The Death of William Posters (37 page)

They followed a narrow river hemmed in by sheer rock, going under a tunnel at one place. The first palm trees appeared, stuck like Worn-out mops along the water-edge, thickening to a belt of green on either side. Luxuriant green snaked between barriers of red-coloured rocky pinnacles, the narrow wedge of a valley opening towards blue sky. Under high sedate palms grew orange, lemon, pomegranate trees, flourishing by the knife-glint of irrigation ditches cutting out from the main bountiful stream.

Seen from above it was a pattern of glass fragments, crystal strips scattered in green chaos, yet made orderly and precise by the water rations delivered to each plot or field. Nothing had come about by accident, only by labour and brain, time and patience, a battle for increase against the nearby desert – so marvelled at by Frank that he once misjudged the acute switch of a curve and almost shot the whole of them down towards it.

They stopped for a meal of cold beans and mutton, bread and mint tea. Filling watercans and loading them on the lorry, he tried to imagine what Myra might be doing at this moment, saw her dimly in the flat wearing her maternity dress, reading and relaxing on the Frenchman's grand divan, abstracted and distant from him, as he was from her, certainly. He loved her like that, hoped to be back with her soon, to be there when the baby was born. He heard its cries already, brought to the nearby stream as an antidote to the desert.

West and south from the last village of their trip, dusk-clouds higher than the highest reddening escarpment were banked up tall and rugged with pink fire, as if part of a wall enclosing the whole world in whose middle he seemed to be standing. Transfixed, he stood alone, a clank of buckets and gabble of women at the well behind.

The light at dusk was of a half-clear quality that made him doubt the power of his eyes, rub them and wonder whether he needed glasses. But wind and dust was the breath of evening desert in midwinter. He expected to feel particles of snow against his skin but got grit and sand, differing temperatures striated one within the other. The sharp line of spectacularly jagged cloud seemed like real wall from this village of gardens and date groves, goat-bells and camel-grunts. They would head towards it at night, as if darkness were the only way to get through safely, no meaning left of its terror. They would come back that way, return under its mounds and hillocks – if it were still there.

Smoking, shuffling his boots on a boulder, he turned to see whether this same red wall surrounded everything. Since it rarely rained, why were such big clouds gathering? All he could see was a deeper fallen night, a corrugated ceiling to the spreading darkness, with land the same non-colour. He returned to his more livid views of the Hamada du Guir, but they had gone, red wall vanished – though perhaps only the deepening night concealed it. The nearness of the desert made him feel like a machine rather than a man, its capacity well-marked and he his own toolsetter for it. He walked back into the village, finding his way in darkness over-stones, and rubbish.

All number plates had been taken from the lorry, and they had given up their passports to the village agent. Frank felt glad as he handed his over, as if the last of all labels had been unpinned from his back, though remembering how impressed he had been on receiving it.

The road soon worsened, headlights bucking at rocks and sliding gravel. They drew back as if shaking a fist at the sky, then dipped. The lorry rocked, like a lifeboat in a storm disregarding what other boats flee from. Bringing his head forward from the seat Frank looked out at lights and dust, the occasional bush, desert rose, or rockhump Sliding out of vision like an escaping footpad who had had second thoughts. They moved slowly south in the bitter night cold of an empty three-thousand foot plateau, yet it seemed that the way was a strip of land only a few feet wide, and that they would pitch into nearby oblivion should the lorry, on one of its two-wheeled tilts, slip right over and roll, roll, roll.

‘This is the safer route,' Shelley explained. ‘We're bypassing a Moroccan post where the officer isn't so sympathetic to the Algerians, believe it or not. He'd hold us up a few hours, which would throw us into daylight and get us seen by one of the flying napalm wagons. So we'll go this way – because any rational man would think it's suicide. The French don't look much where we're going.'

‘What about these lights?' Frank said. ‘They've had me worried all the way from the village. We can be seen for miles. Or don't we bother about that sort of risk?'

‘We're a long way from the border yet,' Shelley laughed. ‘I'll clip them off when the time comes.'

Frank hung on when the sway took him unawares, thinking that a man could get seasick this way. But no one did. Ten of them were packed in behind, all smoking shit-fags, except Shelley who smoked his in a pipe, sucked away as if it were whisky in the bowl. Frank couldn't imagine what lay ahead in the way of landscape or human events. He was spinning out the rope of his life behind. It dragged along the ground, and only when it touched hard rock did it disturb him. In front was space; untouched, spiritual and corporeal territory, darkness for a sharpening mind to enter and fill up on. Unable to consider the past, he tried feeding on the future, but shied back from it because nothing was there. Only idleness has a future. Work, fatigue, dust and grit imposed the prison-minutes of passing time on him. He had to think on the present, dwell on it with the great concentration that can only be employed by a man who has no future. ‘These are the times when I'd like to read,' he said. ‘At least you can see something in daytime.'

‘Recite a piece of poetry, then,' Shelley laughed, ‘or a passage from the Bible. Isn't that what the English do when they're in a tight spot? If we can't rub the boredom out of our lives we're no use as people.'

Frank smiled, in response to a grin he didn't see but knew had happened. Those clearcut platitudinous teeth of Shelley's will be the ruin of him, he thought, like the third match in the trenches. Three grins, and a mortar bomb's got them all.

By night and in secret they crept nearer to the border. ‘It's no use looking for it on that map,' Shelley said, maintaining the air of uncertainty. ‘According to mine we're in Algeria already, so take over while I hand out the medal ribbons, will you?'

Lights off, towards dawn they stuck in an unexpected pool of sand. ‘You bloody night-owl,' Frank said. ‘I thought you knew the way a bit better than this.'

‘You can't stop mistakes. What sort of a holiday do you think gun-running is?'

‘I always thought it was a man in a turban,' Frank said, ‘picking off Beau Geste with a silver-handled blunderbuss and then getting signed up for Hollywood.'

Shelley rubbed his greying, close-cropped head. ‘No, it's just getting jammed in a patch of lousy no-good sand when you're not expecting it, and at me most god-awful time.'

Everyone worked, with rakes, planks and shovels. Rubber burned from wheels uselessly spinning, and the futile grind of the motor seemed to broadcast its trouble across the blackness. Shelley tried again, but every attempt to get it out by engine-power dug the wheels further in. He raged at the unexpected: ‘We'll have to race for that ravine now, to drop in safe before dawn.'

The fire they were playing with was beginning to burn their fingers. Frank wanted to get at the wind and throttle it – in spite of the fact that, as Shelley said, it would obliterate their tracks. Its erratic moaning made him sweat. The sky was an owl's eye they were crawling around in. Stuck fast in the sand, the whole dawn world of the wilderness was hooting softly over them – until totally drowned by a raving lorry engine like a massive dum-dum drill dividing his life with the maximum pain and clumsiness.

Four planks were under the tyres, sand spaded clear. They were a team of horses and, all their goods scattered as if to start a market where one had never been before, the wheels gripped and climbed along the wood. Frank felt like cheering. The sand was grey grit, bone dry, and once off the planks they were in it again. The pool had turned into a lake, a morass of dust. This was the raw, real sweat of life, plagued by a burning cold wind and empty stomachs, tindermouths opening from the extreme backbone of life, trials and hazards before dawn where everything is impregnated with the total discouragement of universal past happenings. If the spirit can recognize this feeling and laugh at it, boot it down and go back to hope and work, then the book is closed and the trek without print or maps can begin.

Frank pushed, lifted, heaved with all his strength. He lay on his back shovelling sand from the oily stinking undergut of the lorry, with danger of it subsiding, pressing him down into suffocation and death. ‘I've done some rum work in my time,' he said to the uncomprehending Moroccan working the same seam nearby, ‘shifted all sorts o' rammel, but this lot takes the bleddy cake, mate.'

Shelley knelt by, a half-knowing glance at the overall situation. Frank was becoming an unknown man to him: the broadening of his accent back to a deeper Midland Limey made him intimidating, a stranger, lying there at his ferocious and vital work. But the mood passed when the lorry was clear again.

Frank lit a cigarette. While working he had forgotten the wind. Now it was back in his ears, functional at least in that it dried his sweat, stiffened the dishrags of his clothes. He saw himself in the oblong mirror of the lorry as he climbed in, conscious of his increasing strength. His short hair was grey from ash and sand, face pallid showing a wide grin with even teeth, arms apart as he heaved himself in, ready for the death-grip of whatever might get at him. But in his face and frame, subtlety was on the march, infiltrating, penetrating, ignoring his parapets, swarming into the desert of himself.

Dawn was breaking, free-associating ink spreading into daylight: black, blue, green and red. The land was uneven to the east, but still fairly level. Shelley drove, and the lorry went like a rhinoceros in panic. They held on, wishing long life to their bones. Some rocks were hit as if the lorry would split in two, send guns flying, bullets spitting and grenades coughing over humps and hollows. Was it like this on the moon? Even the grey dust in saucers of earth looked cosmic in the spreading light. Yesterday had no connection with this.

One case of rifles had been given out. ‘If any point of doubtful return exists on the trip,' Shelley said, ‘this is it.' French planes flew from airfields at Colomb Bechar, eighty miles east, and patrols operated now and again from Meridja. F L N scouts in the area would warn of any approaching danger. But nothing would be seen if all went as it normally did, quietly. The only people met would be those of the F L N waiting to come for the supplies.

24

‘We stay here all day,' Shelley said when they reached the ravine, ‘and tonight trundle fifteen dark miles east and hope to meet up with the boys coming to get the stuff.' It was easily said, and to move your finger a few inches here and there on an empty map. The ravine was a narrow cutting in a country of many similar concealments. They covered the lorry with cloths, sand and thornbush to make it invisible from the air, and from land unless someone stumbled right into the hiding place. ‘If that happens,' Shelley grinned, ‘he'll never see mom or pop again.'

Out of the twelve, six were continually deployed among clefts and boulders surrounding the ravine. Warning signals would not only bring the rest up to reinforce them, but a further system of ankle-trips set out by Shelley with great skill and patience ensured all twelve firing at once without any voice being heard – though this was elaborate precaution rather than seriously intended defence. However, Frank couldn't see how a more skilful ambush could have been set, a perfect trap in the middle of nowhere. It was a combination of guard and ambush, a magnetized web of defence known in the Chinese manual as the ‘spider layout'. Of the two Brens, Frank manned one, and a Moroccan held the other. The rest had rifles and grenades.

Frank was flattened beside a rock, an enfiladed view of the plain matched to the Moroccans strung around to the right whom he knew to be there but could not see. The half conscious workings of his brain were muzzled by the uncannily sharp alertness with which his eyes registered the landscape they were to watch. He felt like a boat out in this grey and beige wilderness, rocky plateau in front, ravine behind. The sun burned, his ears still filled with the sound of the engine racing as, towards the last dawn, its tyres had spun to escape the rut they'd sunk into, as his own mind and body had formerly and likewise crazed him in the thousand useless revolutions of his own spirit. The land turned a dim red, then purple, the horizon shimmering, a line beyond which the remains of a man's soul might find final rest, or the ways and means of change that he had always deserved.

The last time he'd held a loaded Bren was on an army range eleven years ago, and not hoping to kill anyone. To wait was theatrical, because waiting meant thought, a continual monologue of destruction and fulfilment. I'm waiting in case the French show up, when I'd give a lot for it to be the British, because they are the ones I should be doing my nut against. Each to his own, and the rest will look after itself. If Kenya was still on I'd make my way there – or somewhere else if I get safe out of this. The past wouldn't come to him, and he didn't know whether to be glad or not. It seemed good that it wouldn't, that it skulked beyond some horizon he'd left behind. His grey eyes glazed the rocks and dips for signs of life. Nothing. Even William Posters blended with the landscape, ghost of the bleak steppe toting a gun, on a level of equality with those who would persecute and prosecute. He hadn't thought of him for months, in any case – William Posters, that soul-anchor stuck in your craw, those dim jerking pictures flickering on the screen behind your eyes when closed, working bewildering renegade rebel magic on the sentimental layers of your caked heart asking for pity and understanding as he flitted, half butterfly, half oil-rag, between the changing shadows of the past. He had lost his cap, dismantled his face, outspanned his forever nebulous cause, and walked over the bottomless cliff towards which you – Frank – had been leading him, not quite without knowing it, from the days of consciousness, whenever that was.