Gerald turned the page. Two German soldiers were resting during the Battle of Kursk. Exhaustion marked their faces as they leant against their vehicle. They’d removed their helmets; their blond hair and white cigarettes shone against their grime-smeared skin and the darkness of torn earth all around them. In the distance, columns of grey-black smoke leant over the flat land.
Gerald looked through the French windows onto the lawn where a female blackbird was pulling a squirming thread from the ground. It had rained much of the morning. The garden looked ragged, littered with the last of autumn’s leaves, their wet iron reds and browns shining on the tired green. Twigs from the ash tree that was dying of blight were scattered, some in the flower beds, some on the grass. The compost heap humped, sullen-seeming, in a far corner. It was Gerald’s domain. Carol was very much the flower girl, but he knew that the real work, the micro-organic engine room work, was done by the ugly stuff, down in the dirt where the science was.
His head ached: a harpoon throb arced repeatedly from behind his left ear forward to his temple. He closed his eyes until the blackness cleared his mind to a view of the steppe, across which grey tanks were followed by tiny grey men scanning an endless horizon. He opened his eyes. A male blackbird was now busily pestering the female until she abandoned the rest of the worm and flew off. Gerald closed the book on his lap, got slowly to his feet, exhaling as he did so to avoid building any pressure in his head, and walked upstairs to the medicine cabinet in the bedroom. Shortly after he’d taken the pain killers Carol returned to find him standing by the kitchen table.
“I’ve got the wrapping paper and the very last roll of Sellotape they had. Would’ve been stumped without that,” she said, with a breathy sense of achievement. “Now all I have to do is wrap the last of the presents for the girls and then I’ll make a start on the tree.”
Gerald stared out the kitchen window at the car, drops of brown puddle water still dripping from its mudguards. “I’ve got a migraine coming.”
“Oh, Gerald, I’m sorry.”
“Just started. Like that; no warning.”
“Have you taken any…?”
“Just now. I’ll get some air, then maybe lie down.”
“Good idea.”
The garden air hung around him like a rain-damp coat. He could smell rot and earth and a faded vegetable rankness, thick and still. He wanted a breeze to clear his head, something sharp and alpine, bristling with frost, not this suffocating marsh-clasp. He thought of snows, of white-uniformed men in white-painted helmets crouched in their foxholes, weapons clasped in gloved hands, ice-bright, alert.
#
He addressed the two cards: one to his sister in Perthshire and one to Magnus, whom he wasn’t sure was still alive. “Did you buy stamps?”
Balanced on a low stool, twisted round the top half of the tree trying to tie a bauble, Carol’s voice strained as she answered: “On the side, under the charity cards.”
“I’m making tea; d’you want one?”
“Thanks” she replied, at full stretch to site the fairy.
As the kettle boiled, he watched her. A thin, graceless woman, he still recognised something of the girlish optimism he’d noticed at their first meeting. Over the years, it had matured into a determined energy, untidy but dogged, a semi-sanguine resilience that had seen her through childlessness and illness and lesser disappointments. It was what, in the darkness as he lay awake listening to the creaks and groans of their house at rest, he most envied in her. The certainty of it.
“What d’you think?” She climbed awkwardly down from the stool and stood back, taking in the whole tree.
“Yes, that looks…” He paused, at a loss. Aware of the lack, he added “Fine… and with the red…” but trailed off, betrayed by asking too much of himself.
“Right,” she said, looking at him, “I’ll have my tea first, then do the windowsills.”
“There’s a thing on soon I want to see.”
She paused. “Oh.”
“I’ll have the sound down.”
“If you could; it is Christmas, after all.”
Gerald watched history – mostly military history – programmes in the afternoon. Carol watched documentaries about art – all the arts – in the evenings, but the afternoons were Gerald’s and she had come to associate the once soft, slow hours between lunch and dinner with the sound of dive bombers, their sirens screaming as monochrome buildings crumbled beneath them and grim, desperate refugees fled through the burning terrors their lives had become. Occasionally, Gerald would mumble assent at the male narrator’s sonorous, authoritarian commentary; very occasionally he’d exclaim “Extraordinary!” or “Did you hear that, Carol?” She wondered how he could watch so much misery, day after day. All that suffering.
#
Gerald placed his right index and middle finger onto his upturned left wrist expecting, as he always did, to find either nothing or chaos. He wasn’t good today. A screen of anxiety had unfurled across his thoughts. He knew, as he had always known, that he couldn’t go on like this. He took a deep breath, exhaling slowly and making himself concentrate instead on armaments production figures for 1943. He couldn’t remember the number of American planes – of all military types – built. It annoyed him; he’d only read the figures a day ago. He realised it must be because he was so tired, not fully focussed. His pulse stuttered, paused and then skipped hurriedly three or four times before resuming a more measured pace. And could that figure for total Japanese armoured vehicle production – the one he’d read on the same day, in the very same book, only a few pages on – really be so low for ’44?
Carol was on the phone to her sister, Judy. They were coming for Christmas lunch: her and Mike and the girls. Gerald could never believe Judy and Carol were sisters. Judy was short and stylish and loud. She didn’t have Carol’s optimism; she was suspicious, always expecting to be cheated. Hers was a life of many dramas, each painstakingly retold to Judy over long telephone conversations, invariably during a programme Gerald had particularly wanted to see. He would turn the volume up, hoping for explosions.
“She didn’t? You’re joking!” Judy said now, her incredulity telling him, from past experience, that the call had a fair amount of life still in it. He took two books from the coffee table and carried them to his office. Closing the door behind him, he sat at his desk and browsed through the topmost book, an impressively illustrated though meagrely written account of the Desert War.
#
Carol was loading the dishwasher as she spoke: “… as if there’s a reason for doing it in the first place. I mean, it did sound a bit dodgy when she first told me what he’d done, but this time round she added details which made it seem very different… you know what I mean?… and I think she’s probably just…”
Gerald was controlling his breaths. He felt that there was really only one conversation Carol had with her sister. One unending conversation, without any conclusion or real change, an iteration of false interpretations, spurious inference and muddled reasoning, further skewed by histrionic bias. Whatever he had heard of it, over the years, had long since merged to a blur of forgettable inconsequence. When, on rare occasions, he’d tried to listen in greater depth, he felt that it had no end, could have no end. There was no solidity to it, nothing in it to set any store by. It was composed of some immeasurable quantity – nebulous and unsupportive – which threatened any chance of meaningful resolution. He found it strangely suffocating.
“Well, it’s much of a muchness, isn’t it?” he said when Carol paused. In the temporary quiet, to forestall any resumption, he added: “I feel a bit off, actually. Felt a little sick just now; I’m going to lie down for a while.”
He heard the last of the dishes being loaded as he lay on the bed, staring at the sky’s restless grey muddling beyond the bedroom window.
#
The house felt calm. Carol was collecting presents she’d ordered for the girls; she’d be gone some time. Gerald exhaled slowly. He could feel his heart beating, even and strong. His head was clear. He was going to reorganise a few things in his office, tie up some loose ends. Then he’d watch the last part of the series on the evolution of tank warfare; he’d been saving it as a treat.
As he sorted the papers on his desk, the view in his mind’s eye began to widen. This was how it often began. A giant map of Russia, the Urals to the east, the Caucasus to the south, spread over his imagination. Across it, from west to east, front lines moved, punching forward with great coloured arrows illustrating the pincer movements of each armoured thrust, arrows which, when he looked more closely at them, dissolved to a black and white film of panzers surging across vast plains, ragged dust clouds drifting behind their progress like smoke. He knew the numbers for each army group – not the real numbers, though they were always his starting point, but the figures that he had decided on for this particular reincarnation of the Nazi invasion of Russia. Behind these front-line numbers, haunting them like prophecies, Gerald also had those for manpower replacement and for production of matériel and general supplies, again doctored from the actual to suit his purpose.
He now was in the second year of this re-imagined campaign: the western districts had been overrun, Moscow had fallen, most of the Crimea too. The southern oilfields were the target, Baku on the Caspian, a town floating on the precious fuel. The Germans always got this far. Always, and normally much further. Last month, Rundstedt, Manstein and Leeb had taken the Urals and its factory zone, driving ever further eastwards towards what Gerald envisaged as a disastrous Stalingrad-style struggle for the distant city of Novosibirsk, which he’d decided Stalin would rename ‘Oktyabrgrad’, ‘The October City’.
Of course, at this stage in the conflict, American supplies were streaming across the North Pacific (Gerald re-fought the entire Pacific conflict on separate days; it would have been overwhelming otherwise) or over the ice roads from Alaska into Siberia, bringing just enough to keep the USSR in the war, while the Western Allies re-took Africa, India and the Middle East, having neutralised the U boat threat and opened the air campaign launched from Britain against the homeland of the Reich.
By the time Russian veterans finally came to stand in the ruins of Berlin, Gerald would feel exhausted. It had often taken him weeks to get this far. Indeed, so spent would he be that he would have to occupy the following fortnight or so attempting to re-imagine Soviet Five-Year plans during the peaceful recovery period following the war’s titanic conclusion. Production figures for tanks and planes would be swapped for tonnage of wheat, tractor manufacture and the number of breeding sows maintained by the victorious but economically ruined Russians.
Gradually, though, as his energies returned, these agrarian interludes would fade, Gerald’s phoenixlike imagination drawn inexorably back to the factory floor’s production line on which rows of armoured vehicle chassis stood, attended to by industrious workers labouring to service the inexhaustible war machine. Tables of production figures would start to flash across his mind, individual numbers magnified for inspection seemingly at random, so that 1,412 fighters would suddenly sound in his head, not linked to any aircraft model in particular, nor even to any nation, but simply as a quantifiable essence, a numerical statement riveted to mechanical actuality.
It would take only a few days of these statistical seeds settling in his mind for the fighting urge to grow. Soon, he would be consulting his books or poring through tables on obscure websites to ascertain exactly how many Panzer IV Ausf. Gs were produced in a particular month. From there, it was only a short step to a new campaign, those same vehicles locked now in furious combat on the unbounded Eurasian Steppe. In turn, other machines, gleaned from other, similarly comprehensive tables, would be struggling in his head to rule the world’s vast expanses of jungle, desert, ocean and sky.
Gerald heard the car draw up. Film clips of combat stuttered and dispersed. He looked at his desk; it still lay cluttered with papers and files. Hurriedly, he gathered them up and stuffed them into a gap on the shelf behind him. The front door opened. He could hear Carol carrying bags into the hall.
“I’m back!”
“OK. I’ll be there.” He paused before leaving the room, looking round guiltily as if he was sure he’d left something behind, but didn’t know what it was. He felt a little unsteady, not certain of himself, uprooted too soon from his world, without any chance to adapt. His pulse had quickened and he felt hot.
“The presents for the girls are really…” she sounded triumphant. Intent on locking the door as he left, he didn’t hear the end of her sentence.
#
Gerald was peeing. He stared out the window above the loo, where an embattled moon struggled among dark clouds rushing like cannon smoke across its blue-washed glare. It seemed somehow ill-omened, menacing. Suddenly, there came to him Caliban’s lines from The Tempest:
“…and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night. And then I loved
thee…”
He’d learned them years before, for the local Dramatic Society’s production, the one where he’d met Carol. It was the only time he’d ever acted. No one had wanted to play Caliban. He’d had wanted to play Prospero, but Mark Doyle – who was rumoured to be semi-pro. – got the part. Gerald thought Doyle’s performance mannered. When he shouted Prospero’s line: “Hag-seed, hence!” his spittle had peppered Gerald’s face. Carol had landed the role of Miranda, much to the annoyance of Doyle’s young wife, a regular Drama Soc. member whose name Gerald could no longer recall. He could remember that he’d wanted to be Prospero because Prospero had ruled the island: it was all his to order, his own world, entire. He even secretly learned the magician’s many lines, just in case. On the night, though, he’d shuffled and drooled as required, hunch-backed and scaly, to moderate applause.
“…and how the less,” he whispered, as another blackening rag obscured the moon.
#
Gerald felt quite unwell. He lay on the sofa as Carol put up the last of the decorations. She was humming to herself, the tune broken by breaths of effort as she stretched up to drape a set of lights over a curtain rail or bent down to fix a mini wreath of pine and holly to the front of a bare cupboard.
Gerald was trying to work out how long an American supply fleet might have taken to arrive at South Africa from the US Eastern Seaboard if it had gone via a South Atlantic route in order to avoid U boats (in his latest re-imagining, Cape Town was being besieged by an over-stretched but victorious Axis army composed mainly of Italians but with a stiffening of German armour). His attention wasn’t sharp, however. His calculations kept getting muddled. Too many factors seemed to be involved. He was tired; he felt as if he had bruises behind his eyes. There was a lack of precision to his thoughts which Carol’s humming did nothing to help.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked.
He felt annoyed at her question. “Do we really need all that stuff up?” He nodded towards the decorations.
“Well, I wanted to make an effort… with them all coming, so that it looks nice. Festive, you know. D’you want tea?”
“Hmm” was the best he could manage. As she filled the kettle, he closed his eyes and tried to picture a moonless night, the huge convoy sliding through dark equatorial waters in a colossal silence as their sonar operators listened attentively for the hidden threat from below.
“Do you think we’ve got enough fizzy wine for Christmas Day?” she asked, placing his tea on a coaster on the coffee table next to him.
“We’ve been over this before” he snapped, looking at her.
“I’m just checking. This is the last day I can buy anything that we might have forgotten.”
“As we do every Christmas, we’ve got more than enough.”
“Yes, of the stuff we’ve remembered. But what if we’ve forgotten…”
“We haven’t, Carol! And anyway, even if we had…” he paused, realising he couldn’t complete his own sentence. He closed his eyes again. He could still see the huge expanse of silent ocean, but he’d lost sight of the ships. They were gone, leaving nothing except the rippling depths.
#
Gerald wondered if he was dying. How could he be lying there otherwise, in the bleak gloom of Christmas morning, feeling so wretched, so unfit for any day, let alone this one? How would he be able to face it – to face the family, the ludicrous ritual of the whole ghastly charade, with such compromised health? He took his pulse again. Fast, too fast. He should take his blood pressure. It might wake Carol, though. Fortunately, he knew she’d be up early; she had so much to do. Trying to breathe calmly, he prepared to submit himself to the bleeping pressure and telltale figures of the little black and silver machine waiting in his bedside cabinet. It would only reveal what he already knew. How could it not?
Edging the curtains, a grey smudge announced the dawn. Beneath, the nearest side of the chest of drawers was solidifying from the dark. If I close my eyes now… he thought, I could just slip away… A bird sang one brief scrap of song into the new day. Oh, God! He shut his eyes tight, but the blackness behind them pattered to the wayward rhythm of his heart.
#
Gerald sat in front of Carol’s mirror. She’d been up for hours, preparing the meal. She’d showered, dressed, done her hair and make-up. He could hear her downstairs now, hurrying to put the final touches to everything. He stared at his face. It seemed to him a mask, a weak likeness, like a photo wrongly exposed. The life had gone from it. His eyes sat in bruise-coloured surrounds, his skin was drained to the colour of old linen, its lines unsightly creases in the fabric. His hand was shaking a little. He felt simultaneously cold and prickled by an itchy heat all over his chest and back. He touched his left arm to see if there was any pain. He closed his eyes and saw himself heaped on the floor at the base of the Christmas tree, clasping his chest, the room splintered with screams, the glittering decorations fading with his sight.
“Gerald, come on, love!” Carol tried not to sound strained. “They’re going to be here soon. Would you mind doing the drinks and cold snacks?”
He looked out the window and exhaled, his breath sour. The top of the dying ash tree clawed its branches against the grey clouds’ gentle drift. It wouldn’t rain today; he’d checked. Carol had asked him to, hoping the girls would be able to play with their presents outside. He could already hear children’s voices somewhere, jabs of shout and yelp puncturing the distance of the day. He looked at the two tablets lying on the table in front of him. In fifteen minutes he would take them, though he felt that the migraine was now unavoidable; it squatted against the inside back of his skull, a wadding ache. He stared again in the mirror at the mask with which he was supposed to brave the day. He felt like abandoning it, leaving it to face the world alone, surrendering it.
“Please, Gerald!”
#
“Hello Gerry!” Mike extended his hand, smiling broadly. “Girls, say ‘hello’ to Uncle Gerald.”
Standing behind their father, Bella and Maeve muttered “Hello, Uncle Gerald” awkwardly, looking down as they did so. Gerald wondered if they shared any of his dread at what lay ahead.
“Hello!” Carol beamed, stepping round him. She hugged the girls and then Mike. Judy appeared from behind the back of the car, her arms laden with presents. Carol and the girls went to help her.
“The usual chaos!” said Mike, laughing. “I’ve got some wine in there, Gerry, but I’ll let them get the presents in first.”
Gerald nodded. In his stomach he could feel a great weight like a stone, malignant and troubling.
“Hello, Gerald. Merry Christmas!” exclaimed Judy, forcing a smile.
“Yes,” said Gerald.
#
Mike and Judy were busy recounting to Carol the semi-farce of the girls’ nativity play. Gerald was refilling small saucers with crisps and mixed nuts. The aftertaste of sparkling wine, acidic and bitter, stung his mouth. The girls were in the garden, playing with a frisbee Carol had given them as ‘a little present for now’. This, Judy had suggested, was the best way to ensure they ran off any excess energy before the meal. One of the girls screamed a laugh as she leapt to catch the luminous disk. Gerald winced.
#
“Mike’s work have said there’s absolutely no way…” As Judy spoke, Gerald found himself trying not to listen to his heart, which seemed to have speeded up dangerously, like someone running at uncontrollable speed in a desperate attempt not to fall to the ground. He breathed slowly, making each breath even.
“Gerald, Mike hasn’t got any wine.”
“No, I’m OK thanks, Carol. I’m the designated driver!” Mike looked at Gerald and raised his eyebrows theatrically in conspiratorial resignation.
Judy twisted round to look out the window. “Shall we call them in, Caro?” She opened a window. “Girls! Girls! Time to get washed up and ready. Come on!” She shut the window. “Mike, will you get them in? Tell them to take their shoes off before they come in. In fact, take off anything muddy actually.”
“Don’t worry, Jude, it’ll all clean off” said Carol, smiling.
“Anything muddy, Mike,” Judy called after him as he walked to the front door, opening it to the sound of the girls’ breathless giggles.
Gerald closed his eyes. In his mind he could see a table of figures, but he couldn’t understand what they related to. He scanned down the columns, but the numbers began to blur as he did so. He forced his eyelids closed tighter, trying to slow the figures’ progress, trying to make out what each one was.
“You alright, Gerry?” asked Mike, now back in the room.
Opening his eyes quickly, Gerald touched his stomach but only managed to say “A bit… you know…”
Carol looked at Judy.
#
Each mouthful seemed gluey, unwilling to be swallowed. Gerald found himself gulping water to push the food down, adding it to the great stone weight at the centre of him, enlarging it, pressing it upwards against his diaphragm, making each breath shallower and shallower, forcing his frantic heart into a smaller and smaller space. His cheeks were filling with uncooperative loitering morsels. He was nodding randomly at the conversation, hearing none of it. His heart tottered and leapt, then halted before staggering on. When he closed his eyes, he could see nothing but a red-brown stain which darkened as it swirled, like the surface of a muddy river in flood, whirling the folded shadows of its troubled current.
“Mum, I don’t like this.”
“Eat a bit more, Bell,” said Judy. “Auntie Carol’s…”
“Don’t worry, Jude,” said Carol, smiling. “You’ve done really well, Bella! I didn’t like vegetables much at your age either.”
“Maeve does, actually, don’t you?” said Mike.
“I do!” said Maeve, chewing proudly as if to prove the point. Bella stuck her tongue out at her sister and giggled.
“Well, if you don’t like Christmas pudding, we’ve got ice cream afterwards,” said Carol, smiling at the girls, “and I know you both like…” but she was stopped by a half-choked sob breaking from the end of the table. In the silence that followed, they all turned to look at Gerald, his hands shaking as he grasped his knife and fork, his eyes open now, staring straight ahead of him at the wall behind Carol’s head, two tears running freely down each of his cheeks, their tracks glistening behind them as they met one another under his chin.
–
Craig has had poetry and short fiction published in various US, European and Asian magazines. He lives in the UK, works for the local council library service and as a university library assistant, and when he’s not working, writing or failing to cook, he likes drinking wine, walking and reading. He also writes plays and is currently working towards his first collection of poetry and short stories.
© 2023, Craig Dobson
Halfway Down the Stairs 