by Xan Brooks
One morning, after a night of fierce fire, he returned to the trench to find the place altered. Someone had draped the walls, top to bottom, in a thick dark material, like a funeral shroud. This was strange enough as it went, but when he drew closer he thought he must be dreaming, because it seemed that the shroud was made of a living material. It shifted and breathed. It sang in a high, keening note that sounded very nearly human. He narrowed his eyes and stood for a spell, inhaling the odour of bodies and gunpowder and petrol and gas. All those charged atoms coursing through his system. Was it any wonder it had made him light-headed?
After a moment, however, he realised the drapes were not drapes at all. Legions of grubs had evidently hatched overnight and the burial trench was now full of flies. The flies covered everything; he could not see the hands. They were moving and buzzing – several flew up his nose – and when he edged further in he could feel scores of them popping beneath his boots.
Once he took those first steps, he found he could not stop. He walked the length of the trench in a trance, breathing in the stench, thrilling to the murmur of hundreds of thousands of flies. Each of the flies had one hundred and one eyes. Each of those eyes watched the man going by. And then halfway in, as though on cue, the thunder started up again. The gravelly rush of incoming fire. The clap of mortar shells. Everything in noisy flux, everything fizzing and popping, and lowly Arthur Elms stepping like a tightrope artist along the line of voltage, moving through the immensity of the moment, with his thoughts leaking out and atoms pouring in. No wonder he changed. How on earth could he not? The maggots grew wings and the man came out different. Buzzing voices filled his head. His fingers shot sparks when he rubbed them together. It could have happened to anyone. But it had happened to him.
Afterwards when they ran him along to the dressing station, the medic had examined his hands and said it was an atmospheric condition, a temporary reaction; that it would not last very long. But the medic was a fool; he was talking out of his hat. Elms has always struggled to keep track of the dates. Weeks, months and years go by in a blur. He lives in the moment; always has, always will. And yet it seems that the effect has been with him for so long now as to count as permanent, which means that there is no need to worry and that everything is fine. He loves Cape Helles the best because it gave him its gift. Cape Helles showed him that he was destined for great things. Out in the woodland of Kent, Uriah only confirmed it.
Those chancers in the square with their crystals and cards. They haven’t a clue; they don’t know what he knows. They call themselves spiritualists when what he offers is magic. His fingers create friction and this time they bloom. The day is bright, which makes the flames harder to see, yet still he can feel the warmth against his skin and the sensation lifts him, elates him; his big moment draws near.
“Firefly!” he roars. “I am the human firefly! Come and see what I do!”
“Pipe down, fatty,” scolds the matchbox seller with the shattered leg.
“Firefly! Firefly!” He stands in the square with blue flames cupped in his hand. He stands with sweat rings at his armpits and his hat brim come loose. He knows that sooner or later the world will turn and take notice.
8
Barely a week goes by without Tom stealing fruit from the grocer. The boy cannot help himself – he is touched in the head and nothing attests to his innocence more than his ineptitude as a thief. Dazzled by the sight of strawberries or bananas, Tom will stick out an arm to lift them gently from the stall by the door. But performing this act sends him into a panic. Instead of replacing the fruit, he takes off at a run.
Nan reckons the grocer might be making matters worse, because the more it happens the angrier he grows, and the angrier he grows the louder he shouts, and the louder he shouts, the more likely Tom is to take to his heels instead of returning the fruit. She wishes Higgs could control himself. If one day he could only glance up and say, “Hello, Tom, how you doing there?” she feels sure that Tom would respond in kind and then they would all be spared the same tiresome quarrel, week in and week out.
In the meantime, take cover, because here comes Mr Higgs. His face is flushed, his scalp’s gone pink and he is wringing his hands in a manner that suggests he has recently dragged them through nettles. He says, “Mrs Marsh, Mrs Marsh, I must protest yet again.”
Nan and Lucy are engaged in washing the windows of the taproom. When Nan breaks off to confront their visitor, the girl makes a show of redoubling her efforts, applying the cloth in a flurry while observing the grocer out of the tail of one eye. Higgs, she knows, is struggling to prop up a failing business, just as her grandfather is struggling to prop up a failing business, just as almost everyone else on Ermine Street is, too. Taxes, bills and the lack of passing trade: it’s the same story all over. But it seems to her that the years of anger and worry have made a particularly deep impression on the grocer, leaving him unstable so that he is liable to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. Somewhere along the line it is as though he has decided that the boy from the pub is embarked upon a personal vendetta, the eventual aim of which can only be to put him out of business. Each time he looks up and sees Tom by the stall, he also sees his own ruin, and possibly the bankruptcy court tucked in close behind.
“Not one banana,” he says. “Two bananas.”
Nan says, “Mr Higgs, I can only apologise. It is totally unacceptable and he knows that, right enough. And when he comes back, we’ll bring him across to tell you how sorry he is.”
Higgs, however, will not be mollified. His resistance has hardened with each angry visit. He says the situation has moved beyond neighbourly conversation. The burglary of his produce has become systemic, and he fears that they have now reached the point where the constabulary must be called upon to intervene. He has tried being nice and he has tried being kind, Lord knows he has, but it’s a fine line between being kind and being soft, and he realises now that the boy has been laughing at him all this time. It’s obvious the lad regards him as an easy mark and in a sense that’s his fault because he made the fatal mistake of going all soft when he should have been steely. Well, no more. He’s going to be strong from here on. He’s going to fetch the constabulary.
Nan says, “Now look. Mr Higgs. Of course he’s not laughing at you. The boy runs away because he’s scared witless.”
Higgs throws a distracted look in Lucy’s direction. His scalp shades purple. “I’m having to watch my language because of present company. But there’s a word I would use for a boy like that one, a very bad word for a little thief who steals my goods, bold as you please. I’m watching my language here because of the girl.”
“Mr Higgs,” says Nan.
“Fucker,” says Higgs. “That’s the word. I’m sorry it got out but there it is.”
Lucy puts the cloth in the bucket and turns away from the glass. “I’ll go and find him, Nan,” she says. “I’ll have him bring back what he stole or the money it’s worth.”
Nan tells her friends that the nurse dropped Tom on his head when he was born and that this is what makes him so slow on the uptake. But then Nan has also been heard to suggest that the exact same thing happened to the butcher boy and the Osborne girl, and once, when a barrel of ale had gone bad without Lucy noticing, her grandmother had shouted, “What’s wrong with you, girl? Did the nurse drop you on your head?”. This made Lucy think that it was simply a figure of speech; that almost certainly Tom had not been dropped on his head, and neither had the butcher boy or the Osborne girl. Unless they had all been delivered by the same clumsy nurse, and this was surely impossible. The nurse would have lost her job. And besides, Tom was born in St Albans.
All the same, her brother is odd; everybody says so. Like a crystal wireless, he has a habit of drifting away from the signal. Sometimes you can reach him and sometimes you can’t.
Lucy throws back the hatch and checks the cellar. She peers inside the cobbled stal
ls and behind the door of the gruesome public toilet, but she does all of these things as a matter of course and without any great hope. When Tom’s in disgrace, his impulse is to put as much distance as possible between him and the Griffin. Look at me, she marvels. Not five days after playing hide-and-seek in the woods, here I am having to do the same thing again.
She had once asked her mother if there was anything bothering Tom and her mother had told her the birth had been difficult and that he had gone without air for maybe as much as a minute and that this meant that they needed to be patient with him because he always got there in the end. Lucy chose to believe the air explanation rather than the nurse explanation, although even that didn’t altogether add up. One, because swimmers held their breath for a minute at a time and never suffered any lasting effects. And two, because didn’t babies survive without air for nine months in the womb before the birthing bit began? If Tom could last that long, then what further harm could it do, another minute or two?
Still, the world has always puzzled him. When he walks through a door, the very act of doing so appears to upset his bearings so that he loses sight of whether he is entering or leaving and starts to turn bewildered circles, blocking the way for everybody else. When he’s outside he feels overwhelmed and will scarcely speak above a whisper. Indoors he is reassured and over-compensates by shouting. It seems that she is forever telling him to either shut up or speak up.
Everything is heightened. Everything risks being misconstrued. Tom confuses in with out and up with down and someone else’s possessions with his own – and then the moment he’s put straight, the shock is too great. He is drawn to the fruit, she realises, in the same way he is drawn towards the stagnant water in the horse’s trough. Its greasy sheen has the boy entranced; she has seen the way he sidles up and extends a hand to dab at the surface. But when he touches it the ripples alarm him and so he leaps back as if scalded. Lucy loves her brother but she despairs of him too. At school they sit him at the back of the class, with the idiots, and she doubts that the lessons have made much impression. He’s only twelve, which means he still has time to improve, and some people are what they call late bloomers. She hopes this is true and fears that it’s not, and either way there probably isn’t very much she can do. Tom needs a mother, not a sister. And even that, she considers, may still not be enough.
Outside the butcher’s, Brinley Roberts occupies himself by making a pattern of footprints in the scattered sawdust. But it is a babyish enterprise, quite beneath his dignity, and he steps hurriedly aside when he sees the girl approaching.
“Where are you going, Lucy-Lu?”
“Looking for my brother.”
“If you need a hand, I’m like Sherlock Holmes.”
“No, you’re alright.” The last thing she wants is to be saddled with Brinley.
Lucy heads out. She believes she knows where Tom will have gone, and runs to the parallel street, the arterial road, not quite two hundred yards away and rattling with activity. She can hear the road before she sees it, as a pith-helmeted explorer might hear waves crashing against a rocky beach and know that he has reached the sea again.
The thoroughfare cuts the neighbourhood in two. The road has been widened and resurfaced to accommodate the volume of traffic. No doubt before long it will need to be widened again. She stands at the kerb and takes it all in: the fractious conversation of saloon cars and motorcycles and steam wagons and horse-drawn carts. These contraptions are too different, she thinks; they will never get along. And yet each is under the impression that the road belongs to them alone. In the midst of the melee, a white-gloved policeman is attempting to play the role of mediator, but his presence only serves to inflame the situation. Now the drivers squeeze their horns and the motor vehicles start to blat and squawk like angry geese on a pond.
Then along come the buses, to make the mess even worse. Nan is of the opinion that there are too many buses at large in London, and here is the evidence to back up her case. The red two-deckers of the General Omnibus Company are at loggerheads with the blue-and-green two-deckers from London Transport & Haulage and these in turn are being preyed on by a band of low-slung, six-wheeled interlopers that operate under the banner of Capital Buses and slope out each morning from a set of warehouses in Penge. All of them congregate at the same stops to bicker and honk over the same set of passengers. Something needs to be done; the whole thing is chaos. No one can be entirely sure that the driver is going where he insists he is going. Nan likes to tell the tale of her friend Mary, who boarded a bus to visit a daughter in Romford and looked up from her paperback to find herself in Chipping Ongar instead.
Lucy stands at the kerb surrounded by the din and the fumes, the scaffolding and sheets of tarpaulin and drooping electrical wires. Then she spies a break in the traffic, hitches her hem to her knees and scampers across to the opposite side.
He is in the milk bar, amid the chromium and glass, the smells of detergent and soured cream. He is staring at the fish inside their dirty tank. The proprietor motions her in with a tilt of his head, the same way he did on her previous visit; they have been through this before. He’d rather the lad bought himself a beaker of something, but life’s too short to raise a fuss, plus it’s not as if he’s doing anyone any harm. Live and let live, that’s what the proprietor says.
Softly, so as not to startle him, she says, “All right there, Tom? Have you got those bananas?”
“Ate ’em,” he says, without looking around.
“Sssh. Inside voice, Tom.”
“Ate ’em,” says Tom, again, but she wonders whether this is true. She thinks that more likely the guilt overtakes him, and that he panics and offloads the fruit on the first person he passes, or hurls it at stray dogs or hedges in a bid to shake himself free of the crime. It would be simpler if he ate the fruit; it would make no difference to his punishment. And yet a nagging sibling instinct tells her he never actually does.
“Wolfed them both down, did you? And I bet they tasted lovely.”
When she attempts to coax Tom outside, he says he needs to wait just a few more minutes in order to see what the fish do next – as if the fish are likely to do anything they haven’t done a thousand times already that day, which is basically taking aimless laps of the tank. But whenever she wants him to accompany her anywhere, his instinct is to stall. He seems to feel that whatever comes next can only be worse, and this outlook strikes her as both silly and sad; she cannot think where he gets it from. He didn’t want to leave the house, so possibly it all stems from that. He didn’t want his dad to die and he didn’t want his mum to die, but then so what, who did? Terrible things happen all the time and there is nothing to do but hope that whatever comes next will be brighter and better.
Lucy says that she has a good idea: she is going to tell him what they are about to do. How about they don’t walk back to the Griffin just yet? How about they visit some shops and buy lots of fancy new clothes? Then they could take the train into town and catch a show for the night, one of those comedy shows, full of jokes and pratfalls.
“All right, Luce. But first of all we watch the fish.”
There are three of them inside the tank. They have black-scaled bodies and lacy grey fins. She does not think they can be English fish. They have been brought in from some warm foreign sea to swim in tap water and eat bread crumbs, butter or grease, whatever the diners see fit to feed them.
“They’re like brides.”
“Inside voice, remember. Who’s like a bride?”
“The fish. It looks like they’re wearing wedding dresses.”
“Oh yes, I see what you mean. All we have to do is find them each a groom.”
“I’m sorry I took the bananas,” he says. “I didn’t mean to and I’ll never do it again.”
“Inside voice, Tom.” But she ruffles his hair and he briefly turns his face from the tank. His features are drawn and spaced exa
ctly as hers are. You can trace a line from him to her and then to their father and then back to Grandad and then most probably back deeper than that, to his grandad’s great grandad, and then maybe deeper than that, all the way down to the dawn of man.
At the counter the proprietor wipes his hands on his apron and says, “One day the pair of you are going to order a drink or a slice of cake and then you know what’ll happen? I’ll drop dead of heart failure.”
“Why?” shouts Tom. This prospect alarms him.
Lucy waves a hand. “We might come by this evening, as a matter of fact, on our way home from the show. Mightn’t we, Tom? We’ll come in a taxi and tell it to wait outside while we eat dinner.”
The proprietor says, “In that case I’ll have to reserve you a table. The duchess was meant to be in later, but I’ll tell her she can go and boil her head. Why have her sort when we can have you two instead?
“Charmed and delighted.”
“She’s joking!” cries Tom. “She’s joking! Don’t really reserve us a table.”
But a minute later she hears a clink and turns to discover that the proprietor has poured two glasses of milk and set them at her elbow. He performs this service so discreetly that Lucy is at a loss and finds herself overcome with shyness and is utterly incapable of acknowledging it. Head bowed, she reaches for one of the glasses and hands it to Tom and then takes a furtive sip from the other, enough to know that the milk is cool and good and that it tastes all the better for the fact of it being free. The proprietor stands with his back to her. He is clearing crockery from the table by the door. Lucy turns back, stares intently at the fish tank and risks another sip to clear the frog from her throat. She draws a breath and says, “Charmed and delighted, charmed and delighted. That is to say that my brother is charmed and I am delighted.”
