by Tom Bullough
– What?! Paolo echoed. Fucking What?! You heard what I said, dickhead! Never fucking question me in front of them like that!
– Why the fuck not? Nick managed. I’ll do what I like.
– From now on, said Paolo, you’ll do what I fucking want you to do. Get it? Every time you do something alone it goes wrong. So leave it to me…
A group of sheep scattered as they approached the top of the field, becoming unsure, having retreated twenty feet or so, whether they should in fact be following them. So they stood exactly where they were, watching as Paolo opened the gate, heading towards the spindly, balding mass of the wood.
– I’m sitting down, said Nick a moment later, sitting down.
– Nick! Paolo massaged his forehead, turning back to look at him. Nick… Vaffanculo! This is your fucking life we’re talking about here!
– What the fuck is wrong with you? said Nick, recovering his breath slightly and squinting back at him from the thick grass. What the fuck is wrong with you, anyway? If you remember, we came out here so no-one would know where we are…?!
– Porco Guida! said Paolo. If you remember, shit-for-brains, you left a note behind!
– I left, said Nick – an edge of Clapton steeliness creeping into his voice – a note to Sonn saying that we’d gone to Ang’s. Yeah? Not we’ve gone to this fucking cottage, near this fucking village, in this fucking… Wales! So even if they did find it, they’d still have no idea where we are!
– Nick! How fucking stupid…? Who the fuck do you think we’re playing with here? This is Steve Fisk! The man knows everyone! If anybody knows where we are – and Sonia bloody well does – then… face it, sooner or later Steve is going to find out.
– What…? said Nick. He pulled himself back up to his feet, his eyes creeping open.
– Well, what’s he going to do…?! We know enough to send him down for the best part of his life and he thinks that’s what we’re trying. Not to mention the fact we’ve got acid worth probably a million quid to him or something. Face it! Him, or someone, is going to track down anyone who knows us, then come out here and look for the fucking ambulance…!
– Paolo! said Nick, his voice and face suddenly hardened. You fucking… bastard! You knew they’d go after Sonia, no matter what happened?!
– Nick… Paolo sighed. I didn’t know shit, okay? What’s done is done. Let’s just move the fucking ambulance…?
He turned and set off towards a gate beside the trees ahead of them, walking quickly for four or five seconds before glancing back at Nick, who hadn’t moved. He stopped again, opening his mouth to speak.
– Paolo! Nick snarled first. You’d better fucking well explain yourself now or that’s it, I’m not going any further.
– Shit, Nick! Steve is not a friend of mine, huh?! He is a very nasty and a very dangerous man who will do anything necessary to get what he wants! Just, use your fucking head…!
– Phone, said Nick, extending his left hand, his shoulders back and square. Give me your phone, Paolo. I want to talk to her.
He took several steps forward. Paolo’s face lost a shade of panicked colour.
– Nick?! he said. Do you not understand?! We have to do this now! Now, you fucking… heathen! This fucking second!
The two of them were face to face, Nick’s left hand still extended and his right reaching down into his pocket. In slightly less than a second he’d produced the flick-knife, released the blade and pressed the tip to the visibly pulsing jugular in Paolo’s neck.
– Nick, said Paolo, without flinching. For the sake… Put… Put that fucking thing away. We’ll find a phonebox. Whatever… We’ll drive to one! You know you can’t use my phone.
A speck of blood had appeared at the end of the blade. It escaped and ran down into Paolo’s chest hair. Paolo winced and tried to raise his hand but Nick moved forward for additional leverage and he left it hanging in the air.
– Nick, he said. Nothing might have happened, at all. Everything might be cool. We might get our money, and I might get my Ducati and… everyone might live happily ever after, but I swear, if you use that phone they’ll send the fucking pigs in! They’ll lock us up for fucking ever!
– Phone, said Nick again, his voice calm, twisting the knife slightly so another current of blood cascaded from Paolo’s neck. You don’t have to worry. I know what I’m doing. It takes them thirty seconds to locate a mobile call… I’m going to be less than that.
Belle appeared around the corner at the bottom of the stairwell, stopping and leaning against the inner wall: pushing her chest outwards then allowing it to fall back, raising her thumb to her lips, holding it there a second and finally inserting it. She looked at Angus across the room, doe-eyed but apparently uncertain what to do next.
– Do you want tea, then? said Angus, glancing at the receding figures of Nick and Paolo through the open door.
Belle removed her thumb.
– Um… alright, she said, smiling weakly and wandering over to the nearest chair, where she sat down.
– Uggh? said Tim invitingly from the corner, holding out the joint towards her.
Angus had forgotten he was there.
Belle smiled weakly again, receiving the joint and smoking it with a kind of wine-bar poise. Her jaw was still working from the previous day.
Through the door, Paolo was pretty much dragging Nick by the right sleeve of his T-shirt, Nick’s feet sliding on the muddy ruts tramlining the field.
– So, I’m going to need to go to this pub… said Belle. Could you tell me how to get there?
– Yeah, said Angus, handing her the tea. He tried, without a glimmer of success, to imagine being close to her again. Yeah. It’s really not far at all. I mean, if you go over the fields. I’ll go up the hill with you in a minute, if you like; show you the path…
– Do you think they’ll accept my credit card?
Belle had become little-girl-like suddenly, as she did sometimes. Her thumb was back beneath her mouth.
– Why? What do you need?
– I… I just thought I might want to spend some money on something.
Belle looked at him perplexedly. Angus finished his cup of tea and carried the cup through to the sink. The sounds of hawking came from the other downstairs room, then the scratch of a Zippo as Pete tried to light a cigarette.
– Pete! said Angus at the intervening door. You want to go to the pub?
There was another barrage of coughing.
– Yeah, he spluttered. Give us one minute, yeah?
A couple of crashes and further coughs brought Pete blinking into the kitchen, the end of a roll-up poking from a corner of his mouth and both hands tying his dreads into an onion effect on top of his head.
– Ah, tea! he muttered, heading towards the teapot and eyeing the gaily-clad ladies and gentlemen promenading round it. Jesus, this place is in a bloody timewarp…
Angus peered past him as discreetly as he could, looking over the cushions in the corner and the six foot of packing foam that lined the right-hand wall. Fay wasn’t in there.
– Pete, he said. Where’s Fay got to? I thought she was sleeping down here last night.
– Fay… said Pete slowly. He looked up from the UHT milk carton. Mmm. I think she’s upstairs. I saw her last night; she went to bed very late. I’d, er… I’d leave her to sleep a bit if I was you.
His left eye held Angus’s – pointedly – for a second or two; then he was slugging back tea, inviting Belle to pass him the joint, preparing himself to walk to the Sun.
x: the moth acts first…
The sun was low above the rock and tawny bracken of the hill behind Pentwyn. Tattered clouds and shadows flowed across the valley: over the concave fields, the farm, the cottage, the stubble-coated field, and Angus, sitting on a gate at its top. Some way down the hill behind him, Pete, Tim and Belle were heading for the cluster of trees that marked the local pub. The clouds were following them, continuing to ford the river before scaling Llandefalle
and setting a course for Cork.
Angus would come here quite often, watching or writing. When the cylindrical bales were in the field he’d sit cross-legged on one of those. These days he’d taken to sitting on the gate instead, observing the sheep. He’d pick one out at random and impose a characteristic on it: caddishness, for instance. Then, as it met with different situations, he’d test the characteristic against its responses, working the sheep out for itself.
He unfolded a piece of paper, and flattened it out on his thigh.
The last of our companions fell suddenly, the nose of his Zero catching a wave, the tail arcing onwards like a sperm whale’s, vanishing in an explosion of moon-white spray.
I flinched as the water broke against my canopy, parting in shivering strands. We were metres above the Pacific now, the rush of the swell audible despite the roar of our engines. The islands were in silhouette, trees gangling higher than our radio masts. Ahead was the target: a seaborne city, illuminated in celebration.
Searchlights were appearing among the colors and lanterns of victory: great, hard beams craning unsteadily across the water towards us, greens springing from the islands they touched and grays from the heaving sea.
In the seconds before the guns, every thought, every piece of knowledge grew effaced from my mind. Words detached from meaning seemed to ricochet about the cockpit: Emptiness, Invincibility, Sun, Substance, Zero, Sacrifice, Moon… Then there were only the relentless instants. The petrifying purity. The terror pinning the joystick to its course.
The Vice-Admiral banked northwards, tracer streaking past the bomb beneath him and his sights levelling on the flagship. Tiny, expanding figures chased from cover to cover, clutching weapons: one crumpling as the 20mm cannons and the 27.7mm machine guns opened upon him. Sparks flew from the fighters lining the flightdeck. Flames. Flickering lines of light radiated around us. I banked in turn – the aerolons sluggish with bullet-holes – the hulking mass of the carrier swelling before us.
– Activate! came the screamed instruction. Activate!
I flicked the switch that primed the bomb. My hand moved independently so fire burst from the nose of the Zero, strafing the hull, sending a pallid-faced man at the rail into spasms.
– TENNO HEIKA…!
The Vice-Admiral climbed sharply towards the deck, his cry continuing. Machine-gun fire burst the canopy around me. Air whipped my face, revived something in the numbness of my mind, drove the tears backwards from my eyes.
– BANZAI! he screamed. Weeping too. His conviction absolute to the very last moment.
The Vice-Admiral’s Zero rose before me, sailing through the storm of the machine guns, coming level with the deck graceful as a wide-winged bird; then the propeller faltered, finally. The scream continued, but the lost thrust brought a drop in trajectory. And in a space between instants, the Vice-Admiral became a fireball, minor against the huge black hull, doused in a second by the waves.
The lights and fire were on me alone now, blinding as I climbed, cannon and machine guns cutting a path before me. Sensation was returning to my hands, to my arms and feet and head. I recalled myself as a child: mobs of us streaming down streets of wood and plaster houses.
– TENNO HEIKA!
I recalled cuckoos and fireflies on humid summer nights. The face of my mother, her young, dark eyes looking down on me.
– BANZAI! I screamed.
My voice was plucked by the wind, torn as the static had the Emperor’s. Every muscle was rigid, holding the shredding Zero to its course. The propeller was faltering, the war in my hands now.
The conning-tower reared before me.
Shadows drifted on across the concave fields, the stream, the cottage, the mottling of weeds in the stubble. A couple of sheep were twenty feet away, heads up, observing Angus with dark inscrutable eyes like they could switch on luminance any time they felt like it. Air flowed across his face. The sun brought reds and yellows, greens, browns and oranges from the valley.
All morning, Fay had been there. And the night before. Angus was acknowledging it now, unsure when the feeling had started but unsure too that it really ever had. What, after all, had he been yearning for all these months?
The night before, when he’d caught Fay’s eye at the table: that had been the moment. Her face had been pale again, moon-white. He’d recognised her like you might recognise yourself in a photograph.
He put a hand through his again-dishevelled hair, filed a thumbnail between two teeth, played a hip-hop beat weakly on the top bar of the gate, then took it in both hands and sprang himself forward, landing in a sheep-beheaded patch of weeds.
Angus still walked around the field like the wheat was navel-high, following the tracks of the tractors, making right-angle turns where they intersected and there was nothing to stop you turning any way you liked. He headed straight down the hill, dodging puddles, watching smoke billow westwards from the cottage chimney. Everywhere the colours were beyond themselves, like those at the peak of sunset.
He stepped onto the overgrown lawn. His hand was shaking as he placed it on a fence post. He walked quietly towards the door, smoothing his hair down carefully and brushing out the wrinkles in his T-shirt, taking the latch and pushing the door away from him.
Colour spread in a wave across Fay’s face. She dropped the paper back in the box in the corner, stepping away from it, wrapping her arms around her shoulders instinctively.
Her eyes had a grief-like intensity.
– Er… Sorry, she started. I… I just happened to see it.
Angus looked at her, then down at the flagstones, then back up at her again. She was so beautiful he could scarcely breathe, although it only seemed now that he was aware of it. The curve of her hips, her tied-back hair, the thin, uncovered angles of her shoulders.
– It’s… okay, said Angus.
In the bottom of his vision, he could see his hands shaking. He kept thinking he should reverse but it was like climbing against a waterfall. The fact of her! It was all he could do to stay where he was.
– Er, said Fay. Could I ask you something?
– Okay, said Angus.
– That word. Banzai… What does it mean?
– It’s, er… Angus cleared his throat. Well, it’s… it’s like a prayer for the Emperor. It’s… Well, literally it means ten thousand years of life to you, but that’s more a manner of speaking. Really, it means forever…
Fay smiled slightly. She shuffled, looking at him properly now.
– Um… she said. Can I ask you something else?
– Okay, said Angus.
– Would you come here, please?
Their eyes met again. Hers were fearful still, but there was certainty in there too. Then whatever had been holding him back evaporated. He moved forward, taking her head in his hands – their eyes staying locked for a second or two; then all four of them closed – and their lips met in the space between them.
Angus felt like he’d spent a lifetime orbiting a lightbulb – blinded, breaking himself against it – when all along the moon had been just beyond the open window. He felt like there was emptiness after all, but an emptiness in the places that, for some reason, he’d been certain he would find something.
The stiffness went out of Fay’s body as they kissed – it did from his, too – and bit by bit he began to see what she’d been talking about, up on the hill. She’d understood him, he saw that now. He’d been clinging to another person’s idea of himself and, finally, he was letting it go.
y: listen to the voice of doom. open your eyes, blind fools!
– If you ask me, said Paolo, it was not a bad compromise. He shrugged, gesturing with the flick-knife. I mean, she’s alive, right? And even I could hear her voice when she answered, so obviously she still loves you.
Nick’s feet were slithering on the verge, slipping into the field’s nearest furrow. He didn’t reply.
– I mean, I just didn’t trust that thirty second thing, Paolo went on. It’s like, you c
ould have got it from anywhere… NYPD Blue or The Bill or… you know. Anywhere. You’ve got to admit. Ten or twelve seconds was much safer?
He glanced back at Nick and, ensuring he wasn’t watching, retracted the blade of the flick-knife and slid it into his waistband. Then he removed the phone from a pocket of his flares, weighing it a second before detaching the battery and hurling it halfway across the ploughed field, where it vanished into the mud.
– Cos we’d have gone to prison otherwise, he said. They’d have been straight out here and nailed us.
– They found her, said Nick suddenly. He looked up, squinting. A bruise distorted the left-hand side of his jawline. They found Sonia. They made her tell them where we are. They’re going to kill us.
Paolo came to a halt.
– Oh, Jesus, he said.
A cloud shadow flickered west through the hedge on their right-hand side, covering them and progressing in instants over the crosswise furrows.
– Is… Is she alright?
– Like you give a shit!
– Nick?!
– She’s alive, said Nick. Okay? She’s in one piece.
– Jesus… said Paolo again. Shit!
He glanced at the stile and the otherwise impenetrable hedge that lined the main road in front of them. A car blinked from left to right of the opening. Across the road, crows swirled like leaves above a pine wood.
– Alright, he said eventually. Well, I… We… Here, have this back.
Paolo held the knife out, allowing Nick to take it and push it peremptorily back into his own waistband – below the navel, where the police didn’t tend to look. He then went to the stile, leaning carefully over it and peering round the edge of the hedge.
The ambulance was in a layby about a hundred yards away, glowing grubby white. Paolo watched for several seconds, looking down the long smooth straightness of the road, at the hedges, the mountain of gravel, the phonebox.