket had been tucked in with an almost military precision, whereas those on the third cot – hers, if the boy was not mistaken – were twisted into a cone. She stopped in front of the second and craned round to see if he was still there. He was. Catching her gaze, he shook his head and motioned that she was to continue on. And indeed, the cabinet belonging to the second cot wasn’t empty. There was a small stack of old magazines and a crushed packet of cigarettes on the upper shelf, and a tattered pair of mud-caked slippers tucked just underneath.
Dot looked again at the third cot. She wasn’t a demanding woman, but it seemed wrong that on her first night here she should be obliged to make her own bed fit for sleeping in.
She heard the door close behind her, then keys rattle, bite and turn in the lock. For a moment she considered climbing into the immaculate cot and to hell with the consequences. But the well-raised girl in her intervened. She set her cases on the floor and punted them under the cot she’d been assigned. A groundswell of tiredness swept through her body. Letting her overcoat slide from her shoulders and pool on the floor, she fell forward onto the mattress and entwined herself in the sheets and blanket.
A new odour assaulted her now. A rotten, nitrous, male odour, all too familiar. A warmth too – animal again – but her tired brain refused to grapple with that. While she loathed emotional indulgence in novels, real life could be more tolerant of the occasional rampant cliché:
‘Oh, Leonard, Leonard, Leonard!’ she whispered. ‘Leonard, my darling. What have I done?’
A fat tear escaped from her eye, cementing the scene.
‘Shut it!’ someone across the ward hissed, shattering it.
THE BELLY OF THE WHALE
A CAPTAIN RUGGLES NOVELETTE
The hardest battle a Limey commando had to fight was against the ghosts of his own mind!
I
Captain Dylan Prometheus Ruggles, British army first airborne division, was born at twelve hundred feet, through a slit in a sky measled with stars. A naked manikin, a hand span in height but fully matured, a search-and-destroy mission hardwired in his genes. A foundling, a celestial bastard, an orphan charged to the universe’s care. A military experiment. A character in a bad novel.
Not yet burdened with consciousness, Ruggles drifted across the starscape as his body sprouted. A rootless tree possessed. Skin stretched, gave, wrinkled. Bones lost density, knobbled and arced. Hair greyed in chalky streaks. From his backpack a cord wound umbilically back to the birthing slit; a vertical wink of light against the inky darkness. His mind looped with partial thoughts and unanchored memories.
His mouth spoke, ‘I…’ and gravity interrupted with a jolt. He dropped, but only to the length of the cord. A yank at the pack, a whip crack, and the furled membrane of a parachute blossomed over his head. A ridged silk placenta softening his descent, a canopy barring the heavens from view, barring his retreat forever.
Easing earthwards Ruggles felt himself into his body, into the world. The air at this height was cold and his bare skin crawled. His feet throbbed, laced into paratrooping boots – calf-high, beetle black. The ground below flashed with toy explosions, phosphorescence in the gloomy, uncharted sea. Distant mechanical thunderclaps rumbled asynchronously with the flashes. His mud-green trousers flapped and snapped in the breeze, his combat jacket rippled.
Nascent thoughts ran first Dulcie, then search-and-destroy.
At eight hundred feet he could make out treetops and hedgerows and a river. In a clearing he saw three rows of huts, long and thin, witheringly institutional. Padding his uniform he felt a folded map, a book of some sort and a packet of Gaspers. He plucked one, crumpled it against his tongue, chewed it into a wad, then stuffed the pack into the band of his helmet. His kaleidoscope mind sharpened.
Spiralled and tossed like a dandelion seed – ‘angels’ Dulcie called them – his trajectory the whimsy of the eddying air. He was headed for the trees, for the huts, for the trees again and then for the banks of the river. At three hundred feet, the wind’s last caprice snapped him back into line with the huts and whisked him into the final plughole vortex.
He saw fences and a watchtower. Beyond the fences were two monstrous figures, nightmarish sentries, five times the height of any man. Giants. Their Stahlhelme shoving skywards, two raging steel glandes penium. He pedalled against the void, swam. Imagining himself a bird, he flapped. No use! Fortune, that mischievous bitch, had played her hand, marked him as a prisoner. A hundred feet, seventy, fifty. A tube of light from one of the watchtowers swept across his path. Thirty, he slackened his legs for landing. Fifteen, ten, five.
Contact.
His feet sank into the churned soil and – he could have sworn it! – the earth rippled, pulsed with concentric circles. The huts juddered, skipped, and for the briefest moment, a single frame spliced in this disaster film, his mind mocked him with a vision of England, of tumbling hills, of a strange manor house, of an ambulance, its back doors leering open.
His body crumpled and he lost consciousness. Far, far above the white slit blinked once, flexed as though smiling, then closed forever.
II
Captain Ruggles awoke naked in a puddle of cold urine. The smell, camphoric and sweet, tickled his nostrils but was not unpleasant. He was alone in a small cell, barren and not much larger than a closet, with a barred window at one end and a door at the other.
His thoughts were muggy, as if he’d been asleep for some time, or drugged, and his throat pricked. No matter how much he ransacked his mind’s outlying regions, Ruggles couldn’t locate any scrap of intelligence concerning what had happened to him after he’d landed, how he’d been stripped and transported to the cell, and by whom. The forgotten events simply would not be located, as if they had been detached from his memory, torn out, victim to a coupon-cutter’s need for (thorough and gentle, no shock!) Bowellax pills. Otherwise he was unhurt, tired certainly, but that was to be expected after the previous night.
What rotten, rotten luck that the wind had sabotaged his mission before it had even started. He knew that the Krauts had some formidable allies, but if they had now inveigled Zephyrus into the Axis, the war was as good as lost.
Whatever was going on, his priority was to contact HQ. To let them know he was alive, that the mission had been an abysmal failure, but that he was fit, and ready to do whatever they required of him from his newly compromised position. He was also keen to make contact with any other detainees, to pool intelligence and orchestrate an escape. But all of that would have to wait. At least until he could find a way out of this cell.
The shriek of a whistle warbled through the window, piercing to the heart of his ruminations. The window had been built high up into the wall, giving the cell a disjointed aspect, accentuated by the way it tapered towards the door. A room conceived to taunt its occupant with its unabashed, chew-up-and-spit-out, machinal inhumanity.
Despite being a stately six-foot-two, Ruggles was a good twenty inches shy of being able to see through the window and out into the yard. Still, twenty inches were nothing to a man of military bent. A quick spring and grab manoeuvre saw him hanging from the bars, his body right-angled, a perfect weight distribution between his ropy arms and equine legs, planted five feet up the wall. His soldier’s body could be twisted to almost any request Ruggles made of it, make any habitat its own. Just then, he’d channelled the grimping powers of the koala in its eucalyptus tree, and felt at home at once. He could dangle so for hours if need be. He could even allow himself to free one hand to disentangle and scratch his slingshot genitals, perhaps the only part of his body over which he had limited dominion.
The yard was populated by his fellow inmates, harlequin-like in their tattered fatigues. What struck him at once was the good number of women – almost unheard of on the battlefield. None of the Allied powers recruited women to serve on the front line, as far as he knew. He had heard the rumours of the American Vixen Assassin Squads – what red-blooded Tommy hadn’t? – but he’d never actually believed in them. Hadn’t they just been conjured up by propagandists to inject fire into the bellies of the lower ranks – the delicious, though distant, prospect of encountering one of these burlesque princesses being enough to harden the wavering resolve of any tail-starved squaddie. But if so, where had these damsels in the yard sprouted from, and why had they not been segregated from the men?
Neither was the physical condition of the detainees encouraging. They were being put through their paces by one of the camp guards, an insipid slapstick of stretches that even the most vigorous among them struggled through like sorry old acrobats. Where was the Anglo-Saxon vim that the newspapers back home bragged of every day? Had that – like the Vixens – been merely another flake in the confetti shower of desperate propaganda scattered from the bunkers of Whitehall?
He turned his attention from the yard and out past the high wire fences. On the horizon he again saw the tall figures which, in the delirium of his descent, he’d taken for giants, horrifying progeny of the Nazi laboratories. In the truth-loving light of morning, he saw them for what they were – the skeletons of ruined smock mills, with timber caps he’d mistaken for Stahlhelme and shattered sails in place of the bolt action rifles. He had thought he was being dropped into XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXX, but now suspected the pilot had veered off course and chucked him out somewhere over Holland. More rotten luck. While he spoke French with ease, il parlait néerlandais comme une vache espangole. Any escape plan would have to grapple with this hobbling reality. Releasing the bars, he kicked off against the wall, turned a double somersault in the air, and punched his feet into the floor – a perfect stuck landing.
His uniform was folded in neat squares just beside the door – jacket, trousers and handkerchief piled in order of size. He picked them up, pressed his face into them and inhaled the scent of industrial springtime. Someone had taken, laundered and pressed his fatigues. What a strange thing for Jerry to have done! He had been instructed in the queer old-maidish tendencies of certain Nazis – a quality that somehow made their equally reputed sadism shimmer with enhanced grisliness – and he attributed this quirk to that. Their perverse spirits being excited in direct proportion to the dapperness of their torture victim. It made sense in a way: the more dignified, the more human, the captive, the further he could be dragged down and debased. Still, this treatment could perhaps be the quirk of a single, prudish guard, a man repulsed by the sight of grime, a fairy perhaps, and if this were so it might be something Ruggles could later use to his advantage.
He slipped into his fatigues, looser than he remembered them. The jacket bagged about his abdomen and the trousers, its buttoned waistband limp, hung from his hips as though pegged on a washing line. He tugged on the collar and checked the name inked inside. Ruggles, D.P. – his uniform alright. He lifted his jacket at the waist and went to pinch an inch of skin, but was shocked when four pallid inches came. The grotesque attenuation of his body meant he would have to start reckoning on his delirium having endured more than the eight or so hours he’d previously assumed. But how long? Two days? Seven? Forty? Really, he had no way of knowing, and such ignorance was dangerous for a soldier. When the balance of a war might tip in a matter of days, none of the intelligence he had been briefed on before boarding the Whitley could now be assumed to hold.
So’ – Ruggles thought – ‘in this vile snakes-and-ladders conflict, I have paratrooped directly onto a serpent’s head and slithered down to…’ Well, he couldn’t even be sure he was back to square one. At least with square one, you knew where you were and what lay ahead. Ruggles was lost, compass-less and alone on this vast bomb-pocked tundra. And worse, no matter which direction his honed soldier-sense might wish to lead him, he was cooped up in this prison camp, as flightless as a pinioned bird.
Ruggles waited for a long time, how long he couldn’t fathom, and when still nobody came, he permitted his heavy head to loll and sleep to rise over him once again.
III
The young girl’s voice warbled as if being channelled through a tin whistle.
‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do…’
Prising open his eyes, Ruggles lifted his head.
‘I’m half crazy, all for the love of you…’
‘Dulcie?’ His voice barely scratched the air of the cell.
‘I’m sorry Daddy,’ said the girl. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’ Ruggles shook his head and batted away the girl’s apology.
‘Dum-de-dum-dum marriage.’
‘I can’t afford a carriage.’
‘But you’ll look sweet, upon the seat of a bicycle made for two!’ Ruggles lifted his leaden arms and clapped. The young girl, who until this moment had been sitting in a chair across the cell from him, stood and bounced a dainty curtsy. Ruggles ground the backs of his bruised wrists into his eyes. His vision cleared and he swallowed back a thrust of emotion.
She was here. His angel. Her robin’s-egg eyes, her ruddy cheeks, her gossamer hair, that chipped tooth, cried over for days then worn proudly as a badge of creeping maturity. All here.
‘Pinch yourself, Daddy,’ she said and laughed again. He did, on the back of his hand. She was right to recommend it. Such apparitions were the stock-in-trade of dreams or heat-oppressed minds. The feeling of fingernails scoring crescents into flesh was blissful. He was awake, percipient. This was no dream, no hallucination, then. She was here. She had come for him.
‘Dulcie,’ he said again, for he could think of no other word nor had any desire to do so. Dulcie crossed the cell and took his head in her arms. Ruggles lolled into her grasp, allowed his head to be cradled against her ribs. She toyed with a tongue of his hair, twisting it about her fingers.
‘It’s so good to see you Daddy. It’s been so long.’
‘I know. I know,’ trying not to sob in front of his daughter. ‘But Daddy’s got some things to do right now. Important things.’
‘What things?’
‘Just…’ He flicked at the air with his hand. ‘Just this. The war. England.’
‘What war, Daddy? There is no war. Not anymore,’ a hairline fracture to her voice.
‘No war?’
‘No, Daddy.’
‘No Germans?’ He could feel her small body trembling against his skull, then the patter of tears on his crown. His angel was crying.
‘No Germans either.’
Ruggles’ mind waltzed. Someone must have been trying to protect the poor girl, hiding the truth from her these four long years.
‘But the Germans…’ he tried again.
