Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Walt Williams talked on in the darkness. And at some point, I began to hear the ticking rattle of something which I thought at first were his keys or his coins, the kind of nervous habit that most pilots end up getting. It didn’t sound quite right, but by then I was too absorbed in what he was saying. Flying, once Walt had discovered it, had been his escape, although, because of the danger to their precious investment of time and good schools and money, his parents disapproved of it even as a hobby. They cut off his money, and what there was of their affection. Walt worked in garages and then on the airfields, and flew whenever he could. He even toured with a circus. The rattling sound continued as he spoke, and I sensed a repeated sweeping movement of his hand that he was making across the stone on which we were sitting, as if he was gently trying to scrub out some part of these memories.

  Then the War came, and, even though the RAF’s discipline, and the regularity, were the same things that he detested in his parents, Walt was quick to volunteer. But he liked the people, or many of them, and he came to admire the big and often graceless military planes. The kind of flying he’d done, often tricks and aerobatics, Walt was used to risk; he opted for bombers rather than fighters because, like anyone who’s in a fundamentally dangerous profession, he looked for ways in which he thought, wrongly as it turned out, the risk could be minimised. And up in the skies and down on the ground, he sailed through his War. He dropped his bombs, and he wasn’t touched by the world below him. Part of him knew that he was being even more heartless than the machines he was flying, but the rest of him knew that if he was to survive it was necessary to fly through cold, clear and untroubled skies of his own making.

  The faint sound of the band in the barn had long faded, and I could see the sweep and movement of Walt’s hand more clearly now, and the clouds of our breath and his cigarette smoke hanging like the shapes of the statues around us. I had little difficulty in picturing Walt as he described the kind of pilot he’d once been; the kind who imagined, despite all the evidence, that nothing would ever happen to them. Not that Walt believed in luck back then—he said he only went along with the rituals so as not to unsettle his crew—but at a deeper and unadmitted level, and just like all the rest of us, luck had become fundamental to him.

  In the big raids that were then starting, which were the revenge for the raids that the Germans had launched against us, so many bombers poured across their cities that they had to go over in layers. Some boffin must have worked out that the chance of a bomb landing on a plane flying beneath was small enough to be worth taking. But in a mass raid over Frankfurt, flying through dense darkness, there was a sudden jolt and a blaze of light, and Walt’s top gunner reported that a falling incendiary had struck their starboard wing. Expecting a fuel line to catch at any moment, or for a nightfigther to home in on them now that they were shining like a beacon, they dropped their load and turned along the home flightpath. But the nightfighters didn’t come, and the wind blasting across the airframe stopped the incendiary from fully igniting. Hours went by, and they crossed the coast of France into the Channel just as the night was paling. The whole crew were starting to believe that their luck would hold, and were silently wondering how to milk the most drama out of the incident in the bar that evening, when the whole plane was suddenly ripped apart as the wing, its spar damaged by the heat of that half-burning incendiary, tore off into the slipstream. In a fraction of a moment, the bomber became a lump of tumbling, flaming metal.

  There was nothing then but the wild push of falling, and the sea, the sky, the sea flashing past them and the wind screaming as the bomber turned end over end and they tried to struggle from their harnesses and climb out through the doorways or the gaping hole that the lost wing had made. Walt said it was like being wedged in a nightmare fairground ride, and that all he could think of was having heard somewhere that the sea was hard as concrete when you hit it. That, and not wanting to die; that, and needing to be lucky. In moment of weightlessness, globules of blood floated around him, and he saw his co-pilot with a spear of metal sticking right though him. There was no way Walt could help. He clambered up the huge height of the falling plane against a force which suddenly twisted and threw him down towards the opening. But he was wedged into it, stuck amid twisted piping and scarcely able to breath as the tumbling forces gripped him. It was then that the thought came to him—the same thought that must have crossed the minds of thousands of airmen in moments such as these—that he would give anything, anything to get out. Anything to stay lucky…

  The darkness had grown thin and gauzy. Looking down now, I could see that Walt was throwing two white dice, scooping them up and throwing them again.

  “So I was lucky,” he said. “I got the parachute open before I hit the sea and my lifejacket went up and I wasn’t killed by the flaming wreckage falling about me. But I still thought it was probably a cruel joke, to get this far and freeze to death in the filthy English Channel. Then I heard the sound of an engine over the waves, and I let off my flare. In twenty minutes, this MTB found me. One of ours, too. Of all the crew, I was the only one they found alive. The rest were just bodies…”

  I could see the outlines of the trees now through a dawn mist, and of the statues around us, which looked themselves like casualties wrapped in foggy strips of bandage. And I could see the numbers on the two dice that Walt was throwing.

  A chill went through me, far deeper than this dawn cold. They went six, six, six…

  Walt made that sound again. More of a cough than a chuckle. “So that’s how it is. I walk over puddles. I fly though tour after tour. I’m the living embodiment of lucky.”

  “Can’t you throw some other number?”

  He shook his head and threw again. Six and six. “It’s not a trick. Not the kind of trick you might think it is anyway.” Six and six, again. The sound of those rolling bones. The sound of my teeth chattering. “You can try if you like.”

  “You forget who I am, Walt. I don’t need to try. I believe…”

  Walt pocketed his dice and stood up and looked about him. With that gaze of his. Smiling but unsmiling. It was getting clearer now. The shoulders of my coat were clammy damp when I touched them. My hands were white and my fingertips were blue with the cold. And this place of statues, I finally realised, wasn’t actually the garden of the house at all, but a churchyard. Our bench had been a tombstone. We were surrounded by angels.

  “Come on…” Walt held out his hand to help me up. I took it.

  I expected him to head back to his battered MG, but instead he wandered amid the tombstones, hands in his pockets and half-whistling, inspecting the dates and the names, most of which belonged to the family which had lived in that big house beyond the treetops. Close beside us, there was a stone chapel, and Walt pushed at the door until something crumbled and gave, and beckoned me in.

  Everything about the graveyard and this chapel was quite and empty. That’s the way it is in a war. There are either places with no people at all, or other places with far too many. The chapel roof was holed and there were pigeon droppings and feathers over the pews, but it still clung to its dignity. And it didn’t seem a sad place to me even though it was decorated with other memorials, because there’s a sadness about war which extinguishes the everyday sadnesses of people living and dying. Even the poor brass woman surrounded by swaddled figures, whom Walt explained represented her lost babies, still had a sense of something strong and right about her face. At least she knew she’d given life a chance.

  “What I don’t understand,” I said, crouching beside Walt as he fed odd bits of wood into an old iron stove in a corner, “is why…”

  Walt struck a match and tossed it into the cobwebbed grate. The flames started licking and cracking. “It’s the same with cards. It’s the same with everything.”

  “Can’t you…”

  “Can’t I what?” He looked straight at me, and I felt again a deeper chill even as the stove’s faint heat touched me. I’ve never seen irises so blue
, or pupils so dark, as his. Like a bomber’s night. Like the summer sky. I had to look away.

  He stood up and fumbled in his pockets for another cigarette. As he lit it, I noticed that once again his hands were shaking.

  “After the War, Walt, you could make a fortune…”

  He made that sound again, almost a cough; a sound which made me wish I could hear his proper laugh again. And he began to pace and to speak quickly, his footsteps snapping and echoing as the fire smoked and crackled and the pain of its warmth began to seep into me.

  “What should I do? Go to a casino—me, the highest roller of them all? How long do you think that would last…?”

  Walt said then that you were never given anything for nothing. Not in life, not in war, not even in fairy tales. Before that night over Frankfurt, he’d sailed though everything. Up in those bomber’s skies, you never heard the screams or the sound of falling masonry.

  He slowed then, and crouched down again beside me, his whole body shivering as he gazed into the stove’s tiny blaze.

  “I see it all now,” he said, and the smile which never met his eyes was gone even from his lips now. “Every bullet. Every bomb. Even in my dreams, it doesn’t leave me…”

  “It won’t last forever, Walt—”

  His hand grabbed mine, hard and sharp, and the look in his eyes made me even more afraid. When he spoke, the words were barely a whisper, and his voice was like the voice of poor dead Pilot Officer Charlie Dyson as he pressed himself to me on that distant summer night under the oak tree.

  When Walt said he saw it all, he truly meant he saw everything. It came to him flashes and stabs—nightmare visions, I supposed, like those of the dead airmen that had sometimes troubled me. He saw the blood, heard the screams and felt the terrible chaos of falling masonry. He’d been tormented for weeks, he muttered, by the screams of a woman as she was slowly choked by a ruptured sewerpipe flooding her forgotten basement. And it wasn’t just Walt’s own bombs, his own deeds, but flashes, terrible flashes that he still scarcely dared believe, of the war as a whole, what was happening now, and what would happen in the future. He muttered names I’d never heard of. Belsen. Dachau. Hiro and Naga-something. And he told me that he’d tried walking into the sea to get rid of the terrors he was carrying, but that the tide wouldn’t take him. He told me that he’d thought of driving his MG at a brick wall, only he didn’t trust his luck—or trusted it too much—to be sure that any accident or deed would kill him. And yes, many of the stories of the things he’d done were true, but then the RAF would tolerate much from its best, its luckiest, pilots. For, at the end of the day, Walt still was a pilot—the sky still drew him, just as it always had. And he wanted the war to end like all the rest of us because he knew—far more than I could have then realised—about the evils we were fighting. So he still climbed into his bomber and ascended into those dark skies…

  Slowly, then, Walt let go of me. And he pushed back his hair, and ran his hand over his lined face, and then began stooping about collecting more bits of old wood and stick for the fire. After a long time staring into the stove and with some of the cold finally gone from me, I stood up and walked amid the pews, touching the splintery dust and studying the bits of brass and marble from times long ago when people hadn’t thought it odd to put a winged skull beside a puffy-cheeked cherub…

  Walt was walking up the church now. As I turned to him, I saw him make that effort that he always made, the dance of being the famous Walt Williams, of being human. From a figure made out of winter light and the fire’s dull woodsmoke, he gave a shiver and became a good looking man again, still thinly graceful if no longer quite young, and with that smile and those eyes which were like ice and summer. He turned then, and put out his arms, and did a little Fred Astaire dance on the loose stones, his feet tap-tapping in echoes up to the angles and the cherubs and the skulls. I had to smile. And I went up to him and we met and hugged almost as couples do in films. But we were clumsy as kids as we kissed each other. It had been a long, long time for us both.

  We went to stove to stop ourselves shivering. Walt took off his jacket, and he spread it there before the glow, and there was never any doubt as we looked at each other. That we would go—stupid phrase—all the way.

  So that was it. Me and Walt. And in a chapel—a church—of all places. And afterwards, restless as he still was, still tormented, he pulled his things back on and smoked and wandered about. There was a kind of wooden balcony, a thing called a choir, at the back of the chapel. As I sat huddled by the stove, Walt climbed the steps that led up to it, and bits of dust and splinter fell as he looked down at me and gave a half-smiling wave. I could see that the whole structure was shot through with rot and woodworm, ridiculously unsafe. Then, of all things, he started to do that little Fred Astaire dance of his again, tip-tapping over the boards.

  I was sure, as I stared up at Walt from the dying stove, that he danced over empty spaces where the floor had fallen though entirely.

  Walt was due back at base that morning, and so was I: we all were. There had already been talk on the wire that tonight, hang-over of no hang-over, Christmas or no Christmas, there would be a big raid, one of the biggest. Leaving the chapel and walking back under the haggard trees towards the littered and empty barn which stank of piss and fag ends, we kept mostly silent. And Walt had to lever open the bonnet of his MG and fiddle with the engine before he could persuade it to turn over. He drove slowly, carefully, back along the flat roads between the ditches to the airfield where the Lancasters sat like dragonflies on the horizon. No one saw us as we came in through the gates.

  Walt touched my cheek and gave that smile of his and I watched him go until he turned from sight between the Nissan huts and annexes, and then hurried off to get dressed and changed for my work. But for the smudge of oil left by his fingers, I could tell myself that none of it had happened, and get on with banging my typewriter keys, ordering mustard by the tub and jam by the barrel and currents by the sackload as the ordnance trucks trundled their deadly trains of long steel canisters across the concrete and the groundcrew hauled fuel bousers and the aircrew watched the maps being unrolled and the pointers pointed at the name of a town in Europe that would mean death for some of them.

  There was never long to wait for winter darkness, and the clouds were dense that day. The airfield seemed like the only place of brightness by the time the runway lanterns were lit and the aircrew, distant figures already, threw their last dart and played their last hand and put on their odd socks and whistled or didn’t whistle and touched their charms and kissed their scented letters and pressed their fingers to the concrete and walked out to their waiting Lancasters. Standing away from where everyone else had gathered, I watched the impenetrable rituals and tired without success to figure out which dim silhouette’s was Walt as they clustered around their Lancasters. And I listened as the huge Merlin engines, one by one, then wave on wave on wave, began to fire up. You felt sorry, then, for the Germans. Just as the sound became unbearable, a green flare flickered and sparkled over the base. At this signal, the pitch of the engines changed as bombers lumbered up to face the wind and slowly, agonisingly, pregnant with explosives and petrol, they struggled up the runways to take flight.

  That night, it was dark already. All we could do was listen—and wait—as the sound of the last Lancaster faded into that black bomber’s sky without incident.

  The way things turned out—thanks to a secret war of homing beams and radar—it was a good, successful raid. But Walt Williams didn’t come back from it, even though his Lancaster did, and the story of what had happened was slow to emerge, opposed as it was by most people’s disbelief that anything could possibly have happened to him.

  I made the cold journey across the airfield late that next afternoon to look at his Lancaster. The wind had picked up by then, was tearing at the clouds, and there was a stand-down after the all the day and the night before’s activity. No one was about, and the machine had been drained of
what remained of its ammunition, oil and fuel, and parked in a distant corner with all the other scrap and wreckage.

  It was always a surprise to be up close to one of these monsters, either whole or damaged; to feel just how big they were—and how fragile. I walked beneath the shadow of its wings as they sighed and creaked in the salt-tinged wind from across the Fens, and climbed as I had never climbed before up the crew’s ladder, and squeezed through bulkheads and between wires and pipes towards the grey light of the main cabin amid the sickly oil-and-rubber reek.

  The rest of the aircrew had reported a jolt and a huge inrush of air as they took the homeward flightpath, but what I saw up there, on that late and windy afternoon, told its own story. Most of the pilot’s bubble and the side of the fuselage beside it had been ripped out—struck by a flying piece of debris from another plane, or a flak shell that refused to explode. Walt had been torn out, too, in the sudden blast, launched into the skies so instantly that no one else had really seen exactly what had happened. They’d all hoped, as the co-pilot had nursed the plane back home through the darkness, that Walt might still have survived, and, Walt being Walt, might even make it back through France instead of ending up as a German prisoner. But the morning had revealed that Walt, either intentionally or through some freak of the way the wind had hit him, had undone all the straps from his seat and had fallen without his parachute. Even now, it was still there, unclaimed, nestled in its well. I was able to bend down and touch it as the wind whistled through that ruined aircraft, and feel the hard inner burden of all those reams of silk that might have borne him.

  Then, I believed.

  I was transferred to another base in the spring after when my section was re-organised in one of strange bureaucratic spasms that you get in the military. They’d had their own chop girl there who’d committed suicide by hanging herself a few months before, and they mostly ignored the rumours that came with me. It was as if that poor girl’s sacrifice had removed the burden from me. Her sacrifice—and that of Walt Williams.