Pieces of Light

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘I had to go on leave,’ I said, ‘to be hurt.’

  ‘They say, old boy, that your AA chaps and their falling shrapnel rip up more of us than their cottonwool does the Boche.’

  ‘It’s Jerry these days, but they are quite right. What do you propose to do about it?’

  He frowned, ignoring my question, and laid his hand on my arm.

  ‘Hugh – are you, you know, intact? Your baggage down there ship-shape, and all that?’

  I snorted. My metal brandy flask saved all that, but I wasn’t about to tell him.

  ‘Packed with nowhere to go, Nuncle.’

  I looked at him steadily. He blinked and stroked the new thing, the beard – more brindled than his walrus moustache, which was old.

  ‘I never forced her hand, Hugh. I really didn’t,’ he murmured.

  ‘Well, that makes me feel much better,’ I said, tapping my stick against the bed end so that it hummed at the other. ‘Congratulations, Nuncle. Now I’m going to forget the whole business. Please don’t think it frightfully awful of me not to attend the wedding, whenever it is. I have a life to lead, and it’s mine, once the war’s done with. I’m not cutting myself off, but I am going to be delicate with myself. That means coming round to it slowly. That means seeing you on my own terms, probably infrequently. I’ll get my things at some point, when the leg’s healed.’

  Or words to that effect.

  He clutched the raincoat on his knees, kneading it as he looked around him nervously. He’s out of his pond, I thought. He’s gasping like a fish. Then he turned his eyes back to me. I was wrong: he wasn’t nervous. He was excited. Sated.

  ‘Would you like me to lay a hand on it, old boy, speed it up with some magnetism?’

  ‘If you mean my thigh, you must be joking.’

  ‘Certainly wasn’t pulling your leg, what?’

  He laughed, happily – ever so happily. I think it is that laugh I hear again as Muck makes his obscene gesture, so discreet that no one else sees it – not even John Wall. A happy, light laugh – a laugh you always liked, come to think of it. It had always been the same laugh, you said, even when he was a boy, playing silly tricks on you in that big house, in that big garden, in that big wildwood. (Was it so wild, then, such a lush tangle?) My mask drops, something tears in me very deep down, a sound like someone hawking down an alley, our minds made up of so many secret alleys, unventilated basements, fusty attics!

  I’ve turned away now and with my pinched face I make it to the cat’s bentwood chair, lift the horrible beast off and am rewarded with a scratch on my wrist. Nothing serious, scarcely puncturing the skin, but my drink spills. Fuck Fatso, I mutter. My neighbour in a green parka, with a face lost in its own mournful longitudes, grunts a greeting. ‘Our furry relatives,’ he says. ‘Did you know that we share an almost identical DNA with ’em? Just one code thingummy reversed, that’s all. True. Honest. Really.’ He’s twitching his thumb and forefinger, showing the reversal of the thingummy. He was on his own before I came along, has a rotten cabbage secreted somewhere on his person. I sit anyway, exhausted. I feel a fear of being alone, Mother. I like this man’s wanderings through popular science, it means I don’t have to talk, just nod. Like flicking idly through a magazine at the dentist’s or half-listening to the radio. Something comforting in it. These amazing facts, devoid of fuzz and blur. Did I know this, did I know that? It means I can ponder, safely.

  God knows how long I’m stuck there. Nearly an hour, maybe. I think I had another pint, on Green Parka.

  ‘Night night, Mr A.’

  It’s John Wall, by the door, Muck swaying next to him. He purses his lips, as if about to blow a kiss. Then the wretched tune comes out again, the ditty, tiptoeing around my heart, needling it. They go out together, Muck still whistling. Fatso is warming my lap. Fatso leaps off. Green Parka’s discourse on the two hemispheres of the brain fades as the door swings shut behind me.

  They are standing in the street, under the orange lamp opposite the pub, as if waiting for me. A creak above my head and the Green Man grins down, a gooseberry-faced lion vomiting dandelion leaves.

  ‘Listen –’

  ‘Say that Frenchie word again, Mr Arkwright.’

  ‘Shut up. This has got to stop.’

  Muck hiccups, his head wobbles. He’s looking straight at me, seeking his centre of gravity somewhere to his left. He finds it. He’s absolutely sure he’s found it.

  ‘What’s the chappie on about, John boy?’

  The wine at supper, the strong beer – we’re all in it together. Amongst the fumes.

  ‘That song. It’s got to stop.’

  John Wall drags his foot forward.

  ‘We like singin’, Mr A.’

  ‘It’s got to stop. If it doesn’t, I’ll – I’ll –’

  ‘What’s he on about, John?’

  Then he snorts and collapses in giggles, on John Wall’s shoulder. John Wall breaks away, as if disgusted by touch, and drags himself closer. He stands very close, in fact. His face is glistening, as if covered with oil.

  ‘I’m not being funny, Mr Arkwright, but I’m owed summat, seein’ as what I’ve lost.’

  ‘Lost? What have you lost?’

  He blinks.

  ‘My mum’s never got over it, acksherly.’

  ‘If you’re on about your father –’

  Muck is swaying about behind, whistling again though about as tunelessly as a doodlebug, doing his best to tiptoe through imaginary flowers. Ramsons, of course. Crushing them. My head appears to contract to teeth and bone.

  John Wall’s small eyes, so very watery, even in the awful orange glare of the street lamp.

  ‘We might claim damages, you see.’

  He’s both apologetic and vicious. Impossible to explain the effect, Mother. Impossible for the finest of my actors to imitate.

  ‘Damages? What rubbish. What was he doing in the wood, anyway?’

  ‘Eh? Well, takin’ a short cut. Everyone has the right to take a short cut. From A to B. You can’t deny ordinary folk takin’ short cuts where they needs to –’

  ‘I know what he was doing. Like the other time.’

  The small eyes slide off.

  ‘Health hazard, that’s what that wood is,’ he says. ‘Could have been a kid. You can always put one of them electric fences right round. I can get one at wholesale price, from my mate in the Army –’

  Muck is urinating loudly against a wall beyond, head thrown back, going la-la-la. I look back at John Wall. He is a mixture of guile and innocence, now.

  ‘I am not about to put an electric fence around a perfectly harmless tangle of old trees –’

  ‘Your uncle did.’

  ‘Want a pigeon, Mr Arnold?’

  Muck’s stubby body is arched back, doing his trousers up behind his friend. They both stare at me as if I am about to perform a little turn.

  ‘I am not my uncle,’ I say.

  ‘But it’s your property,’ says John Wall, scratching his bad leg.

  ‘Cursed, that’s what it is,’ says Muck. His head’s wobbling again, his eyes are runny. They’re horribly like Aunt Rachael’s eyes. Why did she blind the house, seal it like that?

  ‘It ent cursed,’ snaps John Wall, over his shoulder.

  ‘Bloody is,’ says Muck.

  ‘Bloody is not,’ snaps John Wall.

  ‘You won’t catch me going in there, any road,’ Muck mumbles, pulling a long face. How can he see anything at night, through those tinted glasses?

  ‘Good,’ I say. ‘I’m glad to hear it. And just to make sure, I’ll put big KEEP OUT signs all around it. NO TRESPASSERS. VERY PRIVATE PROPERTY. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m speaking metaphorically. In other words, the joke’s over, or I might get very very upset.’

  The two stare at me, apparently aghast. I realise that I have been spitting, and not only metaphorically. My lips have drawn back to reveal my gums – a thing you never liked, Mother. I have the sensation that my head has turned int
o a skull, and is lifted about an inch from my body. I have to wish them a hasty goodnight. I think I’ve made my point.

  Your affectionate son,

  Hugh

  Midwinter. Rather miserable weather, but we’re all well heated. Very low sky.

  Dearest Mother,

  I have just got back from a rather jolly walk around the grounds. Muddy underfoot, but I mostly kept off the lawn. Sap so down one feels it will never come up again, without a bit of encouragement. Awfully slothful air about this place. I so hate sloth. No one shaves properly. Tufts under the nose.

  I walk away and my head returns, fleshed again, to my neck. Malarial, almost. A wolf whistle follows me, blowing me along. It might not have been them. Agamemnon killed his own daughter for a fair wind.

  Did I know this? Did I know that?

  Thump thump thump, from the village hall. There are youths dotted about everywhere, girls in dangling sleeves, boys in baseball caps, cropped hair, long hair. It’ll be a gas. I make straight for the phone box by the old well in the middle of the square. I’m dialling my friend Morris.

  ‘Impress me with your Internet thing. Gas. Mustard gas, nerve gas, the lot. Everything there is.’

  ‘Gas?’

  ‘I used to know but I’ve got holes. Particularly nerve gas, because I don’t think it was around. Before the last war. Everything. Its history, who invented it, when, everything.’

  ‘You’re going to sniff it or something? You’re missing London that much?’

  I growl and give him the number and wait outside, sitting on a low wall by the old well and its seized glossy pump. This is my revenge, Mother.

  The disco children wander past and giggle. One of them says, ‘Ha haar, me hearties.’ Their laughter is like a shout. I feel much like I did when I was a boy: frightened of them. I wish I’d had friends at home. It wasn’t normal to do what I did: read, walk, bicycle about, act Shakespeare in a wood, not talk to anyone except Mrs Stump and Susan, the Jennets, the odd tradesman or farmhand or the dotty friends of Nuncle’s. Nasty, dotty friends. Nazis. Jolly Nazis. I’m so excited! Oh, I’ve waited so long!

  Sometimes he did actually speak to me.

  ‘Hugh lad, did you personally hear of relatives of the deceased being killed before the burial?’

  ‘Of course,’ I would say, just to impress him.

  Off back into his study, nodding and humming.

  I stare at the defunct well and its potted flowers, sickly in the lamplight. It’s all coming together. I’m walking through the wood and the pieces of the puzzle are being carried to me by tiny helpful elves. Avenge you, avenge Rachael. Deep roots pulled out screaming like the deadly mandrake, that sends all who hear it mad. But afterwards – what love-balms of mandragora, what healing and soothing follows that awful shriek!

  The disco thumps and thuds, forms emerging to bright flashes from the hall’s door. Torture while a girl with a lurid face calls her mother, the mother’s voice a distant duck, the girl’s petering out to a whine, revealing not even anger. ‘Oh Mu-um!’ When she emerges from the booth she jumps, noticing me only now, scurrying away on clapping heels. Wait. Wait. Then the phone rings and it’s Morris, pleased as punch. The phone box is fetid with cheap scent, crawling with ugly words that have stayed with me, Mother, as these things do while the sweet ones fly away.

  Morris tells me nothing I don’t know already about mustard gas – nothing you wouldn’t know, either.

  ‘One to a million particles of air can scald the skin, hey, that’s something.’

  ‘Has it got arsenic in it?’

  ‘No. That’s lewisite. You have to prick the blisters, yuk. Doesn’t lewisite ring a bell? Or am I thinking of some actor? Jerry Lewis! Didn’t we all think they were going to slug us with it? Hey, did you ever do gas-drill? Wasn’t it kinky in those rubber boots and oilskins –’

  ‘Hot, Morris. Boiling hot in a freezing wind on Mam Tor.’

  ‘Stumbling about like gargoyles, yeah. There was this paranoid sergeant called Watts, he thought every piddling rainbow puddle of Castrol was mustard – that the hour had come, O Lord!’

  ‘We were all paranoid, Morris. We thought London was going to end up looking like a sugary pancake.’

  ‘How many were killed here in the end, Hugh?’

  ‘London lost 250,000 in about nine months.’

  ‘Wow, that many? You haven’t added a zero?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How d’you remember?’

  ‘Because I lost people I knew. Tell me about nerve gas. My card’s running out.’

  He tells me that in 1936 one Gerhard Schrader, working on chemicals for agricultural use, discovered a pesticide so lethal it was reserved for military use only: human beings instead of ants or slugs or beetles. Suck Me Rob. A minuscule dose was sufficient to block nerve transmission and bring on rapid death via uncontrolled twitching and paralysis. Samantha’s Tits Taste Nice. The Nazis produced thousands of tons of this nerve gas in the late thirties and called it Tabun. Spell it, Morris. (I’m writing it down on my palm, along with the rest: TABUN.) Ross and Mandy Shag Here.

  ‘It was never used. Amazing.’

  ‘Why not, Morris?’

  Wish I was Ross.

  Sigh, like the sea.

  ‘OK, I’m scrolling. The Nazis, poor deluded fools, were kind of convinced that British scientists had discovered similar agents and would zap back in kind. Isn’t that Mutually Assured Destruction before its time? The British hadn’t in fact discovered a bean. Correction. I’m scrolling up some more. Click. OK. They’d isolated the chemical that transmits impulses across nerve junctions. But that’s all. Big deal.’

  My palm is a mess, like a stone covered in runes. Why didn’t I bring some paper? Why do I have this obsession about keeping my pockets clean?

  ‘But the Germans must have known they didn’t know, Morris. They only had to keep up with things, with developments over here. They must have gone to conferences before the war, asked questions, snooped about.’

  ‘The glaring gap in British scientific papers was interpreted by the Nazis as censorship, it says here. That’s called projection, in my book. It also says that if they had known the truth, we’d have been mincemeat.’

  ‘Not mincemeat, Morris. Twitching horribly to death all over the place, maybe, but without a single scratch. A sort of mass lockjaw. Paralysis and agony.’

  ‘I was speaking figuratively. We’d have been cooked, anyway. The end of civilisation. Apocalypse.’

  ‘So things ran that close. Saved by a blank.’

  ‘Yeah, a supposition extrapolated from a blank. I guess there weren’t very many good spies in those days. I guess they didn’t have Internet. Anyway, why do you want to know, my good friend?’

  ‘What’s the antidote, Morris?’

  ‘Ah, urn, atropine. Whatever that is.’

  Remember, Mother?

  Jason Scalehorne Wanks.

  ‘Atropine? Are you sure?’

  I’m blushing furiously, though Morris doesn’t see that. There are lurid faces pressed up against the phone booth’s glass, ugly and orange in the lamplight.

  ‘Not bleach, Morris?’

  I turn my back on the disco louts but they’ve started tapping and banging and calling me names.

  ‘Hang on, Hugh. I seem to remember bleach being around. Chloride of lime, wasn’t it? Don’t crowd me. I’m scrolling right now. Yeah, bleaching powder for neutralising the stuff. You only take atropine if you’re poisoned but it has to be quick. So you’re too late. Anyway, in your case it’s probably just nerves.’

  I thank him very much and hang up. I open the door but can’t say anything to the louts. They’re waiting for me to say something but I can’t, the mention of atropine has made me too small. I glance at my scrawled-on palm as I hide it: TABUN like the name on a tombstone, or a writer’s big idea. I see it as a drum booming through the forest – and then I gasp, I see it, I gasp. ‘Oh my God!’ The door thumps shut. The louts gawp around me, m
ere kids again.

  ‘Hey, he’s having one of them heart attacks.’

  I stagger forward a few paces, collect my stride, and walk away quickly. Faces on my back, as if they’re up close breathing on it hotly. They jeer and wolf-whistle and one cries, ‘Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!’ while another shouts, in a strong village burr, ‘You’ve forgotten your pacemakurr,’ but feebly, as if I might come back and clout him. Laughter like a single shout.

  Of course you remember atropine, Mother. You and Aunt Joy would pronounce it to rhyme with ‘sin’, Nuncle to rhyme with ‘whine’, Father as if it was Latin. Horrible taste, humiliation in a sticky green bottle. You thought I did it deliberately, in protest. It dried my mouth out and I drank more and the problem got worse. The sheets flapped on the line, including the rubber one. I think that’s why I never invited anybody to the house. Up until I went to Randle, beaten for it three times at Flytings. If the Dorniers had dropped nerve gas instead of H.E. and incendiaries, I’d have probably been the one person to have survived.

  Nuncle with his bleach and atropine, and myself. Among the trees. With the jolly von Thuleites. What a fine start to paradise.

  Your loving son,

  Hugh

  Not terribly good weather. On and on. Mud where they’ve introduced football.

  Dearest Mother,

  I’m doing fine.

  We have to go back to that symposium of 1937, just for a bit: the copies spread on the table, for sale at some outrageous price, illustrations by an Eric Gill acolyte without the talent, Rachael turning the pages languidly. The cover features Nubat himself, looking like one of those bead-tressed derelicts who hang about Netherford clocktower, with huge dogs.

  There were a few Germans still present – not jolly Thule types but the eminent academic sort with prissy smiles imitating that horrible gauleiter Heidegger. And the odd German kept on coming until just a few months before war was declared. Tabun must have been mentioned before then, obviously. Top secret, but they would have fished a bit, tried to find out whether the British bods at Cambridge and places had really (as they’d assumed) stumbled on the same.

  Ted gives me a little wave with his drying-up cloth as I slip past the bar’s back door for a steadying nip of my malt.