Brian Aldiss - A Soldier Erect - or Further Adventures of the Hand-Reared Boy

My young man tenderly clasped my wrist again, perhaps as much feeling my pulse as detaining me.

‘Lovely girl, sir, waiting for you here with sundry embraces, just now, sir, in this room close by.’

Again a whispered word with a half-seen stranger, as we stepped between pillars supporting a balcony or a roof, pushed past a stable containing an animal of some kind (I could hear it moving restlessly), and came to a door. In the wall beside the door, a tiny candle burned in a candle-sized alcove. A faded blossom lay beside the candle, while night insects hovered round the flame. The door was slightly open.

‘Come in, sir, come in!’

The young man pushed the door wider. I could not make out the interior at all, so dimly was it lit. Hesitating on the threshold, and still being able to hear the movements of the animal we had passed, I imagined at first that I was looking into a stable, with a high wooden partition barring most of the space. There seemed to be no furniture. Two or three people – including a boy who might have been the boy who ran on ahead – were standing waiting in the dimness. One of them called out huskily in an Indian tongue.

As my eyes grew used to the light, I made out a face near the ceiling of the interior, staring down at me through ironwork at the top of the partition. At that moment, one of the people in the shadows lifted up an oil-light, so that the watching face took on detail.

How could I describe it? Even next day, it was like a face in a dream. Its dark liquid eyes and its mouth, the black hair neatly gathered back, were common property of millions of Hindu girls. Yet the excitement and imagined danger of the circumstances were so intense that I felt at once I knew her character: pitiful, pliable, timid, passionate. Her face was naked to me in the light.

While the light was still brushing shadows of bars across her face, she became an individual for me – my first foreign woman! Was this the girl they had brought me to? Then I loved her. Sex I wanted, but far more than that I wanted love!

It seemed that my young man was having an argument with the people in the room – for it was a room, and the girl was looking down at me between the bannisters of a wooden staircase. In the delay, she and I stared across at each other.

As we stood there, a wash of brilliance swept round the court outside. It picked out the senile old men and the doomed tree, then lost them in shadow again. Pillars, vines, decaying houses, stable – then the beams of light swung and caught me on the threshold of the room. I turned. As I did so, my young man pushed me from behind. I was outside, in the court again, and felt the door slammed behind me. I heard a bolt clatter home. Two MPs with truncheons jumped out of their jeep and ran towards me.

It counted in my favour that I made no attempt to escape or struggle. As they escorted me towards the jeep, my only concern was to protect the rolled picture of Hanuman, still clutched in my hand.

Out of Bounds! It was one of those childish phrases that made the Army seem like public school. With their arbitrary rules and the cunning mixture of moral impositions and brute force which constituted authority, the two institutions were much alike: although there was marginally more liberty and less swearing in the Army.

I told the Redcaps that I had not realized I was out of bounds. They were openly contemptuous and disbelieving – that was their profession. They demanded to look at Hanuman. I unrolled the poster and let them sneer at it. Even when I said it had only cost me ten annas, they remained disdainful.

My salvation was that I was fresh to India. My knees weren’t brown. I had got no service in. Otherwise my feet would not have touched. They would have had my guts for garters. They had it in for me now. If they ever found me in the brothel area again, I would never know what hit me. I’d be up the creek without a paddle.

After these admonitions, to which I responded by standing more and more rigidly to attention, the MPs drove me through town and back to the barrack gate. They studied me in silent commiseration as I climbed out and made my way back past the guardroom towards ‘A’ Block.

The bastards! Back in the barrack-room, I was too brassed off to speak to anyone, or to do anything more than climb into bed and get my head under my mosquito net. We were off to Burma soon – precious little chance we would have of getting a woman there. We should get ourselves fucking killed and that was all. What right did the Army have to keep me away from that lovely little bibi on the stairs?

It was impossible not to conjure up her face, looking like voluptuousness itself between the bars. Under the blankets, my damned thing rose, the quick-couraged MP-defier. When I clutched its sturdy shaft and tried to think what it would be like to push it up the imagined vulva of that half-imaginary girl, the necessity for a quick rub overcame me. Each stroke was to be the last but, Christ, what else was there in life? Although I grudged the old five-fingered widow her easy task, there was a certain relief in feeling the blobs of spunk cut a swathe over chest and stomach.

In those days, it was easier to come than think.

Next morning before parade, I stuck the crumpled picture of the monkey god on the wall beside the bed, next to the pin-ups of Ida Lupino and Jinx Falkenberg.

‘You know, Stubby, mate, I’m sure the old sweats as knows India are dead right about what they say about women, like,’ Geordie said after parade, waving his hands and his Adam’s apple in distress at having to say something to me I might not like.

‘What do they say, Geordie?’ He had taken care to get me on one side to speak. Word that the MPs had brought me home had evidently seeped through to him.

‘Well, you know same as I do – that you can get into trouble, like, if you sort of go with a pusher, like …’

‘Come on, Geordie, you were telling us down in the bazaar that you saw a bit of crumpet you fancied.’

‘Oh, I know, but I didn’t really mean that. I mean, I wouldn’t really … I mean, we do seem to have everything in barracks as we could want, don’t us, like? I mean, quite apart from all the parading and training. They say there’s two games of football a week. Well, two or three, I think the notice said. We can work up a sweat, you know, me on inside right and you like on the wing, just like at Aldershot …’

‘Sure, and then guard-duty at night. Oh, it’s a full life okay, a great life if you don’t weaken. You aren’t trying to tell me I ought to keep myself morally pure, are you?’

‘No, no, it’s hard to explain. You know I don’t want to get at you, but you are my mate, after all, Stubby. I just mean that even without pushers around, it’s a pretty full life …’

Perhaps he ran out of words. Perhaps he saw the look on my face.

‘You think I’m a bit of a cunt, Stubby, don’t you? Be honest now!’

‘’Course I don’t, mucker! …’

Poor old Geordie! There was a lot in what he said. Our regimented life was designed to be sufficient in itself. And he hadn’t even mentioned our two-day exercises, when we ran and crawled round Central Provinces as we once had round Arras and Somerset …

This rigorous existence was not enough. Every situation generates its legends, and our legend was Burma. We were attuned to every word about it, to every whisper that trickled through, just as we were to messages from that other distant country of sexuality.

Burma was hundreds of miles away from Kanchapur. Mandalay was as distant from us as Toronto from Miami or London from Kiev, and the route there lay across mountain chains and enormous rivers; but our ears were turned in that direction. At this time, late in 1943, the Japanese occupied almost all of Burma and were moving towards Assam. They still had the legend of invincibility round them, which the Chindits were only just denting. They were the fearsome yellow tribes who survived in jungles where nobody else could.