William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

The body lay on its belly in a wide clearing of violently torn and trampled grass. The birds had already pecked away both calves and the porcelain gleam of exposed ribs shone beneath the tattered shirt.

“Army boots,” Temple said, not wanting to speculate further.

“Looks too small for Gabriel,” Felix said bravely. “He was a big chap, Gabriel.”

Wheech-Browning rejoined them. By now they were all covered with flies, flies crawling all over their faces, oblivious to their waving hands. Temple took some paces to one side.

“It’s been chopped off,” he said. “That wasn’t an animal.”

“My Christ,” said Wheech-Browning. He suddenly leant forward from the waist and vomited. He straightened up unsteadily, wiping his mouth. “Phew,” he said. “There goes breakfast.”

As if on some unspoken order they withdrew to the mules.

“What the hell is going on?” Temple said. “Who chops off a man’s head in the middle of the veldt?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s not Gabriel,” Felix said. He swallowed heavily. “I think. I mean you can’t tell. Without…”

“Who is it, then?” Temple said. “Von Bishop?”

“Where’s the head, though?” Wheech-Browning asked. “Why carry off the head? I don’t understand.”

Temple suddenly recalled the mound of earth at the camp. “You stay here,” he said to Wheech-Browning. “Keep the birds off. We’re going back to the camp-site.”

“Scarecrow,” Wheech-Browning said, holding his hands out from his side. “That’s what the chaps called me at school.”

Temple and Felix rode back to the camp-site.

“What is it?” Felix asked.

“I think they’ve buried the head there,” Temple indicated the mound.

“Oh God.”

“Shall I do it or will you?”

“I think you should.”

Temple got down on his knees and began digging away the loosely tamped earth with his hands. Six inches down his fingers struck something soft. He felt his mouth swim with saliva. He dug some more. The head was wrapped in a square of blanket.

He turned round. “It’s here,” he called to Felix, who was standing some yards away. Felix came over. Temple could see his jaw muscles were clenched with effort. His top lip and growth of beard were dewed with sweat. He looked down at the blanket-wrapped head. He took a long quivering breath.

“Could you…please.”

Temple reached down into the hole and carefully un-wrapped the head. He saw a squarish handsome face, very white and thin, with open eyes and mouth. He wiped away some of the larger ants. The hair was pale brown and tousled. Something about it made it looKARtificial.

He looked round and saw Felix crying silently, his hands over his face, his shoulders shaking.

“Poor Gabe,” he heard him say.

Temple wrapped up the head again. Then he stood up and walked over to Felix. He put his hand on his shoulder for a second. He didn’t know what to say. He felt an inexpressible sorrow for the young man. He walked away from him, past the two scouts who tended their mules, kicking savagely at the grass as he went. He took some deep breaths, looked up at the sky, beat some dust from his trousers. Off in the distance he could see Wheech-Browning capering madly around the corpse, waving his long arms at the wheeling birds as if he were putting on a performance for them. His yells and whoops carried faintly across the grass.

Temple walked back to Felix.

“What made him do that?” Felix asked hoarsely. “Why did he need to do that?”

“I don’t know,” Temple said. “I don’t have any idea.”

“What’s his name?”

“Von Bishop.”

“I just don’t understand,” Felix said softly, a tremor distorting his voice. “What would make anyone do a thing like that?”

“I don’t know,” Temple said with some vehemence. “It just doesn’t make any kind of sense at all.”

“Snap!”

“Eh?”

“Snap. I win,” Felix said. “ Ganhador . Me.”

“Oh. Oh, sim.”

“ Terminar? ”

“ Sim. Sim .”

Felix noted down his victory. It took his score to 1,743 games of snap. His opponent, Capitao Pinto, had won thirty-four. Felix put the cards away. The capitao turned for consolation to his erotic books.

Capitao Aristedes Pinto was dying of tertiary syphilis. Or so he said. This fact didn’t bother Felix so much as the histrionic way the captain flicked through his small but well-handled collection of pornography. As he turned the pages of dim photographs and extravagant etchings he would sigh wistfully and shake his head as if to say, “Look at the trouble you naughty girls have got me into.” Occasionally he would give a fond chuckle and pass one of the books over to Felix for his perusal. Initially, Felix had indeed been intrigued to look at the pictures — mainly of plump girls in bordellos, with their breasts hanging out of satin slips, or skirts routinely raised to reveal huge creamy buttocks or luxuriant pudenda — but now it was just another irritation. The girls all smiled and posed with little coquettishness, almost as if they were drugged. Felix thought of his own solitary encounter with a prostitute in Bloomsbury Square. It seemed like decades ago, in another world.

Pinto was a small fat man with a pencil moustache, a festering sore in one nostril and one smoked blind eye. His uniform was constantly smeared and dirty, but for all that he was an amiable sort of fellow, Felix thought, and he seemed to find it not in the slightest bit out of the ordinary that he — a non-English speaker — should have to liaise with an English officer who in turn spoke no Portuguese. Felix had been sharing quarters with him at Boma Durio for getting on for three months and, thanks to the absence of a common vocabulary, they had never had a cross word.

Pinto pushed the book across the table and Felix obligingly scrutinized the picture.

“ Francez ,” Pinto moaned. He parted his lips in a grimace of ecstatic pain, exposing his four silver and two gold teeth. “ Diabolico! ” He blew on his fingertips and launched into a lengthy reminiscence in Portuguese. It was an impossible language, Felix thought, full of thudding consonants and slushing noises. He’d been trying to learn it for three months with the aid of a crude dictionary he’d bought in Porto Amelia but he couldn’t even pronounce it. Pinto had been making better progress with his English and spoke a little French, and through a combination of all three languages they just about managed to communicate. It was almost as difficult as talking to Gilzean. Felix shifted in his seat uncomfortably. He worried that he’d let Gilzean down rather, given him false hopes. His gloomy sergeant had died of blackwater fever three days before Christmas 1917. Poor Gilzean.

Pinto went back to his book and Felix took the opportunity to stroll outside.

Boma Durio was a huge earthwork fort, roughly two hundred yards square, set on a hill a mile away from Durio village somewhere in the middle of Portuguese East Africa. In one corner of the square was a red-bricked tin-roofed building which was Felix’s and Pinto’s quarters. Nearby were half a dozen large but flimsy grass huts which housed Pinto’s servants, his three young negro concubines and the half company of Portuguese native troops and their camp followers. The rest of the square was empty. That morning it had been filled with six hundred potters and their loads of yams, manioc, rice, sugar cane and sweet potatoes — provisions for some of the twelve thousand British and Empire troops still chasing von Lettow and his small army up and down Portuguese East Africa.