I Remember The Mud And The Whistle From Before I Was Me

When I was small I had a dark birthmark high on my right thigh, an ugly puckered thing that the other boys stared at in the changing rooms. My mother said it was just how I came out. But I always felt it was a wound. Not a birthmark. A wound that had already happened to me somewhere else.

I did not have nightmares like other children. I had one dream, again and again, and it was not a dream so much as a place I went back to. There was mud. Cold mud that pulled at your boots. There was a long ditch dug into the earth and men sitting along it with their backs to the wall, and there was a whistle, and I knew, the way you know your own name, that the whistle meant you had to climb out of the ditch and walk toward the noise.

I was very young when I first told my mother about the whistle. I did not have the words for war. I called it the walking place. I told her that when the whistle blew you had to stand up even though standing up was the thing that killed you, and that I did not want to stand up but I stood up because the others did. She thought I had seen something on the television. We did not own a television then.

The mark on my leg was tied to it. In the dream, something hit me in the leg, high up, in exactly the place the birthmark sat, and I went down into the mud and I was warm all of a sudden which frightened me because everything else was cold. I would wake up with my hand clamped over my thigh. I did this before I understood what a bullet was, before anyone had explained what happened to a body when it was hit.

I never spoke about it outside the house because I could tell it made grown-ups uneasy. But when I was around eight my grandfather came to stay, my father's father, a quiet man who had been quiet his whole life. One evening he was looking through an old tin of papers and he laid a photograph and a name in front of me, testing something, I think. The name was his uncle, who had gone to the first great war as a young man and never come home. Missing, the letter said. No grave.