leaving his initials on a tree trunk. But my eyes were pulled past my own scribbles to an uneven line of capital letters at the foot of the page. I could see her with clenched fist and jutting tongue.
DON’T WORRY, DANNY. EVERYTHING WILL BE ALL RIGHT. YOU’RE A GOOD MAN. YOU MUST BELIEVE THAT. NO MATTER WHAT.
VALERIE.
I wondered what was so bad that Val had to try so hard to make me feel better.
And what the hell had she thought of my other jottings? I turned back to my own writing. abandon all hope arbeiters – this isnt freedom – its a lie I know its a lie – cold and hunger and arbeit makes you dead – the dead are free they sent the dogs into the hut today – hot breath slevers cold nose sniffing me wanting to make me run and then hunt me down – you had to lie – he maketh me to lie down in green pastures – yet will I fear evil not moshe – moshe didnt lie – was always afraid we were all afraid but moshe wore it like a coat – the dogs love that – they love fear it drives them mad I chucked the notebook down on the floor and stumbled into my office. I pulled out my bottle from my desk drawer and poured a big shot into my tumbler. Then I sat down on my visitor’s chair in my pyjamas and rocked and rocked. In my mind’s eye was a day, two days, all the days in the camp. A double row of wooden huts inside a high barbed wire fence. On the edge of a sleepy little village, a thousand years old, not far from Munich. I often wondered why the villagers stayed there. Afterwards. Why would you want to live in a suburb of hell? The name Dachau tainted for evermore?
I saw Moshe’s chubby face. One of the world’s helpless types. Couldn’t do anything for himself. His mother had cootered him all his days. A big baby. The Nazis loved hurting him. Bullies always picked on the weakest. They kept him alive – just – so that they could go on hurting him. He was so good to hurt.
They would take him away and bring him back blubbering and howling, his pants wet, tears soaking his bruised face. At least he had a face, until they sent in the dogs. All you could do was bury yourself into the wooden bunks – two of you to a bunk. Hide your head and your hands, anything that the dogs could get their fangs into. You didn’t try to escape. Moshe did. Terror overcoming sense. Moshe ran and we watched him from our safe bunks get almost to the door before they brought him down and went at him. Like they’d found a rat and were going to worry it to bits. Moshe stopped screaming when they tore his throat out. His heels went on kicking on the wood floor a while longer, but finally stopped.
They pulled the dogs off. They didn’t want them sated. They made us clean the mess up and take it to the big pile by the ovens. For three days Moshe’s skull grinned at us from the rotting heap of human remains. The skin had blackened and puffed up and the crows had his eyes before they found room for him in a batch, and consigned him and us to something like rest.
I sank the whisky and poured another. It stung my lip and I cursed Wilson again.
But at least the pain was real. Sometimes when I went out into the London crowds – for the solace of watching folk doing normal things – the gap seemed to be between two worlds.
When I was a kid, everything was in colour like some of the latest Pathй News.
Then there was now, and it was monochrome. I sometimes wondered how far back my amnesia really went and if my early recollections were really mine. I have a sense of me that doesn’t fit with the earlier images. I wander the crowds and go out hunting for people and places I knew before the gap, to see if they can make the bridge.
Doc Thompson told me it might be like this, but he was really guessing; none of them really knew the effect of the damage to my brain. They took off the bandages one day but whatever they’d done inside my head wasn’t working. I was in constant pain. In fact I was pain. It was the centre and reason for my existence. Morphine worked until it became a problem; that is I couldn’t get enough.
“We’re going to try something,” he said.
I was barely listening, could barely hear him, for the pain. “Anything. Try anything. Try cutting my head off, Doc, if that would help.” I was feeling pretty bloody sorry for myself, lying pinned to my bed by the huge rock on my forehead.
“We’re going to give you some EST.”
“Fine.”
“Electric Shock Therapy. A new treatment from Italy. We’ll put some mild current through you to see if that alleviates the pain.”
I screwed open my eyelids. “Are you just guessing?”
“The results have been very good. It’s worked for other head injuries. And people with trauma.”
“But you don’t know?”
“We can’t give you any more medication. As it is, you’re at the limit. Look, there’s no harm trying this. It’s perfectly safe. Been used scores of times to good effect.”
I’d heard. My mother told me of a neighbour who went doolally at times and had to go in for some wee shocks, as she put it. I remember the neighbour, always drooling. But hell, she seemed happy in her own wee world. What choice was there?
They wheeled me into the room and helped me climb on to the bed. There were three people tending me – stopping me running away – all in white coats and – conspicuously and bizarrely – wearing Wellingtons. The bed was covered in a thick rubber sheet. It felt icy and silky and smelled of old petrol.
They fastened my arms and legs with thick straps and I began to think I preferred the headaches. I felt the helplessness overwhelm me. The same feeling I had just before the guards hit me. I started to struggle.
“It’s all right, Danny. You’ll be all right.” The Doc made it all right by sticking a needle in my arm and filling it with happy juice. I settled down and let them wheel the machine over next to my bed. I let them wet my forehead with jelly of some sort – it was chilly and greasy. Then they clamped two metal pads on the same patches and put what looked like a scrum cap on my head to hold them in place. The Doc held up a rubber mouthpiece, like you get when you go to the dentist to keep your teeth open. I hated dentists.
“Stops you biting your tongue,” he explained.
He prised my jaw open and jammed it in. It tasted of cold rubber and meths. I thought I would choke and fought back the panic. My chest was heaving. Doc smiled at me to make me brave. It didn’t work.
“We’ll start with some low level current to see how it affects you, Danny. All right?”
Even if I could speak, what could I say? He didn’t really care anyway.
“Stand well clear, please.”
So they didn’t want to get electrocuted as well. I heard a click and felt a tickle, then a jolt. My head and body twitched like a frog’s leg in the science lab. That’s what I’d become. They did more, lots more, and increased the level.
I don’t remember going back to the ward after that. In fact I don’t remember much about the next few days. The pain was less but so was everything else. Just a kind of numbness, as though they’d cut something out of my head.
They gave me four more sessions over the next two weeks. Then they let me vegetate. Most days when it was fine, they’d wheel me into the sun and park me under a tree. I’d sit there and gaze at the early summer flowers. Or maybe the flowers were gazing at me; we seemed to share the same level of sentience. I didn’t have many visitors. Couple of army types. I even think Caldwell showed up once but I couldn’t be sure.
I know my mother came. She came every day for a week. She’d got lodgings nearby in Warwick and got a bus over to the hospital every day. Once she got past the crying stage she just sat and held my hand. We didn’t talk much. We were never great talkers. But on the second day she brought out a book from her shopping bag – Ivanhoe, one of my favourites – and began reading it to me. Reading till I fell asleep in the sun listening to her quiet Ayrshire burr recounting tales of glory and struggle. I suppose she was trying to tell me something.
I missed her when she went. But already I was feeling better. The pain would come down like a tempest a couple of times a week, but mostly I was free of it.
The dreams started, and the memories began to erupt, like waking up with a jolt in a cinema just as the hero is getting a pasting.
I was there through that glorious summer, growing stronger – outwardly – every day. I began to do my own reading; this was the second time in my life my mother had got me going. We’d been the only family in the street of red sandstone tenements that borrowed library books from the big Victorian pile across the other side of town. And my folks kept me on at the Academy with the unheard-of goal of university, not apprenticed to a good trade like my
