In this desolation the camp was established a mile down the road where the factories gave way to seeding grasses and dumped cars, and many officers and many men spent their days instructing him. Although it was useless. For the gun still always jammed. He could never get the better of the judo sergeant. An inability to leap the commutative law made the logic of circuitry an impossible barrier. He could light no fire without a match. Explosives still terrified him.

And the rain came down.
He pushed open the door of the waiting-room and sat by the rusting iron stove that burned deep among old cinders. He watched the lost souls flicker in the cherry red. The door was open so that he could hear the whistle of the train, and he could hear the roar of the fire and the rain on everything outside. The serge over his knees steamed and grew too hot, but his feet were cold in the draught rushing to the stove. The window was steamed up. He rubbed a pane clear and wiped his hand on the wooden bench. He had nothing to read. There were fading bye-laws on the wall opposite, but the print was too small to read without moving from the fire. There was an old orange and red poster advertising a far distant and unreal seaside from a time long before his war. The clock had stopped long ago. He found his watch had too. Through the smeared windows he could see the sparrows hopping in and out under the rain dripping from the roof onto the edge of the platform. There were mail sacks on grimy trolleys and cardboard crates standing, stained by drips from the roof. There were sparrows on the platform edge and the hiss and drip of rain and the heat and the coke fire burning red coke burning the lost souls flickering and a seaside far away with bucket and spade on a holiday the waves and the rain running for the shelter of the pier running and he woke up to the big diesel thundering through non-stopping and the roaring fire of the stove was all around him. And he was sweating and he was cold.

He smoked a cigarette. It was too overcast to tell the time.

They’d shown him rats first. The Professor came down and explained that some were more intelligent than others and how they could be trained. But his assistants all joined in, arguing, and Hobbled sat looking at the rat they’d got in the maze who’d long since got its reward and was now sitting up looking bored and every now and then cleaning its ears with little delicate jerks of its paw that reminded him of the way she jerked the brush out of the ends of her hair. And by now they were all clustered around the blackboard in great excitement, and the rat finally curled up in a corner, after looking at him and twitching its nose for some time, and fell asleep, and the late sun came into the nissen-hut and flooded all the many past days and he fell asleep, too, dreaming of them.

They never did like the way he fell asleep. He used to go out in full kit, staggering under the weight of the huge ball of string, paying it out as he went, trudging through the long canvas corridor they’d set up in the desert fifty miles out from camp. The dry heat built up inside until the canvas seemed like the bricks of a cooling furnace, and if it didn’t they’d pump hot air in, and sometimes saturated hot air, to make it like however it might be over there. And you stumbled on and on. And he stumbled, lurched on. And distantly, melting into shapes like a dissolved negative on and on she on and on as the day went on and the miles went on and the string unravelled dream somewhere out there not over there behind me all behind to the next corner and to the sand bones put there or here or anyway and to the next, and the next, and the next. And they would find him at some corner fast asleep. At first they would come quickly and shake him awake. But then they started to leave him, and it was cold and bright with stars when he woke up. There wasn’t much they could do except try again the next day.

“How can we reward you,” the Professor said tetchily one evening, “if you don’t ever succeed?”

But one day he patted Hobbled jocularly on the shoulder. “I think you’ll keep awake today, young man,” he said.

Towards evening - if it was evening; under the canvas only the watch on his wrist said it was, and who knows what they had done to that? - he staggered, searing pace after searing pace, to a wavering corner, red in his eyes, blood thundering in his ears, the string diminished to a ball in one hand, and stopped for breath against the corner-pole, and waited for his racing heart to slow before pushing himself away from the pole, and round.

And there she was beside a little tent, in a canvas chair, her back towards him, a thermos-flask beside her, reading. And the green grass grew all around.

He broke into a scrambling run across the last few yards of sand.

The soft backs of her arms and her long brown legs stretching out and the hair of the crown of her head.

But the Professor leapt like a little monkey from behind the tent, followed by two military policemen. “Not so fast,” he said, and they dragged him away.

The next time they let him get to the chair and look down over the back.

And the next time to her side.

And the next time to sink down on the grass in front of her.

And the next to halfway through the raising of her eyes.

And the next to the moment of recognition.

And the next to the first vocable.

And a darkening of the lake extended from the shores until, afloat on darkness, they seemed as distant as fisherman from the horizon’s rim. And the soft tones became masculine, the dulcet hard. And against his will he released an oar to drift, and reaching into darkness encircled with cold fingers a furred wrist, while she growled fiercely at the pain, as a beautiful cat will growl at a tumour.

Perhaps it is better not to understand, he thought, to be married, to walk streets, wipe dishes, strike matches, taste, talk, joke. Perhaps it is no honour to go down like a banner before forever.

And the rain fell, dripped, channelled from the roof, hissed, sprayed, misted the distance and the glimpsed fields. Life came only from the scuttering sparrows, but he imagined the woodlice in the damp beneath forgotten timbers, the spiders indifferent to minutes, the worms turning over the tons of fields. The small unconscious slow continuing fierce indifference.

Down the line the long hoot sounded. The train came out of the mist and out of its sound, and filled the station with arrival. She stepped down into his arms and the morning was lemon-cool and delicate on its legs like a foal.

All day her hair fell around her face like a lion entangled with honey and the long summer passed on. The hills opposite remained hazy under a warm sun. No glint of steel or lens flickered from the roofless farmhouse across the valley. Not a bush stirred.

But Hobbled was afraid.

“You still love him,” he said, sneering.

She said nothing.

“You’ll do anything for him,” Hobbled said.

“He’s good,” she said, turning away. “That’s all.”

I can’t stay, he said. The time has come, he said. You’d use anything, she said. Anything, he thought. And they will call you a hero! she said.

“You cannot go on living with an invalid,” the Padre said. There was a thin aluminium cross on the unplastered wall behind him. The CO told him no reasonable man could be expected to put up with it. The sergeants all agreed they wouldn’t stand for it. The symposium reached a consensus. They took him back for a refresher course.

All day long the speakers belted out the Emperors singing ‘Clothes’. We’ll have you right they said, unfolding huge posters. Just you wait, they said, lacing up projectors. Hang on, they said fiddling with fine tuners. It won’t hurt, they said, thumbing through colour-proofs. She’ll get over it, they said. After all, crying’s not like writing a poem.

Touching her shoulder in gossamer acknowledgement of all they shared, he got up in disgust from the sunlit table outside the cafe where the three of them were sitting. Hobbled went into the Gents as he came out and there was the smell of vomit and all over the walls FUCK scribbled in his immature hand, FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK, and there was nothing else to be said we all know know know know know FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK.

“That way lies fascism,” the chief instructor said, picking his nose.

Woodlice in the damp beneath forgotten timbers, the spiders indifferent to minutes, worms turning over the tons of fields.

“It’s time to go,” the instructor said, examining his snot.

And Hobbled smoked with a hot mouth, leaning over the water on the shaded side of the sail, and once a week they ran the auxiliary for ten minutes, and the fumes settled in the calm air and hung about the deck for hours.

Over the soup the old man said, “What do you want to know?”

“Whether it is still possible?”

Wiping the plate with his bread. “Once you get there you will see for yourself.” Drinking. Taking an apple. “You will see for yourself or not at all.”

Out in the bay Hobbled saw again the recession of evening, the horizontals of a declining sun, the left sand-castles, runnels of chair-leg and overprinted chaos of footfalls waiting, waiting upon the high tides, the secret tides of darkness, absolving, erasing, taking back to the sea’s swell the disturbed grains, the shells patterned on crumbling parapets, the feathers, tins, papers of bright high day.

“I used to think my father was a god,” he said. And it came back, the heat of the rock as he placed his palm against it, the scent of the honey from the hive torn open, the rising of the bees, the sudden scatter of crawling things, the black scorpion running, and the sandals, winged, really there beneath.

Hobbled picked his teeth.

Out in the bay he saw again the recession of evening, who had once stood with a sleeping child in his arms, and seen an otter serpenting through moonlight and shallow pools where the light from a distant dissolution was absorbed at last.

“He was human,” the old man growled. But he filled the wine cups, and the evening surrounded them, and Hobbled thought it might still be possible, sitting beneath the dark branches, watching the bubbles in the dark wine, flies in their ceaseless explorations, and the shadows of leaves on the table and the old man’s hands.

Hubbard's books are presently available as paperbacks or PDF downloads from www.lulu.com/alanhubbard