Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  George was somehow limiting himself to short words, for fear that he might betray himself if he allowed anything as complicated as an actual sentence.

  “She’s a sing-a-bit, dance-a-bit girl, really. She’s different, you know.”

  The face that was impossibly his dad’s face crinkled in thought for a moment, and George saw something raw and vulnerable that he wasn’t used to seeing.

  “I mean, I got pals think she’s a bit flighty, but they don’t know her. She just . . . likes attention. No harm in that.”

  George realized that he was asking for reassurance, and he felt embarrassed at the vulnerability in the very face he had gone to for comfort.

  “No.” He shrugged, out of his depth. The man looked at the picture with the baby. He coasted his thumb over the grimacing little face. He looked up into the sky.

  “Maybe the nipper’ll be enough. Maybe slow her down a bit.”

  “Maybe not.”

  The words came out of George’s mouth before he could stop them. They sounded flat and rank and bitter.

  “Yeah, well. If not, it doesn’t matter. We’ll have something good to show for it, eh?”

  He waved the picture of the baby and then slid both photographs back between the printed pages of his book.

  George nodded. His dad’s eyes found his.

  “You got nippers, chum?”

  The question took George by surprise.

  “’Course not.”

  “Takes you funny, it does. By surprise. It’s like this.” He waved the small, much-thumbed novel over his shoulder before pocketing it as he went back to crouch over the kettle that was now coming steamily to a boil. He carried on speaking without looking around. “It’s like a book, isn’t it—one minute you’re the hero of your own story, and then your girl produces this little atom and, even though he’s ever so tiny, everything moves a bit, and you see you got it all wrong—you ain’t the hero of the story at all. And what you took for the center of your own stage isn’t the center of any stage, it’s just a space on the edge of a much bigger place that was there all the time, only you didn’t see it. . . .”

  His voice trailed off in wonderment, and for a while, all that George heard was the soldier tinkering with tin cups and the kettle and billycans. Then he turned with a face that was brightly smiling and so obviously trying not to be scared that it hurt George to look.

  “But it’s all right, it’s good. It makes all this easier. I mean, it makes it lots worse, too, worrying and all, but you know even if some bloody whizzbang’s got your number on it, at least you had a speck of a hand in something that carries on, right?”

  He held out a steaming tin cup to George. George took it and nodded. He took a swig and gasped as the liquid burned his mouth. The soldier seemed not to notice as he continued earnestly.

  “I mean, I ain’t ever seen the little mite, not to hold, but if I was to stop one and never get back to Blighty, she’d tell him all about me, right? I mean, he’d know that I . . . you know, how much I—”

  A giant sledgehammer slammed into the earth with an impact that knocked them off their feet, and the shock wave made George’s ears go momentarily deaf to anything except the sudden panicked pounding of the blood in his head.

  His hands scrabbled down his body, and he was appalled to find wetness all over it. He waited for the pain of the gushing wound to hit him, but all that happened was his hearing slowly returned and he saw his father’s face looming over him as it fumbled on a tin helmet.

  “Waste of good tea, chum.” He smiled and reached a hand out.

  George let himself be pulled back to his feet and looked down to discover no red pumping horror disfiguring his torso and legs, just the dripping contents of his tin mug.

  Another slamming impact hit the ground, this time farther away on the other side of the ruin. The soldier grimaced. It was such a heartbreakingly familiar expression that George couldn’t help believing this was his father in front of him. It was deeper than thought; it was flesh calling to flesh and recognizing itself.

  “Ranging shots. Fritz has got us bloody bracketed. This is going to get hotter before it gets better.”

  Astonishingly, now that they were in action, George saw that all the doubt and vulnerability had gone from his father’s eyes. He looked solid again, more like the dad George remembered. And then George’s body took over, and he was a soldier, not a boy caught in a good dream about to go bad, and he was busy comforting his horses as a new series of explosions began.

  “That’s our mob hitting back. We’ll have to see if we can’t hit them before they plaster us!” his father shouted, ducking as something whirred past his head. “Call them artillery duels, but I’ll tell you what, there’s nothing gentlemanly about them. It’s kill or be killed and devil take the hindmost or the one whose gun-layer can’t cut the mustard.”

  BOOM. A shell clipped some of the remaining thatch off the top of the wall and left them ducking reflexively under a hail of dry rushes and plaster dust.

  “And a happy Christmas to you too, Fritz.” His father grinned, a fierce light in his eyes.

  The horses were bucking and pulling at their hobbles in terror, and then there was a sharp crack and a whump as something hit nearby. Something flew past George’s head, and something else glanced off the leather protector on his leg, kicking him hard. He had to hold on to the horses’ tack to keep his feet. One of the horses was neighing and shaking and trying to wrench itself free, and when George looked down he saw something smoking sticking out of its leg.

  The sight of blood, the rising thunder of the barrage, and the nearness of the miss jolted George, and somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered that he could end all this by just stepping off a plinth in a city far, far away. It was a strong temptation, an instant ticket home.

  He felt the shocked quivering of the horse’s nose, soft as down beneath his hand. He didn’t think as he dropped into a crouch, fumbling at one of the bags hanging off his belt for a field dressing.

  “Here, give me a hand!” he heard himself yell. “Grab his head!”

  The soldier with his dad’s face grasped the horse’s head and started trying to calm it. George saw himself reach down and grab the red-hot shard of metal protruding from the horse without a second’s hesitation, and he felt the shock of his fingers burning as he gripped on to it and yanked it out of the shaking leg muscle. As the redness gushed from the wound, he jammed the thick pad of field dressing over it and pushed down hard to stop the bleeding. With his other hand he shook loose the bandage and looped it around the leg, cinching the free end snug against itself as he did so.

  He ignored the fact that the ground was bucking and heaving around him, and wound the bandage tight over the dressing pad, passing the roll to himself on either side of the leg until he ran out. As his hands worked, he noticed how very white the bandage was, and how well it looked against the deep chestnut of the horse’s leg. He inhaled the clean healthy smell of the wood smoke from the fire. He’d never smelled anything so good before. He leaned down and tore the end of the bandage against his teeth, and twisted the double end he’d made back on itself and tied it off securely.

  The horse’s leg was shaking, but George was pleased to see the blood wasn’t yet leeching through the gauze.

  “Good job,” said the soldier, smiling grimly down at George from where he was holding on to the bit below the horse’s widely dilated nostrils.

  George stood up and put his arm around the horse’s neck, stroking and calming it.

  Suddenly there was a hole in the thunder, and George and the soldier stood there on either side of the horse’s neck, still and waiting. George saw the horse’s eyes with extraordinary clarity, and thought he’d never seen such a deep and beautiful brown. Then he was distracted by something red, and his focus shifted to a ladybird calmly walking up the leather of the bridle toward his father’s hand resting between the horse’s ears. Beyond the ears he saw the sky, and he realized that it
was not a pale white sky as he’d first thought, but a delicate blue that had an exquisite green tinge to it. It was as if the moment of silence and the fact that death could come smashing in from that sky at any moment was making him see everything more intensely.

  He suddenly knew, in a kind of extension of this heightened awareness, that this was an extraordinarily precious moment, and that he had to take advantage of it before it was eviscerated by the next salvo of shells. He had something to say to this soldier who was and was not his father, more than a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a never-in-a-lifetime chance that he mustn’t squander.

  He turned to look into his father’s eyes, his mouth opening to speak, but the horse’s neck obscured his father’s face, and all he could see was an untidy tuft curling up and off the front of his head. As he moved to make eye contact, there was another explosion, not too close, but enough to make them both duck their heads. And then the shells began dropping all around them, and the day split open and hell blasted out in a thunderous series of hammer blows that slammed into the ground and seemed to suck the air out of their lungs as they clung to the horse’s neck and kept their heads down. Flying shrapnel and earth and stones blew past them.

  This time, there was no more silence, just incessant noise and a relentless pounding that made the hard earth beneath their feet buck and roll like a ship’s deck in high seas.

  George didn’t see much of the barrage they were stuck in the middle of. Every time there was an explosion, he ducked his head, and when he opened his eyes, all there was to see was the air full of dirt flying around. All he could do was bury his face in the horse’s neck, one hand clenched over it, the other rhythmically stroking it as he heard his voice saying:

  “Easy now, easy now.”

  The bombardment was shaking more than the foundations of the earth on which he was standing. It was shaking his grasp on everything. Every time he heard an explosion he flinched, and he knew the next one would be the one that blew him apart. When it wasn’t, the anticipation of the following one made him wish it had been.

  Some distant memory of a plinth and the fact it would just take one step to free him from this hell again tried to make itself heard in the back of his mind as the endlessness of the horror took his legs out from under him; but he closed his ears to it.

  He realized that it was only the other soldier’s arm gripping his over the top of the horse’s neck that was keeping him upright. He tried to brace his boots and set his legs, but it was like trying to stack jelly. He gritted his teeth, and then he heard his father’s voice saying:

  “Good boy, good boy, you’re going to be fine.”

  And even though the soldier was saying it to calm the horse, he was also gripping George’s arm as he did so, and George’s heart opened again, despite the cacophony of the world coming to an end all around him. He found the iron in his soul and made his shaking legs do their job. As he looked down and saw them braced and supporting him, he noticed the thing, the last bad thing before it happened.

  His father’s boots were like his.

  The only difference was that his father had broken a lace and had hurriedly mended it by knotting it at the toe end.

  George knew what was going to happen even as his hand clenched on to his father’s sleeve and he started shouting—

  “No! Dad! Listen, please, I didn’t—”

  The soldier’s head jerked up and met his eyes across the horse’s neck. He was smiling.

  “It’s okay—”

  The wall came in as if another giant had just kicked it down. The horse kicked sideways, and they both flinched. George felt the hand that had been gripping his go limp, and suddenly it was his turn to support the whole weight of the man on the other side. Then the horse tumbled over as a gout of flame rolled over them.

  George didn’t let go of the arm even though they were suddenly enveloped in a cloud of dust and smoke that was impossible to see through. He felt the horses’ hooves lashing about in panic and heard their screaming neighs, and with his free hand he found the hobbles and released them, and then the horses were gone. He pulled his father’s limp, heavy body onto his shoulders and staggered out of the burning debris into the open.

  He shouted for help, but none came, so he staggered forward up the hill, the weight on his back heavier with each step. He heard himself sobbing, and then the wind whipped away the smoke, and the barrage stopped. He saw the hill ahead of him, and he dropped to one knee at the horror it revealed.

  The two guns were destroyed. One was pointing crazily to the sky, the other was just not there. In its place was a crater with the gun team neatly splayed around the rim like petals on a flower. Bodies were blown into the barbed wire, some of which were not moving. Something was trying to crawl out of a shell hole. The impaled horse was gone, as were most of the birch trees.

  George’s scream for help turned into a question, and he heard the word “Why?” convulse repeatedly out of his throat. All that time he clutched his father’s dead arm tighter and tighter as he felt the weight of the body buckle his legs and start to drive him into the ground.

  And then something clattered at his feet; it was a stretcher. He looked up and saw the Officer and a bombardier looking at him with infinite sadness in their eyes and heard the Officer say:

  “Put him down, Gunner.”

  He shook his head and tried to straighten his legs despite the crushing downward force on his shoulders.

  “Can’t carry him forever. Put him down.”

  Again George shook his head and clenched on to the arm all the more tightly.

  “It’s my dad.”

  One of his hands twined fingers into the dead hand’s fingers, and he held on for all he was worth. But there was no answering flicker of life. Then the hand seemed to grow bigger in his, and his fingers slipped out of it. He heard the fast percussive wah-wah of a police car roaring past, the rumble of London’s traffic dialed back up as the sky dimmed, and his knees gave way. He fell off the bronze plinth and felt himself being caught in two bronze arms. He hung there, looking down at the Officer’s boots. The light dimmed down to black, and he let it close over his head like the sea.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Gunner’s End

  The Gunner lay in the dark water, waiting for death. The human part of him was numb with the constrictive horror of drowning, the bodily outrage, the pounding claustrophobia of the pipe, the terrible impossibility of taking a last breath, and the choking wrongness of it all.

  The statue part of him knew that turn o’day was upon him, and that his death as a spit was coming. He had spent his whole existence marking midnight and standing to, and as with any habit, the rhythm and timing of it was hardwired into his body clock.

  He would cease to walk, cease to talk, he would just be an inanimate lump of metal. Somehow dawn would see him winnowed to the elements and reconstituted on his plinth, never to move again. He had often wondered if the spits who had died were dead inside, or merely unable to move or express themselves. He hoped they were dead. Otherwise it would be like being buried alive forever, with a tiny window to view the passing world but no way to communicate with it other than an unending scream that sounded only inside your head.

  Death, he hoped, would be just nothing. A big blank, a full stop, a balance where the absence of life and hope was counterweighed by the absence of pain and despair. A final equation where nothing equaled nothing, and all calculation ceased.

  He managed to squeeze his arms so that his hands could lie calmly across his chest. He closed his eyes and composed himself as he waited for oblivion.

  The trouble was he didn’t feel composed inside, because, as the seconds ticked away, he couldn’t help thinking that the whole oblivion thing was an easy way out. George and Edie would still be in danger, no matter whether he was conscious of it or not, and that felt bad. He grimaced as he realized he was not going to go gentle into any good night; rather, he was going to go feeling like he’d betrayed the
m by checking out early.

  His eyes snapped open in the blackness. Well, he thought. Forget this composing yourself lark. Go down fighting.

  He kicked his heels in and started pushing himself farther into the pipe. As he did so, a savage smile played on his lips. He was smiling because he knew this was a doubly futile gesture: he was going to be dead any second, and no one would ever know he had tried. He was smiling because he was just doing it for himself. He was going to die living his last moment exactly as he was, and not a damn thing less.

  It was a good plan. It was tough, it was valiant, and it was, in the finest tradition of all good plans, destined to fail.

  He didn’t die fighting.

  He didn’t die being who he was meant to be.

  He didn’t die at all.

  Somehow in the middle of kicking and pushing his way along the narrow pipe, shoving the bundle of heart stones ahead of him, he realized that he knew the day had turned, midnight had passed, and he was, unexpectedly and extraordinarily, not dead.

  He didn’t know that this was because George had stood his watch and kept his place on his plinth alive; he just knew that not only was he not dead, but he was feeling stronger with every foot that he moved along the narrow pipe.

  And the pipe was narrow. It was definitely getting smaller as the debris on the floor got thicker and the Gunner’s nose began to scrape along the roof.

  But instead of his dying, the pipe came to an abrupt end. He was reaching ahead of himself to push his bundle onward when it met an obstruction and all progress ceased.

  The fact that his vigor and strength were unaccountably returning had the contrary effect of making his predicament feel much worse. When he was winding down into what he thought was an inevitable death, his weakness had enabled him to ignore the claustrophobia. Now, having all his energy crammed into a blank pipe end buried under who knew how much city earth was unbearable. The pressure building up in his head and body made him want to scream and kick, but you can’t scream under water, and there wasn’t really room to kick. So instead he tried to ignore the fact that he had been worming his way forward only to jam himself into a coffin of his own making. He tried to think clearly. He had gotten into this pipe because there was a small but definite whisper of a current running through it. If there was a current, it meant the pipe was not a dead end. So he reached ahead of himself and ran his hands over the roof. He felt nothing but stone. He moved the bundle, and his hands felt the sidewalls. And there it was—a void. It wasn’t a dead end, but an angle. He squirmed until he could get his arm farther into the angle, and was amazed to find he could feel nothing but water, no sides at all.