Water Over the Bridge

Everyone in Hackney heard about the ‘15 pound baby’. They say he looked like a lump of beef. That’s where he got his nickname. When the Great War struck 20 years later, and Beef was sent to the trenches and fed old, tinned beef every day, it felt like some kind of cruel joke.

Beef was so imposing and stoic that he instilled a supernatural courage in the soldiers around him. They were comforted, like children standing behind the leg of their father. They’d charge anywhere, as long as Beef charged with them. 

Despite Beef’s 7 foot, 200kg frame, the Germans could never hit him, and stories of his size and strength crept through their already fragile trenches. Gruesome fairytales of Rachsüchtiges Fleisch - ‘Vengeful Meat’ - were whispered, and feared. But they were just stories. Beef was a man, and the death, the mud, the stench, and the cruelty broke him. He was shipped home to a psychiatric hospital, where he joined the other shell-shocked ghosts of Europe’s implosion. 

Two weeks later, in the hospital cafeteria, Beef snapped. He could see the trenches and the bayonets all over again. He attacked the staff. Every guard on the property was summoned to the cafeteria to subdue him, and in the end, he’d hurt ten people, and killed two others. Three, if you count his suicide soon after.

The incident left the hospital entrance unguarded. It was an escape window I couldn’t ignore.

Unlike Beef, I faked my insanity. I simply couldn’t run into No Man’s Land again. So I merrily skipped and danced up and down the trenches singing God Save The Queen until they sent me home and wrapped me in a straight jacket.

On the morning of Beef’s final stand in the cafeteria, I walked out the door and ran into the woods. I avoided the roads. If I was spotted, I’d be back in the hospital just in time for afternoon tea and electroshock therapy. 

The woods were so quiet and sleepy that I felt guilty crashing through the brush. With no arms to balance me, I fell over, again and again. My hospital clothes were wet and filthy, but I kept running, slogging through the mud. It was painfully familiar.

That afternoon I reached a town. I was careful to not be seen, but it soon struck me that it was almost empty. It felt dead, as if something had sucked the life out of it. I knew what that something was.

I strolled through the streets, free, yet trapped. Occasionally I’d see an old, haggard face in a window. What was that look in their eyes? Was it disgust, or pity?

It soon started to rain, and I hastily took cover under a stone bridge over a cobbled street. While I waited for the rain to abate, I strained against the jacket, twisting, pulling, wrenching, contorting. Nothing.

Suddenly, out of the rain and into the refuge of the bridge burst a young man, soaked and breathless. He wore a long trench coat, his hands jammed in his pockets. Hatless, his drenched hair stuck to his face. He shook it off his face like a dog, and looked at me.

‘Hullo!’ He saw my jacket. ‘Bloody Hell, are you from the asylum?’

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.

‘Shell shock?’ he asked.

I cleared my throat. ’Aye.’

‘Where’d you fight?

‘France.’ 

He smiled. ‘Me too.’ He nodded at my filthy hospital garb. ‘How’d you get out?’

‘A soldier had a fit this morning. His name was Beef. He was a giant of a man. Every guard left their post, and I ran.’

‘I say… Beef is in the hospital?’ He looked concerned and distant, his stare drifting off towards France, as if he thought Beef’s absence meant the war effort was doomed.

The rain seemed to be getting heavier and heavier now. Perhaps God was trying to wash the world of the sins we’d committed. It struck me that I couldn’t perform the Sign of the Cross, should I need to. Does an insane man not deserve to pray? 

‘Listen, mate, I know that what I’m about to ask is a lot, but would you help me get out of this jacket? I won’t tell anyone you helped me.’

‘I’d love to, but…’ he lifted his knee and used it open up the right side of his jacket. He had no arms. 

‘Gangrene. My Mum stuffed the jacket sleeves and sewed them into the pockets so people wouldn’t stare.’

‘Oh, right.’ I suddenly felt tired.

We stood there for a moment, two armless men with nothing much to say. It was getting colder, so we sat together under the bridge, huddled side by side. The warmth of men, meat stuffed in a can. It felt like the trenches again, but there was no artillery. There was just the dull symphony of the rain. 

‘How do you pray?’ I asked him out of curiosity. ‘With no arms -  no sign of the cross?’

He looked at me, confused.

‘You still believe there’s a God? After all we’ve seen?’

I turned away, and watched the water dripping down from the bridge above us, as the rain began to waver. I didn’t want it to stop, I wanted it to rain forever, to flood the trenches, flood the cities, drown the soldiers, drown the politicans, drown the Kings and Queens, drown the hospital, drown the old people in their homes, drown me and the amputee under the bridge. To cleanse it all. 

I started to weep, but the man didn’t console me. He couldn’t, they’d taken his arms. I put my head on his shoulder.

In the distance, we heard police sirens wailing, like the whistle of the commanding Officer. The whistle that tells you you have to go ‘over the top’, and back into Hell.