by Adam Roberts
The underground railway was easier to disable than the above-ground network. It was an easy matter to snap the rails with explosives, of course; but the enemy repaired them with impressive rapidity. That hardly mattered. We blew a few more Thames bridges, and positioned other devices to break gas mains - making great bright feathers of flame that tickled the undersides of the clouds with light and heat. Then we broke open water mains and snapped the straws of the gas pipes. We brought down a few roadway overpasses. We did various other sorts of damage.
By the time we pulled back, south-west across Wimbledon Common we had done something better than seizing the city - we had seized it up. Modern cities are delicate corals. London depended upon a few, vulnerable systems for transport; and when they were interrupted the result was a disproportionate quantity of trouble for the British authorities. Military vehicles had to be used to ship in basic supplies; troops had to be stationed all about the city to keep order; there were demonstrations - as many were organized against us as against the government, but both sorts had to be policed - and riots. We were a little over nine thousand individuals, and we never committed more than a third of our number to the big city; but that was more than enough to bring the whole of London to a halt.
12
I was in a house in the outer suburbs of London - somewhere a long way west. The owners had, I suppose, vacated it, sensibly, and gone whither they could. East Anglia was a popular destination for refugees, apparently - the government established camps along the Norfolk coastline. Or maybe they’d fled south-west, joining the clogged M3 or following arcane satnav routes through country lanes to get to Southampton and Bournemouth. At any rate they had gone. So we knocked on the door with a grenade rather than our fists, and two dozen of us took up temporary billets. Two dozen is a good number. It means that two of you can take a guard detail every hour, and otherwise the rest of the day is free to sort yourself out; to rest or play; to browse online and improve your skillbase, or to catch up with friends. I explored the house. The top floor provided a good view of the grey length of the London orbital motorway - weirdly empty, despite being, on this stretch at any rate, undamaged. A few cars and vans were parked - discarded I mean - along the hard shoulder. Otherwise I saw only animals, going single or in packs, from abandoned vehicle to abandoned vehicle hoping for food. Once I saw three adults clamber over the low wall on to the motorway, hurry across it and hop over on the far side.
Behind and before the gorgonized river of grey was an olive-green and brick-orange landscape of trees and houses. The sun was going down behind the foliage line of the horizon, a mix of superb fruit colours in the sky: strawberry reds and peachy oranges and banana yellows. It was mine to look at, and the birds’s to fly in (to rub against, it looked like) but otherwise nothing disturbed the evening quiet save the occasional, and distant, grind of a military jet flying somewhere away to the north.
All the street lamps were on, a tessellation of parallel landing lights lining empty suburban roads. Nor had the electricity supply been curtailed, so that we were able (we: a woman called Heron and a man called Hussein) to cook the supplies we had salvaged from a warehouse half a mile away, and enjoy a pretty decent meal.
We all watched the news on a television the size of the whole wall, a piece of kit that rendered the newscaster’s face large as Goliath’s. He had on that austere expression news-readers wear when they deliver bad news. I suppose they practise it, in front of the mirror, before they go to work.
The news was all the war, of course. There was nothing else. All Premiership football had been suspended until the war situation (‘war situation’ was the preferred locution) was resolved. The Prime Minister had convened a cabinet of the talents, and addressed Parliament about the state of emergency. Aid had been offered by North America. In Croydon civilians had heroically, and spontaneously, resisted incursion by rebellists. There had been riots in Hackney. The rebellists had established a base at Kingston, hijacking boats, packing them with explosives, setting fire to them, and pushing them out to float downstream. The fire brigade, said the newscaster, had dealt with most of these suicide barges.
‘Why do they call them suicide barges?’ said a trooper called Porter, who was one of our number. She had her left arm in a cast, and wore an eyepatch, but had elected to carry on fighting, enabling herself to this end with a continuous supply of painkillers.
‘Maybe they think we leave pilots on board,’ I suggested.
‘Which,’ said Simic, clapping his arms around my shoulders from behind and embracing me, ‘is tantamount to saying they think we’re idiots.’
‘Do you remember that boy, in Basingstoke?’ I said, shortly.
‘Boy?’
‘We went into a house, you me and Tucker.’
‘You’ll need to be more specific than that.’
I looked at him. ‘Think back to Basingstoke. We came in through the busted-up window, and checked the hallway. In the hallway there was a lad, ten years old maybe. He was on his back.’
Simic scowled at this. Talk of dead kids was, clearly, not congenial for him. It would hardly bring good luck upon us, would it now? And if not good then what kind? ‘I remember him. He had a key in his eye.’
‘In his forehead.’
‘That’s right. The key must have been in the lock - hey, Porter, listen to this. It’s pretty weird actually.’ Because what else do we do, faced with such a thing, than to turn it into a believe-it-or-not, and stress its peculiar fascination? Weird shit happens all the time, but people’s appetite for weird shit keeps growing. ‘This kid, in Basingstoke, must have been in the hallway of his house when a detonation went off outside. The blast blew the key out of the lock and straight in his head.’
‘Fuck!’ said Porter, because it was the kind of response expected of him, but he spoke without heat. ‘Was he, like, walking about, with this key stuck in there?’
‘He was dead.’
‘Oh.’
‘Anything can be a weapon,’ said Hussein. ‘What you’re saying is: the blast turned the keyhole into a gun, the key into a bullet.’
‘Yeah. It’s a shame, though. Him being a child. But it wasn’t our blast.’
‘You sure?’ I said.
Simic turned his you’re harshing my buzz, man expression on me. ‘I remember they were trying to kill us. I remember running hither and yon trying to avoid getting blown up. Hey, I tell you what. Maybe he wasn’t dead - you know? It’s not as if we checked for a pulse in his jugular. Maybe he was just stunned. Maybe he got up afterwards, and he’s now alive and happy and playing in the playground with the other little kiddikins.’
‘You remember the way we had to dash out the back of that house?’ I said. ‘You remember that a plane came by and blew the whole thing up?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Simic made the gollum-gollum noise he occasionally made, when he was trying to scratch an itch right in the middle of his head. ‘Tony,’ he said. ‘I love you more than I can say, but why are you bringing up that kid, now? All the dead bodies we’ve seen, kids as well as grown-ups. Why that one? And, fuck, why now?’
‘Because that kid - yeah?’
Simic nodded.
‘He’s standing behind you now.’
Of course this made Simic yelp and spin around, and then everybody decided that this was me making a big joke, and everybody laughed. At first Simic fumed and told me off, but then he slipped into the general vibe and laughed too. But here’s the thing: the kid was standing right there, just behind Simic. He had the key poking out of his forehead. What is it with ghosts, anyway? The inertia of the spirit world - why don’t they take the opportunity to pull together the gaping wound, to remove the dagger, to tug out the key that ended their lives? The boy stood there with a knowing expression on his face, his skin blue as woad.
Everybody ate, and key-boy stood and watched us; not hungrily, not resentfully, but patiently. As we ate we watched more news.
The bulletin was given over to a ten-min
ute segment interviewing survivors of Dorking Fields. A reporter walked around a hospital thrusting his chopstick microphone in the faces of various soldiers and policemen. Some of these latter were hobbling about on crutches or with calipers; some were supine in bed. One wept as he talked of having his left leg amputated below the knee. The interview was intercut with footage shot by embedded reporters travelling with the Medical corps, the first personnel (the voiceover said) to discover the atrocity. Wobbly images of people lying on the blood-messed turf, wailing and lifting their arms. A long pan of a disorienting sea of writhing humanity. The tape feed wriggled along the bottom of the screen at all times, like red tapeworm: AUTHORITY CONSTITUTES WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL and those plus signs that separate items: ++ JENNY COBDEN IN SKIING ACCIDENT, FIGHTS FOR LIFE IN SWISS CLINIC ++ RENEWED FIGHTING IN CORNWALL ++ ULSTER ATROCITIES ++ COURT APPEAL PLANNED TO REINSTATE FOOTBALL. News pretends to be additive. It is not, though.
‘It was a mistake,’ said Simic, in a sober voice.
‘It was hard work,’ said Hussein.
‘It was the yelling,’ I put in. ‘That’s what I didn’t like. I had to wear my iPod to block our the noise.’
‘That’s dangerous, listening to music when you’re working,’ said Todd - did I mention Todd to you before? I can’t remember. ‘It distracts you.’
‘I know.’
‘The enemy can creep up on you.’
‘I agree. This was only because of all the shrieking. The shrieking was putting me off my game.’
The Secretary of Health was on screen, fixing us all with her beady eyes and promising the British People that the victims of Dorking Field would not be forgotten by the government. That they would receive the very best in medical care. That this atrocity showed the heartless savagery of the enemy we all faced. There followed thirty seconds of rhetorical boilerplate about how we were terrorists and rebellists and violent bandits and that the whole modern phenomenon of the New Model Army had to be rooted out and extirpated for the good of democratic society.
‘Democratic,’ said Heron, scornfully.
‘That’s rich,’ I agreed.
‘It was a tactical error, breaking all those kneebones and shinbones at Dorking,’ said Simic. ‘I voted against it.’
‘The vote didn’t go your way then,’ said Macleod, crossly. ‘That is how democracy operates.’
‘Democracy is not infallible,’ Simic pointed out, rather pompously. ‘We can make mistakes, collectively, just as easily as we can come to the right decision. That,’ and he pointed a thumb at the screen, ‘was a mistake. It makes us seem like savages.’
‘They’d be more furious if we’d executed them all,’ said Heron. ‘Or do you think we should just have brought them all with us, a long crocodile of prisoners trailing behind us wherever we go?’
‘Killing them would have been better,’ said Simic, firmly.
‘Hark,’ said Hussein, cupping his ear derisively. ‘The vrai savage speaks.’
‘I’m content to stand by the collective decision,’ said Simic. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. I know what it means to be part of a democracy. But another part of democracy is the free and frank exchange of views.’
‘Oh exchange away,’ said Hussein, nodding, and biting another portion from his chicken wing. ‘By all means.’
‘If we’d killed them there would have been some pother, and they’d have called us barbarians, of course. But it would soon have died down, and the numbers would have been folded into the overall casualty figures. Plenty of people dying in this war, you know. This way, though, the media will keep parading the legless policemen and filming their tears, and it will keep hurting us.’
‘I’m not hurt,’ I said.
‘You’re saying,’ said Heron, sucking on a chicken bone like a lollipop stick to get the last shreds of meat off, and pulling it with a smack from between her lips, ‘that mercy backfires.’
Simic made a moue, as if to say: well, yes. Then he said: ‘war,’ as if that one word explained everything.
‘You could be right,’ I said. ‘But it’s the past. We need to look forward. Onward.’
The news had moved on, now, to an account of the fighting in the West Country, where a completely different NMA - the news stupidly conflated them and us, as if we were all part of one unified invading army - had engaged troops in twelve hours of intense fighting south of Barnstable. We watched with interest, and broke out the chocolate digestives.
13
The following day we moved further away from London and hooked up with several dozen clumps of troops. And do you know what? Simic was right about Dorking Fields. The wounded prisoners generated more hostility than dead bodies would have done. Human beings aren’t enormously logical about that sort of thing. We debated this, as we debated everything, and the wikis buzzed with chatter, and the software worms crawled in their semiconscious way checking the probity of the connection. Talk and talk and talk. But there wasn’t much we could do, and so we went on with our campaign. We were warriors.
One night, a day or two later, I had to sleep in the open air, in the countryside south-west of London. It was on account of a skirmish that dragged itself on unconscionably. Sometimes fighting does just dribble on and on like that. We spent several hours in a field - hiding amongst cabbages, leathery great leaves like black-green batwings - and fought sniper-actions and contact fire until past midnight, anxious the whole time that the enemy might simply call for air support and flame the entire area. But they didn’t; and we made sure our action was spread as widely as possible over the whole terrain, hoping thereby to inoculate ourselves against area denial from the skies. Either it worked, or else the enemy had other reasons for not blasting us.
Eventually the fighting eased off from the continual bang-bang-bang and turned into spittery gunfire following a random pattern. There were long stretches of nighttime silence only occasionally interrupted by jittery clusters of small arms fire, or else distantly coloured by the sounds of cars, yawning very far off; or of planes flying past, I suppose sweeping the ground with infrared. Simic and I cuddled together for the warmth of it, and dozed under the thickest vegetation we could find. I slept, off and on, for three hours or so; but holding him in my arms like that - the pressure of his body against my body - gave each of those hours a magical weight and intensity. That was the happiest I’ve been. That’s quite a claim, actually, now that I look at it. That’s a pretty big claim. But it’s right, it’s the truth, it’s right. If he had not had his helmet on I would have stroked his hair. He wouldn’t have minded, or been freaked out; he understood the nature of the connection between us, and understood that it was neither what he nor what I was used to in our relationships.
I had stood beside him at Basingstoke and seen him shot down, and I had known the terror he would die. To have him again, literally in my arms, was the purest intensity of resurrection and love.
As the dawn did its chilly widescreen slow-fade-in we poked our heads up to discover that the enemy had withdrawn all their forces - eastward, mostly, or that’s what the wiki said. There were a couple of dozen bands in our area, each with a different localized task for the day. So we pinged one, pretty much at random, and went to join them.
I see how you’re looking at me.
You think I delude myself. I know that Simic didn’t love me the way I loved him. When you face death together, you bond closely; but I know better than anybody Simic was a thoroughly straight-o man. That didn’t matter. My love was something more than that. This is my way of saying that it was more important than sex. And I’ll tell you something else, too; something that only soldiers properly understand, because they face death all the time. What I mean to say is: because the intimacy of death is the very definition of what we do. Civvies tend to think that sex is itself a value (because it is genes, and because it is passing on our genes). But the truth is other. The truth is that the proximity of death is the core value. The continual proximity of death is the very ground of lif
e. Genetics is just a wrinkle by nature to try and evade it. In the continual proximity of death a purer, taller, more sublime love is possible than can be achieved in the tangles of childmaking. In the service of life, love is always secondary; but in the company of death love shines as master.
You do need to understand how deeply I loved him. That’s crucial. Excepting only that I am not the subject, here; and even Simic is not the subject. The subject here is giant.