David Malouf - Fly Away Peter

Eric shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Wilya come again, Jim?’ A fine line of sweat drops on the boy’s upper lip gave him a phantom moustache. ‘Wilya, Jim?’ His voice sounded thin and far away.

Jim promised he would and meant it, but knew guiltily that he would not. It was Eric’s questions he would be unable to face.

As he walked away the voice continued to call after him, aggrieved, insistent, ‘Wilya, Jim’?. It was at first the voice of a child, and then, with hardly a change of tone, it was the voice of a querulous old man, who had asked for little and been given less and spent his whole life demanding his due.

Outside, for the first time since he was a kid, Jim cried, pushing his fists hard into his eye-sockets and trying to control his breath, and being startled — it was as if he had been taken over by some impersonal force that was weeping through him — by the harshness of his own sobs.

THE AIR, EVEN at knee height, was deadly. To be safe you had to stay at ground level on your belly, but safest of all was to be below ground altogether.

Breathless, and still trembling, his head numb with the noise that was rolling all about, Jim scrambled to the lip of the crater, and seeing even in the dark that there was no glint of water, went over the edge and slid. He struck something, another body, and recoiled. But in the sudden flash above the crater’s rim saw that it was, after all, only a dead man. He had stopped being scared of the dead.

Making their way out here, crawling, moving on their knees, squirming at corpse level, they had seen dozens of unburied men, swollen black, their bellies burst, some with their pockets turned out white in the moonlight where the scavengers had been through. Jim had been happy to stay down among them while the air thumped and shuddered and occasional flashes revealed the thickets of barbed wire they had fallen among. The air was tormented. Dull axes might have been swinging down. An invisible forest, tree after tree, came crashing all about, you could feel the rush of breath as another giant hung a moment, severed from its roots, then slowly, but with gathering speed, came hurtling to the earth. Jim crawled among the dead. Occasionally one of them stirred and slithered forward; it was the only indication he had of there being others out here, still alive and moving on. There had been seventy of them at the start. But one of the officers who had brought them out was killed almost immediately and the other had got them lost. They were scattered all round among the wire and were no longer a group.

It was this sense of being alone out here that had broken him. That and a renewed burst of machine-gun fire that whipped up all the earth around and made an old corpse suddenly bounce and twitch. He had decided then that he’d had enough. He lay breathless for a moment, then slid into the shell-hole from which, he decided, he would not come out. He put his arms round his head, while the sky bumped and flickered and the deeper sound of shellfire was threaded through at moments with the chatter of the Maxims. He was out of it.

He lay back, breathing deep.

But now that he was safe again the wave of panic that had caught him up retreated a little and he saw that he would go back. He told himself that what he had stood quite well till just a moment ago he could stand again. Besides, it was dangerous to stay here and be left. He rolled on to his belly in a moving forward posture, gripped his rifle, and was about to spread his knees and push up over the rim, on to the live and dinning field, when his heel was caught from behind in an iron grip. He gave a yell, kicked out and tried to turn, and another hand grabbed his tunic. He was hauled back. He and his attacker rolled together towards the oozy bottom of the hole. Hoarsely protesting, punching out wildly in the dark, he began to fight.

It was eerie, nightmarish, to be fighting for your life like this in a shellhole out of the battle, and with an unknown assailant. They were locked fiercely, brutishly together, grunting strange words, trying to stagger upright enough to get the advantage, to get some force into their blows. The fight went on in the dark till they were groggily exhausted. Suddenly, in a flash of light, Jim saw who it was.

‘Wizzer!’ he found himself shouting as the man’s hand continued to clutch at his throat, ‘it’s me, you mad bugger. Jim. A friend!’ Wizzer seemed astonished. Falling back he threw Jim against the wall of the shell hole and Jim lay there, panting, with his heels dug in, and watched Wizzer draw a sweaty hand over his face, removing the mud. It was Wizzer alright, no doubt of it. Overhead the sky was split. A livid crack appeared in the continuity of things, a line of jagged light through which a new landscape might have been visible. The crack repeated itself as sound. Jim’s head was split this time and the further landscape in there was impenetrably dark.

‘What’re you doing here?’ Jim asked between breaths when they had recovered from this external assault.

Wizzer looked sly.

‘What’re you?’

Jim didn’t know how to answer that.

‘I sort of slipped,’ he said.

Wizzer’s face broke into a mocking grin, and Jim remembered with shame that only a few moments ago he had been cringing at the bottom of the hole with his head in his arms like a frightened child.

‘You pulled me back,’ he accused, suddenly misunderstood and self-righteous.

‘Yair?’

‘Listen Wizzer,’ Jim began again, ‘we’ve got t’ get outa here and find the rest of the platoon.’

‘Not me,’ Wizzer said, springing to the alert. Just that, but Jim saw that he meant it, was in no way abashed, and assumed in his own frank admission of cowardice that they were two of a kind. Jim began to be alarmed. He tried in the dark to locate his rifle. He had stopped hearing the noise overhead. There were so many ways of being afraid; you couldn’t be all of them at the same time.

‘Listen Wizzer,’ he said softly, as if reasoning with a child, ‘this is serious. We’re right out in the open here. Whatever happens we’ll be for it. We’re right out on our own.’

His fingers reached the rifle and he looked to the place where the sky began, wondering, if he took off, whether he could make it before Wizzer was on him again. He wanted nothing so much now as to be back where he had been ten minutes ago, in the thick of it. Scared silly, but not yet sullied.

Suddenly, alarmingly, Wizzer began to quake. His shoulders first, then his jaw. An odd moaning sound came from between the man’s clenched teeth and Jim could see the whites of his eyes in the mud-streaked face. He had drawn himself up into a ball and was rocking back and forth, clenching his fists to his chest. His whole body was being shaken as by other, invisible hands.

Jim could have scrambled away without difficulty then, but was held. He felt a terrible temptation to join Wizzer in making that noise, in adding it to the whine and crack and thump of shellfire beyond the rim of the pit; it would be so liberating. But some sense of shame — for Wizzer, but also for himself — held him back from that and made it impossible also for him to slip away.

‘This is terrible,’ he said to nobody, standing upright now, knee-keep in the mud they had churned up. He didn’t know what to do. Wizzer had subsided into choking sobs. The other had let him go.

‘Listen Wizzer,’ he said, ‘I’m leaving now. Alright, mate? If you want to come with me we could go together. But it’s alright if you don’t.’ He backed away to the wall of the hole and dug in ready to climb. ‘Alright Wizzer? Alright?’

He felt desperately unhappy. He really did want Wizzer to come; it was the only way to wipe all this clean. He kept his eye on the man, who was still again, with his head lifted like an animal and keenly observing, as if Jim were doing something incomprehensibly strange. Jim eased himself up towards the edge of the pit. ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘I wish you’d come Wizzer.’ But the other man shook his head. With one last look backwards Jim rolled over and out, and was immediately back on the field, in that weird landscape as you saw it at belly level of wire entanglements, smashed trees, the knees of corpses, and other, living figures, some quite close, who were emerging like himself from shallow holes. He was back.