The Coward: Conscience on Trial - Softcover

Wall, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782796169 ISBN 13: 9781782796169

Verlag: ROUNDFIRE BOOKS, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Frail and disillusioned, Bill Rowe languishes in a prison cell. As the Luftwaffe pass overhead, he relives his journey from a basement in Gateshead to a tribunal in London tasked with examining and judging that most private and intimate of things: conscience. But will he die a coward or will he find the strength to confront his past?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tom Wall is the digital editor of the Environmental Health News. His freelance journalism has been published in the Guardian, Independent, Observer and New Statesman.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Coward

By Tom Wall

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2014 Tom Wall
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78279-616-9

CHAPTER 1

Like an attentive, perhaps even obsessive chronicler, Bill Rowe knows these bricks. He knows their rough calluses and crumbling lime mortar veins. He knows their dark pockmarks and dusty scars. Nothing escapes his lingering eye and grafflin hand; he knows every last imperfection and blemish.

In the dead of night, when his coughing wakes him, he runs his fingers over them, tracing the marks left by his fellow outcasts and sinners. Some have hacked mindlessly away to pass the time or exorcise inner demons. Others have painstakingly etched their own name or the name of their hinny or eked out declarations of innocence or pious pleas for forgiveness.

George McKibben 1922.

Ivy Dearlove.

I never laid a hand on her.

God loves all his children.

When Bill arrived six months ago he added his own name with the hard end of a bootlace. The waxy tip eventually bent and frayed under the pressure of his shaking hand but he didn't give up.

Bill Rowe 1941.

The voices and visions came later.

An unanswered cry for help. A man running. Flames gathering in his clothes. Skin breaking and weeping.

Two pale heads rising and falling with grey waves. The warmth leaching from their hearts and salt stinging their lips.

A heaving mob intent on doing harm to a child. Lovers perched at either end of a single bed. A constable digging his dirty fingernails into a collar bone. A pile of belongings on a doorstep. A mother turning away in disgust.

And the question always the same: why? The guns keep firing and the bombs keep dropping. And the bodies of innocent men, women and children continue to pile up in cities with familiar names and others with strange names. Coventry. Liverpool. Mannheim. Chongquin.

His fingers locate familiar lines; he explores each one, reliving those first days and nights. To begin with he liked the ritual of marking the wall each evening, it reminded him that his ordeal would not go on forever, but the more he did it, the more he realised that recording the passing of time only slowed it down.

Something wriggles in his hair and punctures the scaly skin covering his scalp. He holds it up in the moonlight seeping through the small slits above his bed. The creature's spindly, alien legs twitch hopelessly as it dangles in the air. Its tiny body is bloated and dark with blood. He flicks it towards the jerry.

He's always had an eye for detail and a way with words. As a boy he used to watch gangs of starlings peck the frozen earth in their tiny yard while Ma chopped and cooked over a smouldering cooking range. When her back was turned he'd press his nose against the steamy glass and follow their search for food. Everything else – the bitterly cold draft and the smell of sinewy meat and onions simmering – he blocked out. Their purple and green dinosaur faces and darting black eyes intrigued him.

'How do they survive the winter, Ma? Where do they go to escape the cold?'

'I haven't the time to think, Bill.'

He would stay there mulling over these questions until he was clipped round the ear by his Da returning home, with the rich, stale fug of cheap ale and baccy smoke on his breath.

'Sit down for your supper.'

Clouds obscure the moon and the cell falls dark. He turns over in search of a more comfortable position but as usual it ends in defeat. The flock mattress is stuffed with a few rags and some wool. It offers little protection against the hard board below. His bones, which these days jut out of him at painful angles, chaff on the wood.

The screws pretend not to notice he is wasting away, they insist everyone is getting the same. The truth is most men, even men who are accustomed to living on next to nothing, would struggle to survive on the rations they bring. When he feels clear-headed and brave, which is rare these days, he points out that his body is giving up, that he needs more food. They snigger behind their clipboards and say no one else is complaining.

Even the older, kinder screws cannot help. One of them, Rogers, who works in the store, advised him to ask to be moved to the infirmary when he saw his pillow case, which was speckled with tiny red droplets. But the officer in charge of the wing, Fry, a tough bastard with a squashed nose and red puffy ears, refused.

'You look fine to me, Rowe. You're just scared of a hard day's work.'

Another lie – in an age of lies. On bad weeks he cannot even make it out into the exercise yard. On good weeks he hobbles around the yard like a crooked old gadgie. He feels like a man of sixty, not a fit twenty-two-year-old who used to swim bare-buff in rivers and wander over the wild, purple-crowned Cheviots.

Moonlight again fills the cell. He closes his eyes; outside he can hear half-starved prison dogs barking and somewhere in the far, far distance the soft rumble of aeroplanes, possibly bombers. But he concentrates on the bleached, lunar interior of his eyelids. And before long he is somewhere else entirely.

* * *

Bare oak branches creak, and heaps of dry, brown leaves crackle in a light breeze. Bill opens his eyes and blinks furiously. It is early autumn and the sun is high in the pale sky. He is perhaps ten. The other lads are hunting for blackberries in another part of the wood or playing Cowboys and Indians. He really doesn't care because this moment is perfect. He feels part of the spongy moss beneath his head: he listens to worms churning the forest's fibrous, woody debris and watches ugly great crows strut and squawk. The city with its constables, taverns and smoky chimneys seems far away. The air here is fresh and clean, the sounds natural and peaceful.

'Bill, you there? Come on you gormless bastard? Harry's cooking up a brew. Bill? Bill?'

The shout disturbs his daydream. 'Aye. I'm over here, man. By the old oak tree.'

Len Weaver looks down at him; older, gangly, wild messy black hair, crooked teeth. The others call him Tatie-Boggle the scarecrow. He lives on the same street as Bill and goes to the same school but his parents are odd sorts. Len's father is a sometime piano tuner and journalist and his mother is a school teacher and dress maker. Their house is full of newspapers, pamphlets and vegetarian cookbooks. And the church they go to doesn't have vicars or priests – anyone can stand up and say what they like. Some of the boys at school say the whole family walk around with no clothes during the summer months.

Len grins. 'What you doing on the floor, like?'

'Don't know – just like this spot.'

Pushing their way through brambles and low-hanging branches, they head towards the den. In a grassy clearing there are two other boys: Harry Bags and Walter Kelly. A blackened metal kettle is suspended above a little fire.

Walter, his hands stained purple from sorting berries, says, 'Where was he?'

'Having a kip by that oak tree, like.'

'I knew we shouldn't have invited that dozy little clot up here. We should have left him playing hopscotch with the girls.'

Laughing, Harry passes round tin cups. He is shorter than Len but with thick, muscular arms and legs and a square jaw. There is even a sprouting of brown hairs on his top lip.

He says, 'You going to see the King open the bridge? Me Da says he coming with Queen Mary.'

Bill realises there are only three cups; Harry doesn't even offer him one. 'I've seen the posters, like,' he says quietly.

Walter ignores him. 'Might do, there'll be horses and a band, won't...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ROUNDFIRE BOOKS
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1782796169
• ISBN 13: 9781782796169
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 226
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar