The Blind Light

by Stuart Evers

  ‘I think,’ Gault goes on, ‘It would be a good idea to introduce ourselves to each other, so everyone knows who we all are.’

  ‘We know who we all are,’ Nate says.

  Anneka watches her father flinch, his stepping in, his phoney laugh, the one he uses when Carter says something she does not understand, but her father clearly does.

  ‘This is my son, Nathan,’ says her father.

  ‘Nathan was it? Nice to meet you, Nathan. And you are?’ he says to Thomas.

  ‘Thomas Carter,’ he says. ‘We’ve met before. With my father.’

  ‘So we have! Nice to see you again, Thomas.’

  Gault displays no sense of recollection, a weary expression instead, his hand-rubbing joviality already waning. Stuck here with a bunch of resentful teenagers, an obsequious father, two women to make tea and comfort the kids. It is the first note of worry; the first sign of wavering. Bombast bombed out, scuttled by the scowling faces on the easy chairs.

  ‘And you, missy?’ Gault says.

  ‘You’ve met me too. I’m Natasha.’

  ‘My, my,’ he says. ‘You’ve grown since the last time I saw you.’

  Gault’s eyes perhaps linger on her longer than they should. Or perhaps she just thinks that.

  ‘This is Gwen, my wife,’ her father says. ‘And my daughter, Anneka.’

  Anneka says hello though she wants to remain mute, to stare at his weak chin and make some sharp remark, make the words scratch, leave a mark.

  ‘And you know me,’ Daphne says.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know you, Mrs Carter.’

  Gault takes a sip of his tea. Anneka feels him look at her, long eyes on her. Lissa would say something. Take a photograph, it lasts longer.

  Lissa in her flat on Granby Street, Lissa doing make-up, heading for lectures, Lissa asleep, still stinking of sex and cider. Lissa and the boyfriend Anneka’s not met, her lecturers and fellow students, all soon to be shadows and burn and bodies under rubble. Rats and cockroaches surviving; no one else. Impossible to think it actually happening; happening, and with a man looking her up and down, calmly judging, perhaps thinking which one he’d fuck first, when it came to it. The plumper, more buxom girl; the taller, lither one. Reducing herself to this, a pick, as in netball at school. The world now, this room. This room reduced to basic, primal thinking. The world reduced and Thomas Carter sitting looking at his fingernails, refusing to look at her.

  Gault speaks to the parents, turns his legs from the four teenagers; small talk and reassuring words, Cuba mentioned several times, a wash of words.

  ‘Hello, Anneka,’ Thomas says.

  ‘Hello, Thomas,’ Anneka says. ‘Dressed for the party, I see.’

  ‘As are you,’ he says. ‘I’m glad to see you’ve outgrown the punk look. It never suited.’

  ‘Oh don’t start, you two,’ Natasha says. ‘We don’t know how long we’re going to be down here, and I’ll go mad if you’re at each other’s throats all the time.’

  Since Fernando’s party, there has been no contact, no exchanges. He rarely returns from school these days, and when he does, he makes sure not to leave the confines of his property, though she has spied on him from her window, watched him swan and preen around the house, drink with his father, not seem to care he made her a prisoner. She likes to think of him beaten in alleyways, battered with lengths of pipe, strapped by lashes. And now here, a fingertip away, all too real, all too hateful.

  The Thomas who looks at her now is no longer the boy from the hide, if he were ever that boy. He is the boy who burned down the hide, who relished in her punishment. The boy from the hide would not have done what the arsonist did. That boy would not have given her up simply out of spite and jealousy. That boy would not smooth away his hair, laugh, look at his fingernails as if bored.

  ‘So Nate,’ Tom says. ‘How’s the football?’

  ‘Good,’ Nate says. ‘Playing for the under-seventeens now.’

  ‘Really?’ Tom says. ‘Gosh.’

  ‘There’s a scout coming from City next week.’

  ‘Well, good luck,’ he says.

  Nate sits embarrassed. A conversation exploded by tenses. Next week. A scout coming. Playing for the under-seventeens. All lies now, all made lies. She wonders if he realizes. Maybe she is wrong. Not possible to believe it, not truly.

  Fernando’s party, still going on, coming now to an end, one out of his control. Death of a myth, a legend. She can imagine him watching the bombs from his window, smocked and drinking the over-proof rum, asking the party if they can hear the drums. Can’t you hear the drums? The drums are coming!

  ‘How are you, Anneka?’ Natasha says.

  ‘Tired,’ she says.

  ‘Me too,’ she says.

  ‘I can’t believe they got us out of bed for a drill.’

  ‘Me either.’

  ‘If it gets to it, do you want to sleep in with me?’ Natasha says, abruptly, as though the question surprises even herself. ‘It’ll be like camp. Or like a sleepover.’

  ‘You don’t want to share with me,’ Anneka says. ‘I don’t sleep much. I toss and I turn.’

  ‘I don’t mind that,’ Natasha says. ‘I just don’t want to share with Tommy. He snores and his feet smell.’

  Natasha laughs at that, the first time Anneka can remember sharing any sort of joke with her. Natasha’s eyes cast down, expecting rebuttal, an easy rejection. Anneka has known her since her birth and yet can’t recall any specific bit of knowledge about her. Anneka has seen her in dresses, being driven off to dances, made-up and graceful in new gowns, but cannot imagine an interior life for her. She has no character, as far as she can see; quick to tears, she remembers, but what else? Some people, she thinks, are locked to us, unknowable as rock; they pass into our lives, and pass out just as quickly, glancing off us, never really meeting. And now Anneka is stuck with her, her only female contemporary, a fifteen-year-old, sitting baffled in rich-girl clothes.

  ‘If you want,’ Anneka says. ‘If that’s what you’d like.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It is.’

  ‘Nate,’ Anneka says. ‘I’m going to sleep in with Natasha. You sleep in with Thomas.’

  ‘Okay,’ Nate says.

  Thomas is talking to her father and Gault. She gets up and taps Thomas on the shoulder. He ignores her, continues to talk of his interview at Oxford, his witty and thoughtful answers. She taps him again.

  ‘Thomas, you’re sleeping in with Nate, okay?’

  Thomas turns. He smiles, that smile.

  ‘What was that, Annie? I was just talking to Mr Gault here.’

  ‘You’re sleeping in with Nate.’

  The radio scuffles then, whining until a voice pierces the static. All eight of them are drawn to it, filings to a magnet. Gault turns up the volume; her father tunes the dial for better reception.

  ‘In Vestry Park,’ a clipped male voice says, ‘the annual rainfall decreased by three-fold over the months of November and December.’

  They all look at Gault. He sits as the voice continues with its incomprehensible bulletin. They know he knows what it all means, but dare not interrupt.

  ‘January saw an abundance of snow, five inches falling in a single day on the twenty-second. Flood warnings could be in place in February, with fine weather for the time of year promised in the last week of the March.’

  The report repeats, then concludes with static. They all look at Gault.

  ‘My God,’ he says. ‘It’s starting.’

  7

  The family hold each other. The four of them. They hold each other and remain embraced; arms around arms, their heads bowed, locked temple to temple. No matter the rehearsal, opening night always a leap. Metaphor redundant, comparisons blithe. No words for it. No way to pinion it, no linguistic trap a suitable snare. It is the totality that evades us. The exuberance of the whole. Every possible emotion, every single reaction, experienced at its most heightened, at its most intense. Terror, yes; but more than tha
t; grief, yes, but more than that; anger, yes, but more than that; thrill, yes, but more than that; pity, yes but more than that. On and on. Every last emotion dialled up, jacked up, blended and pulsed, no drug invented or imagined as powerful. An implosion of emotion so savage, so various and so concentrated, the body is placed under the most extreme of pressures, every part of the human ecosystem straining under its weight. It is the hit that every addict craves; somewhere between the delivery of a healthy child and a stillbirth; between surviving a knife attack and stabbing someone dead; between whole body orgasm and the first signs of cardiac arrest. It is all of human history and human experience in one ten-second fury.

  8

  After the message on the radio, after she has hugged her family, Gwen turns to Daphne. They look at each other, the way they sometimes do, as though checking each other’s make-up. Daphne gets up, heads to the kitchen and returns with a magnum of champagne. Unasked, Gwen goes to the kitchen and comes back with glasses. Daphne opens the bottle, the pock as the cork flies echoing around the room. She fills the glasses and hands them around, the early evening hostess, a painted smile on her lips.

  ‘I promised my husband I’d do this,’ she says. ‘I promised him we’d toast everyone. Wish everyone bon voyage and safe sailing.’

  Her hands are shaking, all their hands are shaking, they look like they are aboard a cruise ship experiencing heavy weather.

  ‘Bon voyage,’ Gault says.

  ‘Bon voyage,’ Gwen repeats.

  Daphne downs her glass; everyone follows suit. And, as at Christmas, they all turn to listen to the voice of the Queen, addressing her subjects from the radio’s orange glow.

  OPERATION MID-OFF

  At the RSGs, we played the recorded Queen’s speech on the designated frequency. Some had heard the words before, most had, but they were still surprised. NATO was trying to calm the situation, but there was no way to calm something this far in train. British missiles were primed. The Russian missile silos were trained upon London, Manchester and Glasgow. The Queen was aboard her nuclear submarine off the Scottish coast. We sat waiting. Working, but waiting.

  Bryan Jerrick, My Cold Wars (Underworld Press, 2001)

  10

  In the small bathroom, Drum sits on the chemical toilet, lets loose his bowels, wonders who will come in next and vow never to follow him into the privy. If the attack is light – amusing, like being lightly pregnant – then six weeks should be enough. Two months at most. The radio will give the all-clear, the instructions. All that training, so long ago, and all so meaningless, if it had meaning even then. The idea of walking out, a few days after, looking for survivors, for those in the lintels of buildings, trapped under rafters, absurd now, laughable.

  Drum wipes and hears a different voice, a different timbre to it, something on the radio. Piss splashes his underpants and he pulls them up, rushes from the toilet. The first news and not there to hear, the first word and him shitting. He runs into the living space and wants to ask what he’s missed, but Gault has a preventative finger to his lips. He is standing closest to the radio, ear bent to the speaker, a BBC voice talking, dinner-jacketed, smooth and warm, treacle on crumpets.

  Warheads in the industrial north and the capital. Casualties unknown. America and the USSR attacking with multiple warheads in multiple locations. Citizens to stay indoors, underground until further notice. More instructions will follow. This bulletin will be repeated every half an hour until more information is made available.

  There are no embraces, they stand as mannequins around the wireless, waiting for more, but nothing more coming. Gault removes his spectacles and wipes them thoroughly with a handkerchief.

  Drum thinks of the blast radiuses learned on Service, the heat maps, the orange sectors of total destruction. Burned into retina those maps, though useless now; the tonnage of the bombs so much bigger than before. Industrial north, Manchester or Sheffield, Newcastle, close enough. The fucking impotence of it.

  ‘When it happens, and when you’re panicking,’ Carter said, a few weeks before, ‘think of me. Holed up in a tiny berth, sleeping in a bunk bed below some farting, wanking counsellor or some red-faced copper. Think of me buried there, away from my family, wondering if you got there in time, wondering whether I’ll ever see you all again. Think of that. Think of me and think of them. Remember, down below, you are me. You understand? When you go down, you are me, and you think like me. You understand?’

  This just before the invasion of Afghanistan, the growing tensions; must have known then, but not able to say. And what would Carter do now? Tell stories? Tell jokes? He would be useless. He would not be dependable. He would jitter in the aftermath, waiver in the confines of the room, kick things over, lose his mind. When he said he wanted Drum to be him, what he really wanted was Drum to be the Carter he’d always assumed he was: in control, born to lead, a rock on whom to depend.

  Drum can be that. Drum can do that. There are months ahead, but at the end of it, he will reunite Carter with his family. Drum will show him he was in control; show him that he’d led the Carters to safety in the new life. Safe, yes. All of them. Just as they’d planned. A glass of Scotch on his homecoming; a glass of Scotch and a promise upheld.

  11

  ‘I’m glad Jim’s not here,’ Daphne says, the two of them in the kitchen. ‘I thought I’d mind. I thought I’d miss him, but I don’t. Strange, isn’t it, that when you need someone most, you no longer need them?’

  Not to think of Ray. No. Not now and not here. Dead Ray. Shadow on a wall, Ray. Conversations in the afterlife with Nick: Ah, dear boy, I have been so wanting to talk to you, do you have time for a pint of black and tan?

  ‘At least he’s safe,’ Gwen says.

  ‘Do you think after it’s all over that wedding certificates will still be valid?’ she says. ‘Surely the records will be destroyed, won’t they? He could come back and I could say I don’t recognize him, tell him to leave my property. We have guns. Maybe I could threaten to shoot him if he doesn’t leave . . .’

  Daphne refills their glasses; in the living quarters, Drum and the children are playing Monopoly like it’s a wet afternoon on a summer holiday.

  ‘I always said I’d go when the kids left home,’ Daphne says.

  ‘Yes you did, Daphne.’

  ‘I think they’ve left home now, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s probably not the time to tell them you’re seeking divorce,’ Gwen says. ‘That could be stressful for them.’

  The two of them laugh.

  ‘He’s probably wondering who to fuck first,’ Daphne says. ‘Maybe I should fuck Gault.’

  She finishes her champagne.

  ‘I would if he didn’t look like a skinny version of my father,’ Daphne said. ‘I honestly would.’

  Gwen vomits in the small sink. Sudden it coming and then all out. Arms around her, Daphne’s arms, and more fucking tears, tears they should be catching, reserving for bathing and drinking; salty, endless as oceans. Fish dead in oceans, risen to the surface, a teeming shine of gill. Fish dead on beaches, swept to shore, a bounteous catch without a net in sight. Birds on the ground, felled from trees and the skies, beaks blackened, feathers singed. Cattle cremated, the smell of hog roast, beef brisket, lamb chops. Ray and Jenny, dead together, entwined, melted into one another, fused as solder-work.

  Daphne off her now; instead a different body. Drum’s sour smell, his arms around her, so many times, so many times over the years.

  ‘Got to be strong, love,’ Drum says, ‘for the kids. Come now, for the kids.’

  That smile and that face. Right of course. The right words and the right sentiment. Dry eyes now. Swirl out the sink, make clean, make right.

  12

  As pieces round the board, money changes hands. Wooden hotels sit on Trafalgar Square and Regent Street and Nate embroils himself in a concerted effort to bankrupt both his father and Thomas. He goes for the corners first, those around Free Parking, Go and the Jail, and builds up
his portfolio. He is tense every time his father rounds the Go square, hoping he’ll fall foul of his East London trap. His father dodges it eight times in a row, which seems somehow impossible; Thomas the same.

  He does catch them both at Fleet Street, collects from both with glee, counting out the paper bills into stacks of the same denomination. Thrilling that, the beating of the two men, the sighs as they hand over their tithes. When he lands on Regent Street, Nate expects Tom to exact revenge, to slide his finger down the card to reveal the huge amount to pay, then revel in the winnings. He doesn’t. He just says the amount and Nate passes it over.

  Nate moves his pewter motor car, but instead of concentrating on the game thinks of his friends. He can see Gary, Richie, Dave and Al dead. Can see them, peaceful almost, laid in their beds. He thinks then of Asa Hartford and Colin Bell, the two of them combining to score a goal just as the bombs drop. He cannot imagine Colin Bell or Asa Hartford, Kenny Dalglish or Trevor Francis dead. He cannot imagine they would not be safe. They would be down below like them, surely?

  Under floodlights, hundreds of feet below ground, he sees them, the greatest footballers of their generation, playing endless games, labyrinthine tournaments. The greatest games ever played and no one there to see them, no crowd to go wild. Chris Birch is with them. The young midfielder showing the older men up. Chris Birch and his thighs, Chris Birch and his boots. He can’t imagine Chris Birch dead.

  Nate rolls a five and a four, moves his car around the nine spaces. He looks around the table, the blank, bored faces, and he wants to fucking destroy Thomas. Deep, deep the burn, the tightness in his arms, the clench of teeth. Headbutt first; a knee to the groin as he goes down. Sitting there, looking at fingernails, not caring, not playing, calm and casually dressed. Rolling the dice and moving his speedboat and missing his fucking properties again.

  ‘Cheat,’ Nate says.

  Thomas looks up from the board, a little smile there, thin the smile.