Siege

Veronica put another grain of rice on the polished parquet floor and
looked at it through the
glass top of the coffee table. Sighting like that kept order in the
structure. It kept everything in
alignment. She glanced up at the clock and then down at her wristwatch.
It was time. Placing
the rice tin on the white carpet and snuggling it into the thick pile
so that it could not fall over,
she stood and thought for a moment, then went out to the kitchen. She
made a glass of lemon
barley and put it on a tray with a packet of biscuits and a plate. As
an afterthought, she added
a table-knife. She paused before stepping out into the narrow hallway
where the stairs had
been made. It was subterraneously dark out there. Veronica put the tray
down at the foot of
the stairs and grubbing into the wall with the knife, she tore out a
piece of root which was
being consumed by honey fungus. By its pale green luminosity, she made
her way up the stairs
and into the sick room.
He lay naked on the cot where they had put him. Which side is besieged
here, she wondered?
Now that winter has set in, we are as captive as the people over there.
The disease was within
the city wall and without. Attrition would determine the loser. Whoever
lost fewest to disease
would win. There was no certainty as to outcome, but in the town they
also had overcrowding
and hunger to cope with. Probably they would be defeated soon simply by
not having enough
defenders left on the walls. But it was not a foregone conclusion. Not
that he cared at this
moment. Look at him. If he had not worn a red uniform weighed down with
gold braid and
had not lived in a tent of scrubbed and pipe-clayed white, they would
have dug him into the
ground before he was cold. She stood there and looked at his clammy
skin. A fortnight ago,
any of us would have remarked on his colour. Now it is commonplace, she
told herself. We've
all seen cadavers like that and we're used to them.
A shade of odd and unnatural blue suffused the man's skin. Heliotrope,
she thought; that
would be the nearest if she had to pick a word. Over his back and his
shoulders raised blisters
full of ink-dark blood and dark subcutaneous lines resembling an
elaborate street plan gave his
body a curious reticulated appearance like an exotic reptile. She
wondered if by some freakish
chance the lines ever replicated the map of a real city somewhere. His
breathing had been
shallow and fast, but now it was becoming almost as imperceptible as
his pulse which had
changed quite suddenly from the rapidity of a new-born child's to a
spasmodic flutter. The man
was effectively dead; only the automatic functions of his body
continued as they ran down at
different rates. Two days of involuntary defecation and reeking sweat
had stuck his sheets to
the lower part of his body like a squalid grey shroud. Flies zoomed and
swooped in intoxicated
rapture. A large affable bluebottle stood on the open right eye as it
glazed over beneath her
delicate feet. She had staked a claim to a soft place to lay the eggs
which ripened insistently in
her fruitful body. In the fetid room new life was on the point of
creation. As the flesh on the
cot chilled and softened into liquidity, it would become a field for
procreation, a medium for
nurture and nourishment, a new world for life to conquer, use up and
abandon.
Can you get my dressing gown, Veronica?
Bath robe, she replied. I think it's on the towel rail. And she went to
fetch it.
Here in the third lines the fighting seemed distant on these quiet
frosty nights with the stars set
out like a diagram in a book. The eighteen pounders and the ten inch
howitzer fired desultory
shots and small field pieces replied as a matter of form. In the still
intervals hounds here in
camp bayed companionably. The town dogs had diminished in number to the
point where you
could recognise individual voices. She supposed that the others had
been eaten. Natural
selection would favour the suspicious and the agile. Next siege, their
offspring would be better
able to avoid the pot. Making her way back, she noted again the beat of
angel wings above her
head. They came diving out of the blackness and clattered past into
obscurity. Some nights
they struck somebody down. She closed the door of the dug-out behind
her. No tent even for
him this time of the year. Flurries of snow made her close her eyes for
a moment and she
stumbled against the bed.
I still feel bloody awful. How do I look, Veronica? I'm not as pale, am
I? She handed him the
gown and went to the drawer for his clean pants. I'll run a bath, he
said. Maybe I'll feel better
then. There was a shirt airing for him on a radiator downstairs. She
went to fetch it. Out in the
trench again, she heard another angel fly over.
While he showered and dithered about, she would have time to count out
more rice. She had
already counted out ninety seven by ninety seven on the floor under the
coffee table and the
same on the glass table-top. In her system, the total on the glass
multiplied that on the floor.
Laying out a third square on the top of a chair made another element so
that she could
multiply to the powers of five and six. Unfortunately, there would be
no time to complete the
third square of ninety seven before he came down. She hastily arranged
thirteen by thirteen
and worked out the final total of 14,961,448,489. There was a sound
from above. She began
to clear up, sweeping the grains from the floor into the dustpan and
using the side of her hand
to shovel the rice on the glass and on the seat of the chair back into
the tin labelled Rice. She
sat herself at the table and looked at the back of her fingernails. She
had been picking at the
quicks and had drawn blood from one index finger. There were still
traces of red varnish, little
shards of colour from a lifetime ago.
She knew, of course, what the angels were. The riflemen on the walls
fired at high elevation
during the night. People said those shots were a waste of the
defenders' powder and lead but
they had an effect all the same; a moral effect. Musket balls were
never as unnerving; all they
did was to make a whizzing noise. It was the elongated rifle balls that
were so worrying. They
gain their unerring accuracy from the spin given to them by helical
grooves in the hollow
cylindrical interiors of rifle barrels. Travelling at a thousand paces
in a second, they present
irregularities of form or density to all sides successively as they
revolve in the tangible air.
Tendencies to deviate in a particular direction cancel out and incline
toward the straight and
true. She visualised lumps of lead as thick and long as her little
finger flying free above the
opposing camps.
But they have to descend, to come down to earth. And the speed of their
spin decays until
small aberrations in the axis of rotation compel the bullets to wobble.
Drag pushes and pulls at
the sides of the little cylinders until they began to tumble through
the night air. At first, there is
nothing chaotic about the movement. The bullets present their blunt
little pintle heads to a
different direction moment by moment as though they are looking round
for somebody, and
they broadcast the sound of their passing as a regular pulse. As they
fall from the sky, they
whir and beat the air with a sound like the wings of pigeons rising
from the ground. And about
as harmless, generally.
Generally, but not invariably. She took a slender knife and a steel
from the drawer. The swash
swash of blade on steel was pleasant and the keenness of the edge a
matter for proper pride.
With the knife in her hand, she went out into the night again. In the
steamy bathroom, the
patient is laid out naked for her to see. It was bad luck for him to
have been caught by an
angel at the end of its fall. The man's eyes are closed. There is a
smile on his lips but a frown
on his brow. When they are holding him down and the knife is exploring
the wound channel,
he will no longer feel amusement or irritation, she reflected. Smaller
emotions are subsumed in
pain. Though even pain is subordinate to grief. She put her elbow in
the water to check.
The movement woke him out of his doze. Is that you, he asked?
Of course it is. Who else would it be?
She motioned to them to hold him down while she began to search for the
ball. It had entered
about the middle of the collarbone and apparently had come out behind
the infra spinous fossa
breaking the scapula on its way. It looked straightforward but
following the wound channel
with the blade, she found that it had not pierced the thorax at all. It
had traversed the axillary
fossa in a line with the wall of the ribs, then the serratus magnus and
subscapular muscles, and
finally had broken out through his shoulder blade. It had actually
passed below the plexus of
vessels and nerves, mincing everything into a blackened mass of tissue
in which it was
impossible to recognise any organ. It was as though the bullet had
walked round three sides of
a city block because it was no longer in a hurry. She wiped her brow
with the back of her
hand. Why had they taken the child away before she had even held it?
It's not as if she was not
on familiar terms with death. But perhaps when she went back to work,
she would not return
to surgery. Paediatrics, perhaps. The light from the frosted window
dazzled her as the winter
sun came out from cloud.
In the mornings, she would shade her eyes with her hand the better to
see how many of the
civilians between the lines had survived the long night and the cold
dawn. The enemy sent out
the young and the old. Better by far for the very youngest to go. The
siege had lasted into a
second winter and idle mouths were a luxury. She had been unable at
first to understand why
they sent out the youngest as well as the oldest to starve together.
She watched them die
trapped as they were between enemies and friends. The babies died
first. She suspected that
the very very old had not survived the first weeks of the siege and had
died in the city though
the merely very old were capable of clinging on for a long time seeming
to manage with no
food better than anyone else put out into no-man's-land. The mothers
who insisted on going
were said sometimes to die of grief but generally, a couple of days
after their infants died, they
would sneak over the parapet of a trench and into the arms of one of
our men. After that, clap
was as likely to claim them as lead or steel.
It was a matter of investment, she had finally realised. Investment
measured in time, money
and love. It was a matter of balancing that against future return. Very
little time, money and
effort had been invested in a baby. Much had been invested in the old,
but they had nothing of
substance to give in return. Although a thirteen year old might not be
a great deal of
immediate use, a fortune in time, money and care had already been spent
and there was the
promise or at least the possibility of repayment. The meagre investment
in a year old child was
best written off. Sad, but there it was. Mothers' naturally strong bond
to the infant was... well!
contingent on circumstances. She had read that mothers among the
hunter-gatherers in the
Kalahari would readily abandon their youngest to enhance the chances of
their elder offspring's
survival. It made sense. And what sense was there in clinging to bad
investments? She had not
clung. They took little Siobhan away almost before she had realised she
was dead.
It's been a long time since you looked after me, he said. It's been the
other way round for so
long. Maybe things... you know. They keep asking when you'll be going
back. You're missed,
you know.
She said nothing.
I'm getting over the bug now, he said. I still feel a bit wobbly, but I
think I'll go up and do
some work in my study.
Attic, she said. And play.
Attic, then. I'll go up to the attic to play.
She helped him to dry himself and to put on his clothes and she
supported him to the foot of
the stairs. He laughed at her solicitude, but it was good to see her
begin to come out of
herself. She ducked down at the foot of the breach. They had done their
job of guiding him
with his men as far as the tape that had been laid out. In the darkness
behind she sensed the
men with ladders. He turned and smiled. Why did they volunteer, she
wondered? Leading a
Forlorn Hope into the tumbled masonry was for the fatally melancholy or
the hopelessly poor.
A successful assault could lead to glory, favour and position, but it
was more likely to precede
an unseen death. The leader of the Forlorn Hope might live on for a
while in song or in the
popular imagination and, perhaps, in a regimental history but he would
not know that. And in
that ignorance was the ignominy of death. She watched him begin the
ascent in silence and she
turned away. Better to hide in her bolthole than to hear the muskets
and grenades, the mines
and the guns which would blast them all to pieces, sacrifices to the
greater army which would
follow them if they broke through this time. The dead were luckier than
the wounded who
would slowly freeze to death on a night like this. Both were luckier
than the town which
would endure fire, sword and rapine when it fell. She descended into
her refuge.
To hell with what he thinks. She opened the tin marked Rice and shook a
pile out on to a
plate. Again she started at the floor making a square of four, then of
nine, then sixteen, twenty
five and all the squares up to ninety nine by ninety nine. The mental
arithmetic became too
hard after that. If she used the top of the speaker, she ended up
having to multiply ten and
twelve figure numbers together in her head. Which left no room for
anything else. She cleared
her mind the better to hold the long sums together in their proper
order.
Up above, he switched on his computer and started a new document. Was
it play? He made
half a dozen line returns to give himself room for a title later, and
he began to type.
'Veronica,' he began, 'put another grain of rice on the polished
parquet floor looking at it
through the glass top of the coffee table. Sighting that way kept order
in the structure. It kept
everything in alignment.' He glanced up absently and noticed the alarm
clock on his desk. His
fingers tapped the keyboard. 'She glanced up,' he continued, 'glanced
up at the clock and then
down at her wristwatch. It was time to see to the corpse.' He frowned,
back-deleted and
tapped out, 'time to lay him out.' Still not quite right. 'Placing the
rice tin on the white carpet
and snuggling it into the thick pile so that it would not fall over,
she got up and went into the
kitchen.' What sort of person is Veronica, he wondered? I thought I
knew her. What would
she do next? And what does she imagine I feel? He looked down at the
floor as though it were
possible to see right through it to the house below. He made two line
spaces for room to come
back and expand later and he wrote, 'Which side is besieged here? We
are each other's
captives, each what the other imagines.'