The nights are long in solitary, but the days are longer. By night he lies on the rough and lumpy bed and tries to forget the pain in his ankle and sleep, but sometimes they give him morphine, and then he sleeps. But there are the nightmares then. He slips into that perfect, beautiful sleep, but then he is dreaming.
He is descending an endless wall with a terrible, rotten rope, and his fingers are slipping and his palms are slick with sweat, and then he is falling, falling, the ground coming up, the green grass and the glimpses of brown mud, and who ever knew that grass and mud could be so solid, because he hits feet first and he hears his ankle go like a rifle shot. And then he is running, trying to run, the air damp and earthy in his nostrils, the little noises of everyday German life, the trees rustling in the breeze. And the pain is hot spears that shoot up through his leg, he is sweating, he is screaming, crying, men are chasing him, and he is screaming, screaming,
and he wakes up and his cry is a bellow of fear in the utter dark.
So he lies there, his back clammy with sweat, panting, desperately wanting a cup of water but it's so dark and he's unable to move and the little room smells of the slop bucket and of mould and cold stone, and he pulls the blanket closer up over his chest. And sometimes there is a knuckled knock on the door and a German accent asks him, 'All right in there?' and he mutters, 'Yes, fine.' Of course he's fine. He's in solitary in the middle of Colditz in the middle of a war, and miles away from his wife, and he's hungry and his ankle hurts like hell and he's slowly going mad. Of course he's fucking fine.
But mostly they ignore him because he does this almost every night, dreams and tosses and turns and wakes up screaming and in agony, and he wakes up every morning to exchange the slop of food for the slop in his bucket.
The days are longer than the nights because – because the daylight drags so slowly, moving from one side of the cell to the other. Because he is hungry. Because he wants to go and sit at the little table and play chess with himself or read a book, but when he makes that monumental effort to hobble across the room and sits on the chair his ankle throbs and burns and it makes him feel so sick that he can't stay there any more. So he limps back to the bed and lies there. He rolls up his blanket to make a pillow to elevate his foot. He cinches his tunic more closely closed over his chest. He lets his eyes roam over the ceiling, looking at the stains of damp and the little marks in the plaster, and he feels he knows every single mark up there by now. He has found faces, beginnings of words, crucifixes, the outlines of a comic strip boy he remembers but cannot name. Sometimes he sees maps in the lines. Germany. Britain. Cathy's face. Sometimes he sees nothing.
And all the time his foot throbs and aches and that damn plaster cast itches so badly, and there's nothing he can do, nothing at all, because he doesn't have anything of the type to push down under the cast. He scratches his fingernails on the outside of the cast and pretends it's reaching his skin. He scratches his other leg, as a kind of stand-in. He scratches so much around the top of the cast that his skin gets raw. He fantasises about something to stick under that bloody cast. Fantasises about his mum's knitting needles ripped from the grey dishcloths she's always making. They wouldn't let him have a knitting needle in here. No fear. They don't let a man have anything he might use as an instrument to end his solitude with death. A man could stab himself through the eye with a knitting needle, straight into the brain.
And that makes him laugh a little, because he doesn't want to die. No matter how bad he gets he doesn't want to die. He gets into those states where his mind just goes blank and it's too much effort to even raise a hand, where the past and the future and the present are all a grey blur and he might as well be lying in a grave. But he doesn't want to die.
Sometimes his eyes start to slip closed, heat creeps over him, he's so tired and so out of sorts because of the constant pain and the odd sleep that the morphine gives him or the awful broken sleep he gets most nights without pain relief at all. But he's strict on that, or he tries to be. If he sleeps in the day he won't sleep at night. His mum always told him that. He used to have terrible trouble with insomnia sometimes as a youth, and when he started to slump asleep over his book in front of the gas fire in that tatty little terrace house in Deptford his mother would shake him awake.
'You'll never sleep at night, Si,' she'd say.
And he would fight furiously then to wake up, because he hated her calling him Si and he hated falling asleep like that when he was supposed to be studying, because he was determined that by hook or by crook he'd work himself out of the station in the life that was supposed to be his destiny and go on to something better.
And he had. By hook and by crook. And he had found Cathy.
He thinks of his wedding night with Cathy. She had been so chaste before then. He had wanted more. He had wheedled, Of course we're going to be married, Cathy. Of course we are. Come on, love. Can't you just – And she had said, No! and he actually respected her for that, much as he had longed for more with her. He had kissed her and she had let his hands roam a bit in the back seat of his car. He had felt the dip of her navel and the soft little mounds of her tits and rolled her nipples between his fingers, but that was all.
And then the wedding night – God, he was glad then that she had made him wait, because she was beautiful, she was perfect. She was in a little silk slip, pale blue, that she'd bought before the war, and she had dropped it to the ground, and he had almost fallen to his knees in awe of this girl that he had married. It wasn't her dad's money, it wasn't the prospects he'd given himself by marrying above his class. It was all Cathy, her beautiful body and her beautiful mind. The way she talked with him for hours, the way her eyes became distant when she played her violin. He could listen for hours to her playing her violin, feeling odd because he could never do something like that, but loving that she could. And on his wedding night he had discovered that she was beautiful all over.
That night they hadn't slept at all.
He startles himself back to reality, to the grey, damp ceiling, the walls, the thought that Cathy is so far away. His ankle throbs and throbs so badly that it makes the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, it makes his empty stomach churn, and he reaches down blindly at the side of the bed and picks up the cup of water down there and sips at it ever so slowly to settle his stomach, to fill himself up, to stop himself feeling so sick.
If he could just sit at the table… He tells himself that, but he's been in solitary before and sitting at the table just affords him a change of view, not much more. Still, a change in view is a change. A chance to look at the back wall instead of the wall with the door in it.
God, thirty days is a long time. Surely the ankle is punishment enough? If there were any justice they'd decide the ankle were enough.
He is descending an endless wall with a terrible, rotten rope, and his fingers are slipping and his palms are slick with sweat, and then he is falling, falling, the ground coming up, hard, sudden, his foot hits. The pain spears up his leg and he cries out, choking the sound back into his throat, rolling, holding the leg, holding it, tears in his eyes. And there are men in helmets, and dogs, and how he hates those dogs. They're not household pets, those things. Their mouths slaver and their eyes glitter and they're as close to wolves as he's ever seen. They stalk. They stalk around him and their mouths drip drool, and –
He chokes awake again. He hadn't even realised he was asleep. His eyes are hot and the back of his head aches and itches from being pressed against the something-of-a-pillow he has on his bed. Outside he hears a sudden cheer and his heart gives a leap. Has someone reported back about the escapes? Has someone got home free? Maybe Pat's made it. Or Dick. He'd like Dick to make it. Dick's a damn good chap. He'd like Phil to make it, all the way back to America. There's something about America that feels like an exotic dream.
But he hears the babble of voices rise and fall, the smack of a ball against stone, and he knows they're just playing, playing like children in the schoolyard, working out all the pent up energy of men who are penned in by their enemies. He feels like a kid kept in by the teacher, kept in at break, doing lines, only he's being kept in for thirty days and instead of lines he's got a broken ankle and a thousand demons at his back.
Stupid. Stupid to think there'd be any news yet. He's not even sure if they've gone. It's like being blind and deaf in here. It's like being buried in a tomb.
He exhales very slowly, stares at the ceiling, wonders if he could muster the concentration to read his book. The guards are relatively kind, at least. Quite a few of the Germans are good sorts, and they've been more lenient than usual about letting him have books. When his mind's up to it he can get through a book in a day, and they don't make him wait and wait for a new one this time. They feel sorry for him because of his ankle, and he knows he must look a state. They give him the chance to shave, but he doesn't take it. He hasn't washed much in days. He sweats so much at night that the bed and his clothes stink. He's dropped a lot of weight, too. His body's putting energy into fixing that leg, but not fast enough, and no one gets enough food in solitary. So maybe when they look in through the slot in the door they feel sorry for him, and they let him have more than one book at a time, or replace it more than usual. One of them even offered, nervously, awkwardly, to play a game of chess with him, but even though the man carried the table over and put it by the bed it was no good, because he couldn't concentrate worth a damn, and he didn't even get as far as losing. Anyway, they'd all get into trouble if Hauptmann Ulman found out.
He has managed to find three swear words and the outline of St Paul's in the plaster on the ceiling. The sun isn't very far across the room yet. He misses Cathy and he misses the boys from the barracks and his blasted ankle hurts so much. He's got thirteen days to go.