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When Jack grows up, he gets his own little flat with a bedroom and a kitchen. The walls and floor are grey and dreary, and the two windows look out onto the brick wall of the bank next door. It’s dark even during the day, and cold.
His mother visits him with food, as well as pictures of sunny beaches and blue skies for his walls. “To give the place some cheer,” she says, bustling around his tiny kitchen to warm up some soup. Jack sets the paintings facedown on the dresser, and smiles through a meal he can’t taste. She leaves and he throws them in the wastebasket. He never wants to see a sunny beach again.
He doesn’t go to university. Instead he keeps the gardens at the estate up the hill. Every time he stabs the dirt, a pig squeals. Dirt stains his hands like warpaint. While he works, the children of the house run around the garden, three of them, fair and clean and perfect. The oldest boy is named Eric, and it’s strange to see an Eric without a Sam attached.
Every weekend he gets himself to church, hands sweating in the throng of people. Sometimes he ducks out and hides in the lavatory, the choir too much like chanting. He tells himself he won’t go the next week, but he always wakes up early on Sundays. A penance, maybe.
Jack wonders, sometimes, what the other boys are doing. The littleuns wouldn’t be very little anymore. He wonders if they feel as guilty and broken and evil as him, and hopes not. Everything that had happened was his fault, after all. Some of them had been six years old, not yet reading. He had been the oldest, and Head Boy, and a dictator.
At night, the memories overwhelm him. They march through the jungle, half naked and painted. “Kill the pig! Slit his throat! Bash him in!” Ralph runs for his life across a burning beach. “You're a beast and a swine and a bloody, bloody thief!" So many moments he regrets, that he will never forgive.
The war ends, eventually. The men come home, and it’s easier, in some ways. Jack isn’t the only one in the neighborhood who wakes up screaming. But they were heroes for their country, and he was a murderer for himself. Veterans deserve comfort, and he doesn’t.
So he shakes his way through church. He lives in the dark. He splits his hands on the trowel as he gardens, day after day, planting life to make up for the ones he uprooted. When he watches children climb trees, he thinks of Simon. I am so, so sorry. You were right. We are the beast.
He doesn’t eat meat anymore.