◊
Melissa arrived in a cloud of perfume, clutching a stack of plastic boxes to her chest. Amanda was sweating in the heat, working fast to set out equal amounts of the cake ingredients on each of the twelve tables.
‘Where have you been?’ Amanda said.
‘The soldiers,’ Melissa said. ‘They wanted to search me before I came in. They were very thorough.’
‘What is that perfume you’re wearing?’
‘I dropped the bottle in my lap in the car. I didn’t have time to change.’
‘Come on, they start arriving in half an hour.’
Four soldiers stood at the entrance to the hall, rifles on their backs, arms folded across their chests, watching Melissa and Amanda laying a stack of four aprons on each of the tables. Amanda patted down each stack to make it neat and flat. She put a wooden spoon into the mixing bowls, always at the five o’clock angle. Melissa opened up the plastic boxes and in individual ceramic bowls shared out crystallised fruits, Smarties, hundreds-and-thousands, and marshmallows.
One of the soldiers, a man with a big ginger beard, came and grabbed a handful of Smarties and clamped his hand over his mouth as he chucked them in. Melissa moved to replenish the bowl, but with a subtle move, no more than placing her fingertips on Melissa’s forearm, Amanda stopped her. Together, the two women watched the man grin at them while he chewed. Amanda reciprocated his smile, but pulled it back when it encouraged the soldier’s grin to widen enough to show a blue Smartie clamped between his teeth.
◊
Greg reversed his truck close to the heap of bodies. Wilkie plucked an earring from the ear of a big dead woman at his feet. Her taupe skirt was torn all the way from her knee to her waist, and her enormous thigh spilled out, streaked with cellulite. Wilkie tossed the earring into a plastic washing up bowl on the doorstep.
James stood at her feet, bent forwards, hands on his knees, looking up and down her. He puffed out. ‘How are we going to handle this one,’ he said.
Wilkie grabbed her wrists. James grabbed her ankles. Wilkie said, ‘One, two, three, lift.’ They raised the woman from the ground. With her arms pulled taught above her head, her chin was forced forwards onto her chest, closing her mouth and rolling out a cushion of fat on which her frowning face rested.
‘Lift man!’ Wilkie said.
‘I can’t get a grip,’ James said. The woman’s wide ankles slipped through his fingers, and her bottom dropped to the ground.
‘Your fingers are too small,’ Wilkie said. ‘They’ve still got some growing to do.’
‘Up yours,’ James said.
Greg jumped out of the cab, leaving the door open. ‘Swap ends,’ he said, and then to James, ‘Take an armpit’.
Greg and James each hooked their forearms under the woman’s armpits. Wilkie, the biggest of the three, gripped her ankles and counted again. The three of them lifted her together.
Wilkie’s face wrinkled with the effort, the bristles around his mouth rolling together into dark creases. The woman’s ankles were slipping through his fingers. He hefted her up into the air a little, slid his grip up under her knees so he could lift her higher. The body sagged between them.
Wilkie began to count again, swinging her like he might a sack of potatoes. But James said, ‘Don’t. Not like that.’
‘Oh give me a break,’ Wilkie said. ‘She not going to feel it. I want to get home before dark.’
James looked to Greg.
‘Let’s just get her up before my back gives,’ Greg said.
Wilkie began to count again, and this time, they swung together.
◊
In the town hall kitchen, Amanda opened the oven and found it to be full of oily lumps of blackened crumbs and a shrivelled half-tomato. Melissa unpacked rubber gloves and fresh J-Cloths from her bag, filled a bowl with soap and hot water, and together they stuck their arms into the oven and began to scrub.
Kneeling like this, their heads close together, they filled the oven with whispers.
‘I’m worried about Greg,’ Amanda said. ‘I’m worried he’s going to do something stupid.’
‘Like what?’ Melissa said.
‘I don’t know. He gets crazier every morning when the truck arrives. He keeps talking about calling them up and complaining.’
‘Well, what if he did?’ Melissa said.
Amanda stopped to look at Melissa, frowning deeply.
‘Are you serious?’
‘He’s got principles.’
‘He can’t afford to have principles,’ Amanda said. ‘He’s going to be a dad. He’s got more important things to think about.’
‘I think I’d be proud of my husband if he stood up for himself.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you had one.’
Melissa did not reply, but scraped a big blob of black foam from the back of her glove and flicked it into the bowl.
‘I’m sorry,’ Amanda said. ‘I didn’t mean that.’ And then, ‘Your perfume really is giving me a headache.’
◊
The back of Greg’s truck was filled, the peak of the bodies rising higher than the cab, held in place by weight and the interlocking of limbs. All three men heaved against the tailgate, pushing against the bodies, until the locking mechanism clicked into place. It had taken them an hour and a half to get a quarter of the heap onto the truck. Now the sun was higher and the flies more numerous. James went through the cleared space on the gravel, throwing stray shoes high up onto the truck and picking up lost watches and coins from among the bloodied stones and throwing them into the washing up bowl, which was now filling up.
‘Can we have a cuppa before we set off?’ James asked.
Greg looked to Wilkie. ‘We should pace ourselves,’ Wilkie said.
‘I want to get this done before it gets too hot,’ Greg said. ‘Let’s stop for tea after we’ve unloaded this one.’
James wiped his hands on his jeans, and where he did, the denim was dark with dirt and other people’s blood. Greg and Wilkie got in the cab.
‘I’ll ride on the outside,’ James said, and he climbed up onto the driver’s step, clinging to the mount of the wing mirror.
‘You know I can’t concentrate with your face peering in at me,’ Greg said.
‘Yeah,’ Wilkie laughed. ‘Why don’t you just ride in the back.’
Greg set off down the track, his truck groaning and shuddering with every dip in the road. Thirst made the men quiet, and in this silence they could hear bodies slipping down the pile, things bumping into the painted steel sides, knuckles, shoes, foreheads, zippers, knees.
◊
The children arrived dressed in various versions of the Captain outfits. Some of them had the official merchandise, produced in red polyester with foam padding to replicate his muscles on their scrawny chests. Others were home-made affairs, red t-shirts with a five-pointed star cut from yellow fabric and stitched on, the black fist at the centre of this logo drawn onto it with marker pens. Boys and girls wore the same costumes. As each new one arrived, they joined the dog-fight round the tables, chasing each other, both hands held out flat in front of them in the Captain’s flying position. Every few seconds one would stop, spread his or her fingers, and then mimic with varying levels of success, the sound of the Captain’s death ray, a sound most effectively rendered by screwing up the corner of the mouth, enough to twist the nose out of shape, biting the front teeth together and forcing out air in a slow, bubbly, hiss. Whereupon, the others would clutch their hearts and drop to the parquet floor, to lay for a few seconds before getting up and awaiting their turn to kill everyone.
‘This is mental,’ Melissa said. ‘What’s wrong with their parents?’
‘Stop,’ Amanda said. She tied a small knot in the strings of her apron at the zenith of her belly. Within a couple of weeks she would have to tie it round the back instead.
The birthday girl arrived, Sasha, her strut making her thick black hair swing from side to side behind her. Her mother, Gov
ernor Franco-Basoni, followed after, flanked by four soldiers. She looked around the room at each of the people present. When her gaze reached Amanda and Melissa, the two women nodded with respect, but this gesture received nothing in return but an indifferent pout.
The soldier with the clipboard who had stopped Amanda earlier, came over and told the women that everyone had now arrived and they could begin.
A boy with his red face-paint already smudged around his mouth ran into the legs of the soldier, gripped the man’s jacket and tugged at it with both hands. ‘Is the Captain coming?’ He said. ‘When is the Captain coming?’
‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ the soldier said, smiling for the first time and patting the boy’s head.
◊
The quarry was dug deep and wide, the road around it pummelled into chevrons by the tyres of earth-moving machinery. Gulls turned circles in the air above. Greg swung his truck round at the edge and James hopped off the driver’s step to guide him back, getting the rear wheels as close to the edge as possible without danger of the ground crumbling away beneath them.
‘You’ve still got some crops going then,’ Wilkie said, pointing across the excavation to a field of tall stalks.
‘Corn,’ Greg said. ‘Only about fifty hectares. But if I didn’t grow something here, I’d go nuts.’
‘Will it be edible?’ James said, and when the other two gave him confused glares, he added, ‘You know, with all this being right next to it.’ James waved his hand around, gesturing at the pit.
‘Give me a break,’ Greg said.
Wilkie picked up a flint, pulled his arm all the way back and grunted as he threw it. The stone flew in a high arc, seeming to take forever to fall, and hit the ground with a soft thud, only a quarter of the way across the pit. Gulls and crows sprung up around the point of impact, complaining, and then settled back into their scavenging, amongst the flecks of pink, blue, white and grey where the clothes of the dead showed through the fine layer of dirt.
‘This time last year,’ Greg said. ‘The government was paying me twice what they’re paying now because I had skylarks nesting right here.’
‘It won’t always be like this,’ James said. ‘They’ll find a weakness. Everyone has a weakness.’
‘Who’s they?’ Wilkie said. ‘They think what they’re doing now is the best thing for everyone. They’re not even looking. This might be as good as it gets. Next year, we might look back to this moment and wish we still had the same freedoms we’ve got now.’
‘Well that’s a cheery thought,’ Greg said. He unbolted the trailer’s tailgate, and grabbed the trouser leg of a man already half falling out. ‘Let’s get this done.’
‘What I was about to say,’ Wilkie said, ‘is that they aren’t going to do jack shit about it. It’s down to us.’
◊
While the cakes were baking, the kids watched a film. It was a montage of clips of the Captain set to a heavy-rock track. Some of the clips were high-quality, taken from news broadcasts. Others were jumpy and low-resolution, filmed on home movie cameras and mobile phones.
All of the town hall curtains were drawn. The kids sat on cushions on the floor, heads tilted back to watch the screen above them. They watched the Captain zipping past office blocks, thousands of windows shattering around him. They watched the Captain standing alongside generals at podiums, bathed in camera flashes. They watched the Captain land on a beach, raise his hands in his signature pose, the people in swimsuits leaping up terrified from their towels, feet kicking up sand as they run to the water’s edge to gather their children. And then everyone dropping, the whole beach felled in a second. And the children cheered.
‘How can you stand this?’ Melissa said, watching through the kitchen serving hatch. ‘Would you let your kid sit through this?’
‘Keep your voice down,’ Amanda said.
‘How can they watch this?’
‘They don’t understand,’ Amanda said. She opened up the oven door and took out two trays of cakes and set them on the hob, before putting in the next two trays of mixture. Most of the cakes were lopsided mutants, spilling over the edge of their paper cups.
‘This can’t go on,’ Melissa said.
Just then, Amanda noticed for the first time, the ginger soldier who’d eaten their Smarties earlier. He was stood outside the kitchen door, watching them both through the small square window.
Melissa wiped her hands on her apron. ‘Would you like one?’ she asked him, holding up a cake. ‘Fresh out of the oven.’
The soldier wedged open the door with his boot and took the cake from her. He shoved the whole thing in his mouth in one go, severing it from the paper cup with his front teeth, watching Melissa the whole time.
‘Good?’ she said.
He nodded, chewing, and wiping crumbs from his beard. He looked around the kitchen, around the floor, behind the door, all around the work surfaces.
‘Are you looking for something?’ Melissa asked.
‘No,’ the soldier said. He took another cake, then went back into the main hall, shutting the door behind him.
Amanda leaned up against the oven, puffing, shaking her head slowly at Melissa. Melissa came close, wiping cake mixture up with a cloth. ‘Do you think he…’ she began, but Amanda shook her head and pinched her lips together. ‘You’re going to get the wrong kind of attention wearing perfume like that,’ she said.
◊
The men were down to the last body, that of the big woman who was loaded onto the truck first back at the farm house. As before, Wilkie grabbed her ankles, James and Greg an armpit each. Wilkie didn’t count this time, but they did swing, and couldn’t help but watch the bulk of her, bouncing down the steeply chiselled quarry, her slow turns, hair streaming, the sudden acrobatic lunges when she connected with something jutting from the side, a rock, an irrigation pipe.
‘What time was the party due to finish?’ Wilkie asked.
Greg looked at his watch. ‘In about half an hour.’
‘So it could be happening now,’ Wilkie said.
‘Will she really do it?’ James said. ‘I mean…’
‘Melissa’s got bigger balls than the three of us put together,’ Greg said.
‘Yeah, but James is lowering our average,’ Wilkie laughed.
James punched Wilkie’s arm. ‘This isn’t the time,’ James said. ‘Jeez, I can’t even think about it. I mean I can’t stop thinking about it.’
◊
Governor Franco-Basoni stood before all the children with the palms of her hands pressed together. ‘I have a special treat for you,’ she said.
The children all jumped up and down on the spot, their hands in the air, shouting, ‘Captain! Captain!’
‘Yes,’ the Governor continued, ‘especially for Sasha’s birthday, and because her family is so loyal, the Captain has come.’
Melissa and Amanda were wiping down the tables and repacking leftover ingredients into their plastic boxes. They watched the red-costumed man stride in through the front door. It was not the real Captain, but even a facsimile was enough to set Amanda’s hands shaking.
The Captain raised his arms and all the children ran up to him, high-fiving him and calling out his name. ‘And where is the birthday girl?’ the Captain said. He was wearing a concealed voice changer which gave his speech the unearthly metallic sound of the real Captain.
Governor Franco-Basoni looked across at Amanda, and mimed the action of lighting a candle with a match. Amanda nodded. The two women went into the kitchen and took out an enormous cake from its box. The red, yellow and black fondant icing on top was in the shape of the Captain’s logo. Amanda’s hands trembled as she stuck one candle into each of the five points of the star, and then three more gathered close together in the middle of the fist.
‘You carry it,’ Melissa said. ‘I’ll light the candles.’
Amanda agreed and handed Melissa the box of matches from her apron pocket. They waited at the kitchen door, just out of sig
ht, for the signal.
The Captain began the first note of ‘Happy Birthday’, and everyone joined in. Melissa struck a match and lit a candle, then plucked it from the cake and used it to light the others before sticking it back in.
Governor Franco-Basoni bade them over with a flick of her hand. A soldier switched off the hall lights.
All the kids, the Governor and the Captain, turning to watch the cake approach, singing the happy birthday song together. Amanda forced a big grin. She could feel the heat of the candles on her face.
The children parted around Amanda and Melissa, so they could get right up to Sasha, who was grinning broadly, the Captain’s hand on her shoulder. And beside him, clapping last and loudest at the end of the song was Governor Franco-Basoni.
In the middle of this applause, just as Sasha opened her mouth and sucked in a big breath of air in preparation for blowing out the candles, Melissa stuck her blouse sleeve into the tiny flames.
The substance she’d soaked her clothes with that morning ignited in one explosive whoosh. Everyone gathered around her was lit up by the flash, their terrified faces captured for a second as her blouse, trousers and hair ignited.
In the second that Melissa burst into flames, Amanda dropped the cake, the Captain stumbled back and tripped over his own heels, and the soldiers, suddenly awakened by duty, swung their guns round from their backs. It took a moment for the screaming to start, but already Melissa was charging at Governor Franco-Basoni, yelling out something, some kind of unintelligible valedictory cry.
So stunned was the Governor that she had taken only one step back when Melissa leaped at her, wrapped her arms and legs around her, and gripped tightly. They hit the ground, burning together.
◊
Greg put the kettle on the Aga. Droplets of water rolled down its enamelled surface and fizzed and spat on the hot plate before disappearing in puffs of steam.
‘Have you got any biscuits?’ Wilkie said.
‘There’s some flapjack in there,’ Greg said.
Wilkie took the square plastic box from on top of the microwave, opened up the corner and sniffed the air inside. James came back from the bathroom. His short fringe and the neck of his t-shirt were soaked where he’d wetted his face.
The New Hero: Volume 1 Page 27