A Soldier Erect Part 1

A Soldier Erect.

Brian W. Aldiss

Book One

The Lair of the Monkey G.o.d

As the last party-guests were groping their way into the blackout, I belted upstairs and shut myself in my bedroom. My dressing-gown fell off its hook as the door slammed, dropping like a dying man, one arm melodramatically over the bed. I dragged my sports-jacket off my shoulders, rolled it into a bundle, and flung it into the far corner of the room, all of ten feet away.

On the top of the chest-of-drawers stood a carved bear, given to me on my tenth birthday by an uncle lately back from Switzerland, a bag of green apples, a framed photograph of Ida Lupino, my uniform dress cap, and three woollen vests. I swept them all off and climbed on to the chest-of-drawers, where I squatted, groaning and rolling my head from side to side.

G.o.d, what sodding, s.h.a.gging, scab-devouring misery it all was! The humiliation - the ign.o.bility - of the whole s.h.i.+tting shower! The creepy, c.r.a.ppy narrowness of my parents' life! And that was supposed to be my embarkation leave party before I went abroad to serve my king and c.u.n.ting country! If that was embarkation leave, roll on b.l.o.o.d.y germ warfare!

By kneeling up a little on the chest-of-drawers, I could press my head and shoulders against the ceiling and so resemble a deformed caryatid. Thinking vicious army thoughts, I pushed one side of my face against the flaking ceiling. My jaw slumped down, my tongue dripped saliva, my eyelids flickered like an ancient horror film, revealing acres of white-of-eye. At the same time, I managed to tremble and twitch in every muscle. Jesus, what a wet dream of a party that was! Party? I asked aloud, in tones of incredulity.

Paaarty? Paaaa-ha-ha-ha-rty?Paaaa-urrgh-harty?, And I thought of the other blokes in 'A' Company. Their genial and loutish faces drifted before my inner eye, their blunt noses and short haircuts almost welcoming ... Wally, Enoch, Geordie, old Chalkie White, Carter the Farter, Chota Morris ... Tonight, they'd all be getting hopelessly p.i.s.sed or s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g girls - or so they would stoutly claim when we got back to barracks tomorrow. And I - I, sober and unstuffed, would have to lie to save my face, to subscribe to the infantry myth that one spent one's whole leave yarking it up some willing bit of stuff in a pub yard. I cramped my shoulders harder against the ceiling, hoping that I might burst through the lath-and-plaster into the gales of the false roof and erupt against the lagged water-tank. You mean to say that was the best they could do in the way of a party? For me, for the conquering hero, for the pride of the sodding Mendips?

The whole idea had been a farce from the beginning. My father had never shown one flicker of enthusiasm. My brother Nelson had managed to w.a.n.gle leave fromEdinburghto see me - 'for the last time', as he expressed it - and the farewell party had been his idea. He had jockeyed the parents into it.

'It's not easy in wartime,' my father said, shaking his head. 'You youngsters don't understand. I'm on warden duty, too, this week.'

'Go on, Colonel Whale would let you have a bottle of whisky, since Horry's going overseas. It's a special occasion!'

'Whisky? I'm not having whisky! It'd spoil the party! You'd only get drunk!'

That's what whisky is for, Daddy,' my sister Ann said, in her long-suffering voice. We'd become good at long-suffering voices, simply through imitation.

My mother quite liked the idea of a party if she could possibly scrounge the clothing coupons to buy a pretty dress. She felt so dowdy. That was one reason why she never wanted to see anyone these days.

She looked unhappily round the sitting-room which, despite many years of punis.h.i.+ng Stubbsian teetotalism, still held a faint beery aroma, in memory of the days when the house had been an inn.

'It really needs a good spring-clean before anyone comes in here!' Mother said, looking willowy and wan, mutely asking always to be forgiven for some great unspoken fault.

The windows look so awful with that sticky paper on them, and I just wish we could have some new curtains.'

Certainly the house did appear neglected, not only because of the war, but because my mother's nervous disease was gaining on her. Housework was beyond her, she claimed. She grew more willowy by the week, to our irritation.

Eventually, Nelson and Ann and I browbeat father into holding a cele-ha-ha-bration. Ann was sixteen; she burst into tears and said she would not let her brother go overseas unless he had a party first.

So who do you think turned up that evening, tramping dolefully up our steps and into the living-room, to sit affrontedly about in their suits and complain of the tastelessness of sausages, the decline of moral standards, and the military failings of the Russians, the Australians, the Canadians, the Americans, and the French? Why, flakey-scalped little Mr. Jeremy Church, father's head clerk from the bank, with his cream-puff-faced wife Irene, very free with her 'lakes' and 'dislakes'; and my grandma, getting on a bit now, but scoring a shrewd blow against the times in which we lived by revealing how sandbags were all filled with nothing but ordinary seaside sand; and the Moles from the grocery, prim but patriotic, bringing with them an old aunt of Mrs. Mole's, who had been bombed out of her London flat and wasn't afraid to tell you about it; and mother's friend Mrs. Lilly Crane, whose husband was in something-or-other, with her daughter Henrietta, sub-t.i.tled 'The Enigma' by Ann; and Nelson's current girl friend, Valerie, watching for Nelson's signal to scram as soon as convenient; and dear old Miss Lewis from next door who still went to church every Sunday, rain or s.h.i.+ne, although she was pus.h.i.+ng a hundred-and-something, or could it be two hundred-and-something?; and a s.e.xy friend of Ann's, Sylvia Rudge. Sixteen of us all told, the only people left in theEast Midlandsthat mortality and conscription had spared. A dead lively lot. Mother handed the dates round with her renowned Light Touch, smiling sadly in my direction as one and all offered their condolences that she was having her younger son s.n.a.t.c.hed from her. More of a funeral than a celebration.

Average age of party - fifty? Ninety? Who cared? I crouched on my perch trying to work out when the visitors had last - if ever - had it in. It was hard to imagine that the females were penetrable or, if penetrable, that the males were capable of penetrating them. Did Mr. Mole occasionally manage a subterranean pa.s.sage up Mrs. Mole, over a sack of demerara, under a flag-draped photo of Winnie with his two fingers in the air?

From my disadvantage point, I could watch my reflection in the mirror of the wardrobe, which stood near the door and opposite the chest-of-drawers. Now there was a borns.h.a.gger, if ever I saw one, given the chance. I stuck my feet in the top (sock and handkerchief) drawer and spread my arms out along the ceiling. The sight reminded me of something. Pulling the hair down over my eyes, I pantomimed a corny crucifixion scene, with plenty of bleary and reproachful dekkos up at the plaster. 'My G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me?' I looked more like Hitler throwing one of his fits than Christ in final aggs.

Why this obsession with Christ, for G.o.d's sake? Perhaps I'd been Christ in a previous existence - during my mid-teens, I had nursed a sneaking belief in the theory of reincarnation. Oh Christ, don't let me have been Christ! I dropped the crucifixion act and made monkey faces at myself.

You could rule out all the women at the party straight away, except for Valerie, Henrietta Crane, and Sylvia. Valerie was Nelson's bit of crumpet, so that left Henrietta Crane and Sylvia. That'll show you how desperate I was, not to rule out Henrietta Crane straight away! The Enigma was in her mid-twenties - perhaps five years older than I. A heavily-powdered girl or was it just that she had never been dusted?, who looked as if her clothes, flesh, eyes, hair, everything, were made out of a single ambiguous material - stale sponge cake, say. Even I, despite frequent practice shots, could not imagine her undressed, or even with her hair down. Did she ever run for a bus, or fart, or burst out laughing? Henrietta Crane was the sort of girl you didn't have to go near to know that her breath would smell of Kensitas cigarettes and Milk of Magnesia. You never find girls like that any more, thank G.o.d. They were all sc.r.a.pped at the end of the war.

Which left our Syl. As the party warmed up - i.e., came to something approaching room-temperature - Ann was working our gramophone, then giving out with a Carroll Gibbons recording of That Old Black Magic, and Sylvia was standing beside her, jiffling to the tunes. It was a wind-up gramophone, brought out of the air-raid shelter now that we were not having air raids any more, so that it needed the two of them to keep it cranked and loaded. I prowled round the perimeter of the little conversations, attracted by Sylvia's jiffle.

Her b.u.m moved round to aboutten o'clockand then worked anticlockwise to about two-thirty, after which it repeated the gambit. Since she was putting more weight on one leg than on the other, her b.u.t.tocks were not quite in synch: the left was with Carroll Gibbons, while the right worked on a wilder melody of its own. What a sight! I could feel my pulses getting sludgey. Sod it, I had to have it in tonight - tomorrow, f.u.c.k knows what would happen tomorrow! My stomach gave a thin whine at the mere thought of tomorrow ... At least Syl could move, unlike Henrietta Crane. Syl was small and rather s.h.i.+fty-looking, but by no means as ancient as The Enigma. Lumps of breast could be seen under a blue dress, although they were unable to coincide entirely with the t.i.t-positions sewn into the dress. Of course, it would be an old dress of her mother's cut down. I'd met Our Syl's mother, but did not let that put me off. I smiled, she smiled, still working the b.u.t.tocks in friendly fas.h.i.+on. Or perhaps they worked by themselves.

'So you're off then, Horatio?'

'The war's been taking too long. The War Office has sent for me at last.'

'... "I hear your name, and I'm aflame ..." Lushy song! What do you look like in your uniform? Smas.h.i.+ng, I bet! All dressed for action!'

'How'd you like to see me in nothing at all?'

'Horatio, what do you mean?'

'Stripped for action!'

'Ooh, we've got a right one here!' she told Ann.

Father was not about, so Mother was being officious for two. She willowed over with a gla.s.s in her hand. 'Now, my big soldier boy, you mustn't let Sylvia monopolize you all evening!'

'I only just came over-'

'Circulate, dear - And brush your hair back properly, you look silly with it hanging over your eyes like that!' These family pleasantries all sotto voce.

If she overcame my natural instinct to look like Robert Preston in Wake Island, which I had seen five times in the camp cinema, so she had also overcome my father's instinct to have no booze during the evening. 'It only spoils the party.' No, come on, he didn't really say that; I must have imagined it! But poor old Dad was the sort you could imagine saying it. Fortunately, Mother's sense of occasion had won; she had sucked up to the chap in the post office, who could get you anything, and secured two bottles of pre-war sherry, which she was now doling out gaily, with many a quip about tipsiness, into little bile-green gla.s.ses. Mr. Jeremy Church, anxious to establish what a merry old t.u.r.d he was, had brought along a bottle of puce burgundy.

'See you later,' I said over my shoulder to Sylvia, loading the words with all the disgusting s.e.xual innuendo they would take.

I skirted the talk of scarcities and heroism, striving to look by other means than dishevelled hair as if I had just arrived from Wake Island. Collecting a burgundy from Church with a minimum of conversational involvement, I went over to peer down at Henrietta Crane.

The Enigma was offering several items of clothing between blouse and sponge cake - vests, spencers, bra.s.sieres, who knows what; wartime conditions gave this sort of girl a magnificent chance to put on every variety of fusty garment her mother had put off fifty years earlier. The sponge cake, notoriously undusted, moved slowly up and down, as if there was someone in it. Yes, I could force myself to get excited. I flung my s.e.xual emotions into gear by imagining sponge-cakey v.u.l.v.as. The p.r.i.c.k gave a faint lethargic twitch in its sleep, like an ancient dog offered an ancient bone.

Henrietta was sipping the puce burgundy with her mother. They were making faces and whispering together. I perched on an arm of the sofa beside her - more for the sake of 'A' Company than anything personal. She moved her elbow away surrept.i.tiously, so that it could not by any chance come into contact with my a.r.s.e.

'So glad you could make it this evening, Henrietta - and your mother. Didn't have any trouble getting here in the blackout?'

'So you've just got this forty-eight-hour leave, Horatio, have you?' That was her mother, not her, looking up brightly and showing her dentures.

That's right. Forty-eight hours. The usual.'

'Just two days, in fact.'

I appeared to make quick calculations under my breath ... 'Thirty, thirty-three, forty, forty-eight ...' 'Yes, that's right, just two days, in fact!' said with as much feigned astonishment as I dared show.

'And where are you going when you get back to the Army? It is the Army?'

'First battalion, the Second Royal Mendip Borderers.'

'Well, that is the Army, isn't it? Where are you going to go?'

'That's a military secret, Mrs. Crane, which I am unhappily unable to reveal.' A military secret securely kept from me, I might have added. While we talked, Henrietta Crane kept looking at her mother, rather than me, her fat little lips glistening as she sipped the burgundy. There was a faint hope that if I waited long enough (say five days) she might get p.i.s.sed and shed all her moral standards; if her moral standards were in proportion to the number of her underclothes - I was convinced that such a relations.h.i.+p existed - then the hope was faint indeed, and more than one bottle of Church's burgundy would be called for.

'Will you be fighting then?' Mrs. Crane asked. Her thin Midland accent made the verb sound the way Southerners say 'farting', while her tone suggested that, whatever I was going to do, it was best I did it quietly in a back street.

'Aye, I expect I'll be doing a bit of farting,' I replied.

More in stupor than in anger, I said to Henrietta, 'It's getting stuffy in here with all this f.a.g smoke, and the room starts to stink of beer when it warms up. Would you like to come and see our air-raid shelter out the back?'

The Old Enigma gave me a waxworky look before her eyes slid to mum.

'We've got an air-raid shelter too, you know,' she said, in a tone suggesting she thought she was committing repartee. 'I keep my collection of little vases in there, don't I, mother?'

That's right, dear.' Smiling at me in elucidation. 'She keeps her collection of little vases in our air-raid shelter.'

'Mmm, I suppose that way they don't get broken if there's an air raid.'

'That's the idea,' Henrietta said. She uttered a short laugh as if it was a prearranged code meaning NO s.e.x TONIGHT.

'Let me re-fill your gla.s.s,' I said. Dog's urine or horse p.i.s.s?

Ann was still working away at the gramophone, flipping the ten-inches on one after the other. She was swigging sherry with Sylvia and giggling. Jeremy Church was hovering about as if he fancied them both, while Mrs. Church listened in agony to the Mole aunt's account of her bombing-out. Most of the records were the sentimental tunes that Ann adored. How Green Was My Valley, Room 504, Whispering Gra.s.s, You Walked By, My Devotion, Yours, and one that she kept slipping on in my honour, You Can't Say No to a Soldier. Christ, she was the only one who had said yes to me; the other b.i.t.c.hes here a.s.sembled did not even appear to know what the question was!

I evaded old Church, who was anxious to talk about The Agony of the Great War ('You don't remember it but things were very much harder then!'), and commenced to flirt with Sylvia again.

'You didn't have much luck with Henrietta then!' she said, and she and Ann and I burst out laughing.

Her arms were rather spotty, but we were getting on quite well when I noticed Nelson preparing to slip out with Valerie. He winked at me, a slow thorough wink that must have bruised his eyeball. Dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Jealousy seized me. Valerie wasn't bad, a bit hefty owing to her involvement in the Women's Land Army, but very cheerful - and everyone understood that Land Army girls needed it regular; the contact with agriculture made them that way. They would be going to the pub for a pint and afterwards Nelson would get her against our back wall for a knee-trembler. I knew this because he had told me about it in a humble but proud way. He claimed that knee-tremblers were the most exhausting way of having s.e.x. I longed to have a try, longed to be really f.u.c.ked out.

'Like to come and see our air-raid shelter, Sylvia?'

'What's so special about your air-raid shelter? We've got one too!'

'Ah, but has yours got hot-and-cold running water in it?'

'No, and I bet yours hasn't!'

'It's got a bit of a puddle in one corner! No, look, see, I keep my collection of small vases in there.

You'd be interested.'

'You keep your what?'

At that point, when the battle to get Our Syl into a suitable knee-trembling position might have gone either way, enter my father! He had finished his warden's parade, looking for c.h.i.n.ks in other people's blackouts. He carried his gas mask and his torch, and was careful not to remove his steel helmet with the letters ARP on it until he was well into the room, so that everyone present was reminded of their duty.

The helmet made him look more squat than ever. I noted that its rim barely came up to the most prominent bit of Henrietta Crane.

His entrance caused some confusion. The old Mole aunt interpreted it as a signal that she should take cover, and had to be restrained by the Moles and Mrs. Church from seeing the rest of the war out under our gate-leg table. In annoyance, father pretended he had noticed nothing (a favourite gambit), and went over to twitch severely at our own blackout, pulling the curtains three times, as if signalling to a drove of Dorniers circling overhead. Nelson and his pusher took the chance to sneak away, and I managed to manoeuvre Sylvia as far as the kitchen.

'Let's go out into the back garden and get a breath of air.'

'I'm just going to have a smoke. Do you want a Park Drive?' She offered her packet. 'It's all our local tobacconist has got and I don't care for them all that much.'

'Thanks. Let's smoke them outside. You can't hear yourself talk in there.' Our hands touched as I lit her f.a.g.

'I was enjoying the music. Wouldn't you say Artie Shaw's the best musician there ever was?'

'Look, please let's go out! You can't rely on the music -my mother may stop it at any moment and recite some poetry, if she thinks the thing's getting out of hand. It only needs old Church to get a bit stewed and all h.e.l.l will break loose in there!'

We were standing one on either side of the kitchen table, puffing our f.a.gs, staring at each other. She was looking more attractive all the time. Surely she must have had enough sense to know what I was after?

Where was her patriotism? Desperately though I wanted to kiss her - just kiss her if nothing more was available - my whole upbringing prevented my telling her so directly. Everything had to be done according to a deadening set of out-of-date rules, rules so ill-defined that you could never be sure when you were set to move ahead. Or there was the more up-to-date but equally inhibiting way of tackling it, the cinema way, where everything had to be done romantically, where there had to be that look in her eye, and a moon in the sky, and Max Steiner laying on the violins ... and then you both suddenly went soft and began saying witty tender self-mocking things: 'I've never felt 'so young before tonight.' 'Why, you're looking positively boyis.h.!.+' 'It's you, my darling, you bring out the adolescent in me.' 'Aren't we all external adolescents!' 'Just for tonight we are!' That sort of American approach was even harder to master than the Ancient British protocol but, once mastered, it gave positive results. The music came on strong, your hands touched, you were over the hump, flowers appeared, you were p.r.o.ne, your lips were touching, pelvic movements started of their own accord. Over our scrubbed kitchen table, nothing began to begin.

'Will you think of me when I'm on Wake Island or some similar h.e.l.l-spot?'

Then Ann in the next room put on her favourite record, everyone's favourite record, of Len Camber singing That Lovely Weekend. We could hear the words in the kitchen, goading me on with their middle-cla.s.s anguish at war and parting.

... The ride in the taxi when midnight had flown And breakfast next morning, just we two alone.

You had to go, time was so short, We both had so much to say.

Your kit to be packed, your train to be caught I'm sorry I cried but I just felt that way...

'I just love this old thing,' Our Syl said. 'There's a chap at the office calls it That Dirty Weekend.' She laughed.

'It's a ghastly song - reminds me of what I'm missing. Whipped overseas tomorrow, never to be seen again. Some fat corner of a foreign field and all that...' By this time, I had an arm round her waist and was smoking heavily against her left flank. She affected not to notice.

'Whereabouts is your brother stationed?'

These days, you'd hit a girl across the chops if she asked you a silly question like that at a time like that Eventually, I did coax her outside the back door and into the soft dark autumn air. You could tell she wasn't too reluctant. Scrunching the Park Drive underfoot, I got an arm round her neck and muttered a few edifying remarks. I could smell her and she smelt pleasant. The night evidently encouraged her. She dropped the rest of her f.a.g and looked up and smiled at me. She was mysterious, just about visible. A nice face, not a bit s.h.i.+fty. She put her hands up to my cheeks and kept them there.

'I'm sorry you're going,' she said. 'You're nice.'

'Don't worry, I'll be back!'

'I'll miss you when you're gone!'