Seeing the true depth of his enemy’s fear, Derek felt his anger subside. Hot resentment gave way to pity and the strength drained from his fists. Blinking and taking a breath, he suddenly felt ashamed. In the space of only a few minutes he had been cruel to Elizabeth, attacked two boys and humiliated a third. Sometimes he wondered about himself, despaired at what he was capable of.
‘Go,’ he whispered, dropping his head and pushing his hands into his pockets. ‘Just get out of here.’
Derek had expected to be summoned to Father Gabriel’s office to answer for his altercation in the park – and deservedly so, he thought – but nobody came for him. As the hours became days, he realised that the boys must have decided against reporting him. Fearing either another audience with him, and perhaps with Edward as well, or simply not wanting to have to explain how someone a year their junior had taken on all three of them, discretion seemed to have won out over valour.
Whatever the reason, Derek did not have to account for his actions and the trio did everything in their power to stay out of his way. He felt increasingly guilty about attacking them and had even considered an apology, but in the end decided against it. A strong reputation in a reformatory was not something to be easily discarded.
Enjoying a week’s break from their lessons, Derek spent most of his days with his head buried in the diary, his eyes drawn – as if led on a string – to the final pages. He had now read them so many times that he was certain they were indelibly etched into his mind. The last entry described every detail of his father’s encounter with the giant elephants. He wrote about the unnatural size of their heads, about the extraordinary length and girth of their tusks. How they moved without sound, graceful ghosts in the rain. He described how one of the elephants had turned to look at him, its eyes glinting like wet coal through the gloom. It was like being looked at by God, he had written. He pondered over how they had appeared out of nowhere and were gone only moments later. How calm he had felt in their presence. How the air had changed. How he first thought they were angels sent to carry him away and how he had held his breath as they passed. He wrote also about how convinced he now was that these were not like the other Great Greys that he had cherished so much. That they were something altogether different. Something entirely and infinitely more special.
Edward tapped Derek on the shoulder, pulling his gaze away from the diary. ‘You do realise that Father Gabriel is going to burn you at the stake for this?’
‘Probably.’
‘And that we might both be thrown out onto the street tonight?’
‘There is that chance,’ he offered, nodding. ‘Still, we both know I’m not going to change my mind about this.’
‘Well, of course not. That would require some consideration and sense on your part.’
‘Precisely,’ Derek agreed, punching his brother on the shoulder. ‘If you’re so convinced that we’re both going to suffer over this, you may as well get one with me. Don’t you think?’
‘I’ve already been knocked out once this month. I think I’ll pass, thanks. Maybe if I tell Father Gabriel how I urged you not to go through with it, but that you refused to listen to me as usual, then perhaps he’ll go easy on me.’
‘Worth a try anyway,’ Derek said, slapping Edward’s leg, a mocking note in his voice.
A man with large sickle earrings and a white cloth bound tightly around his head peered out from behind a curtain that at some point in its life had been a light beige colour. There were dark rings under his eyes. ‘Which one of you am I cutting?’
‘That would be me,’ Derek replied, standing up.
‘Well, your Majesty, get yourself over here. I don’t have all bloody afternoon,’ he snapped, pulling open the curtain and pointing to what looked like an old barber’s chair. The smell of blood and exposed flesh hung in the air. ‘So, what do you want?’
As the brothers stepped into the booth, their twin reflections lit up the faces of more than a dozen mirrors mounted on the wall. The man’s eyes flickered between each frame, unsettled by the myriad of matching faces that surrounded him. Derek offered the man their father’s diary and pointed to the bottom of the page. ‘This is what I want.’
Glancing at it, a scowl crawled across his face. ‘This sketch is all wrong. It shouldn’t look like that.’
‘If it’s all the same to you,’ Derek replied, ‘I want it exactly as you see it.’
‘I don’t care,’ he sighed. ‘How old are you, anyway?’
‘Old enough.’
The man leered at Derek for a moment, his eyes flitting back to the mirrors. ‘You understand that once I cut you, there’s no turning back?’
‘You mean tattoos don’t wash off?’
‘You trying to be clever, boy?’
Ignoring the question, Derek pulled out his money, threw it onto the table and dropped himself into the chair. ‘Let’s get a move on. You don’t have all afternoon.’
Wincing at his brother’s brashness, Edward dropped his head into his hands. In the mirrors behind him, twelve young men followed suit.
‘You’ve got a bloody mouth on you,’ the man snarled, snatching up the money and stuffing it into his pocket.
You should try living with it, Edward thought.
PART 2
The Great Grey
1
Fourteen years later
19 July 1916
The Battle of Delville Wood
The dead were everywhere. A rotting raft of human wreckage, of soldier debris, bobbing and bloating in the flooded trench.
‘You’re hurt,’ Edward cried out above the din, leaning back against the sandbags.
A fresh volley of bullets sprayed into the banks above them, spitting up mud and flecks of blackened skin.
‘A scratch,’ Derek shot back, shaking his head.
Edward leaned in for a closer look. ‘Your eye … it’s full of blood.’
‘It’s nothing. Nothing … I’m fine,’ he said, wiping the wound with his soiled sleeve.
‘There’s no way you can see anything through there,’ Edward argued. ‘Stay close to me. Take everything to your right. I’ll guard your left side.’
Derek was about to protest when a fresh wave of soldiers poured into the trench. As he turned to face them, he realised they were now heavily outnumbered. Less than a hundred or so of their own men remained on their feet. The enemy, in contrast, seemed infinite. There was a brief exchange of fire before weapons fell empty and the first man charged at them, thrashing through the fetid waters. He ran with his rifle extended out from his hip, its lethal bayonet winking in the late-afternoon sun.
‘I’ll take him,’ Edward called out.
But Derek ignored his brother’s call, stepping ahead of him and widening his stance. He was preparing to draw the initial strike by feinting to his left – a tactic that had so far served him well – when the soldier stumbled and collapsed onto his knees. Seizing his opportunity, Derek swooped down onto the man’s back and raised his knife. As the man fought for purchase in the rancid mud, howling like an animal with the scent of a butcher’s block in its nose, Derek closed his eyes and drove his blade into the man’s neck. A wild spring pumped from the slit, spraying up the side of his arm in rhythmic bursts. Each wave of blood drained strength from his thrashing limbs. As the man’s life ebbed away, Derek could feel the bile rising up in his throat. Suddenly he wondered about the soldier. What was his name? Did he have a family? A wife? Children? In recent weeks, he had been haunted by a recurring dream of a young German girl holding a candlelight vigil for her father, praying desperately for his safe return. But no matter how long she waited, or how much she cried for him, he was never coming home. In the dream, the girl grew into an old woman and died with her face pressed to her bedroom window, still waiting. Still hoping. The candle still burning.
Before the fighting had erupted, the war had held a certain allure for Derek. An opportunity to fight for England, for the greater good, as he saw it. It seeme
d a proud and glorious calling, an opportunity to stare down the enemy, to wage war for a cause more important than any he would ever face on his own. But the truth of sawing through a man’s throat and watching the light fade from his eyes soon doused away any trace of romance. Taking fathers from their children, it turned out, had the effect of stripping a man’s soul, raw and bloodied, from his body.
Derek rose to his feet just as a second and third soldier, running side by side, crested a mound of bodies ahead of them. They were less than twenty feet away, wide-eyed, and each armed with a pair of bloodied bayonets. Both men appeared to be young, barely twenty, but the scarlet stains on their blades afforded them a measure of respect that would otherwise have been withheld. Without having to exchange a single word, Derek immediately engaged the young German to his right. In one fluid and graceful movement he grabbed the man’s rifle, twisted it from his hands and dragged his knife across his throat. For a moment there was nothing, as if the blade had missed its mark, but then a wet mouth fell open on the man’s pale neck: a death smile. Within moments the man’s compatriot had joined him in the shallow water, clutching at his shirt, blood and water bubbling through the hole in his chest. As Derek watched them die together, fighting back the vomit in his throat, Edward suddenly screamed at him. ‘Derek! Move!’ he cried, shoving him hard into the bank.
Trapped for a moment in the mire, Derek watched helplessly as a bayonet punched through Edward’s chest – a black blade that was meant for him. Scrambling frantically to his feet, Derek was about to throw himself at their assailant when the man was shot in the face by a stray bullet. Bits of teeth and bone exploded from his mouth. He rocked on his feet and then tipped backwards like a tree being felled. Edward, straining to draw breath, staggered forward and collapsed into Derek’s arms.
‘Oh, Lord …’ Derek whispered. As panic flooded his mind, his hearing began to recede. The cacophony around him was reduced to muffled cries, screams without edges. Sheets of blood washed down from the thick slit in Edward’s chest. Knowing that he had to stem the bleeding, Derek pressed his hand into the wound. ‘Hang on, Ed. Please … just stay with me!’
Edward tried to reply, but was unable to talk. Instead, blood pooled and gurgled in his throat.
Derek leaned over and pressed his face against the side of Edward’s head. ‘You stay with me. Hear me? Keep your eyes open!’
Edward nodded and squeezed his brother’s hand. ‘Just … a … scratch,’ he wheezed, strength draining from his fingers.
‘Ed! No! No!’ he pleaded. ‘Somebody help me! Please … please!’
As men charged and fell around them, screaming and grappling to stay alive, Derek remained a statuesque figure at Edward’s side.
Crying tears of blood for his dying brother.
2
Seventeen months later
4 January 1918
London
Derek Hughes stood at the entrance to the crumbling Shepherd’s Gate Cemetery and bowed his head. He tucked in his shirt, removed his hat and ran a comb through his hair, as if the interred residents in front of him might somehow take offence at his dishevelled appearance. As the late afternoon sighed its cold breath down the back of his collar, he slowly made his way past a rolling field of departed soldiers. The fight, and the reasons that gave life to it, now forever gone from them. Rows of plain crosses marked their graves, wooden sentinels of the dead.
While balding trees and threadbare tracts of dead grass jostled and twitched to the icy gusts, Derek wondered if there was a city in the world more depressing than London at this wretched moment in its history. The war may have finally ended, but its long shadow remained. Apart from the thousands of lives lost, meagre food rationing, piles of rubble where buildings once proudly stood and a bitterly cruel winter were just some of the ravages that befell a nation now so wounded that many doubted she would ever fully recover. While Britain bled, her people were on their knees, begging for food and warmth and crying for loved ones who would never return home. Generations of families, once prosperous and hopeful had, in a beat, been rent asunder. In the slow march of history the war might only have been a single stride, but in many ways it was a step off the edge of a cliff, forever maiming many of the world’s great nations.
Derek still found it hard to believe that he had survived the blizzard himself. Of all his many brushes with death, the only permanent wound that remained with him was the injury to his eye which had left him partially blind. Yet, considering the fates suffered by so many of his countrymen, he felt virtually unscathed by comparison. In any event, the affliction hardly hindered him at all in his day-to-day life and, in truth, he was far more plagued by the darkness that crept over him at night; by the things that he wished he could not see.
Despite being skewered by a German bayonet and losing what appeared to be an almost impossible amount of blood, Edward had also survived the war and now bore only a pair of scars on his back and chest – a permanent keepsake from the nightmare of Delville Wood. Miraculously, doctors estimated the bayonet had missed his heart by less than an inch, but had clipped his spine and, as a consequence, he suffered considerable nerve damage to the right side of his body. It left him with impaired movement and almost no feeling in his right arm. It was severe enough for him to be declared medically unfit for combat. Despite his protestations, and after months of exhausting every possible avenue to be reunited with Derek on the frontlines, he was finally forced to accept his fate. First refusing and then ultimately absconding from a meaningless desk job, he spent three months moping around their one-bedroom hole in the wall on the outskirts of London, dreading the knock on the door that would bring news of his brother’s death. Eventually, when he could no longer bear it, he decided to honour the arrangement he had made with Derek before entering the war. They had agreed that either together – or alone, if it came down to it – they would travel to southern Africa and spend the next part of their life in the land of which their father had written so fondly. They had planned to spend time with the elephants, the Great Greys, that for so many years had filled their dreams. And so, after weeks of painful deliberation and wracked with guilt, Edward finally set off for Southampton and managed to board a ship to Cape Town.
Derek stepped off the cemetery’s main cobbled path and headed for the back gate. Passing through it, he stopped for a moment and stared down the street. On the right was the overgrown and unkempt remains of a park in which he had spent so many afternoons as a boy, a place where he had once insulted a girl named Elizabeth and got into more than a few fights. On the left were the buildings of his childhood, half of which were now just relics, brick skeletons of the past. He slipped his hands into his pockets and headed for the only home he had ever truly known. Without having to read the sign, he pulled up in its shadow, its words forever etched into his mind. They stood unmarked and unmoved, untainted by the years, above a timeless steel and wood-panelled door.
King’s Cross Reformatory
‘Submit yourselves to your masters’
1 Peter 2:18
He knocked, felt his heart quicken, and took a step back. After a few moments a lock slid away and the door opened a crack. An old man whose face appeared trapped in a grimace stared back at him. Long wisps of silver hair hung over his eyes. ‘Yes?’ he asked curtly.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,’ Derek offered. ‘I’m here to see Father Gabriel.’
The man, hunched over by a sour blend of age and bitterness, deepened his frown and ran his eyes down Derek’s body. ‘He expecting you?’
‘I believe so.’
‘Name?’
‘Derek Hughes. My brother and I used to, well … live here. Many years ago.’
The man shrugged, as if it made no difference to him either way, and then swung open the door. ‘Follow me.’
As Derek stepped forward, he could feel his pulse rise into his throat. The courtyard was another photograph from his childhood, almost precisely as he remembered it. Despite ho
w the war had reshaped large portions of London, very little change appeared to have swept through King’s Cross. The ivy-covered walls still framed a cobbled and grass-sloped yard which loomed over the same home-made boxing ring where he had once fought Edward. Only the mattresses covering the posts had been replaced.
‘Father Gabriel still lets the boys fight?’ Derek asked, finding his voice.
The man grunted. ‘Rather them than us. Young bastards.’
They walked through the back entrance of the dormitory and turned into a dank corridor that led to Father Gabriel’s office – a passage that Edward had once been carried down unconscious. The man knocked on the door and then immediately pushed it open. ‘Father, you have a visitor. Says he used to live here.’
Father Gabriel was sitting behind his large wooden desk, another relic unaffected by the years. He put down his papers, removed his spectacles, and looked up.
‘Hello, Father,’ Derek said warmly.
‘Derek,’ he beamed, a smile spreading as he spoke. ‘I would know your voice in my dreams.’ He immediately rose from his chair and rushed around the table. Despite his age, he moved like a man not far from the prime of his life. He opened his arms and embraced Derek. ‘It is so good to see you! I can’t tell you.’
‘And you, Father.’
‘My God, you still look just like your brother. The same curly hair. It’s remarkable. You’re just taller. More solidly built. But, then again, you always were made from heavier cloth than Edward.’
Father Gabriel could still clearly see the shadow of the boy he had known, still sense the daring and bravado behind his features – the impulsiveness – but the innocence that once filled his eyes was no longer there. The smooth skin from his boyhood now carried the telltale lines of a man who had travelled through the darkness of the frontlines.
‘I prayed for you. For both of you.’
‘Thank you, Father. It may well have spared us.’
Journey from Darkness Page 3
