Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

And then too, finally, she feels as if she might really have been raped. All this time, thinking she’s escaped Colin, thinking she’s escaped with her life. Yet she’d been right to start with, when the word had sprung to her mind as he’d pressed her against the mildewed tiles of the pool. He had wounded her, she thinks, and not a small wound, the drops of blood in her drawers, but something deeper and stranger. What a wound it is that stops you bleeding. And in her heart there’s a morbid fear that what he’s given her is a lingering death, nine months long, that she won’t survive childbirth, that she’ll die and he’ll have raped her after all.

She takes the heavy scissors out of her pocket at last and sets them back in her sewing basket, impaling a ball of wool. She’ll be needing her knitting and sewing soon enough, she thinks. But in the meantime, there’s nothing to be protected from anymore.

She’s subdued for days. Even the pictures, where she goes to escape, no longer feel like a refuge. Outside, the marquee’s lights seem to wink at her, “Now Showing, Now Showing.” Inside, she sits at the very front of the stalls, shrouded in the blue fog of cigarette smoke that settles beneath the stage, as far away from the courting couples in the back row as possible. But with the screen looming over her she finds herself dreading a glimpse of Colin in the newsreels, finds her eye drawn to a shock of curly black hair, a trim mustache, a certain rakish angle to a forage cap. This close she can feel the rumble of the Allied tanks rolling through French or Dutch or Belgian villages; she recoils from those girls on the screen throwing flowers and beaming, dancing in the streets.

Afterwards, she can barely recall the news when Arthur asks her. She has thought of writing to Colin, telling him, but she doesn’t have an address for him, and even if she had, she can’t imagine how to put it. I’ve missed, she tries, but all that comes is I’ve missed … you. And she recoils, first from the lie of that, and then even more from the truth within the lie, the truth that if she tells him, she’ll be asking him to come for her, to put it right. So is it shame that’s stopping her writing, she asks herself, or pride? Both, perhaps? Either way, she refuses to give him the satisfaction of an appeal. Better by far not to ask than to be refused.

Instead of going to the pictures, she takes to spending her free evenings, and then any time she can escape from her chores, in the trees above the camp, smoking to keep the midges off, staring at the men.

She wonders what will become of the Germans now. The war has gone on so long — her whole life, it feels to her sometimes — it’s hard to imagine it ever ending, despite the victories. They’ll be there for the rest of their lives, she thinks, studying the men, until they’ll have lived here longer than they ever did in Germany.

She finds herself wishing it were Colin down there behind the wire, a prisoner himself. She thinks of him surrendering, hands raised, pictures him in solitary confinement, curled up in a dark cell. But even as she smiles grimly to herself, the very word “confinement” turns on her. It’s as if the language is coming to life, talking back to her in it’s slippery English tongue. For she’s the one, she thinks suddenly, she’s the one who’ll be in her confinement soon enough. The word itself seems a cell to her, pressing in on all sides, inescapable. She watches the grey men trudging across the dusty parade ground, wonders what the wire feels like clutched in a fist. She wants to run down there, press her face, her breasts, her stomach to the fence, feel it pressing all over her, the metallic tang of it between her teeth. She’d bite down on it, just to stop screaming.

And then she wishes Colin not a prisoner at all, just dead, slaughtered by one of these very Germans if possible. Him, or him, or him.

SHE HASN’T SEEN the gang of boys at the camp again — most likely bored by the prisoners at last — but one evening Jim returns alone. He’s had some falling-out with the others (over her? she wonders, over what she said to Pinkie? but he won’t talk about it). At first she thinks he’s come looking for her, and she presses against the tree she’s leaning on, but he only has eyes for the camp. By rights she should send him home, but there’s something so plaintive about the way he kicks his scarred leather ball down the lane alongside the fence, then sits on it, bouncing slightly, staring in at the Germans’ game, that she doesn’t have the heart.

She holds her breath when one of the Germans drifts over to him — the one she talked to, she’s sure — strains to hear what they say, but there’s no shouting this time, no name-calling. The German just crouches behind the fence, pretending to be a goalkeeper, while Jim fires his ball over and over against it, making the wire ring. Jim’s back the next night and the night after that, talking with the prisoner, about what she can’t imagine. Once she sees Jim slip his small hand through the wire, and later, as the German walks back to his barracks, she sees him lighting a cigarette. It makes her want one, but looking into her pack — she’s taken to buying her own now — she pauses, trying to remember how many there were the last time she had one. She has a vision of Jim going into her bag, stealing one, the very one the prisoner is smoking now, and she’s instantly affronted, not at the prisoner — she’d not begrudge him — but at Jim. She wants to have given the German the smoke.

What on earth can they be talking about anyway?

The next night, she sees the German pull something from his tunic, shielding it from the guard towers. It glints in the dusk as he slips it through the fence into Jim’s open hands.

She’s waiting for him later, sitting on his bed in his room when he comes in, and she holds out her palm.

“Give me.”

She expects him to bluster, but he seems almost relieved to show it to someone. A thin green beer bottle — she recognizes it from the pub; they sold a crate to the guards recently — and inside it, when she holds it to the light, a tiny ship, a fishing boat made of matchsticks, with a square scrap of grey cloth for a sail. Sailors, she recalls, submariners. The glass is still hot from the boy’s hand.

He looks at her expectantly.

“How do we get it out?”

She’s thinking of a grey shirt with a small square hole in it.

“How do we get it out?” Jim repeats, and now she sees why he’s offered it up so eagerly, but she shakes her head. He takes it back, tries his fingers in the neck one by one, but even the longest won’t quite reach the prow.

“You can’t,” she says gently. “Not without breaking it. That’s the whole point.” But she can see it’s lost on him. The prisoner has given him a toy he can’t play with.

“Well how’d it get in there?” he asks, concentrating on his little finger, waggling behind the glass, like a worm on a hook.

She shrugs, stumped. “Some trick.” And the boy nods heavily, as if he’d expect no more from a German.

“You’ll get that stuck,” she warns, and he pulls his finger out quickly.

“What do you two talk about?” she asks.

Jim holds the bottle up, squints down it’s neck. “He wants food, fags.” He tilts the glass to his lips as if to drink, then blows experimentally, and she sees the little sail flutter. “And he keeps asking your name.”

“You didn’t tell him!”

“Course not!”

She smoothes her hands down the front of her skirt.

“Well, you’re not to go back there. Ever! You hear me?”

He sets the mouth of the bottle to his eye, peers at her through the thick glass, as if through a telescope.