by Tom Bullough
– Alkalai…
Nick could hear Steve’s voice in the back of the ambulance: tight and South London. Stopping at the driver’s window – holding the cool-box by the unrubbed ends of its handle – Nick cleared his throat, waiting for instructions, looking at Paolo as his eyes flickered open.
Steve checked briefly beneath the curtain.
– Right, he said. Nick. Open the door and put it on the seat.
From somewhere to his left Nick thought he heard the sound of a diesel engine, but it was distant and he thought nothing more of it, doing as he was told then wiping his hands thoroughly on his jeans.
Mac ducked beneath the curtain, seized the cool-box with his enormous hands and removed it into the back.
– Right… he growled.
– Okay, said Steve. Now, I’m going to check this thing over, just to see exactly what we’ve got. Nick, you are going to get into the driver’s seat, put your hands on the steering-wheel and stay exactly where you fucking are.
Across the seat, Paolo had started moaning to himself. There was a click as the lid of the cool-box opened, and suddenly, as Nick was pulling himself inside, the engine sound loudened, and a dirty green Land Rover appeared in the wing mirror beside him – a hundred yards down the track, steering round the potholes.
– Who the fuck is that?! said Mac.
Nick looked, then leant out of the sliding door and stared as it passed them, coming to a halt on the slope beside the house.
– It’s… he said. It’s the farmer, and… a girl.
– Okay, so why the fuck isn’t this flask full?! said Steve.
The doors of the Land Rover swung open and Belle and Mr Lloyd got down into the yard, talking for a moment across the seat, gesturing towards the ambulance. Then Mr Lloyd set off towards the house – a collie wagging behind him – and, after a moment, Belle started down the hill towards them.
– Well?!
– Steve… hissed Nick. She’s coming this way!
– Nick, said Steve. His voice was livid now. Where the fuck is the rest of this flask?! A third of it’s not here! That’s a hundred fucking grand!
– Steve, for Christ’s sake! said Mac. Let’s just get out of here!
– Listen, said Steve. I am not giving up a hundred grand for any fucking girl! Okay?! Get the fuck rid of her!
A moment later, Belle was at the open driver’s door, pushing her hair back from her face, smiling weakly and glancing up at Nick.
– Hi, she said. Is, er… Is the back open? I need to get my cigarettes.
– No, said Nick.
Paolo had managed to pull himself upright. He was hunched to conceal his leg, his face behind his hair.
Belle looked at him curiously.
– Paolo? she said. What’s going on?
– Here, why don’t you have mine? said Nick, producing a packet of Lambert & Butler and proffering it. I, um… There’s something wrong with the lock on the back doors.
Paolo turned slightly to look at her, his face bloodless, bruised and bearded, dark beneath the eyes.
– Paolo? Belle repeated.
– Okay… Steve’s voice was quiet, icy again. His face was in shadow. The curtain flicked open and the long, silenced barrel of the gun swung out across the seat. Put your hands out…
But when he saw Belle he hesitated. She had stepped back reflexively and was staring up at the space in the curtains. Her hair was loose, shining in the sunlight. Her eyes were wide and mascaraed. Her cardigan was open, exposing a strip of stomach and cleavage. Her skin was flawless.
Steve only paused for a moment – for long enough to inhale – but Paolo threw himself on the gun unthinkingly and wrenched it downwards, pulling Steve forwards, collapsing with the effort, the gun coming loose from his fingers and discharging into the rubbish on the floor. Steve threw himself after it, but Nick had it by his feet and he kicked it out into the yard, removing the flick-knife from his waistband, releasing the blade and – in an instant – burying it in his back.
The scream this time was unhampered, guttural and incredulous. The knife jarred against his shoulderblade and caught in his sinews. Blood fanned across the grey wool of his jacket.
– Belle! Nick shouted, jumping out after the gun, chasing round the bonnet. Pick it up! Pick it up!
Across the seat, Paolo had slid open his own door and had fallen into the yard, moving dreamily. Steve was floundering, shouting, blocking off the back with his convulsions.
Nick wrapped his arms round Paolo’s chest and began to drag him backwards up the hill towards the house, over earth and clumps of weeds. Belle had picked up the gun and was ahead of them, whimpering, pointing it randomly around her. In front of her, the house’s back door was ajar. Paolo was heavy, groaning faintly. Nick was watching as Mac shoved Steve to one side and landed in the driver’s seat.
The starter motor churned, stopped, churned again.
– Belle, shoot them! Nick shouted.
There was a trail of blood in the dirt from Paolo’s leg. Nick felt his arms beginning to weaken. The engine came alive and the ambulance moved forward.
– Belle! Nick was screaming now. Fucking shoot them!
Belle stopped between the barn and the farmhouse, staring as the ambulance approached, its bonnet gleaming white and the specks of clouds on the windscreen. Nick’s arms gave way. He went to pick Paolo back up, but looked again at the ambulance, his whole body quivering; then he turned and ran for the door as Belle – finally – began to shoot.
Her first shot hit the windscreen, turning it into a web of white lines. Her face was amazed rather than terrified, the gun held close to her chest. On the ground beside her Paolo was trying to move, his face invisible beneath his hair. Momentarily Belle glanced at him, and at the space where Nick had been, then the ambulance hit the slope and she pushed the gun desperately away from her, peering along the silencer. Her second shot glanced from the radiator. Her third flew away across the yard. But her hands were beginning to steady now, and her fourth punched another hole in the windscreen.
The ambulance was barely two seconds away when it slewed from its course, colliding with the barn to its left, bowing the corrugated-iron door. Belle was still firing – silently – her face set with determination. The walls of the barn boomed together, like the soundbox of a guitar.
It was no more than a minute later that Pete first heard the sound of rotor blades. The four of them were at the top of the field above the cottage, looking across the valley through a space between the barns. Belle had been over there, that much they were sure of. They had watched as the ambulance headed back towards the track, but who had been inside it they had really no idea.
Angus and Fay started running moments later – evenly matched – balancing their way across a tiny footbridge over a weed-choked pond and vaulting a stile at the other end.
– Tim, come on! said Pete, setting off after them, looking back.
A helicopter was floating over the quarries in the hill opposite: tiny, glass-nosed, its bodywork black with a camera poking from one side. The air around them was starting to pulse. Tim was peering at him across the stubble, grinning maniacally.
By the time Pete had climbed over the stile and arrived in the next field, Fay and Angus were almost in the one beyond it. Pete followed them along the footmarked verge between the furrows and the wood, his breath tarry, his dreadlocks bouncing against his back.
He stopped as the helicopter dropped into the field beside him, deafening, leaves rising in waves from the bare lines of earth, a door on its right swinging open and the inspector with the moustache jumping down, shouting something, struggling through the down-draught towards him.
– They’re in the ambulance! Pete shouted back, guessing the question.
The inspector cupped his ear against the gale. His eyes had an eagerness about them that Pete found surprisingly endearing.
– Here! he shouted. I’ll show you!
Angus and Fay stopped running whe
n the helicopter appeared above the field behind them and they saw its insignia. They retraced the verge as far as a gateway in the wood, watching the helicopter – its rotor blades circling – then Pete and Hooey as they climbed aboard, talking excitedly.
The draught was making eddies and spirals in the air around them that – it struck Angus suddenly – seemed somehow to have been there all along, as if they’d been waiting to be realised.
– Divine wind, said Fay.
– Porcoddue, said Angus.
They watched as the helicopter took off again, leaning to the left and growing faint behind the wood. The leaves settled back to the ground. Angus and Fay sat down on the verge, putting their feet on the nearest ridge.
– I’m… tripping, said Angus, looking at her.
– Me too, she said, looking back.
It wasn’t an oppressive kind of feeling, more of an acute sense of elevation. The two of them watched the sky in front of them, fascinated by it as if it were a display of the Northern Lights.
The sky was enormous, as was the field. Both curved away from them, following the sphericality of the earth. Angus felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to lie face down, put his arms out and hug it.
– I, um… he started, turning to Fay to explain this, but the idea shone so plainly from her face already that they could only start giggling, joining hands and inspecting each other.
Her face was pale – grinning – her hair spreading to either side of it and her eyes shining with amusement. Angus leant forward and for a while they kissed, colours evolving and unfolding in their eyelids.
– Where does the track go? said Fay, when they finished, looking through the gateway into the wood.
– The track… said Angus. He stood up, teetering. The track was rutted and grassy. It curled to the left and vanished around a corner. The track goes… anywhere!
– Well, said Fay. She sounded impressed. Then, let’s go down the track!
Pete was squashed into the space between Hooey and the men with the rifles, pointing out the track to Pentwyn and its junction with the long grey line of the road. When they banked, his dreadlocks swung like a plumbline. He’d never been in a helicopter before. He had to admit it was impressive.
You could see everything from up here. The brick and wood cottage at the bottom of its field, the trees following the course of the stream, Tim in a star shape on his back in the stubble, a pair of figures carrying another into the farmhouse, what appeared to be Belle sitting smoking on the garden wall, a maroon Jaguar parked behind a mound of gravel, the river, the mountains… Everything!
It was Hooey who saw the ambulance first. He was leaning forward in his seat, his hands folded anxiously. It had stopped perhaps a hundred yards outside the turning into the track, a dent around its left-hand headlight and a line of oil behind it.
– What’s going to happen to them? said Pete, bending towards Hooey’s ear.
– Who? said Hooey.
– Nick, said Pete. And Paolo.
– Oh… Hooey frowned. He looked as if he hadn’t given the matter much thought. I’d… urge them to co-operate, frankly. You’d be astonished what a little co-operation can do.
A figure was moving down the middle of the main road beneath him, heading vaguely towards the layby. He was hugely built, smartly dressed, and had the cool-box pinned beneath his left arm.
He was only stepping on the lines in the middle of the road, Pete realised; and as he arrived on the straight before the layby these lines became a sequence of dashes. Had he simply run he might just about have made it to his car in time, but leaping from dash to dash was slower progress. The dashes were narrow and several feet apart, with cat’s-eyes to encounter in between them. Pete could imagine what it would be like down there. The terror of the black and the brilliance of the white – he’d been in enough similar conditions. You had only to see the distinction once and that was it: the white spelt safety, familiarity, comfort, while the black became the unknown, the great dark emptiness, where anything at all might happen.
z: …shining.
I was unsure whether my eyes were closed or open. I was unsure even whether I had eyes at all. I may have been facing up or down. I may have been cold, or hot, or distinct from all of these things.
It did, however, seem that I possessed a memory of pain in my left leg, another in my pelvis; an idea that my eardrums had been damaged in some way, by the sound of my own voice, by the explosion that had driven me up and into the canopy.
It was dark. That much I could be sure about. It was dark and in some way I was floating. I had not, of course, known how events would unfold once the mission was over, but I continued to expect the handmaidens of the Kami to materialise at any moment, to take me in their arms and carry me towards the light of Yasukuni. Yet as the seconds – the hours or years – elapsed, I became aware that my thoughts were growing vaguer again, fiery in some way. Panic was pressing itself upon me. I had an overwhelming sensation of confinement and powerlessness.
Perhaps, it occurred to me, I was capable of moving myself. Perhaps for a mere student – a humble conscript – it was an arrogance to expect help from those beautiful maidens, whose images I knew so well from my upbringing. The darkness seemed not only to be enveloping me, but to be infusing my very core.
The light appeared suddenly, faint through the flexing blackness. In some moments it was a circle, in others fragmented. I willed myself towards it, scarcely conscious when I broke the ocean surface. My head spun in the waves, craning backwards to cough down air. Above me the moon was huge – white, full – clear even to my salt-damaged eyes.
It was just as I was slipping back into blackness that I heard a sound nearby. A foreign shout of some kind. Fighting to remain afloat, I found myself suddenly in a light of such brilliance that it might have been the sun. I could see only whiteness, feel only the coarse hands that took me by the neck, tugging me backwards into a dinghy and throwing me to the floor where my left leg crumpled beneath me.
The blindness dissolved slowly into a line of barking faces, the reek of alcohol, the dark lines of the gunwales. An ornately dressed man was pushing his way towards me, stepping over the thwarts, the crowd parting in front of him. He stopped, astride – his face contorted with anger – but even as I was, sodden and shivering, I might have been new-born.
He held no fear for me of any kind.
Also by Tom Bullough
The Claude Glass
Konstantin
Copyright
Thanks
Boundless thanks to C, J, Matthew, O and W (alph. order), Nat, Mark, the incredible Hughes and Llewellyn families, Michael Morrogh, Dave for acidic advice ([email protected]), Angus, Oshry, Carl, Bruce Robinson, Peter Dyer, Ian Lowe, Mary and Becky.
A © Tom Bullough 2002
For author information:
www.tombullough.com
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews
Published in 2002 (and as an eBook in 2012) by
Sort Of Books, PO Box 18678, London NW3 2FL
www.sortof.co.uk
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Print ISBN 978–0953522767
ePub ISBN 978–1–908745–23–1