But his hands cramped from holding them back and his ribs ached from how much they yearned to be hugged tight and never let go again, and he shoved the wings on haphazard, unable to take this a moment longer.
“It never really meant anything. You know that.”
He didn’t think he could feel any smaller, any more abject, until he looked down and found there were tears in Chris’s eyes. Their gazes locked, and something passed on them—an understanding of sorts. He latched the final buckle. Chris sniffed, rubbed his tattered cuff along his eyes and straightened up. “I suppose I did. I’m sorry to make a scene. Good luck then, Geoff. I wish you all the best.”
He wanted to say something that would make it better. Couldn’t think of a thing. “You too, Skipper.” He racked his brains for that perfect phrase, was still trying to find it when Sumala alighted on the dragon’s back and showed him how to fly. He could have hated her at that moment, if it wasn’t all being stored up for use against himself, because of course there wasn’t anything he could say or do that would make this better. The only thing that might make it a tiny bit easier on them both was to get it done and over so that it didn’t keep hurting like a bitch, so they could move on and get a start on the recovery.
There was no joy in flight, but there would have been no joy in anything for him. He set the wings working, rose up with a friendly wave, teeth still embedded in the side of his cheek to keep him from blubbing. Chris gave him an equally friendly salute and a painfully artificial smile, and he turned away quick and found the nearest cloud to cover him, so that when Sumala joined him she would not know how much of the wet on his face was tears.
“I won’t marry you, you know,” she said, touching his arm with sympathy, “but father will find a nice girl of your own rank for you. Come on, they are all waiting for us.” But when he hugged her tight and bent his head into her shoulder to weep, she didn’t hurry him up, and she didn’t make him let go.
Drained of tears and options, he followed her to where her people waited, and thence into her world. He didn’t look back—it would have been more than he could take.
Ben had never seen anyone completely fall apart before. Chris did it very neatly. Indeed, if Oonagh hadn’t chosen that moment to turn to him and say farewell, Ben might not have noticed it happening at all. Chris stood quite upright, as if he were on parade, but there was nothing behind his eyes, he didn’t seem to even hear Oonagh’s words to him.
She broke off, midway through a courteous speech of thanks to give Ben a thoughtful look. “You choose to stay with this man?”
“Yes.” It wasn’t a hard decision, with Chris looking so very stricken, so very much like he was holding it together only because he didn’t know any other way to handle this much grief.
“I think that’s wise. For you don’t like to lie, and if you came with me you would have to, constantly.”
“I don’t like to lie, and I don’t like to be lied to. I don’t like to be fucking trapped, no matter how good your intentions.” He offered her a hand up, to get on the dragon’s back, but it was more out of a desire to be rid of her than from courtesy. She didn’t look very pregnant, but then he supposed she wouldn’t, this soon. “Besides, you’ve taken enough that was his. I’m going to make sure he has at least something left.”
Oonagh laughed, exchanged one long glance with the man from the helicopter, who was currently slogging his way uphill, picking through the tossed boulders on his way towards them. “You have a softer heart than you allow to show.” She nudged the dragon with her knees and tossed him the circlet he had worn. He didn’t attempt to catch it and it lay at his feet gleaming like water. “We’ll meet again, Karshni, even if it is after both of you are dead. I can afford to wait.”
Chris lost what seemed an infinite gap of time, came back to himself at the sound of a man’s voice, calling “Mr. Gatrell?” in a clipped, authoritarian tone. Oonagh must have said something—some form of farewell, for he could see her bending low to the dragon’s back as the two of them squirmed into the side of the hill. The dragon’s tail grated against small pebbles as it dragged inside and a fall of dry soil and small flint tumbled after it. Then there was nothing on the hilltop but himself and Ben and the man from the helicopter, striding up through the stones with an expression on his face that said he was prepared to take responsibility for this success if it was absolutely thrust upon him.
Chris thought he should be angry about that. The stripes at the man’s shoulders told him he should be at least standing to attention, but he really couldn’t see the point of either. It was Ben who said, “If you’re the cavalry, you’re a little late,” in a voice whose tartness brought a certain dim satisfaction to Chris’s soul. Not the only one feeling shell-shocked and resentful, then. That was good.
“You called for backup but it seems you didn’t need it.”
Chris put two and two together. “Air Vice-Marshal.” He roused himself to nod, but the salute still adamantly refused to come. “Maybe if you’d come sooner there’d be another pilot still alive. How long have you been here, observing?”
The brass had a leathery face, and the sort of thick silver hair Chris associated with aging movie stars. “Long enough,” he said. “I presume this is Mr. Chaudhry?”
Was it, though? Chris wondered. Ben was not demonstrative at the best of times, and the little hurt of that was subsumed in the larger devastation of Geoff’s decision. But was it Ben or Karshni who stood with him, scowling?
“That’s me.” Ben didn’t shake the outstretched hand. “What’s it to you?”
“Only that the police have been treating your disappearance as murder.” Henderson’s bland face froze a little further. “I shall inform them they can call off the inquiry. But, gentlemen, if you weren’t civilians I would have you on the carpet for your insolence.”
“What are you going to do with us?” Chris thought about the last time the top brass had been involved: the psychiatric ward; trying to prove he was sane enough not to spend the rest of his life in an institution. He didn’t think he had the energy to fight that particular battle again.
Perhaps Henderson recognised the weariness and grief after all, for he gave a small smile and looked around, taking in the wreckage of the Tornado, the Nine Ladies—only six left upright. The patches of blood on the grass were even now turning into rusty-red clover and field poppies.
“I’m going to send you home. Believe it or not, we have most of that on tape. In a few days you’ll be asked to come in and give statements. Then you’ll be sworn to secrecy and allowed to go about your business. I may, however, keep a closer eye on you in future.”
He offered his hand to Chris, who took it automatically and was held in a firm, dry grip for a moment while the air vice-marshal fixed him with a bright blue gaze. “You’re owed my thanks, though I don’t suppose you want them. I can at least deal with the fallout for you.”
He smiled. “For example, I believe you arrived in a stolen plane, and you, Mr. Chaudhry, arrived on a dragon. Let me give you a lift home. We’ll talk in a couple of days.”
Chapter Eleven
They dropped Ben in the scrubland a hundred metres from his own house, and under the curious stares of a dozen children and a dozen armed marines, he didn’t want to push it by insisting on going home with Chris. The man himself said nothing either way, just looked at him with preoccupied eyes as if he was seeing something entirely different, out through the metal walls and seventy years ago.
“I’ll…see you later,” Ben managed before wading through the onlookers and heading home. But the big, neat house didn’t feel like home to him any more. He shucked off his flamboyant silks in the hallway, hesitated over what to do with them and then shoved them in the washing machine as he passed it. The phone rang just as he was going upstairs, and he ignored it. It echoed up the stairs all the time he was throwing on jeans and a T-shirt, folding a suit into an overnight bag.
There was a whiskey glass in the sink that
he didn’t remember putting there, police tape over the tarpaulin that closed the gap where the extension had been. A new plywood door and padlock and the marks of big dirty boots on the carpet in what was left of the new living room. The wind came in from beneath the new door and eddied the scent of floral air freshener, and when he touched the door into the kitchen, greasy grey fingerprint powder came off on his hands.
I came back for this? He thought of the glory of the Gandharva army, of the beauty and discipline of Chitrasen’s people, invincible and unashamed. It made him wonder what had been so terrible about his parents’ upbringing that had made them want to reinvent themselves, leave their entire pasts behind. Made him wonder too what he was missing, whether it was too late to reconnect with his own heritage. He was a prince—bloody hell! A prince in exile. He could surely manage to do better than this empty imitation of someone else’s life.
Ben moved the vase of now wilted flowers away from his parents’ wedding photo, leaving it nakedly on display for the first time since it was taken. Time for you to stop being ashamed, he thought, looking at their youthful faces with love. Perhaps somewhere in the stack of letters and documents he had inherited with the house, he could find the names of his family left in India. It wasn’t too late to get in touch. Instead of regretting his lack of community, he could get off his arse and find one.
And in the meantime he could also ask Chris whether his morris musicians could use a mandola player. It wasn’t exactly a high-powered career in the record industry, but it was a small step towards getting music back into his life, and better than practicing alone.
The phone went again as he was passing back through the hall, and he noticed with some disbelief that it was only half past twelve. The afternoon stretched ahead as it always did. He felt that too should have changed—the way the world worked should not be trundling on, oblivious, when he felt transformed. Ignoring the phone, he locked the door behind him, flung the bag into his car and—with a sudden optimism towards his future—drove to Chris’s house in Matlock.
It was shuttered tight, derelict looking, blinds down in the kitchen and bin-bags taped over the broken sitting room window. When he knocked on the door, he got a wall of silence for his trouble. He hammered harder. “Chris, are you in there?”
Time for a moment of panic—bloody hell, he knew he shouldn’t have allowed the man to be alone, shouldn’t have left him undefended, walking wounded as he was. Then Chris opened the door and stumbled over the threshold, already three quarters of the way towards falling-down drunk, his hair dishevelled and his eyes red rimmed in a pallid, haunted face.
“Thought you…thought you’d gone home. What’choo doing here? All over now, isn’t it? So you can bugger off and…and so can I.” It was half-belligerent and half-self-pitying, a very unattractive combination, but when Ben got his arm under Chris’s shoulder, steered him back inside, the older man’s body was loose and pliant against him. Trusting.
“Did you hit the bottle the moment you were in the door?” he asked, rhetorically.
“Hate drinking alone.” Chris let himself be led into the sitting room, sat down on a cushion on the least vicious end of the sofa, where there was indeed a mostly-empty bottle of Irish whiskey and an ashtray filled with the ash and butts of five cigarettes. “Going to have to get used to it.”
Ben registered the broken TV and the word Murderer sprayed on the wall in bright red paint. Shit. If he’d known Chris was coming back to this, there was no way he’d have let him go. To lose so much, fight so hard and then be kicked in the teeth with this when you got home… No wonder he’d turned to the booze with such abandon.
Chris hadn’t washed, was sitting now bowed over with his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, still in the burnt and battered black hoodie he’d worn for the rescue. It was torn in several places, framing bruises and dried blood. The hands, knotted in his hair, struck Ben suddenly as beautiful—cleverly articulated, perfectly made, slender and expressive—and stained reddish-brown.
Ben picked at the edges of the wallpaper. As he’d suspected, it had been there a long time. The glue was old and tired. He got his fingers in behind the paper and tore the whole panel off, ripping the red word into pieces, crumpling the pieces up and tossing them into the fireplace. He’d get a glazier in tomorrow for the window, paint this room. Something lighter than the current dingy stripes. Maybe he’d even get the chance to add those bookshelves, and the decent curtains he’d been itching to install since he first saw the place.
Chris flinched at the sound of tearing, and certainty and affection flooded up in Ben as though a dam had broken in his soul.
“Look at you.” He shook his head. “You’re a mess. A complete hero, and a fucking disaster area.” Pulling Chris up by the arms, he pointed him in the direction of the stairs. “I’m going to put some coffee on, and then we’re going to take a shower. I want you to drink lots of water and—”
“Not an invalid. Know how to hold my drink. Drink you under the table any time… What did you say?”
“I said you’re a disaster—”
“Something about a shower?”
Ben surprised himself by laughing. God, he did, he felt happy. How had that happened? “I thought you’d like that idea. Feel free to throw up any time as long as it’s not over me.”
Chris’s miserable face melted into a smile—a little tentative, a little bemused with itself, but radiant nonetheless. “You say the most romantic things.”
The shower turned out to be awkward and strangely tender, Chris almost asleep in the warm spray, needing to be held up. Ben didn’t know whether to feel insulted or charmed, decided that a combination of both summed up the entire relationship so far. And he must like it, mustn’t he, or he wouldn’t have come back for more.
Cleaned and wrapped in pyjamas and a big flannelette dressing gown Ben had found tucked away in the airing cupboard, Chris was a little more human. He curled into the corner of the sofa and cradled a cup of coffee, head bent over the steam, hair tousled and drying slowly in the close, midsummer heat. Ben felt a little more human himself once he had opened the kitchen blinds and windows to let in fresh sunlight and moving air. Then he phoned Phyllis and Grace to tell them they were back, not to worry, and please don’t come around until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.
When he’d made some lunch, which they ate in companionable silence, washed the plates and taken out the rubbish, he put his bag on the packing-crate coffee table and brought out the circlet from the depths of it. The silver jewel in the centre shone like a fallen star, washing his aching eyes and Chris’s tired face in misty, cooling light.
“She’ll be keeping tabs on you with that.” Chris had raised his head only enough for the light to reflect from his half-open eyes. “You really want to keep it?”
“No. I just didn’t want to leave it there for the police to find. D’you think I should give it to the RAF? For their X-files department, if they have one?”
“I think you should bury it. Out in the garden, under a marker.” The smile was tired and a little worn around the edges. “She’s clever. And…fond of you. Maybe there’s more to it than meets the eye. You might find you need it later.”
Ben went into the kitchen and returned with a glass of water and painkillers. He took one of the shelves from the crates and laid it over the springs of the sofa so that he could sit down next to Chris, wrap his fingers around the glass and make sure he drank. He got an indecipherable look as a reward, something between puzzlement and indignation.
“I’ve been thinking—”
“I was afraid of that.”
Ben slapped Chris on the arm and laughed. “I’ve been thinking about having a son. What to do. How would you feel if I engaged the MPA to rescue my son and bring him to me?”
“I’d tell you you were fucking insane. We were lucky to get out of this alive and relatively unscathed. You don’t want to take them on again, Ben. We might not do so well next time.”
Chris drew himself more closely together. His head lowered fractionally, and there was that score in his brow, like someone had hit him with a hammer between the eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry I made a scene…am still making a scene. Just ignore me. I’ll be fine in the morning.”
“We could—”
The restraint snapped, let out a flood of words: “You can’t rescue a man from something he’s chosen. It was true, what he said. We never really looked past the end of the war—didn’t expect to survive it, you see. It didn’t matter then that everything would change, after. We were living from day to day, didn’t think about the future. Probably we always would have drifted apart. He’d have wanted a wife, children. I’d have embarrassed him—it would have all ended badly. Probably just as well we’ve been spared that.”
It had the flavour of something he’d been telling himself repeatedly since he got home, and it made Ben unhappy. He reached out and curved a hand around Chris’s cheek, feeling beard burn and the soft fragility of human skin, warm and frail.
Chris covered the hand with his own. “I don’t want you to think this means I care about you any less, Ben. It’s just, the war was the biggest thing in our lives. Not the best, the way you’re the best. But the most intense. It’s hard…to get over it. You know?”
You’re the best thing in my life? “Was that…” A declaration of love? Ben rather thought it might be, phrased in cripplingly undemonstrative 1940s speak. All at once, he didn’t want to think about going up against the Sidhe again for a long time either. He’d think about that later. “Never mind. Listen, let’s go to bed, yeah. You’re tired, I’m tired. I don’t remember the last time I slept, and you look like shit. Come on.”
Dogfighters: Under the Hill Page 18