Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [100]
‘Hey there,’ Charles murmured into her ear, his words muffled by the pillow. ‘Come back; you’re a long way away.’ Tactfully, ‘How about supper?’
This was one of the times when she was tempted to tell Charles everything; she had a feeling he would understand. But an unspoken pact had been established: they existed in the here and now, within a bubble of warmth and security. What was outside remained outside. Were she to say ‘I have a son. He’s in a prison camp for enemy aliens and I’m sick with worry’ – worry for his well-being and, unacknowledged, worry too that he might be drifting away, becoming less her son, indeed someone alien – what could Charles say? Comforting her, he would need to say . . . something. Did he, too, have a son? A daughter? Did he have a wife? He surely had a life. A complicated one.
She twisted back into the circle of his arms, clinging to the warmth of him, swept by the fear of another loss; drawing him into her. They fitted together like a soft jigsaw puzzle, breast, belly, thighs, flesh to flesh, her legs trapping his.
‘Later,’ she said.
45
Letters from home. On days when a dust storm lashed the barracks and whipped the faces of internees hurrying to mess hall or shower block, Joey, alone in the hut, ran his fingers over the thick, creamy paper Nancy favoured, and pictured her writing at the kitchen table of a narrow house in a street with a dry goods store on the corner where once he had sat on the porch steps and watched shabby men buying sardines and Saltine crackers before trudging on towards the endlessly receding horizon.
‘Dear Joey . . .’
A letter required a reply. His pen hovered, as usual. There were letters unwritten, that sang their silent words in his mind; revised, refined, endlessly qualified to be ever more precise. These were purely theoretical letters. Head stuff. There were others, written but not posted: jottings, despairing or angry, scribbled, torn up. There were, finally, those Joey completed and entrusted to the collection bin, to the trucks, trains and delivery men. These were the envelopes Nancy opened, the pages she read and reread.
One of these was the brief note that told her he was leaving the camp.
He never intended to enlist. Anger, resentment, a sceptical view of the government’s change of heart, all pushed him towards non-involvement. In the hut, late at night endless conversations took place, as they took place in other huts. Kazuo and Taro the smart ones, Ichir the joker, Joey the oddball. Debating, questioning. What if . . . or if not . . . Would it help to . . . but on the other hand . . .
Afterwards, Joey tried to pinpoint what tipped it for him.
Partly he was doing it for Ben, who had carried a burden of guilt for being the brother too young to go to war, the brother who survived. Partly he was doing it for a whole heap of people who thought they were American until told otherwise; when they suddenly discovered they were enemy aliens. He wanted to peel that label off them: smash the wire fence, yell at the guards, ‘Category error! Category error!’
Perversity played its part: he disliked being called a smartass who felt he was too clever to be gun fodder. And there was revulsion from his surroundings, a flight from apathy. If he signed, wherever they sent him, he would be out of here. He needed space to breathe; he was twenty years old and his body itched for action.
The decisive moment crept up on him unheralded: in the confines of the hut they were arguing fiercely, Ichir, pacing and turning; Taro and Kazuo on the floor, backs propped against the wooden wall. Joey, cross-legged on the narrow bed, as always when thinking, had reached for pencils and paper and was