IF YOU EVER MAKE IT TO TEN, YOU WON'T MAKE IT AGAIN
1.
They get married because she's with child.
That's how it happens, back then, all too often but don't take that to meant they don't love each other, they do they do, John and Sarah Mitchell, he repeats her name to himself over and over sometimes when she's there, sometimes when she isn't, Sarah Mitchell, Sarah Mitchell.
"You lovesick old fool," she says. Her hair is very red. People call her a witch, sometimes. She laughs, usually.
"Crime to love your wife?"
She shrugs.
"Probably. Be stoic and sensible like usual, shouldn't you?"
He laughs.
"I'm a mopey bastard, aren't I?"
"Yes," she says, "yes, you are. Better hope the boy doesn't get that."
"You think it's a boy?"
"Feels like a boy," she says.
He grins.
"I think I'd like a son."
She hits him.
"Of course you would. A child to corrupt, yes, John Mitchell?"
"How could I corrupt anyone?"
She is twisting around her rosary again. It's funny, he thinks, she's been more religious since they married, which is funny-of course, before, she wasn't very religious at all (the two of them in his rooms, her sneaking out in the mornings to get into her own bed). He wonders if she's worried-about the child. She's always been very thin.
"You've got a bit of the devil in you, I always thought."
He grins.
"John Devil Mitchell."
"Don't take it in stride. Should hope he's not like you."
"Take pity on me." He kisses the side of her face-she laughs and pushes him away.
"You're an animal."
"Take pity on an animal."
She's nineteen. He's twenty. This is not considered young, not yet.
He works at the docks, she stays home and waits, waits for the child, waits for him waits for something and it's not much, the two of them and out of a lifetime, seven months is not very long at all.
She gets the fever after the child is born (yes, a boy, she was right) and the infant is left in the other room crying and nobody pays attention to him and the mother's body is slick with disease but that is not important right now the mother's death is an ending and a beginning and a precedent, really. The father asks the midwife to name his son and she's nervous, doesn't want him to hate it and she ends up naming the boy after his father. John Mitchell, born September 22, 1895. John Mitchell again and again and again.
("Came in killing, didn't we?")
2.
He's in the woods. He is German. You are allowed to pity him, remember-this is not that war, this is not the morally easy war, this is the tangled and muddy one, the one nobody can pinpoint. His gun is heavy on his shoulder and he has a letter in his pocket but nobody will feel sorry for him, if he dies, on account of the letter-not the English, anyway, and if he reads theirs, he won't either, if you can't speak someone's language they are not human.
He has gone a little ways when he realizes there is a man about ten feet away from him, and the man seems to be British. Outline-no-there are two of them. Shit.
It's surprisingly quick-he lifts his gun, he doesn't have time, he is moving over and he is getting closer and then moving back and then he drops his gun and is running and there is a shot and he is on the ground.
A few minutes later, he realizes they are standing over him.
The man stands over him with the gun. The other one goes through his pockets. His breathing is heavy.
"Cheer up, Mitchell. The first is always the hardest."
"Who says I need to fucking cheer up?" It's a bit of a sneer. It's from the man standing up-the one who has shot him.
"I'm sorry-I-you looked a bit-"
"I'm fine. Don't worry about me." The man (Mitchell) spits on him. It hits the top of his lip.
The dying man can't understand any of this, of course, he only knows that he's been spit on and he is dying and this is all a tremendous indignity and he twitches a little bit.
"You got a girl, Mitchell?" the other man asks.
"Not exactly. Why?"
"I'm just saying-you can tell this story to 'not exactly'. She'll think you're a big damn hero, won't she? Bright side, innit?"
"Fuck off."
"Tetchy, aren't we? One might think you're brooding, Private."
"I said fuck off."
"All right, all right."
"He wasn't my first, anyway." It's almost nervous. A little overconfident.
"Like hell."
3.
She knows she's not supposed to. She's supposed to be a good girl, a good Catholic but it was always so hard to say no to him, to someone like that and they were all leaving, weren't they?
"Isn't it more of a sin not to?" His mouth is lining kisses around her neck, down to his undershirt and he's grinning, too cocky and she pulls back.
"I-"
"I'm going to war. I might not come back, you know."
Her breath catches.
"Don't say that."
She strokes his cheek with her hand.
"Might help to have something to remember home by."
"Oh, don't be ridiculous."
"Hannah," he coaxes, "Hannah."
"I expect you've done this before, then."
He shrugs.
"Only paying for it."
"Ah."
She's always been sweet on Johnny Mitchell, but they all have, haven't they, all the girls in the village, he's the wild one. He was beaten by the other boys when they were younger, the odd one, the one who looked like a foreigner but age fifteen or so he learned to use his fists and they all love him and they're all a little afraid of him and girls who have never spoken to him will pray he doesn't die in the war because that is what it is like with boys like that.
She didn't expect him to notice her. He was smoking, out by the back of the church and he saw her and the cigarette went under his foot and he grinned at her.
"Hannah O'Connell, isn't it?"
"Might be, John Mitchell."
He grins. There's something oddly childish about it.
"Well, I see you know me."
"Everyone does."
She bleeds for him, all over the bed and he hardly seems to notice, pushing into her and she feels almost disconnected from her body and it hurts and she says it doesn't and he kisses her when it is done and says he will remember her when he is away and she tells him, very softly, to come back and she's not sure he hears.
He'll marry her, she thinks, when he gets back, when he finds out and the war can't be too long and she waits and her clothes get tighter and she doesn't write to him, she doesn't know where she'd reach him but there's time, she thinks, except there isn't.
People in the village stop talking to her around seven months, her father slaps her hard in the mouth when he realizes (blood again for John Mitchell) she keeps praying he'll come back, he's wild but he's not cruel and he'll marry her and it will stop mattering and she tells herself this over and over.
As it turns out, he never does find out.
His father gets the telegram. People come to her house, to tell her, they must have known it was him (who else?) and it is gray and their village is gray and she feels the child moving in her and none of it seems to stop.
She bleeds, again, when the child is born, again over the sheets (more blood for John Mitchell) and it is in a different town and she has bought a cheap wedding ring, because who would guess, anyway? Half the women here are war widows and she guesses she hates him, it's funny, hating someone dead but he's taken everything away from her, that's always been what he's done, isn't it? He takes.
Nobody ever finds out she wasn't married. It's not quite a tragedy. It just is.
4.
Well, she was lucky, wasn't she? Must have been imagining things, though. Not like he was really going to drink her blood, must have been some kind of trick, the bastard, something to make her nervous, either that or he was just a real pervert, that one. She had a feeling about him from the first, she did, when she was in the pub sitting down and he came in. She figures the other one, the ugly one, was rich or important or something with that suit and the handsome one, the young one, paid to follow him around or she didn't really know, about the two of them because something put her off, almost, but the older one came up to her and offered to buy her a drink and who was she to turn down a free drink?
"You're small."
"Like small women, do you?"
"No. But you'll fit in the boot of the car."
It all happened quickly, too quickly, him pushing her out of the car and her shoe fell off and she hobbled on the way home and she doesn't know, was it some kind of code, some kind of joke, saying he'd drink her blood? She guesses he and his friend probably would have taken their turns with her-some men prefer to have you struggle, she guesses, even if you'd have said yes.
She's not a victim, but she is and she has nightmares afterward, him leaning into her, him saying she ran towards it, that she wanted it and that's what they all say, isn't it? She starts to wonder if it's true, if he's right and she earned it or would have earned whatever he was going to do. Because that's what they all deserve, don't they? You get into a car with a strange man and whatever happens, you deserve it.
He left a bruise on her thigh, where he pushed her out of the door.
It's just the kind of thing that happens to women in London.
(Not even good at mercy, eh, Mitchell?)
5.
"Am I the only one, then?"
"The only one what?"
She stubs out her cigarette.
"The only woman who's gotten to remember what an excellent lover you are." Her eyebrow is up. She gets out of the bed.
"Jesus, Josie-" He puts a hand on her arm. "Don't ask me that. You don't want to know."
"Yes, I do." Her eyes are rather hard. He realizes, looking at her, that she means it. That's the funny thing about her-she really does want to know, always.
"No. You're not."
"All right," she says, "how many?"
"But I-you-"
"How many?"
"A whore, when I was fourteen. A few whores, actually, when I could afford it. Hardly regular. Then I slept with a girl from my village, before I was turned. It was just before I left. And then two more prostitutes at the camp. "
"And after that?"
He swallows.
"No humans."
The truth is-
She's not his victim later, when he actually kills her, when she offers herself. She's his victim now because it won't work and they both know it won't work and she is here anyway and she will be a little ruined, after this, for men, she will settle for the man she marries and she will grow up and grow old and he will not.
"I'm setting myself up for disappointment, aren't I?" she asks, the first morning after the night they spend together. He is still naked, on her bed, all taut muscle and she tries not to look at him.
"No good for you, then?" He grins.
"Don't be an idiot."
"Take pity on me."
"You're an animal."
"Take pity on an animal.
She's his victim, because she falls in love with him and she shouldn't and that is the way things are with him, they are all his victims and maybe this is just how it has to be. She's not sure. She doesn't think she'll ever understand him, whatever else.
She ends up being the one to throw him out. It's something of an honor. She's certainly the only one to ever do that.