New Model Army

by Adam Roberts

  Isn’t crying a shocking thing?

  A rectangle of light came on in the mock-Tudor house’s flank: bright yellow against the darkness, with an attendant trapezoid of rather dimmer yellow upon the grass beneath it. Then, a few moments later, the front door - two inset stippled glass panels - lit up. I reached into my pack with my good hand as the door swung open.

  A man came out, still fitting his right arm into the sleeve of his dressing gown. His was a large bald head, and it was briefly silhouetted against the light in the hallway behind him like the dome of a Van de Graaff generator - a few wild hairs standing straight up off it under electrical prompting. He padded over the drive, and aimed his key at his car to switch of the wailing. I recognized my cue.

  I stepped forward. ‘Give me the key,’ I said. I may not have articulated the sentence very well. My mouth was gummy, and tears were still leaking out of me.

  ‘What?’ he cried, turning to face me. ‘What?’

  I came further forward. The car was still shrieking, and shrieking, and shrieking.

  ‘What?’ he said again. ‘You what?’

  Aiming the pistol with my left hand was a tricky business. I didn’t want to shoot him by accident.

  ‘That,’ he demanded, crossly, ‘what have you got there?’

  ‘Give me the key,’ I repeated. I felt a huge pressure of will inside me. He was fucking going to give me the fucking key. ‘Hand it well over. Do it now, or I’ll rip open your body with this, this, this.’

  But he ignored me, from dazed incomprehension rather than bravado, stepping over to his car and pressing the key against the roof. The lights stopped flashing. The song of sharp grief was ended. I felt a flare of rage at this, bright as a welder’s torch. What right did he have to stop the shrieking? He was supposed to give me the key. He hadn’t given me the key. I resented the curtailment of the car’s song. Simic deserved much more than this.

  I aimed the pistol at the ground, not far from his feet, and fired. It felt awkward, firing left-handedly. But the round passed from the weapon and into the ground, and it shook my ears as it went, and it woke him up. He did a short-lived impression of his car alarm; and then he dropped the key on the gravel and threw his arms upwards. I made him pick the key up, place it on the roof of the car, and back off into the garden. ‘Lie down,’ I shouted, weeping like a child, barely comprehensible, bitterly conscious of how stupid I must look. But raging, too. ‘Lie on your front.’ It would have been the easiest thing in the world to shoot him through his ridiculous bald head.

  He kept saying Christ’s first name, over and over.

  I had never before seen a skull so idiotic, so puffed-up and shell-like. His head ached to received my bullet.

  I tucked the gun into my trousers, picked up the keys, opened the car, put the keys in my pocket, threw my kit inside, got in myself, and freed the keys to start the engine. And then I drove away. The street lights were smeary blurs that leapt and danced when I blinked. I could hardly see.

  I kept to tiny roads, synchronising my NMA wiki with the machine’s satnav and making my way past a succession of signs all offering WELCOME to CAREFUL DRIVERS and, by implication, with no hospitality for me: Much Hadham; Patmore Heath; Brent Pelham; Nuthampstead; Great Chishill; Fowlmere; Haslingfield, and finally along the road into Trumpington.

  It was still dark, a little before dawn, and the broad road from Trumpington to Cambridge was deserted. In no time at all I was in Cambridge proper, patrolling along the narrow streets, with the stone trench on each side, sliding between the tall, silent and unlit edifices of Gothic and Classic colleges. My tears had dried. The skin of my face felt caked and stiff.

  I parked outside an all-night coffee bar and bought a cardboard cup of black, tasteless to my gummed mouth but palpably hot. A few panda-eyed students were clustered at the back of the place, giving all their attention to their screenbooks and paying me no heed. The server was a dark-skinned woman, and she looked at me, but not in recognition or suspicion, and not with any interest: in fact with a settled form of indifference. I don’t know if she considered me a suspicious character but didn’t care, or if all her customers looked like me.

  I paid one euro for a screen and spent an hour browsing newssites, my mind numb. I was exhausted but wide awake: a strange combination. The thing was, I was curious how subscriber newsgroups were reacting to the ongoing - but it was the same sort of stuff I could get through my own link.

  A great mass of outrage and hostility focused on my NMA, expressed in a great variety of forums; and a lesser quantity of Scottish nationalist or other support for what we were doing. England brought war to half the globe for two centuries; now war has been brought to England was one commentator’s opinion (or words to that effect), and her feed carried two thousand reader comments. In the twentieth century the enemy was dictators; now the enemy is terrorists wrote another, with eight hundred comments. Any means necessary, was a common tag, and the means included all-out nuclear assault, gas, white phosphorous, targeted gene-weapons or ‘sonic lasers’, which (the commentator insisted) were in development in a secret lab. But the thing deemed ‘necessary’ varied from annihilating NMAs to humbling the UK Government. Above all the web hummed with the palpable excitement of it. Nothing more exciting than war, after all. The best kind of war is one close enough to you to raise the thrill, but not so close that it actually incommodes your day-to-day. Homeric, was one very popular tag, which didn’t seemed to me very accurate. Heinlein, another. Churchill, another.

  I couldn’t get used to tapping the mouse with my left hand. It didn’t feel natural, or right.

  When I went outside again the sky was mother-of-pearl overhead and rosy nearer the rooftops. I drove out to the north-east of the city, where Harry lived.

  This was Harry’s road: two lines of fancy terraced housing. Both sides of the street were crammed with parked cars, but I wasn’t in the mood of drive about looking for a free space, so I stopped, fished a tyre-lever from the boot to use as a makeshift towline, and dragged a car by main-motor-force from the side of the road. There was a satisfying sound of metal complaining, and of course the parked vehicle’s alarm started whooping. I towed it round the corner; and because I had a little difficulty unsnicking the tyre-iron (for it had bitten hungrily into the metal), I left it there with the wailing machine. Then I drove back round and parked up.

  I tickled the belly of my smart phone until Harry’s number came up.

  It rang eleven times before Harry’s breathy voice mumbled ‘You’d better have a fucking good reason for ringing me at this hour, Caller Unknown.’

  ‘It’s me.’

  But his mind was obviously blurry. ‘It’s me?’

  ‘It’s Antony’

  ‘Tony Block Jesus. Tony Jesus Block’ The o vowel was inflected with a groan. I heard him coughing. Then: ‘Jesus you know it’s not even six oclock.’

  ‘Did I wake you?’

  ‘You remember the times we spent together? You remember how I wasn’t a vampire, and needed to sleep in the nighttime, like every other fucking human being? That’s still the way it is with me.’

  ‘Can I come over?’

  He coughed again. I could hear a voice, indistinct, in the background. ‘I’m not sure that’s,’ he said. ‘Look, that may not be.’

  ‘I’d really like to come over.’

  ‘Where are you, Tony?’ Harry asked. The voice in the background became more distinct: you are speaking to Tony? you are kidding me along?

  ‘Cambridgeshire,’ I said. ‘I am in the English county of Cambridgeshire.’

  ‘Are you outside my house, Tony?’

  ‘I am outside your house, Harry.’

  I could hear Joram, in the background, harrumphing. Harry asked: ‘Have you come from London?’

  ‘Brew me some proper coffee, Harry, and I’ll tell you about it.’

  ‘Jesus Tonio, couldn’t you give me a little more notice?’ Everything he said, from this point on, was accompanied
in the background by Joram’s squeaky little voice saying no! no! no!, like that Simpson’s episode in the radio station where Bart shouts I want my elephant! in the background of all the songs.

  ‘I’m a little hurt,’ I said.

  ‘Hurt? Like, hospitalisable hurt? Hurt hurt? Or just hurt?’ No! no! no!

  ‘I need to come in, really.’

  ‘Come in for, what, hospital care? We’re not a hospital.’

  ‘It’s a sprained wrist,’ I said. ‘A broken heart, maybe. I’m not sure about that.’

  ‘How long, Tonio?’ He meant how long will you be staying? In the background: No! no! no!

  ‘Couple of days.’

  ‘Do you know how outrageous this is, turning up like this?’ No! no! no! ‘Do you follow the news? It’s illegal now to have military kit in your house. The police could arrest us.’ No! no! no!

  ‘Please, Harry.’ That was a word I almost never used. Harry knew that.

  So I was in their kitchen, drinking coffee and eating a freshly toasted crumpet, the butter oozing from its giant pores like - but I didn’t want to think what that oozing resembled. The news was on in the corner, and Harry was fussing at my face with a blob of disinfectant-soaked cotton wool and some tweezers. Joram was sitting on a stool glowering at me with his arms crossed.

  ‘Bits of - is this blackened glass? Is that what this is? Did you go through a window?’

  ‘I presume it’s stone.’

  ‘Don’t move your mouth for a moment. There’s a piece the size of my little fingernail in your chin.’

  ‘Concrete. Or metal - or maybe it’s glass, yeah. Could be lots of things.’

  ‘Don’t move your mouth.’ He fussed for a minute. ‘Oh but you look a mess, Tonio.’

  ‘Why don’t you go to the hospital?’ said Joram, with a hint of Hispanic ch to the h of the last word. ‘They can look after you better at the hospital.’

  ‘Don’t mind Jory,’ said Harry plucking something that wasn’t a hair out of my eyebrow. ‘He doesn’t mean to be unwelcoming.’

  ‘You’re a fucking cold-eyed killer,’ said Joram. ‘Is my opinion, Tony.’

  ‘And lovely to see you again Joram,’ I said. ‘Do you know what? You’re the only person I know who pronounces a “u” in the middle of my name.’

  ‘I ought to call the police,’ he snarled.

  ‘You ought not,’ said Harry, severely. ‘Don’t you worry about Joram. He’s not going to call anyone.’

  This, of course, was a worry. Perhaps I should have checked into a hotel, after all. But my sense was that the bullet at Hampton Court had changed things - we were probably in for an intense week, or fortnight, before the government finally accepted the inevitable and agreed to ceasefire and negotiations. During that time a lower profile would be best; and having my face snapped by the lobby camera of some hotel and stored on some police-accessible database might not be the cleverest thing. This, though, would depend upon Joram. And here’s the thing: if it had just been myself and Harry in that house, I would probably have started crying, and I would have wept and wept. Joram’s hostility at least gave me a notch against which to brace my grief. He gave me something to do that wasn’t crying.

  ‘Are you going to call anybody, Joram?’ I asked, concentrating my words and aiming them directly at his head.

  His fuzz-bearded face gave me a Paddington Bear Hard Stare. ‘There’s a terrorist hotline,’ he said. The ch as in loch: chotline.

  Of course, him saying so meant that he wasn’t going to call. At least not right away. If he’d been planning to do so he would not have mentioned it to me.

  I got to my feet and picked up my kitbag with my good hand. ‘Spare room in the same place? Or have you converted it into a home gym?’

  Joram hissed.

  I got upstairs and into the spare room - it was exactly as I remembered it. The curtains were drawn. The lampshade, when I flicked the switch, illuminated shapes from the Elgin Marbles and projected them dimly along the top of the walls. There was a smell of furniture polish, or of new carpet weave, or at any rate of a long stretch of prior non-occupation.

  There was a mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door. I peered at my scratched and patched face for a while, hearing but not listening to the bicker of voices downstairs: Harry’s deeper, Joram’s higher-pitched. I put my head round the curtains to check the view from the window - a line of houses directly opposite, parked cars hemming both sides of the road. I calculated the exit line: a jump down on to the roof of the dark blue 4by4; good cover all the way along in either direction.

  And when I had done all this I lay on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. The skin of my face throbbed a little from where Harry had gone over it. There was a square of wood inset into the ceiling. I got up again, and standing on the bed, was able to push this up and into the attic space. Even with my bad hand it wasn’t too hard to haul myself up; to switch on the light and look around. Nothing but boxes, and the Λ beams of the roof. I took my rifle out, put it on one of the beams, and closed the hatch. Then I got my pistol, checked it, readied it, and put it into my waistband. Then I opened the spare room door, and went across the landing into the bathroom. I pissed, washed my hands, and took a good look out of the window there at the property’s rear aspect - the ground floor roof stretched a good distance into the garden, which would be easy to go along. From there twenty yards to some bushes, and the backing garden a fence away. This was a better exit. Getting across the landing wouldn’t be hard.

  I went back into the spare room, put the pistol under the pillow and lay on the bed. Then I got up again, retrieved my pistol and tucked it into my pants. I checked under the bed and behind the wardrobe. Nothing there. I lay down again. There was a picture on the wall - a horse, done in blocky torn splotches of red and yellow and green. I didn’t like the look of it, so I got up, took it down and leant it, face to the plaster, against the wall.

  I lay on the bed again. I was crying, I remember that. I don’t remember what I was crying about, or indeed if I was crying in response to any particular mental prompt - whether, in other words, I wasn’t crying in the same way that I was breathing, or whether it was a more proximate reaction to the beating of my grief inside me. The localized rhythm of being-in-the-world. The handle of my pistol was digging into my stomach a little. I shifted it round a little.

  I dozed, I think. I couldn’t say for certain that I slept, nor could I say for sure that I was awake. I had a half-dream, which is to say I experienced dreaming stripped of narrative or personage. There was a great plain, wide and green, and over it moved mighty parades of clouds, billowing structures of bright and bone-coloured splendour, darkening to blueberry in the middle of their undersides. The clouds were constantly decanting their contents on to the dark-green grasslands below, and the grasses were constantly soaking it up. There was not one sign of human habitation anywhere, and the air was neither warm nor cold, and the clean smell of rain and pasture possessed the whole of the landscape. The rain came down with an almost spiritual tenderness and completeness. And my point of view soared, and swept over the grasses: it was not just pasture - here were forests and copses, and here were ripe orchards, branches doing their actorly-melodramatic reaching-for-the-sky thing. Nettles like ruffs about the base of the trunks. A cidery scent or tang on the wet moss, and the grass between the trees. Crimson Queen, Early Bower, Green Longstem Pippin. Cobwebs strung with all the rain’s clear globes, like miniature glass fruit. A boy in amongst the trees. I thought for a moment it was myself, as a youngster, but it wasn’t. I knew who it was.

  The key, the key.

  A rat-tat knock at the door.

  I was upright and the pistol was out and aimed at the door before I knew anything consciously - my finger light on the trigger. I had instinctively quietened my breath.

  From the other side of the wood: ‘Tony?’

  The aim would have taken the bullet through the wood and into Harry’s chest. I would then have dropped my aim a l
ittle, to take into account the fact that his body was falling, and fired again.

  Croaky: ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m going to work, Tony.’

  I checked all around the room. Sucked in a silent breath, blew it silently out. I thought of putting my gun away, but felt more comfortable holding it out.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I’ve got a spare key - shall I leave it on the side downstairs?’

  I became aware that my face was a sticky: the phlegm and salt aftermath of tears, glue on my cheeks. ‘Key?’

  ‘A doorkey, yes? Front door key?’

  ‘OK.’