good boys do fine always

He finds him at Nurrungar. The long ride has left him powdered in dust to the roots of his hair; Ralph pulls off his cap and knocks it against his thigh.

The garrison commander makes the introduction and leaves Ralph there standing stupidly in the open doorway of a hut — not a wild sort of a hut, with leaves for a roof and a trodden-dirt floor, but corrugated tin and a radio that is always on, tuned in to the official band always. A den of small luxuries.

The man standing before him cannot be described as handsome. Time has not improved him; he still has the same flaring, raw-boned, rangy quality as before, only transposed somehow onto the features of a grown man ten years on — still bloodless and beardless but with a sharp Adam’s apple in his throat that hadn’t been there before. There are dark smudges beneath his eyes, purple and shining. The bones of a skull, shining out like buried treasure and the clear fragile white skin of a woman — and those stains of fatigue, like a painted mask.

“Hullo,” Jack Merridew says. “So you did come. I thought they’d send someone else.”

From the stiff way Merridew steps aside, steadying himself on the doorjamb, you’d think it was the secret police here to collect him. His arrival has evidently interrupted Jack at tea — the little table is only a few uneasy strides past, and the spread is at once pitiable and so lavish by the standards of rations and barter that it makes Ralph salivate. White bread and jam set out on the table, a sleeve of sugary biscuits, marmalade and margarine and tea.

He must be some higher-up fellow’s bum-boy, Ralph thinks uncharitably — to have this whole structure to himself and not a sweltering share in a Nissen shelter with six other fellows trying to steal his writing paper and his boots. Such things do not come free. That is the way he has grown accustomed to thinking, in the institutions into which he has entered since last seeing Jack Merridew.

After the ship, they went their different ways — and when school resumed it was a reinstitution of good order, grown-ups with mustaches and elbow-patches sifting the sheep from the goats. Some small clusters had formed, boys who begged not to be separated or representatives of institutions otherwise obliterated in the fray, but Ralph had stood alone, and Jack had gone away. When they’d tried to put them up together aboard ship, how he’d screamed and screamed — that is Ralph’s last indelible memory, not Jack the ancient hunter but Jack the child screaming himself hoarse while grown men watched.

Merridew is not about to offer him anything. Jack knows too keenly the smarting of shame if such an offer were rebuffed, and at the same time is in no hurry to share his bounty. The folding table is taken up by a big book like a ledger, raked across with staves; at first, Jack hurries over to it as if to whisk it shut and carry it away, but his hands linger and he gives Ralph a look as if daring him to remark.

“You’re some sort of court composer now, aren’t you? They told me that before I came.”

“I compose pieces for radio. You might be interested to know that I’ve been commissioned to write an oratorio.”

He is proud of the fact, but Ralph is not interested to know it — imagine hiding out here with a nothing post and a nothing job, and scribbling. How is it that someone had become wild, and then changed back again to be so goddamned tame? There is only one chair; Ralph leans with his back to the wall, watching.

“You can write something for the dedication ceremony.”

“I don’t know about that,” Merridew says, small eyebrows drawing up.

“Turn up, get your medal, have your picture taken, and never think about it again.”

The new regime is positively mad for medals — they all bear Queen Elizabeth’s face as if they’re left over from before. No doubt Jack Merridew has a couple of those rattling about in the bottom of his trunk — medals for surviving, medals for doing as you’re told, medals for waiting politely. Some sort of attaché now, or civil servant, or something — living on the base like an officer but giving no orders, humored by the commander, tolerated on strict terms. He should be used by now to going where he’s told for the sake of appearances.

“Pictures? So it’s a stunt. Christ, I hate journalists.”

“It’s not journalism.” The state’s behind it, and it’s all had the proper sign-off. No one reads newspapers anymore; what would they put in them? “There will be a hearing. You’d better come for that if nothing else.”

“Not much of one, I suppose,” Merridew says, with a touch of desperation. “I’ve already made my statements last time. I don’t see why I should make the effort a second time — it’s nothing but a waste of petrol.”

This time I’ve come to you, Ralph thinks. They’ve got petrol going spare now, with nobody to burn it, and enough time.

“It’s not like last time. It’s going to be done right. But you ought to know all about that already, it was written in a letter. Every old boy received a notice.”

They are the old boys, as if they all went to the same school, as if they all sat in the same backside-worn pews and listened to the same lectures. The cream of English youth, scalded.

Jack turns his head. “This is the first I’m hearing of it.”

“But you knew I was coming. You said it yourself. The commander said you’d been waiting on tenterhooks for days. Will you pitch in or not?”

Jack holds up his hands in exasperation; they are smooth and knobbled and white.

“I read the papers I was sent. I wasn’t under the impression I’d need to make statements in person. Why can’t I send in a written account and save the trouble?”

“They’re going to ask questions this time,” Ralph says, and that shuts him up.

Jack Merridew, non-compliant. Time has made a gargoyle of him, a dark gaunt parody of what he might have been if life had carried on uninterrupted — all hard bones and smooth cheeks, with those dark smudges shining beneath his eyes and the freckles spilling across his forehead. No chance of growing a beard, of course — but he must shave every day regardless, and somewhere in this parched little suite there is a razor and a cake of soap like the prize tokens of a man aping adulthood. Men their age do what their fathers did — or what they remember them doing, before the bomb.

“Do you have a woman?” Ralph asks, as though asking whether a man owns a car — the party line has trumpeted virile, productive manhood for all good English men remaining, almost before all the talk of keeping oneself pure and clean had worn off, on their mission of making new children for the Empire.

Jack looks stung. “What, here? No. Where would I keep one?"

“Then what do you have to lose?

“I’ve got my work to think of.

“Stuff your work,” Ralph says resolutely. “Writing the odd tune now and then? Some of us have real problems to manage. Go and lead by example.”

“Stuff— you come here talking nonsense, interrupting my work, and impose on me. I should knock you down.”

He wants Ralph to come to him — he’s secretly pleased by it all, and he knows what he must do. He’s pleased that it’s Ralph who came and not some other.

“Go ahead, then. I’ve been sent here with orders to take you back. I’ll show you the papers, if you like. Your commander thought you’d rather hear it from another old boy — he knows, so don’t go complaining. Knock me down if you feel like, only tell the truth.”

It is no longer the strangest thing to have happened — while they were scrabbling about in the mud, there’d been a war on, and these days it seems as if half the grown-ups around are held together by thin little wires, tied together by brittle resolve and little else. At night he lies awake thinking of the blood — blood on a boy’s freckled hand, his own or someone else’s.

Merridew rakes jam over a slice of pale bread — nursery food, Ralph thinks with the fascination of hunger. Ralph wants to snatch the piece from his hand and devour it — his belly is empty, tight as a drum,

“I’ve told the truth the last time. I don’t remember any more at twenty-three than I did five years on.”

“Don’t you ever have dreams?”

“No,” he says complacently, “never. I haven’t had any trouble at all since the war, and if you’re having a difficult adjustment I don’t know what can be done for you.” And he goes about sucking jam off the side of one long white finger — darting Ralph with a look as he does it, like he knows. Jack knows.

The war stands in place of something else — something briefer even than the exchange of bombs, than the licking of wounds and the unsteady mending of an empire. The first thing they did, after the long blackout ended, was make a new Eton — Eton on another shore, schoolboys in their absurd hats sweating under another foreign sun, reading Shakespeare and injuring themselves at rugger.

“So you won’t do it?”

“I’ll make up my mind. You can’t stay here. Go ask about a cot or something. What do I care?”

*

He does not do what Jack tells him. He does not go and see about a place to sleep until the next ride back. He goes and finds the driver of the car that carried him up from Ballarat, and with the money and ration slips in his pockets he buys a bottle of spirits, and he drinks it alone in the heat of a generator shack, sweating through his clothes. They’re drinking the same stuff in the officer’s club, behind the billiards tables and the plastic-shelled record player; the same bitter pomace brandy is served in antebellum snifters and passed around to men with officers’ insignia at cuff and collar as though it doesn’t stink of methylated spirits

Ralph pushes in past the doors of the officers’ club and feels the pressure of eyes on him. His uniform is the wrong sort, his colors are not right, and the sweat runs down the inside of his collar. The drink makes him hard and steady, holding him down like a weight in the belly. He is gasping for a cigarette and spoiling for a fight.

“You can’t be here,” Jack says, at his approach.

Ralph steadies himself on the edge of the table, tipping glasses and sending the ashtray sliding. Other men’s voices murmur around him, but they are not his interest. This is his enemy; this is his brother. Face to face with him, Ralph still feels as though he is a boy — all his years of manhood have sloughed away, and he stands here shocked with primal feeling. Jack may cultivate a gentlemanly dash, but the boy in him shines out, the phantom impression of naked limbs and knobbly knees. It’s hateful as poison.

“Like hell, I can’t. You’re not an officer — not a real one, anyway. Not a chief. Do you still paint your face, Merridew?

“Do you think you intimidate me?”

“Get up,” he says. “Stand up.”

“You bastard,” Jack spits and rises up.

“Are you going to scream?”

No paint now, of course. Paint under the skin — clay, blood, filth. Jack seizes him in both fists, shaking him like a dog — Ralph lashes out forehead-first to stun him and then the fighter in him flares, the hunter-warrior wildness that cannot be turned to a scholar’s purposes. He hits him and hits him until his knuckles have split; Ralph licks the blood from his upper lip and laughs.

Ralph lashes back, strikes out at his face, and the blow lands — all the narrow bones in his fist are mashed against the knobbling surface. He knows the feeling of the bone beneath his knuckles, the furrow of teeth. It had been that same face dripping blood on him in the night. That painted face, painted in blood from the nose and lip, the jabbing pain of a blow to the stones and then escape. He has always known it, even as he has always known that Jack would have killed him if not interrupted — he’ll kill him now if he can.

When the real officers drag him out from under, he lets them do it, falling back into their grip like cordwood — some of them land half-hearted blows to his trunk, but such blows are nothing and it isn’t the drink that numbs him but the wild comedy of animal grief, howling inconsolable despair

*

The holding cell must have been a lavatory once; the fixtures are gone but the pipes remain like a silent enticement to self-destruction for any man with a belt or a pair of bootlaces. These are the dark corners of the empire now, wild hot places tamed with institutional certainty — corrugated steel, dripping pipes and reservoirs, fences to keep out the wild dogs. Ralph nurses his bruises, passing through the queasiness of approaching sobriety with the resignation of a hospital patient, and plots out the chart of what will come next. The commander will dismiss him, and he will be subjected to further discipline; there will be further tests, and charges, and more dreary detention.

He has just slipped into an uneasy drowse when the door opens, and in some ageless corner of his mind, he registers that the man there is his father. A moment later, adult intuition says it is one of the men who dragged him here come to give him a kicking, or it is the base commander here to upbraid him for his drunkenness. It is none of these.

Jack has changed out of his uniform; his silhouette is soft in shabby flannels and shapeless jumper, and only the shock of red hair cuts him out the same. The light catches the corner of his smooth cheek. Ralph stiffens; he is frozen very still, in an artless sprawl. Any motion might betray him, any sound — a deep animal panic has taken him over, and seized him to the marrow.

His hand creeps toward his pocket as if there will be a penknife there waiting for him, or a bludgeon. He has bitten his nails down to the red-rimmed quick.

“I don’t have a gun, you know,” Merridew says uselessly. His great white hands jerk up his jumper-hem as if to prove it.

“You’ve come to kill me with just your hands? Are you going to throttle me to death?” He gestures at his own throat with both split-open hands.

“I didn’t,” Jack says. “I’ve come to let you out, but only if you won’t be any more trouble. I’m not going to say anything that isn’t true about a bunch of little boys.”

Ralph studies his bitten nails sourly. “Oh, yes. Poor little boys. Poor creatures. Sad stuff. You know.”

“All things considered, we were rather lucky, weren’t we? Going off on a grand adventure instead of staying in place and getting bombed to ash. Getting to meet a load of other boys from different schools.”

“Grand— on a grand—” Ralph croaks with laughter, until the bruises on his ribs set him to hacking. “Someone told you that, some man in a suit, with spectacles. You know better.”

“Have you come here to try and frighten me into saying something to suit your agenda? I’m not frightened of you.” Jack’s chin juts proudly; after all this, he has almost grown to be handsome, his bleak bones have spread out and his red mouth has a womanish grace. Too bad for him.

Ralph grins like a dog. “Frightened of me?

“You’ve come here to ruin things. I won’t have it. I’ve put all that behind me now, and if you knew better you’d do the same. Be sensible.”

Sensible? Nothing is sensible. None of this madness is worth reasoning with — queueing and recycling water and rationing your tinned pilchards to keep back the shadow of the old world, the old war. The new world is only a bunch of motherless boys, turned loose on a bigger island.

“No, I think you are frightened of me. You’re scared to death because I know what you are as well as you do. There’s no use pretending, Jack. You know. You know what you are. And what are they doing here? Running about in dress-up, playing soldiers. They’re not your soldiers, and that must burn you up. Where are your hunters now, Jack? Do you think they’ll lie for you?”

Jack’s face is a mask. He has thought about this, he has thought about it very much. He does remember. He hasn’t forgotten. Neither of them has forgotten the other.

“The younger boys won’t remember,” he says, after a lame pause.

“Littluns. The littluns remember. They’re old enough now to confer about it, and they won’t all lie. Not this time.”

Some of them still wet the bed at night ten years on. Some of them still lie shivering all night in dread of beasties in the dark. Processed and warehoused, shaved to the skin and deloused, shuttled about and fiddled with and told to keep quiet for mummy and daddy, mummy and daddy undoubtedly dead — who would not rather be set adrift instead, and give up barracks beds and rationing for the easy rhythms of sand and sucking water and overripe fruit? Who wouldn’t miss it?

Jack lunges for him and Ralph skitters back, plastering himself into the corner like a spider — his hair is hanging in his face, limp with cold sweat, and his heart is beating in his chest like a trapped animal. There is nowhere to run, nothing but a single doorway and that barred to him by the body of his enemy. There will be no saving interruption now.

Jack’s hand is around his throat, and the demented animal weight of him is pressing down. His jumpered elbow digs into Ralph’s chest to compress his sternum.

“We’re not kids anymore,” Ralph says, gripping him in return. His fingers stand out terribly brown against Merridew’s wrist; the fine red-brown hairs all lie in one direction like they’ve been lovingly brushed into place.

“Stop. Stop talking. I don’t want to hear this.” Jack’s voice is broken and low, an animal snarl.

“Are you scared of me, Jack?”

Jack crushes his mouth in a kiss, knocking his head into the pipes with the force of his press; Ralph devours him in turn, viciously searching for some long-lost satisfaction. This is the madness of what they’ve done, what they’ve become.

Ralph drops to the floor, mouth smarting. All the fight has gone out of his body, and in its place is a queer and piercing resignation. The horror in Merridew’s face has turned to an odd blunt resolve.

“Come back to my room. This place stinks like piss.”

“Of course it stinks.”

Jack offers him his hand, holding out that broad knobbled palm like a venomous serpent and Ralph seizes it.

*

They don’t make it to the bed, which is just as well. Afterward, he puts the kettle on.

Jack sits on the end of the bed, bare feet crossed in front of himself. Naked, he is charmingly ungainly; the bruises are blooming on his face, more bruises like fingerprints on his naked neck.

“If I tell you something classified, will you laugh at me?”

“I’ll laugh at you anyway.” Ralph leans back against the little table, carelessly aching. The scabs on his knuckles have split again, and with the tip of his tongue, he can worry at a seam in his inner lip.

“I write the musical cues for state radio broadcasts — water means life, save gas, you’ve heard them.”

“You’re joking. I always thought those were generated by machine somewhere. You mean—”

“Yes, that.”

A whistle dropping to a resonant bellow, a sequence of notes that would be reflexively identifiable to any schoolchild — listen close now, gather round your radio and listen, your leader is speaking.

Ralph shakes his head. “And they pay you for it?”

“In addition to my other responsibilities,” Jack says, sounding bruised. “What do you do? I’d thought you’d gone to jail or something.”

“Only the Navy, and that’s just as bad. They couldn’t be rid of me, not with the number of fit young men they’ve got, only I’m not fit. Not mentally. I’d wake up in the barracks and see Simon there at the end of the bed, with the blood running down. I was a little cracked, in those days. They locked me up for it. Let me out to come and find you.”

“I don’t know any Simon,” Jack says.

“Yes, you do. He wasn’t saying anything when I saw him, he was just standing there, with a broken-off jaw like a hinge and sand stuck in his eyes.”

No eyes — could that really have been how it was? A howling pack of boys, gouging and thumping, turning a living body into something hideously yielding. The sensation of flesh giving way, of bone giving way, of something impossible. That’s what he remembers, and the truth — the truth is something else, washed away into the water and rotted away into the earth. Jack’s unprepossessing face squares with dark resolve.

“In school, I used to dream about pigs. A pig’ll eat anything — wild pigs eat meat, did you know that? Not just carrion. They go after rabbits and fawns and anything else they can get.

“Why shouldn’t they?”

“Just in case you were feeling bad for them or something. They’re nasty creatures.”

Ralph sucks on a cigarette grimly. “Right.”

Jack falls back against the mattress, in a jumble of sinewy legs and bony knees like Christ on the cross. “I wish I were back there. I want to hunt again. I want to be something. I want to mean something.”

“Do you want me to feel sorry for you?”

“I want to apologize.” His head is turned away to face the wall; he cannot look at him. “I would have killed you.”

“Just now, or on the island?”

It is only ever the island, and it doesn’t even have a name — only a letter and a number. To a cartographer it would be negligible; to any strategic end, it would have been useless. To a pack of boys, it had been paradise.

“Yes. Both. Either. I thought I’d kill you then, but I couldn’t do it — oh, alone. Without a gun. I didn’t think. I’m glad I didn’t.”

Ralph studies the long line of Jack’s body, the bony midline from groin to navel to throat. He could kill him here, but he wouldn’t like it. He won’t thank him, either. He won’t ask, why did you hate me? or why did we kill or what can we possibly say, he won’t think ahead to questions; there is only the awful inexorable truth.

“That’s just as well. They’d have found you out, and you’d have been a murderer. Do you want a cigarette?”

One white hand stirs against one white flank, ugly as a painting. Mute and elegant despair.

“Yes.”