by Chris Cleave
He looked over, but Simonson only stared ahead at the road. Alistair put the pad back in his pocket.
At the city’s edge the fortifications gave way to a treeless plain of small fields no larger than suburban gardens, enclosed as far as the horizon by a tracery of dry stone walls. It was arid land, with dry yellow grasses in tufts. Poor crops of oranges and artichokes struggled in the thin yellow soil. Dusty stands of barbary fig rose along the lines of the walls, and in the ditches teasels and reedy bamboo were footed in unseen damp. There were small rock escarpments, indistinguishable in hue from the walls, so that the eye lost the distinction between the man-made and the natural. One scarcely cared in any case. It was wretched country, the kind no man would bother to wall in if any other land were available.
“Damn it,” said Simonson. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you are quite right.”
“You must write as and when you please. Don’t mind my sour grapes.”
“I wouldn’t mind grapes of any kind. Who’s fussy these days?”
Simonson smiled in a way that did not entirely release the tension. Four 109s barreled overhead in an asymmetric V, uncontested and exultant in the blue. Simonson swung the van off the road and they jumped from the cab and threw themselves into the ditch. They lay with their hands over their heads for a minute while the aircraft noise diminished. The Germans had either not noticed them or not considered them worth the ammunition, and flown on into the west.
Simonson and Alistair climbed out of the ditch and sat in the shade of a yellow stone wall, dusting themselves off. Black bees droned in the thyme beside the road. Dogs barked from farm to farm. Birds gave monosyllabic cries, harsh and unlovely, as if describing the landscape. The wind worried up twists of dust from the road. Fat-tailed lizards plowed the dirt, and from far away came the boom of the coastal batteries.
Simonson looked out over the ruined country. “You know who’d miss me if those planes had shot us up? No one.”
Alistair shrugged. “I might miss you.”
Simonson seemed not to hear him. “It would keep one going, to have someone who gave a damn.”
“What about your three nice girlfriends?”
“If I died they might wear the grief like a brooch for a while, if it pleased them to go with the fashion.”
“I thought you were fond of those girls.”
“The clue is in the plural, isn’t it?”
“Then perhaps you ought to pick one.”
“But there’s nothing to choose between them, don’t you see? They spend their mornings in bed and their afternoons at Claridge’s. They are indistinguishable among thousands. They are fireflies.”
“Whereas you want the actual fire.”
“Must you mock me? You know me less well than you imagine.”
“I wasn’t mocking. Well, only a little.”
“It is too easy for you.”
Alistair held up his hands. “I’m sorry.”
They remounted in silence and drove on, while Alistair drafted the letter to Mary in his head.
—commands us to convey to you his fulsome apologies for his libelous comments, which arose merely from our client’s state of happy distraction, brought about by the many utopian delights afforded by his present location.
Cresting a rise they saw a pillar of smoke a mile ahead, thickening as they approached. Slow from the hunger, Alistair hardly noticed it.
The food and the drink on this island are enough to render a man dizzy with delight. The foie gras has only one fault, which is its superabundance. The caviar is so consistently good that one gets a little weary of it.
The smoke was half a mile high now, directly ahead on their route.
There is a host of charming local rituals, many of them involving fire.
“I think we had better pull over here,” said Simonson.
“Mm?”
“It’s just that we are carrying three thousand pounds of artillery shells and it seems prudent not to drive them through flames.”
Simonson stopped the Bedford a safe distance from the fire, and upwind of it. They got out to see what was going on. In a village of two or three hundred houses, the church was ablaze. The wreckage of a bomber and the bodies of its crew were strewn around. Flames blew across the road and the air stank of burning aviation spirit. People ran in and out of the church, bringing out artefacts to save.
Next there are the art treasures, which the locals are quick to display.
It seemed the fire was burning itself out. The buildings were all of stone, of course—there was little wood to catch light—and now that the aviation fuel was burning off, there was only an angry soot being lifted in the shimmering, superheated air. In the little stone square before the church, a crowd was gathering. Alistair and Simonson pushed through it.
It is an al fresco culture and one is never bored as there is always something going on in the town square.
A German airman was on the ground and the Maltese had encircled him, kicking and spitting. A blade of bone protruded through one trouser leg. The side of his mouth was torn, the wall of the cheek hanging in a flap and revealing a row of bloodied molars. He was pleading with his tormentors in good English, accented only by his wounds.
“Damn it,” said Simonson.
The locals are hospitable to the British, though less well disposed to other foreign tourists.
Alistair shook his head savagely, forcing himself to concentrate on the present moment. His mind changed focus so sluggishly now, after the months of starvation. The enemy airman looked up at him, beseeching. Alistair felt a tightness in his throat. It was a scene he had come across during the long retreat through France. If an aviator had to bail out, it might be better to shoot himself on the way down than to parachute into the hands of people he had been bombing.
“Leave that man alone!” Alistair’s voice was lost in the din. “Leave him!”
The people looked through him. Some grinned. There were no women or infants in the crowd. It was a bad sign. Evil made warning ripples.
A boy of eleven or twelve in a clean white shirt, black trousers and a black cloth cap, laughing, kicked the German in the crotch. The airman drew into a fetal tuck, which caused his smashed leg bone to dig in the dirt. He screamed, and as he did so another man kicked him.
“Please! I did not want to fight you! God save the King!”
A man took a handful of dirt and tilted the airman’s head back and packed the bloodied and protesting mouth. The man gave a choking moan. A purple mud of dust and blood escaped in clots through the rent in his cheek. There was laughter in the crowd, since the joke was now on the enemy. How pleasing it was that the whole great logistic of armies and states, of countless millions of fighting men and their associated materiel, could deliver a punch line to any grid coordinates at any time.
The fire from the downed aircraft had spent all its fuel now. The haze caught at the back of the throat. More villagers closed in on the broken man.
“I am a British Army officer!” Alistair shouted. “Leave that man alone!”
He put himself between the German and the people, but they got the better of him. He took an elbow to the neck and another to the solar plexus and he found himself winded, at the back of the crowd. He could no longer see the German.
Simonson took his arm. “Come on. One mustn’t expect more.”
“You aren’t serious?”
“They’ve been bombed for months. What would you have us do?”
“I’d like you to help me,” said Alistair, taking his .38 from its holster and turning the cylinder to check the load.
“For pity’s sake! We have a ton and a half of HE in the truck, and the enemy is already airborne. You know how many men died to convey that ammunition, and you want us to leave it sitting in the open while you play white man’s justice? The man
is dying in any case—you saw him.”
“Yes, but I will shoot these people before I let them torment him.”
“Then I will leave you to it, Alistair, because I am not going to lose a truck full of shells for the sake of your pristine conscience.”
The two officers stared at each other for a moment.
“Fine,” said Alistair.
He stepped around Simonson and cocked the hammer of his revolver. He fired five rounds into the air and the jeering stopped. The locals spun around, startled at first, then with faces turning sullen.
“It’s quite all right,” said Alistair. “I might do the same in your shoes. But you may go to your homes now. I haven’t seen your faces and I shan’t be taking names.”
He stood with the Enfield pointed at the ground. He looked at his shoes. The wind piled dust up against his toes and scooped out hollows to the leeward. As he watched he became aware of a slow movement in his periphery, a receding and a lightening. When he looked up, the square was empty except for the squirming body of the airman.
He holstered the revolver, buttoned it down and knelt beside the man. The poor devil was facedown and heaving as he tried to breathe through his smashed and bloody nose. As Alistair turned the head and began to scoop the dirt out of the mouth, he saw that the man’s eyes had been put out. They didn’t bleed—the sockets had been packed with yellow dust like the mouth. A bloody foam hissed in and out of the man’s nostrils as he fought for air. Alistair removed dirt until finally the man could breathe, in coughing gasps that sprayed blood.
“I’m so sorry,” Alistair said.
He cradled the man’s head. The black hair was sticky with blood, and the yellow dust had caked on to it. He was older than Alistair—in his late thirties, perhaps. An hour ago he had been flying, his tie neatly knotted.
“Look what they have done to you. I am god-awfully sorry.”
The man’s jaws snapped tight around the side of Alistair’s right hand, opposite the thumb. The splintered teeth, horribly sharp, sliced all the way through to the bone. Alistair yelled. He smashed his free hand against the man’s jaw, but the teeth only bit down harder. Alistair twisted to change the angle, but agony gave the other man an awful strength. He dragged Alistair down to the ground.
“Stop it!” yelled Alistair. “Please! I am helping you!”
But the man no longer knew what was happening to him. He took Alistair’s throat, the thumbs pushing into the windpipe. With his free arm Alistair tried to push him away. Sparks began to slide across the blue sky, which faded to indigo, and to black.
A shot came, and the thumbs released his throat. Alistair drew a long, rattling breath. The teeth loosened on his hand and released it. Alistair rolled away through the dust. As his breath came back he managed to kneel. Simonson, who had shot the German through the side of the head, was still aiming the revolver. He wore an expression of distaste, and his lips moved silently for a while.
“Get up,” Simonson said at last.
After a long moment it occurred to Alistair that Simonson meant him. He stood unsteadily. A near-semicircle of flesh was missing from the side of his hand. Blood ran into the dust. Between him and Simonson, the German lay on his back with his arms laid neatly at his sides.
“Excuse me?” said the German.
Simonson and Alistair stared. Blood and yellow fluid drained through a hole in the man’s temple and another hole in the opposite cheek.
“Excuse me?” the man said again.
Simonson shot him a second time, in the chest. Alistair supposed that some invariant politeness had caused him to wait until he was sure what the man had said. The German’s body bucked twice, arching and relaxing. Then he drew a long, hissing breath and said, “Sorry, I think you are speaking English?”
Simonson lowered his pistol and looked furiously at Alistair.
“I am confused,” said the airman. “I have had maybe an accident. Excuse me . . . for my English.”
“Your English is fine,” said Alistair.
“You are . . . what is the expression? . . . too kind.”
Alistair knelt beside the dying man. “I’m sorry.”
“Please let me go. Do not make me prisoner. I have fear for . . . my son. He is . . . not a forceful boy and I worry . . . that he might . . . excuse me . . .”
The man fought for breath. Bloody foam leaked from his mouth.
“It’s all right,” said Alistair. “It’s quite all right.”
“If I am . . . prisoner . . . he might . . . at school be bullied . . . and . . .”
Simonson shot the German again, the bullet striking in the chest. The man’s ruined mouth worked as he tried for another breath. Simonson shot him three times more in quick succession, the bullets destroying the abdomen. Blood and fluids welled through the dark flying jacket.
“And,” said the man, “and . . .”
“I’ve no more rounds,” said Simonson.
“And the . . . child is . . . so . . . so . . .”
Alistair took his revolver, aimed it quickly and fired with his eyes almost closed. It was not a good shot, the bullet striking to the side of the man’s forehead, lifting away a part of the scalp and exposing the skull but not penetrating it. The force of it had knocked the head to one side. It was Alistair’s last round too. The man took another breath, and another.
Alistair dropped to his knees and did the only possible thing, taking two handfuls of the yellow dust and pressing them into the man’s mouth. He still felt the hot breath hiss from the man’s nostrils, so he pinched the nose closed and held the body down until it ceased to struggle.
When it was over, Alistair stood. He and Simonson watched the man in silence, not at all sure he was dead. If the war had proved anything it was that life had unexpected resistance to the instruments with which men had been issued.
Simonson lit a cigarette. “I shan’t forgive you for this.”
“No,” said Alistair. “I don’t suppose I would.”
“We have to go. When we get to Bingemma we’ll send a burial detail.”
“I’d sooner stay and bury him now.”
Simonson shook his head. “It wouldn’t make either of you feel better.”
The Maltese, who had watched the whole thing from their doorways, emerged into the street to give the two officers a slow, ironic handclap. The sound rang in the square while Simonson and Alistair walked to the truck.
Between the yellow stone buildings, in front of the soot-blackened church, the cold northwesterly began its work of covering the dead man in dust.
March, 1941
MARY ARRIVED AT ST. Helen’s church at ten to four, in premature twilight under smoke. The city smelled of brick dust and charcoal. The hush was already on it—people had gone down to the shelters early.
“Sleep well?” said Huw.
“Dreaming of you.”
“Go on with you. The little one’s out the back already.”
Mary joined Hilda in the cab of the Hillman. In the yard behind the church the wall was down, revealing the acres that used to be Bishopsgate. In drizzle, boys in shorts picked through the ruins for shrapnel and brass.
“Look at it all,” said Hilda. “They say we shall win, but how?”
“Father says the city will have to move underground if this goes on.”
“I should hate that, shouldn’t you?”
“I suppose there will be ventilation shafts and skylights.”
“Well there’s something to look forward to. And are there to be murals down there, of woodland glades and seascapes?”
“Look on the bright side,” said Mary. “There might be—”
“There isn’t a bright side underground. It’s just dark.”
“We must simply do our best then, with Tilley lamps and ‘Kumbayah.’ ”
“Lovely,”
said Hilda, “but I might take my chances on the surface.”
“They won’t let you. Even after we win, Father says preparedness will be the thing. Society will be organized, and people will live where they’re told, and do the jobs they’re given, and be permanently ready to fight. Father says that was our mistake, after the last war. We let people live willy-nilly.”
“Yes, it was lovely.”
“Father says it lasts about twenty years. After that, anyone half organized will do this sort of thing to us.”
Mary cranked the wipers to clear drizzle from the windshield, the better to indicate the rubble.
Hilda said, “If that is really the future, then what is the point in living?”
“We could have hobbies.”
“One of my hobbies is tea. Shall we go to the crypt and drink some?”
“Don’t you care about the future of civilization?”
“No,” said Hilda, “I care that Alistair still hasn’t replied to my letter.”
“Oh,” said Mary.
“I can’t stop thinking of him. Aren’t you the slightest bit sympathetic?”
Mary’s heart caught. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, it isn’t your fault. Come on, let’s go for that tea.”
Soon the sirens howled up to their huge C-sharp and swooped down to A again to start their cycle. The first bombs fell and the night was underway, and they were sent out to the first casualties.
Clive was drunk before they even began. Huw was white with fatigue. They picked up two deceased and were halfway through their first run to the mortuary when Mary took a corner and both the bodies on the roof flew into the street. Clive and Huw had forgotten to strap the stretchers down. The men worked together to recover the first body, making a count of one, two, three, lift, but they discovered—after two attempts and a long interval of confusion in the slits of the ambulance’s headlights—that Clive had been lifting the arms of one corpse and Huw the legs of the other. Mary watched them curse and begin again.
As softly as she could, she said, “I’ve been writing to Alistair.”
Hilda looked straight ahead and said nothing.