Thompson had stopped singing. He was crouched over his cap under the lamp light. Counting his money. No, he shovelled it almost without looking into his overcoat pocket. He was getting ready to go. Preparing to follow, Benson thought of tall Walters with the square-cut sideboards and the small moustache that he kept always neat until the day the blood ran over his face and he could do nothing about it. Brown eyes, deep set. Steady, humorous eyes – Walters saw the funny side, while he saw. Straw boater, blazer, white trousers, the Edwardian gent complete, this debonaire suitor when last seen a bundle of mud and blood and torn khaki.

  Thompson had started across the pavement towards him. He moved further into the arcade but the other passed the entrance without a glance and went on towards Lime Street, walking very slowly but with no trace of a limp. The overcoat came almost to his ankles. He stopped to investigate the litter bin on the corner. Benson stopped too, watching the other root among cartons and Coca-Cola tins and find nothing. He crossed the road at the traffic lights, turned left down Lime Street then went up the steps into the station forecourt. Benson was in time to see him enter the cafeteria.

  He did not follow immediately. He went some way towards the platform entrances, then stopped, momentarily at a loss. With an obscure instinct of flight he glanced up at the departure schedules. From where he was standing he could see Thompson at the counter getting a hamburger and something hot in a plastic cup.

  He could hardly have chosen a more public place for his supper. The cafeteria was lit with appalling plenitude by side lamps and overhead neon and it was walled with glass on three sides. Those inside were as open to view as fish in a frondless, floodlit tank. There was only one way in or out. He could hardly lose Thompson here. Nevertheless, he felt insecure, he wanted to be nearer. After hesitating some moments longer he went through the swing doors. Approaching the counter he saw Thompson in a corner with his back to the entrance. He had never been in here before and he was dazed momentarily by the assault of light. It streamed from walls and ceiling, bounced from the orange and yellow plastic of counters, tables, chairs, was reflected in flat gleams from the silver foil that lined the ceiling. Light in here was the visual equivalent of a prolonged scream. He asked for tea. The girl who served him was languid and pallid, etiolated – as if she needed her roots renewing in the dark.

  He took his tea to a table near to the door; from here he could see the back of Thompson’s head and a section of his overcoat; between them was a woman with luggage and two small clambering children. He took one sip at his tea then put it down quickly; he had caught the smell of burning plastic from it; the hot liquid, acting on the spongy, white material of the container, gave off a smell like burning industrial waste. He had not wanted tea in any case. He was content to wait. So long as he could keep the other man in view he felt at peace.

  It was a curious place, all the same, for Thompson to choose. Cheap of course – that would be a consideration; but people were too conspicuous in here; it was not natural for human beings to be so exposed to light, or perhaps merely not natural for Thompson …

  Far cry from Wadis, he thought. Far cry from that maze of water courses where we squirmed along. There we sought concealment. That was Thompson’s habitat – he had strayed by accident into this terrible realm of light. After forty years. After dwelling clay-coloured there in memory for forty years. He would have dwelt there for ever but for this meeting. Watching Thompson’s motionless shoulder in its shabby black, watching the moving forms of people outside, beyond the glass partitions, he intoned to himself a formal description, something he often did in dreams and states of reverie: Beyond the ridge of Buonriposo, on the Western limits of the Beachhead, lay the upper reaches of the Moletta Stream, a tangled maze of water courses, called Wadis by the British troops from North Africa, because of their resemblance to the dry streambeds there.

  He was rather pleased with this as an impromptu effort but of course they hadn’t been dry for most of the time, far from it, and it didn’t convey the real truth of the terrain. One might as well say that the stage in the cellar where we all performed under Slater’s direction, where Walters was Burlington Bertie and I was Velma the Vamp, was a level projection of such and such an area, raised so many feet above ground level. They were both stages, one where we strutted, the other where we crawled. Acres of the mind. Yet be assured we have no need to plot these acres of the mind with tumty-tumty-tumty-tum and monsters such as heroes find …But we do, we do have need. Why otherwise have I been led to Thompson after all these years? He fits the description, he is a monster such as heroes find.

  Benson saw the black shoulder move, saw the head tilted back slightly, imagined the motion of Thompson’s thin throat as he drank. Killer Thompson. The Wadis were a murder ground and you were at home in them, hence that name. Men went off their heads there. You, foot-dragging psalmist, found your apotheosis. You were a great success. You were a famous looter. Rings, watches, wallets, cigarette-cases, lighters, sometimes an officer’s binoculars or even a camera sometimes. Sold back at B-echelon or on leave in Naples. And you didn’t get a scratch, or maybe later. Not then, not in the Wadis. Slater too – one knew he would never get hurt.

  Some of those channels were shallow, hardly more than a scrape in the ground, hardly deep enough to hide a crawling man. Others went down forty feet or so, gorges dug out by the water. Centuries of gouging. And all interconnected, linked by our excavations and theirs into a complex system. The place was death to anyone with no sense of terrain, no sense of direction. Like the one I shot that day, with Thompson looking on. He is there now, in the open, in the sunshine, combing his hair, which is longish, glinting, colour of soiled gold. He is young, about my age. In the open, in full view. He has made a terrible mistake …

  Thompson got up quite suddenly and moved towards the door. He passed by Benson’s table and Benson lowered his head, catching as he did so the other man’s smell, a pungent reek of stale sweat and unwashed clothing.

  He rose at once and followed. He could not let the other out of his sight until he knew where he lived, where he could be found again. He followed down the steps, back on to Lime Street, round the corner up Mount Pleasant. He kept his eyes fixed on the form before him in the black overcoat several sizes too large, walking very slowly as though tired or sick, bearer somewhere about him of a vital phial, distillation from the past. Certainly nothing to do, he thought, with the man we killed together. He was a dead man before I pulled the trigger, such grotesque misjudgement carried death with it.

  Cardinal crime, Slater would have called it. A blunder like that is a crime. Straight, serious brows, very composed face. Second Lieutenant Hugo Slater. Familiarise yourself with the terrain – that was one of his frequent sayings. He applied it to the stage space too, when we were rehearsing. A real slave-driver – he never let up. Not just a question of knowing the landmarks but an intimate sense of relation between your body and the ground, every little bump and hollow, every scrape and hummock. Until you can move about the stage with confidence. That intimate knowledge will make the show a success and it will save your life in the Wadis. Quality of survivors. Thompson had it. And I? I survived too. My cardinal crime killed Walters instead of killing me …

  At the end of Catherine Street Thompson rooted for some moments in the rubbish bin near the bus stop, again found nothing. Then he crossed the road and began to traverse the wide area of waste ground on the other side. It was very dark here, once the street lamps had been left behind, and uneven under foot. Benson stumbled once or twice among weeded-over rubble left from the demolitions of years before. All over the city these areas of wasteland were growing; whole blocks fell into ruin, became hazardous and insanitary, were pulled down and the wounds left to heal themselves with grass and nettle and willowherb.

  In the darkness, in his black coat, Thompson was difficult to see; Benson had to keep close so as not to lose him. They came out onto a narrow street of dilapidated terrace houses and boarded shop fronts. Benson glanced at the names in passing: Genevieve’s Hair Styling and Accessories, The Magic Carpet Café, Atkins Family Butcher. Smells of damp and excrement came through the boarded fronts. Monty Carlo’s Fish and Chips. That couldn’t be a real name surely. Heavily gridded post office on the corner. No lights showed, there were no signs of habitation in any of the houses, above any of the shops. Beyond, as if this devastated street were a first line of defence, rose the bastions of the Railton Housing Estate, towards which Thompson seemed to be heading.

  Benson was tired now but he followed doggedly. Thompson passed through a set of bollards then a railed gate. They were in the shadow of the Estate now, in a wide concrete courtyard with buildings on three sides and a row of sheds with metal fronts on the other. In an entry off the courtyard Benson saw a rat running. He felt the crunch of glass under his feet. He followed Thompson through another gate, out into another courtyard identical to the first. Some windows were lit up, not many. Once, from an upper floor, he heard voices and later a baby crying somewhere; but for the most part the buildings were silent and dark.

  Thompson went diagonally across the courtyard and entered a narrow lane where the buildings were close together. It was now that Benson almost lost him. Emerging from the lane he was just in time to see Thompson disappearing down the basement steps of a building on the corner.

  He stood there some moments longer looking across at the place where Thompson lived, at the drainpipe hanging off the wall, the broken railing, the barricaded windows. Then he turned and began to retrace his steps, taking care to follow the same route. It was after one o’clock when he got back. Though physically exhausted he had no desire to sleep. He drank some whisky but it did nothing to relax him. For a long time he lay awake, restless and in some indefinable way alarmed, as if he had been singled out for something. The signs did not culminate in Thompson, he knew that now. They led beyond. From time to time, like a ritual incantation, the words of his own description came back to him. Beyond the ridge of Buonriposo, on the Western limits of the Beachhead, lay the upper reaches of the Moletta Stream.

  They lead beyond, he thought, lying on his back, staring up at the dim ceiling. Beyond is all around us, not just in front. Cautiously, as if the act of recollection might put him in the same danger again, Benson spoke to his frightened, twenty-year-old self: I, you, Benson, you are crawling on your belly along a crack in the ground, urged on by the cicadas …

  PART TWO

  Middle Passage

  I, you, Benson, you are crawling on your belly along a crack in the ground, urged on by the cicadas. In front of you, some yard or two, crawls Lance-corporal Thompson, you can see the soles of his boots, and his rump, and the back of his helmet. You are looking for a place to put a forward machine-gun post. It seems incredible. You are in fear because this crack in the ground is a shallow one and the enemy positions are close. You know they are close and you think you know where they are but you might be wrong. In this complex delta of the Moletta the lines are hopelessly confused, we are just where the winter offensive left us.

  This day is sunny. You are crawling and sweating and afraid and the sound of the cicadas is in your ears. Late April then, not so long before the break-out. In April the weather got warmer. The cicadas seemed to start up at once and all together, like a sudden celebration of something – not peace or an end to fear and boredom. But it was a cry of life. It laid a pulsing swathe of sound over the ruins of war and winter, the devastated landscape of the Wadis. That shrilling intensified with the heat as if in some way a response to pain.

  That must mean there was shrub. Yes, the ground in that sector was not churned up so much. Good cover then. Walters behind you … No, not that day. By that day you had been doing your act for a month, more than a month. Burlington Bertie and Velma the Vamp. No, you are with Thompson. This was the first day of heat. This was the first day of real heat. This was the day you came upon the German and shot him.

  He was there, inexplicably in the open, in the sunshine. He had taken off his helmet, He was combing his hair. In some way quite beyond determining he had mistaken matters, misunderstood the terrain. Cardinal crime. Otherwise what was he doing there, alone, dreaming, unprotected, the Spandau before him, its barrel pointing towards the ground? The sun had brought him out. Some hope, relaxed caution, prospect of change after the misery of winter, the weeks of stalemate, the murderous closeness of the lines? That long constraint of the trenches, the random deaths, the oppression of fear. Then the rain stops, the clouds roll away, the sun shines down. Like an unwary insect. No, human.

  “He’s yours,” Thompson whispers courteously, keeping his head down. “Shoot the fucker.”

  You can’t shoot him yet. Why not? Is it because he seems to be putting on a performance, not merely enjoying the sunshine but somehow, though he doesn’t know we are there, signalling his enjoyment? He is handsome with his fair hair and prominent chin. He puts the comb away. He yawns and pats his mouth. He stretches his arms and arches his back. Alone there, with no audience that he knew of, he was acting. Like a child. You glance from him to ferrety Thompson, whose eyes under whiteish lashes are fixed, staring with ferocious intent. Go on, he says. Shoot the fucker. Thompson despises you. The cicadas are loud. The German doesn’t know that Thompson and you are watching him but he behaves as if he had an audience. That is strange, metaphysical. So he is performing for death. What else? So he is not in the wrong place at all. You can smell the sweat and clay of both Thompson and yourself. For fuck’s sake get on with it. He must have heard the sound of the bolt because at the last moment he raised his head. You squeezed the trigger, smack in the temple, twenty yards. His legs jerked up, he fell backwards. As he went over he made one single loud squawking sound like a hen. Ugly sound, oddly contemptuous. It was exactly as though he had booed himself off stage.

  That is the way the show ends, not with a whimper but a squawk. You have killed him over again a good many times since. Not so much out of guilt. He was there to be shot just as you were there to shoot him. Why else were you crawling about with a gun? No, because he, Thompson, compelled you, with his rage and contempt. Shoot the fucker. In some sense you have been in servitude co Thompson ever since. To this noisome street singer, bin-scavenger. Thompson noted the place so he could return in the dark, pick over the body. Star looter Thompson, he brought the helmet back. That was another day. That was the day Slater spoke to you about his idea for putting on a show. He spoke about it that same night, back at B-echelon, after we had been relieved.

  Well after midnight when we got back. We were exhausted. Can you spare me a few minutes, Benson? Why did he choose you? There was a full moon that night. We stood talking near the water in the shadow of a bombed house. Dirty-smelling haze over the water from the smoke canisters we used to protect our shipping. Through this the sea had a smooth, oily gleam on it. Slater’s face haggard, handsome in its severe way, very regular, level brows, straight mouth. His mouth sharp in the corners. His eyes were light – pale blue or grey. Alive and eager that night because of his idea. “I want to get a concert party together,” he said.

  The gods had favoured Second-Lieutenant Slater. You knew that, little as you knew of the world, little as you knew of him. Not so much visible signs of privilege or wealth, but it was there in his voice and looks. Most of us there were reduced to common paste, mere blobs of humanity, even the officers. But there was a distinction about Slater, as if he knew himself to be special. “I want to get a sort of concert party together,” he said. “Using people from the unit.”

  As he spoke there was a swift flash of gun-fire from somewhere further along the coast, then a whole series of flashes, one after the other. In that second of silence the sky was lit up and Slater’s face caught some light from the glow. He was smiling slightly. He began to say something else, but then the crashes of the guns came, drowning his voice.

  That was the same day. Earlier that day, early in the morning, Thompson came back with the German helmet. Looter Thompson had to come back with something. He carried it up-ended, like a begging bowl …

  “You don’t look well.” Rathbone took a feverish drag at his cigarette. “That woman,” he said, apparently in reference to his last client. “Very unfortunate for you,” he said, “getting on the wrong side of Dollinger. Has he made his move yet?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he takes his time over things, Dollinger does. He keeps his seasons and his rages. He moves in a mysterious way. Dollinger was a wrestler, you know.”

  “So they say.”

  “The story goes that he was forced to retire from the ring after killing a man. Have you seen her?”

  “Yes, once or twice. She just gives me a look, you know. Dragon.”

  “Don’t malign the dragon. It’s a very complex symbol, terrible but necessary, something you could hardly say about Mrs Dollinger. Only he who conquers the dragon can become a hero. Jung goes so far as to say that the dragon is a mother image.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course it can be anything. I’ve been thinking about that fire of yours, that started all the trouble. The difficulty is to know whether to take the positive or the negative side of it. If you take the positive side it looks very good indeed because the owl is Athena’s bird and she is the principle by which a man can combine power and wisdom. She is the embodiment of harmony, enabling us to see the pattern and the meaning of life. And of course the beetle, which rolls its eggs along in a ball of its own dung, is an age-old symbol of creation. From that angle, as I say, it looks very good, especially for someone in your line of business. But of course the owl is the death harbinger too. Balance and order can become inflexible and sterile. This aspect of Athena’s nature is reflected in her shield, which bore Medusa’s head, and in later fairy tales where the birds symbolically associated with her had the power to turn men to stone. As for the beetle … have you read Kafka’s Metamorphosis?”