The Walking Dead

  'We'll go for it.'

  There was the click of the lighter behind him. The Nobbler swung back his arm, the plastic bag with the half-brick in his hand, and heaved it at the bay window. The crash of the glass–enough to wake the bloody dead–pealed in his ears. Then he was roughly pushed aside. A small flame had caught on the material in the bottle's neck. There was the slosh of liquid. He watched his man hurl, short arm, the missile through the splintered hole the brick had made and break as it landed. There was a flash, then a growing roar as the fire caught. A light upstairs, across the street, snapped on.

  'Come on, leg it.'

  His face, behind and above the scarf, felt the heat of the spreading blaze, and he started to run. Well, he wasn't a kid, was he? Couldn't run fast, could he? Do the best he was capable of, wouldn't he? Hadn't gone fifty paces and his stride was already shorter and he could hear his man behind him, panting like a bloody pig, and he heard the shouts and the cackle of the radios, then the pounding of bloody boots. Benny Edwards, the Nobbler with the reputation, thought his world was caving in on him.

  It did, sooner than he'd reckoned possible.

  He was a couple of strides from the back wheel, breath sobbing in his throat, when the door of that bloody van–the window-cleaner's–heaved open, swung on the hinge and was right out, blocking him. He tried to swerve but hadn't the control of his legs and fell. In the fraction of time before his face hit the road, he saw the big fuckers spill out of it. He was down. Two of them were on him. Hands searched his clothing, probed into his pockets, and his arms were wrenched into the small of his back. He felt the cold of the handcuffs on his wrists. He'd always thought, if it went, sour on him, that there'd be a ring at the door around five in the morning, detectives in the hall with the courtesy to let him dress decently and give the missus's cheek a peck, and a solicitor–not that fucking Nat Wilson, no way–at the police station by the time he reached there. But he was on his face with the grit of the road in his eyes and he felt suspended in the depths of humiliation…and was.

  13 July 1937

  It is called the battle of Brunete, and within four days our offensive has failed.

  Brunete is a village, but it is worthless. Every building in it has been destroyed by our artillery, by their artillery and bombing. We advanced to within two miles of it and were halted. I do not understand how our commanders could have ordered its capture and been prepared to sacrifice so many lives in the attack.

  I have asked Ralph how it was justified, but he will not answer me. Each time I question him he turns away. I have relied on Ralph so often to lift me–he is so strong in dedication and purpose–but here he will not…

  Our battalion was ordered to capture a long ridge of ground that was completely bare of cover. We reached it. We have called the ridge Mosquito. Hill. We gave it this name because the bullets buzz round us like the swarms of those damned insects, but the bite is worse and so many have been bitten, for nothing.

  Huge forces have been used by our side, but we have not made the breakthrough that the commissars assured us was inevitable…and this evening we buried our gallant Major George Nathan. He was a wonderful man and we have followed him through every hell that the commissars have sent us into. (The commissars are never with us in the heat of the fighting.) He always carried a gold-tipped baton, and none of us ever saw him flinch or show fear. He was hit by splinters from a bomb. At the time he was wounded, grievously, we were under attack from the new German Messerschmitt 109s and also a formation of the Heinkel ills. I have never been so frightened. Our own aircraft, Russian, abandoned us.

  Major Nathan's last order to us was that we sing to him. As he moved towards death, in a shell-hole, we crouched round him and he had the final company of our voices. I could hear Ralph's above all others. After our major had gone, slipped away, we knocked together a crude coffin from planks, gouged out a shallow pit in the ground at the bottom of the hole, and there were olive trees–broken by the enemy's shell-fire but still standing–and we left him where there was a view, at some different time, of the dried course of the Guadarrama river. We never had a better officer, nor ever will.

  This afternoon we were ordered to dig trenches, which is always the sign that the offensive is finished. It is impossible to dig. Not even with pickaxes can we break the ground. (We covered the earth on the Major's coffin with stones, so that foxes and rats would not get inside it.) There is no water here. Even if we could get to the river, which is under the enemy's guns, we would find no running water in it. The Americans to our right have taken so many casualties that their two battalions are now joined as one, and that is under strength; they have no water for their wounded.

  It is as hot, now, on Mosquito Hill as at any time since I came to Spain. The bodies out in front of us are already swollen, their skin is black and the flies swarm on them. Our mouths cry out for water–not cry, my error, but croak. When we sang for Major Nathan it was a supreme effort, and my throat is now as sore as if I had rubbed it with a carpenter's rough paper. It is rumoured that we have captured only twenty square miles, but at a cost of more than twenty thousand casualties. If God exists, He has not come near to Mosquito Hill.

  Is it the heat, the thirst or the suffering around me, but I wonder now if I will ever leave this country? If I am ever permitted to go home to you, dear Enid, I believe–accept my promise that the force of the sun breeds delirium in us–that I would take the trolley-bus into the City and go to the office where Mr Rammage is and I would beg him, on my knees, to accept me back. But I think the sun and the death that is everywhere have affected my mind.

  It hurts so much that Ralph will not talk to me.

  But as I write by the moonlight–and at last the guns are quiet, as if the mosquitoes have been swatted away–I think he watches me, and I sense that he believes me a fool to have committed my thoughts to these pages.

  We are so isolated from all past experiences. We wait for death to choose us. Death is an end that may be preferable to living. Is a man who is dead in pain from a parched throat? Does he yell, a crow's call, in the night for water? Is he at peace? Does he lie in the arms of his girl? Maybe I should try to write a poem–like Sassoon or Rosenberg, Owen or Graves–and hope that it will be read, one day, when the Poetry Group meets, if any there remember me. No, it is a delusion.

  I think I ramble. I am, I realize it, gripped with arrogance. I am no Owen, but a wretch with a dried-out throat and a shattered mind. I am of the Doomed Youth that was the 'Anthem' of Owen. I say his words, but soundlessly: 'What passing-bells for those who die as cattle ?/Only the monstrous anger of the guns./Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle/Can patter out their hasty orisons.' I am wrong…cattle in a slaughterhouse die better than we do.

  Soon it will be dawn.

  We are lost souls, and the dream has forsaken us.

  Dear Enid, I have to try to sleep. The 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' was written for me, and I am walking towards hell and am alone, and I have forgotten what cause it was that brought me to die 'while in a foreign land', here or somewhere else.

  The dawn comes quickly, too fast.

  Propped up on his bed, Banks's eyes lingered on the page of the notebook, and he reread again the last line. The dawn comes quickly, too fast. There were distant shouts as the garrison camp woke, as there would have been on Mosquito Hill when the officers roused their men. He had been awake for an hour and, against all better judgements, had started on the entry written by faint candlelight so long ago…He never skipped, and he resisted the temptation to find the last page, the last words written by his great-uncle. There was not the scream of the day's first artillery shell fired from a 155mm howitzer by German gunners or the nationalists, or the first howling low-level flight over the ridge of a Messerschmitt fighter, but a high-pitched jingle of tinny music.

  He reached on to the bedside table in the barely furnished room of the camp's visitors' quarters, lifted his mobile and clicked 'receive'. Sharply he gave his name, the
n listened.

  'But they're not there. They were moved out…What's the damage?'

  He was told, and some more.

  'But that's brilliant, Wally, picking up the lowlife…What should I do, and when?'

  He shaved fast, dressed, then slipped on his suit jacket so that the pocket hung down over the pancake holster on his belt. He locked his door and went down the bright-lit corridor, heading for his Principal's room. By the staircase, half-way down the corridor where a uniformed constable lounged on a plastic chair, there were windows and he saw that darkness still cloaked the parade-ground. He knocked, said his name, heard an answering grumble, went inside and switched on the ceiling light. Wright was in bed and blinked up at him. Like any other policeman, he was familiar with the work of delivering bad, sad news, and had learned it should be done briskly, without emotion. His Principal might be a hero but he was not a friend.

  He said, matter-of-fact, 'Sorry and all that, but I have to tell you your home was attacked an hour ago. Of course your wife and daughter were not there and are quite safe. A window was broken and a petrol bomb was thrown into your living room. The street was staked out, across the road and down it. The guys were in there pretty fast with extinguishers and most of the damage is smoke and scorching, not structural.'

  Some would have wept, others would have let free a volley of oaths, obscenities. His Principal merely grimaced.

  'Because we had the stake-out and were able to move so sharp, your neighbours won't have been affected other than by the drama. The homes on either side of yours are fine. Yours is now boarded up .'I suppose, when you went to the judge and told him of the approach made to you and turned in the money, that you realized there could be retaliation. People on high are singing your praises.'

  The Protection Officer expected a platitude response. Something about 'duty' and something about 'ethics'. The Principal only shrugged…Peculiar.

  He bored on: 'Actually, we've had a rather good result, and my boss is well chuffed with it. We have three arrests–a driver, the jerk who threw the petrol bottle, and the one who chucked the brick and broke your window for the petrol to go through. He's Benny Edwards and it's the first time, and not without trying, that he's been nicked in flagrante. He's a specialist in nobbling, but that's as far as I can go on him.'

  No reaction, nothing. Banks had anticipated something…Bizarre.

  'I'm not permitted to discuss it further because of any possible conclusions you might draw in relation to the case you're sitting on, Mr Wright. What's paramount is that nothing I have said to you prejudices your opinion on the trial. That is why you have not yet been asked for a statement on the approach made to you, why you have not been sat down with a book of photographs so's you can identify the people you met, and the circumstances under which you were given that sum of cash. It's all being kept till after the verdict you and the rest will reach. Does that make sense?'

  His Principal could have said bloody something. He saw the roll of his eyes.

  The man seemed so calm. It was like, Banks reflected, his Principal was indifferent to having had petrol splashed into his living room and lit. Banks would have been mental with fury at such violation of his territory. He realized that he understood so little about the man. He had not managed to dig his way into the school teacher's trust–that was why he had won no normal, predictable reactions. But they called him a hero. There, perhaps, he fitted a pattern. A hero, in David Banks's world, was not a special forces' trooper–up a mountain in Afghanistan with all the high-tech gear hooked on his webbing–but the little man, ordinary as sin, who was confronted, from nowhere, with acute danger to himself and others. His hero was a man who made a bridge of his body for many to crawl over when a ferry-boat turned turtle, in darkness with panic around him. His hero, man or woman, young or old, had gone back into the smoke and toxic hell of a bombed Underground train, deep in a tunnel, to help those so badly injured they could not make their own escape. His hero was Cecil Darke, without water and with the smell of the dead round him, on the ridge of Mosquito Hill. They came in all shapes, all sizes and fitted no stereotype, and what made them so special was their lack of preparation for what they would endure. He felt, rare for him, a keen admiration. Whatever his emotions, Wright had them successfully bottled and corked. What did they say? They said, 'Don't make a drama out of a crisis.' The man was now identified by twin echelons of organized crime, had acquired the enmity of two brutal clans, would live with that weight on his shoulders–and his family's–for years to come. He had stood up and been counted against the forces of corruption and intimidation. Not bad for a bloody school teacher, but the mark of a nobody who was found to be a hero, too true. Maybe the man was in shock.

  Banks said kindly, 'I can rustle up a cup of tea if you'd like one'

  His Principal rolled over in the bed, away from him. 'I'd prefer it if you got lost and let me go back to sleep–switch the light off on your way out.'

  He did, and shut the door quietly behind him.

  Another day was starting, and Banks did not know what it would bring–if anything.

  In a Belgravia hotel room, where the street below the window reverberated with a road-cleansing lorry, a couple made love. They had barely slept.

  He thought the younger woman was clumsy through inexperience but relished her passion.

  She thought the older man was now almost drained of his strength and doing it from long unused memory cards but was childishly eager.

  An opened champagne bottle, its contents going flat, was tilted in a silver bucket. She'd said she was teetotal and didn't need the stimulation of alcohol, and he'd followed suit but the wasted bottle would be on his bill.

  She was astride him and he was on his back, and the sheets were nicked off the bed and on the carpet with their scattered clothes. He was in her, and his hands reached up for her breasts. He talked and she listened. Then, when he was flaccid, limp–between times–she talked and he listened, but mostly it was him who talked and while he did she helped him to get ready for it again. A wife, Gertrud, who had been a childhood sweetheart, and a divorce of twenty years ago that had come through, final papers, on a fax machine in a foreign city. A boyfriend at university who had only shagged her on Saturday nights when the hail of residence was heaving in unison. A secretary where he worked who cared for him but as a younger sister and didn't share a bed with him. A young man, a staffer at the Home Office, whom she'd ended up with after a Christmas party.

  For too long he hadn't done it; not often enough she hadn't.

  He bounced his buttocks on the bed and heaved into her.

  She thought him a cob horse who'd remembered what it was about.

  He didn't know whether it was spontaneous.

  She didn't know whether he'd planned it.

  He felt privileged; and she felt damn, damn good.

  There was no relationship for the future. They were ships that passed.

  She felt him shrink and wriggled off him. She lay beside him and heard his breathing, harsh but regular, and he had nothing to say…Silence, and the road-cleansing lorry had moved on. Quiet…No one who knew her where she worked would have believed she had copulated three times in a night with a man nearly old enough to be her father and gloried in it. No one who knew him would have reckoned him capable of giving and taking acute pleasure. She was off the bed and walked naked to the side-table, her feet kicking aside a drift of sheets and clothing. She switched on the electric kettle and tore open coffee sachets. It was the first time, afterwards, that he had not spoken about his wife, his secretary, his life or work.

  'You all right?'

  'Just thinking.'

  'What were you thinking about?' she asked.

  'Oh, mistakes and good luck.'

  'I don't regard this, what's happened, as a mistake, and…'

  He said, distracted now, 'No, no…I was thinking that this might be the day when the mistake is made, and when we've gotten lucky.' *

  'For what you
paid, Miss, what did you expect? A high-performance Alfa?'

  The nurse from Accident and Emergency tossed and twisted in her bed as the first light of the day seeped through her curtains. She had not slept and would be a rag doll at work that morning. As it had through the night hours, irritation swarmed in her mind, with frustration over the reception she had faced at the car-dealer's yard at the end of her shift yesterday afternoon. Knackered after another difficult day, Avril Harris had explained the problem: backfiring on deceleration, particularly on the approach to stop lights, sometimes once, sometimes twice, with a gunshot's report. Wasn't it under warranty? She had been told, slyly, that she'd never asked about warranties but if she had she would have been told that they did not apply to a car priced at under a thousand. The problem could be handled but the work would have to be paid for; the dealer had denied obligation. 'Sorry and all that, but it was bought as seen.'

  What he was prepared to do, without cost to her, was explain the fault that she had described with a mounting anger. It was about the timing, about the exhaust valve opening as the piston exploded; she knew how to operate a complicated defibrillator, or any of the maze of equipment that surrounded a patient in trouble immediately after admission–but had no comprehension of the workings of the internal combustion engine under the bonnet of an old Fiesta. She was told about the crankshaft, the timing belt, the camshaft and the valves, and she was tired, flushed, and had lost him. He'd shrugged–and she'd hoped the unthinkable: that one day the bastard would be wheeled on a trolley into her care, parked in a corridor and left to sweat–and smiled showing bad teeth. 'It was tried and tested by you, Miss, and you didn't have a complaint then.'

  It was like, Avril Harris had thought, the dealer had never seen the damn car before. Until they had a look under the bonnet, he didn't know whether it would be a fifty-pound job or a hundred–work and parts, but for cash there'd be no need for VAT added on top–and she could drop it off any time she wanted and they'd take that look, then tell her what the damage would cost her. She had decided that–whether it made a noise like the gun battle at the Alamo each time she came to red traffic lights–she was damned if he'd get her trade.