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Dizzy City

A Novel

Steerforth Press

PART ONE

Mr. Benedict Cramb

November 1915

I'm not one of those, thought Ben, looking back along the lines of sameness all dressed as he was, in drab green, dull as you like, a country visit on a day of rain. That's what they were now, the color of moss and mud, thousands and thousands of soldiers walking in one another's footsteps. I am different from that lot, thought Ben. If I was back in London, I'd be in a wool suit, the one with the chalky lines down it. I'd have my white shirt on, my shoes gleaming, my hair would be just cut, tapered to the neck and run through with Macassar oil. My mustache would be waxed and the ladies on the Strand, balanced in their heels, would be tapping their pretty little parasols at their sides, pretending not to look at me.

Then I'd be meeting the gentleman I've come for, beside his club with its slit-eyed porters. I'd be talking, as ever, and the man I'd be talking up would be nodding in agreement. We'd have met before, but now he'd trust me and he'd be reaching inside his jacket and out would come his wallet. It'd be pigskin, monogrammed and worn down by the passage of pounds, and he'd part that fleshy cleft and would dip in and pluck out a dozen notes for me. He'd have that confidence in me and then he'd never see me again. I'd be on the tram to Harrods, going with his money to buy myself a silk tie. I'd not be telling the boys about this little job on the side. This one I'd spend on myself.

The sergeant blew his whistle and Ben breathed in the wet air and stared up from his daydreams at the blank French horizon. What the hell am I doing here? A thousand pairs of boots in the damp mud, the soft pop of their lifting, the slap of their descent was all that Ben could hear. This is temporary, Ben swore to himself. War is a passing thing, but other men's money will be needed every day of my life.

Chapter One

They were lying on their fronts in the mud. There were two games usually played at night: Birthday, where a man named his favored food, and Perfect Girl, where each contributed a body part of a woman known to all until they conjured an ideal.

"Birthday or Perfect Girl?" whispered Douglas, breaking an hour of silence.

"Both," said Ben.

David giggled nervously.

"I don't want to play," whispered Chimer, his skinny body shaking from the cold.

"I'll go first," said Ben softly. "Mashed potatoes with lots of butter served off Ellen McNabb's bum. With the French silk pants on. The blue ones."

"You've never even seen them," said Chimer in a hushed voice.

"A roasted chicken," whispered Douglas, "held between Catherine Ellis's thighs. With her stockings on. And garters."

"Come on, Chimer," whispered Ben, "why don't you play?"

"You're all fucking lunatics," whispered Chimer through chattering teeth.

That morning, after the march, Ben had been standing in the trench, still tasting the taint of rum and bile at the back of his throat and then the whistle blast and he was over and running. They were together at least. And they went over together that morning, Ben and Douglas, and Chimer and David. Best friends who had taken their shilling together at the Duke of York's on the King's Road, had done their square bashing at Aldershot, running and drilling. Again, it was the noise that shocked him once he was over. The artillery had stopped, so there was no more thunder, just screeching and whistles and thuds and screaming. The Germans had hurried up from deep beneath their ordered trenches and set up their machine guns. Ben had looked to his right as he was trying to run and he could see them going down ten at a time, more. And he couldn't move fast, they had said to run, and Captain Traven was blowing his whistle, but Ben had mud coming over the tops of his boots and he didn't know about the rest, but he had trouble seeing out, had tears coming down his face. Crying, just the nerves, the body doing strange unconscious things. So he had moved with his own lot right on the eastern edge of the push, and everyone was going down, so Ben dived too and his lot followed. They always followed him.

His friends thought he was lucky. Twice in London Ben had been taken by the police, but they'd all been done five times and more. Of course, thought Ben, his wounds were relatively fortunate, the deep scar on his hand, but that was where a man got lucky wounds, out in the open, the only reason anyone ever volunteered for patrol. Stay in the trench and it was all head shots and shells, but on patrol or out in the open there was the blessed chance that a man could be shot in the leg or arm and packaged home.

Ben had dived into a shell hole. One of theirs, one of ours, Ben didn't know, but twenty feet deep and more. Ten days in a trench and earth on all sides and then up and running and feeling nothing but naked and exposed and in truth, there was comfort to be back down in the mud. First thing he did was to leave his rifle on the edge of the crater, pointing back to their own lines, because he knew he'd have the sense not to stick his head back over until darkness had fallen. By then they'd all have forgotten which way was which.

We're all right, Ben thought; no one knows we're in here. At the bottom there was thick mud, but none of them cared with the sound of what was above. There were bodies at the bottom, Germans from a push two days before. And there too was the body of Captain Traven. Ben's friends were trying to get purchase, using the other rifles to dig in so they wouldn't slip down. No one wanted to slip down into the deep mud with the dead.

Once secure, they looked at one another and found that they were, to a man, untouched, barely a scratch. Nothing wrong with any of them that rum rations couldn't have cured. They were shaking, but they'd been shaking all that morning waiting for the whistle. Ben remembered that Chimer hadn't been able to stop himself. Even when the fire had dwindled to silence, he was muttering, his thin frame shaking, "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. What the fuck are we doing here?"

Ben knew the answer: they had always followed him, from the theater, through the streets, right up to enlistment. He looked away from Chimer, useless to think about what could have been done differently to avoid the present. If they were to blame it on anything, then blame it on the fact that they had ever met. In London, in the theater on Old Street. The boys "acted" from time to time, bribed by their parents, brought on stage as orphans or acolytes. They were pointed to, drew an ahhhh from the mothers in the audience, and were given a little copper afterward to save for the penny candy store.

Sunday afternoons, after the matinee, the mothers and fathers would walk across the road to the Pig and Bell and the children would be left to mischief. Always to the prop room, Ben in possession of a borrowed key. Always soldiers. Redcoats, cavalry, Roundheads. And they were only caught once, when they had played too hard, breaking the cardboard swords.

"They look real," said Chimer.

"They are real," said Douglas, and brought one down on David's head.

"To the battlements," shouted Ben, and off they ran, parry and thrust, and when all had marched up and down, played the roles of good and bad, they found that their swords lapsed at awful angles, creased and wobbly.

"What do we do?" asked Chimer.

"Just put them back," said Ben, as if he thought that a night in the prop room would restore them to strength.

Ben had been summoned by Chimer's mother the next afternoon and bent over her knee. The shame of it, no real pain, just surprise and crying and red-eyed in front of your friends at the grand age of eight, too old for such babyish humiliations. Far too old to react with tears. Ben laughed now, little silent wisps of heat escaping from his lips in the half-light. How long had they been in the shell hole, he asked himself. An hour? Three?

"I'm the Romans," Ben said, age ten, standing in ill-fitting armor.

"What?" asked Chimer, swinging his shield around his head. Thin now, thinner then, all rib cage and wide eyes.

"I'm the emperor," said Ben.

"Of who?" asked David.

"Of you lot."

"And who are we?" asked Chimer.

"Whoever you want," said Ben.

"I'm a king," said David. Thick blonde hair, a mop until the army cut it. Always a comb in his back pocket, right up to enlistment. Look at him now across the shell hole — blonde sideburns, flecked with mud to the side of his helmet. "There was a King David, right?"

"We can all be kings," said Chimer breathlessly, his shield still held above his head.

Three kings against an emperor and they always knew that Ben was supposed to win. Their deaths could be long and imaginative. David and Chimer and Douglas twirling and shouting and making last, violent lunges at the emperor as they fell, but Ben was always left standing amid the bodies in the center of the stage. That was the way it always was. Ben remembered the sensation of their still bodies lying around him. They'd never dared to turn on the theater's floods, so there had never been any warmth from stage lights, none of the heat of the audience, and Ben had always felt he was alone in the dark, his friends at his feet, with no one watching from the wings at all.

"Can we get up now?" Chimer would always ask when they had died, exhausted and happy, lying in the middle of the stage.

"Not if you're dead," said Ben.

"Fuck off," said Douglas, and got to his feet. Always swearing to make the stagehands laugh, to get a reaction from their fathers. Ben turned from one side to the other, feeling the stiffness of one shoulder ease up as the other pressed against the muddy side of the crater. Chimer was staring at him.

"You come here Ben Cramb." Chimer's mother again. Always trying to curb him.

"Stick a finger up your arse," he would shout. Aged what, thought Ben, aged all of eleven. And spanked again, always by Chimer's mother. But no tears, not now, and his father dead and all of the company amused by him and soon a little wary. Ben's mother didn't come there anymore; she let him run wild. By then, only Chimer's mother felt she could discipline him. The rest let him stay. And then came the card playing, and then came the little thievery, the learning and the leading of Chimer, Douglas, and David. They all loved him, even their mothers deep down, even when they called him a cheeky monkey and he called them daft old windbags. But that was it; he was good looking even then. He'd learned to seduce as a child, could persuade them all, even Douglas eventually. He looked up at Chimer, still all bones, even in uniform, with his pack on, muddy puttees. Bet he doesn't weigh a hundred pounds, thought Ben. Never did.

* * *

"And what are we going to do?" asked Chimer, now thirteen. Past playing dress-up. Wanting to be older, little mustachy wisps guarding their mouths. Not Ben, of course. He had stolen a razor and made a morning display of shaving. Smoking, all four of them, out the back of the theater on the steps, watching the girls pass by in their stockings. "What are we going to do when we're old?"

"When?"

"I don't know, in five years then?" asked Chimer, a little cough at the rough tobacco.

"Make money," said Ben.

"Doing what?" asked Chimer.

"Football," said Douglas. "Five pounds a week at the Arsenal."

Ben shook his head. "Five pounds a week," he said. "That's for the monkeys. You don't have to work." He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wallet.

"Whose is that then?" asked Chimer.

"Point is," said Ben, "I don't rightly know. Point is, it's got twenty pounds in it. That's four weeks of David running in the mud with your Arsenal getting cold. And that's if you could kick a ball."

"Which you can't," added Douglas.

And the laughter and they're laughing at David, with his boyish dreams and his blonde thatch, and Ben did worse than that, he thought now in the mud. He gave them all a five-pound note, a fortune to his friends. They're not going to be able to show their mothers. It'll make them like him, apart from their parents. It'll make them like him. And did he like them? God yes, he now knows, not Douglas perhaps, too often against him. But David, and his winks and open heart, and Chimer, and his secret ties with Ben. Chimer's mother knew him well. Chimer knew him well, too. Knew Ben was still a little boy, that there was a thick layer of posture in Ben and what then? What was behind that? A shortcuts man, a con artist in schoolboy knee pants? Was he always this way?

* * *

"You awake?" murmured Chimer.

Ben nodded.

They began to whisper the time every other minute. Douglas had four wristwatches from picking in English graves. No luck in that, Ben had thought. They had smoked everything they had that afternoon, for they knew they couldn't smoke at night. There was nothing going on by then, all silent, except for those who'd been shot and hadn't made it back. Ben could hear them calling. The Germans were usually good with stretcher bearers, letting them come and go. He supposed most had made it back, but no one had thought to look in their hole, and they weren't about to look out.

"When the hell are we getting out of here?" Douglas whispered.

November and dull clouds and no sun, not that day. It was getting dark and they knew how cold it would be. The mud would harden, a crust of frost, and no food, no drink, not a cup of tea to warm them.

David said, "We'll get out tonight."

"What if we're shot by our own?" Ben asked. They didn't know the password. Why should they? They were supposed to be in one trench or the other, not in between.

"So what do we do?" David asked.

"Wait for the end of the war," said Chimer and that had brought the last shared laugh. "Or Ben'll think of something?" he added grimly. "Right Ben, right? Don't you always think of something?"

Ben looked down into the darkness behind him. The day before they had all been issued short pieces of rope to help pull one another out of shell holes should they fall from the duckboards. He sat upright beneath the lip of the crater, rubbed his hands together for warmth, and tied the ropes together, then signaled that he was ready to be lowered down the crater's side, to strip greatcoats from the dead. The earth was chalky and the depths of the pit emitted a creamy froth of phosphorescence.

* * *

Ben slipped down the shell hole toward Captain Traven's body. It lay atop the others. The German snipers had been picking the officers off, noting them by the gleam of their shoulder pips, and though Traven had been free of such identification, Ben recognized the fur-lined collar. Balancing with one foot in mud and the other on the back of a German corpse, Ben began to pull the coats off the bodies, then throwing them up to Douglas. They'd been issued badly cured fur jerkins that still reeked of the goat, sheep, or horse they'd been stripped from, but had been ordered to remove them for the attack. Germans overcoats were thicker than theirs but none was as fine as Captain Traven's: leather cuffs, fur collar. Ben kept it for himself. There was a small book of some kind in the inner pocket that Ben decided to return as identification. Douglas and David hauled him back up the slope and the four men sat miserable in the darkness together, urging the sun to rise.

Still, they could not warm themselves. Chimer wanted to crawl back to their lines, but Ben insisted they'd be shot. "Stretcher parties'll be out again at dawn," Ben said, pushing his hands under his armpits.

"What if they don't find us?" asked Chimer.

"They don't have to," Ben had answered, explaining that if Chimer, as the smallest, played dead, they could use two rifles as a stretcher and put one of the greatcoats over him, create their own stretcher party. There was only one small issue. There were only four of them. In thick mud, the RAMC always used four men per stretcher, sometimes eight in double shifts. They knew it would be hard, but still, better than creeping through the dark with one of your own taking potshots at you. Muddying their helmets first, they pissed on the firing mechanisms of their guns to free them of muck, then held them close and threw a coat over Chimer. David and Douglas had one end, and because Ben was the biggest, he stood alone at Chimer's legs.

At dawn, they made it all of twenty feet from the shell hole, and it had been silent. Ben had a Sunday morning feeling, like he waswalking over a field to church and nothing else was stirring. He was with his best friends in the world, but his hands were so cold, they'd been bare to the wind all night and the mud was like black ice, slippery, and he was trying to keep hold, but he couldn't. One of the rifles slipped and out came Chimer. He fell to the ground, sprang to his feet, and immediately began to wipe his muddy hands on his puttees. And it would have been funny anywhere else, a face full of mud and your best friends there to laugh. There was nothing but silence, but Ben sensed something else; he knew they were being watched. There must have been some sun that morning, because Ben's last memory was of a rapid shadow moving across the mud, and he could hear it coming, one of those barrels coming through the air and he was farthest and he saw it so he could turn his back and let Chimer block its path.

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Excerpted from Dizzy City by Nicholas Griffin. Copyright © 2007 Nicholas Griffin. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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