Hemingway’s Chair

bastard.’
    He
regarded Martin with frank contempt. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t know what those
are.’
    The
curly-headed boy giggled again. The farmer pointed angrily into the field.
    ‘Those
buggers are bloody bullocks. They haven’t a bollock between them. And I’m not
going to get them bloody fed if stupid bloody buggers like you start waving
their bloody arms and yelling and putting the fear of bloody God into them.’
Then he stopped and looked at Martin suspiciously. ‘Are you one of those hunt
saboteur buggers?’
    Martin
shook his head. He ached all over and he could feel the first drops of rain.
    The
farmer persisted. ‘You bloody look like one. All bloody scrawny and smooth.
Well, you’re all the bloody same you buggers. You can’t be real men, so you get
in the bloody way of those who bloody are.’ Martin reached the gate and a
moment later mounted his bike. So urgent was his desire to get away from this
place that his foot slipped and the pedal spun round and cracked him hard on
the shin. He thrust his left foot down to steady himself and felt it slither
away on a lurking patch of bullock ordure. He toppled, quite slowly, into the
hedge.
    The
curly-headed boy giggled.

Thirty-four
     
     
     
    Martin
woke up with a jolt. He lay, fully clothed, holding hisbreath,
straining to hear a repetition of the sound that had awoken him. It came again,
preceded by a shrieking gust of wind. He pulled himself up. His head swam.
Without putting the light on he made his way unsteadily to the window and
slammed it shut as another gust cracked into the side of the house.
    As
he turned he caught himself a hard, disabling blow on the corner of the safari
table. He clutched his thigh and sank to the floor cursing.
    He
lay there until the pain wore off, then dragged himself across to his bed,
leaned against it and reached up to switch on the light.
    What
it revealed was not a pretty sight. At least he had remembered to remove his
shoes, which lay mud-caked where he had thrown them, beneath the hand basin.
His anorak was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he had removed it downstairs. His
soiled post office jumper and crumpled shirt had screwed themselves up around
his body as he slept. His trousers were creased up along his thighs.
    He
remembered arriving back home, damp and dirty. He had gone straight upstairs,
telling his mother he wanted an early night. That must have been six thirty or
seven. He turned the Ingersoll traveller’s clock towards him. It was two
o’clock.
    The
wind rose to a scream then fell away again. He clambered to his feet and began
to pull off his jumper and his shirt, his still-damp trousers and his
underpants until he stood before the mirror naked, save for the
paisley-patterned stockings on his feet.
    His
body was white and smooth. His shoulders were wide and skinny like a coat
hanger. His chest was concave and hairless and his skin freckled a little at
the shoulders. His stomach bulged, round and compact, and skimpy reddish brown
hair ran down towards his groin. He was quite startled to think that it was
this body that had brought Ruth such pleasure only two nights ago. There must
have been some mistake.
    He
ran water into the basin and doused his head and washed beneath his arms. He
dried himself carefully and pulled on a clean pair of underpants. Then he
opened his wardrobe and flicked methodically through the hangers.
    He
selected a military outfit. Though Papa had never been a soldier he had been in
a lot of wars as a reporter or an ambulance driver and Martin felt he would
approve of the khaki shirt, serge trousers and combat boots that he took down
from the top of his cupboard. To round it all off he clipped around his waist a
German army belt which was as close as he could get to the Wehrmacht belt that Hemingway often wore. This one too had ‘ Gott Mit Uns' engraved
on the buckle, and he had found it in an army surplus store behind Colchester
Barracks.
    On
the table he laid a US army helmet of the sort Hem was holding in the photo he
had of him with General Barton and Colonel Chance on the Western Front in ’44.
He took a bottle of tequila and a glass from the cabinet together with a small
bag of sea salt and a hardening week-old lime he had been saving for just such
a moment as this.
    He
sat down, sliced the lime and put the pieces on a saucer in front of him. Into
another saucer he tipped a small pile of the salt. Then he took the tequila and
poured a measure into a thick,