Key to the Door (51 page)

“We were lucky to find water so soon,” Odgeson thought.

“It was due to my good navigation,” Brian claimed. “I steered by the sun and had my map open all the way.”

“You couldn't see the sun,” Baker cried, pulling off his boots, “and the map you drew is no bloody good.”

“You won't be able to get them on again if they're wet,” Knotman said. Baker ignored him: “I could have steered better with my cock,” he called to Brian.

“If there'd bin a brothel down here, I suppose you could.”

Tributaries came in by thorn-covered gullies as they tramped along, unnoticeable until threads of water were elbowed from under bushes by their side. They reached an island in the stream and split up for the evening tasks. Baker sat on a rock in his underwear, patching his trousers, while Jack and Brian were high up the bank, filling the air with the splinter of branches and dragging wood back to the fire.

It grew dark, and water formed two phosphorescent humps as it dropped into a deep pool at the foot of the cliff face. Fire shadows danced at the bordering wall of the forest a few yards away, and they ate a hot meal, back in the familiar sound of water travelling out of nowhere into nowhere, a stream that hurried by six men locked in the shadows of the forest, mocking the purposelessness of their journey as it passed.

Brian lit a cigarette and lay back, stars like the eyes of fishes set between black tree-shapes towering about. The primeval noise of the water receded into another locker of his mind, leaving his immediate senses in a vacuum of half-consciousness. Then the noise poured back into his brain and ears and he heard Baker say: “It looks as if Seaton's asleep”—so he pulled off his shirt and swilled himself in the icy water, then, in spite of its sting, fell straight into a deep blank slumber.

Waking early, he was glad to be getting out of the forest. Now that there was no such obsessive goal as reaching the peak, he felt its spirit imposing too heavily on him, saw the jungle for the desert it was, a dull place because no one of flesh-and-blood lived there. All you could do was burn it down, let daylight and people in; otherwise it was only fabulous and interesting when written about in books for those who would never see it. Still, he'd always be able to say he'd been in the jungle, tell anybody who asked that the best thing was to leave it alone, but that if you had to see it you should get a few thousand feet up and look down on it. He could easily understand how the jungle would drive you crackers if you had to stay there too long; how its great forest-mind could eat you up with the dark grin of possession. He sent a nub-end spinning into the stream, watched it taken to where they would follow.

They descended by the winding defile, taking to jungle at midday to avoid stone-faced waterfall cliffs. The panic flight of tin-footed minuscular fugitives sounded on the foliage roof, a commencing tread of raindrops before the full weight of water crashed on to them, spattering hats and finding a short-cut to their skins. Soil and leaves made anchors of their boots as they slithered down, edging back to the stream. Brian shouted through the wall of rain: “One minute dry; the next drenched.” Baker, only a foot away, heard nothing.

“That was a big piss,” Knotman said when they stood by the stream. Clouds were scattering, and shirts steamed on bushes in the returning sun. An Avro 19 droned like a silverfish high overhead towards Burma, and Brian waved in greeting. Brown water swirled at their thighs as they slowly descended, and when the sun burned, Brian's shirt felt pasted to his shoulder blades, a poultice that increased the aches instead of lessening them. By map and compass they were close to where the lorry had brought them nearly a week ago. A score of tins remained, dragged up and down the mountain for nothing. “We might as well dump 'em,” Kirkby suggested.

Knotman didn't agree: “You've a month's rations there, in right-little tight-little England.”

They came out of the jungle. Stubbled, tired, bush hat pulled down, Brian felt he could have travelled for weeks more, until he reached the dam over the stream and collapsed on to its concrete platform, held there for a minute by a wild saw-toothed cough that left him without breath, sitting still and trying to bring trees and sky back into focus. He watched the others emerge: Jack with his shirtsleeve torn away; Knotman limping because he hadn't had his boots off for days; Odgeson chalk-white and walking carefully as if afraid he might fall, while Kirkby and Baker looked fit by comparison.

Odgeson went to the planter's house and telephoned for a lorry from the camp. They set off four miles to meet it at the main road, a slow straggling file all but done for after the rapid descent. Brian was at the end of his strength, faint itches chafing at various parts of his body where leeches still fed. I don't feel as though I've got enough blood left to keep myself going, never mind them, the greedy bastards. I'm pole-axed, and wish I was in Nottingham out of this blood-sucking sun, back where it's cool and my brain will clear so's I can start to think, pick up the bones of my scattered thoughts. I'll be twenty-one next year, and an old man before I know it.

Packs were swung like corpses on to the waiting lorry, helped by a sergeant who had come up for the ride, the same who had got Baker in trouble outside the admin hut last week. “There's a war on,” he told them. “It started while you were away. We thought you might have got caught up in it.”

“What sort of a war?”

“The Communists are at it, trying to throw us out of the country and take over. They've killed a lot of people already.”

The lorry drove south along the main road, through villages and rubber plantations, the sea a perfect blue sheet to the right, sky equally blue and empty overhead. A breeze cooled them and took away the heavy smell of soil and sweat. No one spoke. Brian leaned back with eyes closed, wondering at the sergeant's words about a war with the Communists in Malaya.

CHAPTER 24

Almost every day of his life Brian had heard his mother say she was going to pack up and leave Harold Seaton. But she never had, and on those days when there was no cause to say it, she dwelt on the still-hot embers from other quarrels. Before coming to work this morning Brian had a real set-to with his father. The house had been a boiling sea of sabre-toothed rows this last week because Seaton had been observed by a neighbour drinking in a Lenton pub with a woman he'd knocked-on with before he met Vera: black-haired, inscrutable Millie from Travers Row—now long since married herself. Not that such a brazen cheeky-daft outdacious baggage would let anything like that stop her, Vera raved when Seaton came home all fussy and pleased with himself, unsuspecting that a neighbour had got in with a colourful story half an hour ago. In times past, fed up to the teeth and eyeballs with him, the whole family had heard Vera say he could clear off and get another woman for all she cared, but now that there were reasonable grounds for thinking that he might, the house witnessed pitched battles that even made the money quarrels of the dole days look like the pleasant tit-for-tat of a lively courtship.

It gave Brian something to think about during the long hours of watching the dead-slow traversing of his piece-work milling machine. He fixed an aluminium elbow into the jig, released the lever, and sent it towards the revolving cutters, making sure that the sudpipe was well aimed against it—otherwise it might seize-up and spray hot metal against his skin. His mother had kept up her tirade for days, even though Seaton had promised faithfully never to see Millie again. Brian asked his mother to pack it up now, saying it was no use going on and on and keeping the house in misery, but she replied: “Why should I? He's allus bin a bogger to me, and this is the last thing I'm going to stand for from 'im, especially now yo' lot's growing up.” So Seaton went on being put through the mill, using a rare control and saying nothing because he knew himself to be in the wrong, until this morning when he was dragged into the blackest and most impressive rage Brian had ever seen and threatened to bash Vera's head in. Brian stood between them intending to bash
his
in if he laid a finger on her. “He thinks you're still a baby and can't stick up for me,” Vera bellowed, halfway between rage and tears. She was triumphant: “I allus said he'd have to watch his step when you grew up. Now he knows what I mean.” Brian was baffled, caught in a fire of despair, knowing he wouldn't be able to do much if the mad eyes and beefy fists of his father made a move. “Christ,” he shouted, his voice brittle, “can't you both act better than this? It's about time you learned more sense.” Maybe they caught the impending crack of his spirit; for the raw feelings of cold and early morning were drawn from all three gradually as tea was mashed and poured out. No one spoke, but twenty minutes later Seaton had been thawed by a fag, and his good morning to Vera was almost cheerful—though it stayed unanswered.

Brian was glad to get away, pedalling his bike along Castle Boulevard, playing the fast and tricky daredevil between cars and buses to keep his mind blank. Speed brought drops of water to his eyes and cheeks; the spring air was fresh and cold, good because the world was waking up with the buds and blue sky. High above, on a wall of rearing sandstone rock, towered the Castle, an art museum and prison for deserters. It crouched like a spider with the beaten soul of the city in its mouth, a Union Jack fluttering on high. Brian cycled as part of the river of people flowing to work along the traffic artery far below, happier when once he'd passed it by and was already halfway through Canal Street. It seemed that the war was finishing, that soon the world would open for travel like a South Sea pearl. He could save money and go to France or Italy, free because call-up would stop with the battles. Yet perhaps it wouldn't be as good as he imagined: Edgeworth's would lose its War Office contracts and he'd be slung on the dole like his old man had been, unable to get a job anywhere, trapped for life in a queue every Tuesday and Thursday for a few measly bob to starve along on. Starve-along-Cassidy, that's what I'll be. “Don't believe it, though”—an uncluttered stretch of cobbled short-cut allowed him to talk aloud as if before an audience—“the soldiers'll be back and wain't stand for dole queues any more, government contracts or no. They'll get the Reds in and then we'll have plenty of work. Yo' see'f they don't. And not all of Fatguts's spouting about good old England and all that rammel will stop 'em either.”

Cycling into the endless streets of Sneinton made him happy, a spirit retained even when he passed the house by which he'd fought with the husband of that bag Edna, picked up in the Langham last autumn. What a night! His black eye lasted a fortnight, and he only hoped the other bloke's had taken as long to disappear. When Bert came home three months later his side of the story was spilled: Rachel had taken him to bed and he'd had the time of his life, including breakfast on a tray in the morning. Bert had all the luck, though he couldn't but laugh as he skidded into the street on which was Edgeworth's Engineering Ltd.

It was a small firm, one long building of sixty workers, and two side offices at the street-end, where a typist drew up the Friday wages. The glass-pannelled door took him into a cul-de-sac of waist- and breast-high machines, lit by blue fluorescent gleams from overhead. Belts under the ceiling ran races with each other, pinjoints clicking against motor-driven wheels. Ted Edgeworth, the owner, worked like one of the men, tall and miserable with long grey hair, dressed in a boiler suit only different from the rest in that it was changed every day instead of once a week. His wife came in often to see him, drove down in a flash car from their bungalow by fresh-aired Thurgarton. Not to help, but to stand by his side while he fiddled with some blueprint or component on his bench at the end of the shop. Their backs were to the workers, but it was safely assumed that she nagged him black and blue over some long-corroding domestic detail because, though no words were heard above the drone and roar, the back of his beanpole neck stayed bright red whilever she was there. Maybe it's because she caught him with some fancy woman or other a few years back and wain't let him forget it, though that's not likely because Ted is a bit pansyish if anything, the way he puts his hand on your shoulder when explaining a new job. Maybe it is something like that: you never know, what with having such a cat-faced scrag-end of mutton for a wife, and two sons in the army who didn't want to take over the business.

When Mrs. Edgeworth stayed away, there was Burton the government inspector from Birmingham to give him hell, as like as not. Poor old Ted. Burton was a real Hitler who played on the fact that Ted was a timid old bastard, even though he was a boss, one who couldn't answer back too much because he was salting thousands away out of the fat government contract whose work Burton came every now and again to inspect. He was bigger than Ted, well-built and pan-mouthed, and let himself go into rages about inferior work that Ted was trying to palm off on a government that had had all the money in the world to spend since 1939. Two thousand nuts went one week to a Birmingham gun factory and all of them had been drilled and threaded so much off centre that the guns would have killed our own blokes instead of the Jerries. Burton made a special trip up in his car and saw boxes of them still being blithely turned off on a row of lathes. He pushed by poor flummoxed Ted, stood at the boxes with his battleship jaw fixed on his gauges, and then carried one back to Ted's bench. Even over the noise of machinery you could hear him shouting, and he ended up by knocking—maybe an accident, but nobody ever knew—the whole box of them over the floor. After he'd stalked out and driven off, Ted started screaming at his tool-setters and viewers, but not near enough to get his own back.

Ructions, everywhere you went, though Brian hoped it would get quieter at home after this morning's bust-up. The house was too small and so was the factory: often Brian would load his saddlebag with sandwiches, a bottle of milk, and a map and take off into the country, pedalling north through the open fields and scrub-lands of Sherwood Forest. The smell of tree bark in spring reminded him of his far-off days at the Nook, and of his not-so-distant ramblings over the Cherry Orchard with Pauline. Ructions with her it had been as well, though things had got better lately. Some months after their parting he'd been walking along the open pavement by the Council House lions one Sunday evening with Albert Lomax, and had spotted Pauline talking to a couple of other girls on the steps. Everyone was out in their Slab Square best, perambulating to either get or give the eye; perhaps in an odd moment stopping to hear a few words of admonition from Sally's Army, or soak up a bit of sound advice from some Communist speaker, or argue with a Bible-backed old god in a trilby hat—who was so thin you'd think somebody had nicked his ration book.