The Fire Fighter

by Francis Cottam

  Black, noxious smoke, chemical in its intensity, met and assaulted them, forcing their retreat back to the building’s high marble vestibule where they tumbled, blind and choking, through the main door. A lead fire fighter ripped off his ventilator and looked at Finlay, shaking his head. Finlay tried to think what it was he had seen in Absalom that would trigger such lethal fumes if it burned. His mind was blank with bewilderment. Pavement danced beneath their feet as the big diesel generator in the basement blew with a moan that became a roar, blasting off manhole covers and spewing through ventilation grilles into the street.

  Finlay could feel panic threatening to engulf him in vast waves that passed over and through him with increasing frequency and force. Was she in there? What if Rebecca was in there?

  He heard a huge, caterwauling crack as the glass summit of the building shattered in the rising heat and great shards of ornamental glass began their descent through the fabric of Absalom House. Two great pieces tore through the tarpaulin that had covered them and slithered down to the street where they smashed and sent fragments exploding through the air. One punctured the tyre of a Dennis pump and another tore through the canvas skin of a mobile water reservoir mounted on a wagon. A third fragment passed through the shoulder of a fire fighter, missing his lung, but leaving a hole in him the size of a baby’s fist.

  Finlay had an extension raised at the south-east corner of the building and climbed it faster than he had ever climbed a ladder in his life. Here the play of one of the platform jets had seemed to make some headway against the fierceness of the flames. A crew spotlit Finlay from the street and he used hand signals made rusty by absence of drills to point to where he wanted to go. He got close enough, behind a heat shield, to see into a corner of the atrium. Then something gave with a snap of steel cables and a shunting screech of sound that ended with a thud at the building’s base. Finlay knew it was the lift. And it had descended from the top floor. It meant that she was here.

  He took a breath and stepped on to the window ledge in front of him, the glass pane long shattered, the granite smeary with heat under his boots. Heat singed the bristles on his face and made his eyeballs sting and shrink in his head. The body shies instinctively away from fire. Finlay overcame this instinct and was about to step down into the inferno of the atrium when its floor gave with a crump, starting a chain reaction of collapse that would leave Absalom a granite shell. Finlay swayed as the vacuum rush of collapse pulled him in. His hands reached for purchase, vainly, because he could not span the window with his arms. And then he was hauled backwards out of the building, as he clawed, one hand gripping a rung, by Pearson, black-faced and grinning on the turntable ladder above him as they swayed away from heat and chaos.

  ‘Reckon you owe me one,’ Pearson shouted, clipping Finlay through his harness to the ladder, securing him. ‘Heard about you and ladders, sir. Wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself.’

  Then he saw the look on Finlay’s face and his grin vanished. He chopped signals in the spotlight glare with his hands and the crew at the turntable base wheeled them away from Absalom and down.

  Finlay, swaying in his clipped harness, stared, abject, through his descent at the building’s burning husk, his body slumped, turning occasionally, as might a corpse on a gibbet.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  Two men were unbuckling him, easing the breathing apparatus off his back.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  ‘You’re a good man, Pearson,’ Finlay offered, mechanically.

  Pearson looked back at the ruin of Absalom, its flames reflected crimson in his eyes. ‘Poor Ricky Nevin used to say there’s no call for any other sort just now, sir.’

  But Finlay was already walking away.

  The assault was as heavy as Grey had warned it would be. It was as heavy and seemingly indiscriminate as it had been on the night that Grey had sat chain-smoking at a table in The Prospect of Whitby, sipping Scotch and telling Finlay about Serre. Over in the west the rolling thunder of bombs unburdened themselves from high formations of aeroplanes, provoking the melodramatic response of useless, pulverizing ground fire, giving the ignorant something to cheer between sips of beer and bouts of fucking strangers in their shelters. Searchlights lit the sky to the west and in their beams was visible the odd, marauding shape of a Messerschmitt as it dived to strafe fire fighters, destroy rolling stock, hamper a heavy rescue or ambulance crew with cannon fire.

  When he entered The Fitzroy Tavern and saw the Irishman ambng friends at the bar, the odds of four or five to one meant nothing to him. The odds would have meant nothing to Jack Finlay anyway. He had never really been a betting man.

  Still streaked across his face and neck with soot from Absalom, his tunic torn and singed and his eyebrows burned clean off, Finlay was a sight even by the pub’s traditionally picturesque standards. But fewer people than usual observed the spectacle, the sheer intensity of the latest German onslaught perhaps eating away at bravado, eroding the general mood of recklessness and thinning the evening crowd. An audience being the last thing on Finlay’s mind, he walked straight over to the Irishman, four-fingered him in the eyes with a jabbing right and then butted him twice, hard, on the mouth, before sweeping the man’s legs away with a kick and dropping to finish the job. Finlay was fast and landed three good kidney punches before one of the Dubliner’s companions smashed a beer mug over his head. Finlay shook glass and stout from his hair and sank a double hook into the side of the Dubliner’s jaw. He felt something explode against his own cheekbone and shook his head again and rose and stamped on the Dubliner’s ribcage. One of them grabbed him from behind then, taking all the momentum out of the kick with the heel of his boot that Finlay had intended to grind into the Dubliner’s groin. Frustrated at being so impeded, he slammed his head back into the man’s face, hearing teeth snap as another man grabbed his legs and lifted him and a fourth swung a bar stool down from above head height into his body. The men holding him did not loosen their grip. They carried him to the alley outside. All the time they were kicking him, Finlay never lost consciousness. He had the clarity of thought to know that they were killing him. So, through the pain and the blood and mucus, when the assault faltered, he knew they were being interfered with rather than losing heart. He looked upward through a gap in his hands. All four of them stood with their backs to him. McKay faced them, grinning as they attempted to surround him. McKay’s fist came out from his side with cartoon swiftness and he jerked the nearest of them off his feet by his coat lapels and smashed the heel of his free hand into the man’s chin. The blow sounded like a pistol shot. Its recipient sagged unconscious in McKay’s grip, only the toecaps of his shoes trailing the cobbles. McKay dropped the man and the other three fled. Finlay’s only thought at that moment was that his father had once fought this creature to a standstill.

  McKay unbuttoned his greatcoat and dropped to his haunches and gathered Finlay gently under his shoulders and behind the crooks of the knees. He lifted him smoothly off the ground.

  ‘You’re coat’s getting ruined,’ Finlay said, tried to say. There was something wrong with his mouth and the words came out cushioned and distorted.

  ‘Sshh,’ McKay said.

  Grief came to Finlay then. Grief shuddered through him. An image of Rebecca’s bed, empty, unmade, still warm with her, arrived uninvited in his mind as his body shook with the pain and cleaving suddenness of her absence. He tried to say her name, tears blinding him, but his mind failed to conjure her face and his mouth seemed unable to shape the single word.

  ‘Sshh, Master Jack,’ McKay said. ‘You’re bubbling blood. Save your breath. You’ve broken a rib and it’s gone into a lung. Stay awake now and I’ll get you to a hospital. Stay awake and trust your old Uncle Charlie. I’ll get you to a hospital and it will all be as right as rain.’

  In the cradle of the killer’s arms, Finlay wept at his loss and shivered.

  ‘Right as rain, Master Jack,’ McKay caj
oled and promised.

  Fourteen

  Finlay awoke and felt nothing but the insidious creep of numbness under the bandages wound tightly around his torso. They had arranged the bed head at a steep incline, supporting him from the waist. He could feel the weight of his shoulders and chest when he tried to fill his lungs in taking a breath. Some kind of contraption had been clamped around his head. He could see the steel bolts at its extremities, blurred by peripheral vision. There was a large ceiling fan above him, its blades like those of a fighter propeller, and he was aware of its persistent revolution in a brush of breeze against his lips. He smelled antiseptic cream and lint. He realized that his sight was still intact. He heard someone settle into a chair at the side of his bed. But he could not turn his head and look at them. The contraption on his head prevented the manoeuvre. He wondered had he broken his neck.

  ‘My boy never had a hope in hell.’ The voice belonged to Babcock. ‘They still won’t tell us the truth about the Glorious. Obsolete. Outgunned. Didn’t even get to bear its bloody guns. Sunk by the Scharnhorst in a few cold, miserable minutes off Norway. Won’t even tell us what it was doing there, steaming around with no strategic role to play of any conceivable bloody use.’

  Finlay said nothing. His mouth was dry and his tongue had been split, he realized. He could feel the stitches sewn into its tip, rough against the roof of his mouth. He remembered that Babcock was a dab hand at sewing. Babcock had sewn together the wound in his leg.

  ‘Might as well have sent them out blindfolded and handcuffed, roped together on Thames barges, those three crews, for all the chance of survival they had. Three ships of the line blown out of the water and not a man to tell the tale. Sorry fucking tale it would have been, Chief Fire Officer. Classified. Classified fucking Admiralty cock-up.’

  Finlay wondered why there were no attendants on the ward. It seemed to be deserted. Were there other patients? He could not turn his head to look. He strained to hear the hubbub of conversation from other visitors. But there was none. He sensed the space he was in was too big to be a private room.

  ‘Wasn’t even time for a wireless signal. They were engaged and they were destroyed. Powder magazines amidships. A few plates of sub-standard steel welded on as extra armour. The Glorious didn’t have the firepower to frighten off a flock of birds. Great big bloody tub of a museum piece. They didn’t find a body. They didn’t find a lifejacket or even a single piece of floating wreckage. Blown to smithereens. No chance. I tell the missus, at least it must have been quick. I have to tell you, Mr Finlay, that she takes no consolation.’

  Finlay’s next visitor was his father. He didn’t talk, like Babcock had. He just sat, a massive presence, still on the creaking chair, and held Jack’s two hands in one of his on the counterpane. He cried quietly for a while, Jack knew for his other son, and then he squeezed Jack’s hands and rose to leave.

  ‘Don’t go, dad,’ Finlay called after him. But he knew that he was alone again in the room.

  Rebecca came to see him. He heard the familiar click of her heels on the linoleum and in his mind could see the switch of her hips as she walked the length of the ward. She kissed his cheek and he inhaled her and felt a lock of hair brush silky against his neck.

  ‘I’m sorry you died,’ he managed to say.

  Her hands lay on his bed sheathed in black leather gloves. She spread wrinkles from the counterpane with taut fingers. ‘We all die,’ she said. With cool lips, she reached across and kissed him on the mouth.

  Finlay wept then in the wake of her departure. He wept at his loss and waste and failure. He thought about his brother, seated at his wireless post, swaying with the current at the bottom of a dim green sea. He thought of his mother, deprived even of the small consolation given her by the shrine to his dad, lost to the bombing that took their house in Stanley Road. She had been out at a seance when the string of high explosives hit, cajoled by the bereft into seeing things on their behalf that nobody should.

  The death of Rebecca was too painful a thing for him properly to contemplate, let alone confront. He was angry that she had taken such a reckless risk as to be in so vulnerable a place at the time of the raid. He was bitter at his own failure to protect her. But he could not dwell on the subject of her loss in the manner that enables men to recover from their grief. He lacked the will. He lacked the strength. It was yet another failing, one that filled him with a sort of weary self-disgust. If he recovered, Finlay knew it would be despite himself.

  The hallucinations continued for several days. It might have been several weeks. Richard Nevin visited. And Albert Cooper came and sat and drank from a bottle of beer and told Finlay a filthy joke. Babcock warned him earnestly about the threat of sabotage. White came and grumpily recounted a long poem by Kipling. Pickering, the looting auxiliary, paid a visit, chuckling and throwing playing cards that all showed the ace of spades on to his bed, leaving Finlay shivering in cold sweat under his bandages. The Dubliner came and flashed his kiltie blade, razor-edged, under Finlay’s nose, singing ‘Danny Boy’ in a sweet tenor voice. But Finlay, though he waited, never felt his father’s presence again.

  When he returned to the real world he was still in a hospital bed and the bed still lay under an indolent ceiling fan. Now there were other patients and nurses and the occasional visit from a doctor, who seemed about the same age as Finlay and had sallow skin and carried a clipboard and whose breath smelled of pipe tobacco. The doctor asked him irritated questions and stabbed at a pad on the clipboard with his pen. Finlay realized that the doctor regarded his injuries as self-inflicted. In a way, he supposed they were. After a while they unbolted the apparatus holding his head rigid and gave him gentle physiotherapy and made him take long salt-water baths. Finlay was able to study the two patients in adjacent beds to his. One looked like he had been trodden on by stampeding cattle. The other had his hands suspended above him in a hoist, bandages like rolls of soft bread thrust over his fingers. Both men were young and each seemed to be sedated.

  ‘What happened to my neighbours?’ Finlay asked the sallow registrar.

  ‘Fellow on your right was beaten with an iron bar. Systematically. Fellow on the left merely had his fingernails torn out with pliers. France and Norway; contrasting interrogation techniques. I’m surprised either chap escaped. But when you’re desperate, eh?’

  ‘They’re agents?’

  The doctor sucked his teeth and looked at Finlay with deepening distaste. ‘They didn’t come by their injuries brawling in a pub.’

  As he always had, Finlay healed quickly. His ribs mended. His punctured lung repaired itself. The hospital occupied a requisitioned school building and still had a running track marked out faintly on its adjacent playing field. He ran laps of the track in bare feet until one of the nurses found him some running spikes from a pile of school supplies stored in a loft. Gymnastics equipment had been stored in the loft and Finlay pulled mats and a set of parallel bars out of the pile and started to use them. The days were diminishing towards Christmas. The weather was soft and wet, opaque and misty most days, without wind. Dawn came each morning with greater reluctance and darkness was upon the world by four as they crept through December and the shortest day. Finlay did his exercises in the hour before sunset. He felt vaguely guilty about spending so much time on recreation when every man of his age was fighting a war.

  ‘Every able-bodied man,’ the registrar said drily, when he voiced this discomfort. ‘We’re here to get you able-bodied again. The exercise will accelerate that process.’

  And his routine found, from somewhere, official sanction. Harry, the masseur from the gym Finlay used behind the Strand, started to come twice a week to knead strength and vigour back into his body on a rubbing table.

  ‘How do you get here, Harry?’ Finlay asked him.

  ‘Round trip takes about eighty minutes from the Smoke in a motor,’ Harry said. ‘Big brute of a Ministry driver brings me in an official car. It’s no hardship, Mr Finlay. I can’t say I’ve ev
er travelled by Bentley before.’

  His mother telephoned.

  ‘I saw dad.’

  ‘I thought you might.’

  There was a silence. He could hear his mother breathing into the unaccustomed apparatus in her hand.

  ‘It was the fever,’ Finlay said.

  ‘It was the gift, John,’ his mother said. ‘It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. It’s how you knew our Tommy had passed on.’

  ‘That was intuition, mum. Nothing more.’

  ‘Are you mending, son?’

  ‘I’m going to be absolutely fine.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know you are. I’ve something else to tell you. But I’ll talk to you after you’ve talked to your Captain Grey.’

  ‘Will you visit?’

  ‘I wish I could, John. I’m laid up with my feet. I’ll telephone you again when you’ve talked to Captain Grey. And I’ll see you when you’re right again. You’re on the mend. That’s the main thing.’

  ‘He loved me, didn’t he, mum?’

  ‘He does love you, Johnny. He always will.’

  He had the time to ponder on his buildings and their collective fate of violence and destruction. He tried to puzzle sense out of what he had seen in rooms fretting with forced use and clumsy alteration. The war effort toiled to such slogans as ‘Make and Mend’ and ‘As Needs Must’. But the science he had seen in his buildings had been baffling and sinister. In one, he had seen huge tanks of soupy liquid, coiled power cables twisting in the translucent broth like conger eels. In another, the ceramic housing of thirty or more crackling conductors had risen from a false floor resembling nothing so much as pulled and rotting giant’s teeth. The apparatus at the old Hawksmoor priest’s house had been the most disturbing. Jelloid and viscous, a warp of matter whirled, suspended there, between unseen fields of force. It span fast, this purple insult to nature. Finlay had been advised to wear earplugs before entering its lair. The sound of its frictive contact with the air was a banshee’s scream. And yet none of this stuff had proved truly volatile. London had not erupted with explosive energy, ungovernable, terrifying, when his buildings had been bombed. Almost all of the volatility had come from the ordnance dropped by the Luftwaffe on Finlay’s buildings. Their purpose remained a gruesome, disquieting mystery to him.