by Adam Thorpe
This is how it has gone, in those few seconds: the plane converged on itself, like a lung contracting, attempting to pop its bolts. Then it ejaculated with a shudder and a screech. Then ivy shot up from the ground, wrapped itself around the fuselage, and tugged. We are now fighting this for a moment, my hands gripping the surface of the tanks so hard on either side of my ribs that the palms will still have a chessboard of holes when we land at Waddington. Then the ivy snaps and we roar free, straight into what looks like an ogre’s face constructed from fire. The fire streams over us, and is gone. I am blinded, I have to blink. Our bombs are dropped. Quite quickly, just like that, without the usual ostentatious feel. Steenie’s voice crackling in my ears. Still will we be the children of the heather and the wind . . .
We rise, a few tons lighter. I’m seeing the ghost of the face in my eye, now blue, now purple, now a black hole cut out with scissors. I should be observing. How do I observe my own death? The picture of a tiger jumping through a hoop of flame slides into my mind, an old picture from a child’s encyclopaedia belonging to you, Mother. The thought of you fills my head and my heart as Pete the captain tells us, in his soft Canadian drawl, that we have been hit. We’ve been hit at the back. I think of Reg the stocking salesman, manning the rear gun. I think of our tail. If the tail’s damaged, it might drop off. Then we will twist and spin like a child’s toy. Where will I have my grave? Down which chimney will I look?
We are banking, not too tight. Now I see Hamburg, very clearly. The harbour burns. Troy is torched. Dolt. This is not Troy. This is like Cologne, Essen, Dortmund. This is like Coventry, Hull, London. I have done this before. I have even been in a plane that has been hit before – perforated by splinters where it didn’t matter. Tonight I feel doomed. The rule is: if you feel doomed, you are inviting doom.
Now I cross-examine the new sounds in the beast, peering at them, gnawing my lip under the mask, as if I am in a classroom, as if I am trying to hear what it has to explain, what calculation it is summing up. A knocking. There is a distant knocking on the hull, beyond the usual throb, as if a stowaway wishes to climb out. There is also someone playing a flute, winsomely, rising and falling, as they’d play flutes in the afterlife, lacking body. We stagger a little, then right ourselves. The intercom is silent. There are no crackles, even. It is dead. No drawl from Pete, no jokes from Dom. They’ve lost their helmets. I visualise cables dangling, electric wires frayed to a dandelion head. Yet my own lights still wink. I smell, very faintly, something bitter, like the burnt bottom of a fried egg, a witch torched at the stake – what? Why that? Some of you are concerned, intoned the chaplain last week, at the thought of going down while you are killing. In for the kill. Wounded mice and birds attract the hawk. At that very moment they come. Did I bring them? I take my motorcycle handles and fire round after round at teases of wings and tails, at sheer shrieks and wails. Nothing happens either to them or to me. They pass close enough to touch, able to burst my blister with a single round. And then they are gone.
I think of them as a band of harpies in a vision. Perhaps I fell asleep. But I saw, through the little holes in the tanks, the ammunition juddering into my guns, and the guns are hot. My hands are black from the grips. There is something wet on my face. It is blood, on my forehead. A nick on my forehead is bleeding profusely, considering the size. I start to laugh. How did anything cut me inside this glass dome? How did anything reach me in this nutshell, where I alone am king?
My hand reaches for a handkerchief and instead finds the letter. We are over the sea, now, flying low, low enough for me to unbutton my mask. Are we losing height? The dark, glandular sea is invisible on this moonless night, apart from the odd wink of a boat, a necklace on the coast. Beaches, children in the sand. Will they be out tomorrow morning? I doubt it. Barbed-wire and guns, a proper sandcastle stiffened to concrete.
I open the letter. I am afraid that if I don’t, we will lose height so rapidly we will crash. I have considered clambering out of the turret and up to the pilot’s cabin, but have dismissed it as somehow treacherous and meddling. Pete will see day, Dom will guide us. I know them well, they’re good at their job: when these beasts were new and still being put through their paces over England, I accompanied Pete in the cockpit – we went very low, some telephone wires loomed up, should we go under or over them, Hawkeye? (Hawkeye was my other nickname, I liked it.) Pete has a sense of humour which will see us on to the smooth concrete of Lincolnshire.
I take off my gloves and read the letter through spots and thumbprints of blood. The blood is red in the orange glow, but the blue-violet ink has turned black. A trick of colour complementaries. I read it again, swearing in a whisper. Then I laugh, a manic howl of a laugh, like a wolf. My lamp is, hit by my outflung hand and I have to right it. It still burns – the bulb has burnt my palm.
She doesn’t know why it is happening. She is bound on a river. It is her fate. And other such rot.
I look out of the window as one looks out of a window in a train, cupping my chin in my good hand. I now know, for certain, as if Herbert E. Standing himself has squeezed my shoulder to assure me, that we will make it back. Because, for the first time, I do not care if we don’t – at least, not for my sake.
Of course we got back. Chaps cheered. The rear gunner’s turret was missing, apart from a dangling ammunition tank. That had been the knocking sound. Scythed clean away, it had taken Reg with it. ‘Life ends at forty,’ someone remarked dolefully, walking away towards the mess hut.
Nobody knew what to do with the cake, of course. The cook brought it out, embarrassed, with a knife: he’d taken a lot of trouble. I couldn’t cut it, anyway – I’d blistered my palm on the bulb. The mid-turret gunner was too busy swearing to himself to help, and the others were walking away. As for me, I didn’t know what to do with the letter. That night they showed some silent comedy shorts; a dollar bill sticks to a robber’s hand and he can’t release it. Whatever he does, however hard he flaps it, the paper bill sticks. But whenever anybody passes, he hides it in his pocket. I’d torn up the letter into confetti, appropriately, but it stuck on my hand all the same. It would always be there, I thought, however hard I try to flap it off, or hide it inside my heart.
They thought my tears in that dark flickering hut were for Reg. Well, perhaps they were, perhaps they were.
The marriage was some sort of nature ceremony in the wildwood, Mother. Trampling the wild garlic to pulp. I didn’t go. I was too busy saving the world (as I wrote to Nuncle) from the likes of him.
Your affectionate son,
Hugh
Very hot. Sultry, even. Window only opens at the top, of course.
Dear Mother,
A hag’s face, horrible, in the hedge.
It’s not you, don’t worry. It pops up.
War experience passed, well done, ten out of ten. But tell your mum the rest, they say. Right up to the very bad thing? Yes. You’re on course. Don’t wander.
Where was I? In the stubble. Rather older. Ankles pricked.
Still hunting for Ray, remember? So I start shouting his name. Now I’m off the stubble and in a bare field, huge, newly sown from the look of it. Deserted but for a scatter of birds on its drills, further up.
Ra-ay!
Ra-ay!
Bloody man. Wild goose chase. He’ll be up there, on that hill, Effley Long Barrow, wherever there’s long grass. There are still a few tufts left on the torn-up downs, here and there. I’m striding beside a high beech hedge kept back by chicken wire. One, two, one two. Swinging the arms helps.
Ra-ay!
Ray-chul!
That certainly wasn’t me! So shocked, I’ve stopped. The only movement is from a sabre-toothed machine on a track way off, heading for a metal barn. I lean against the hedge and its chicken wire. Who’s teasing me? The pot-potting of guns, hoarse crows, chugging magpies. Could have been a magpie. Rae short for Rachael, anyway. I could have been shouting for her.
So that’s why I end up saying her name
to myself. Why not? It’s totally normal. I’ve read something unpleasant, in Ray’s hand, last night. You can’t blame me for trying to recover her, get back our secret little joy from the poachers and slanderers.
The flock of feeding birds doesn’t rise, not even when I project the name straight at them. RACHAEL! Maybe I’m only mouthing it. Awful thought. They’re annoying me, now. I’m practically shouting it but they’re still not budging and the field and sky swallow up my shout. Nothing afterwards, no echo, not even a sigh. There’s this far-off blast furnace working without cease – but that’s traffic, that’s not her breath in my ear.
Hoarsely whispering her name again, over and over as I walk, one for each step, a stage hiss – though there’s nothing to fear, no one in sight, no living thing but the birds on the drills, the open downs going on and on. Pigeons, they look like. One of them alights. No, is alighting, wings spread wide, not more than a foot from the soil. I never knew pigeons could hover, like hummingbirds. The others contemplating the seed, it seems, before stabbing. Only my shoes are moving, appearing one after the other beyond my stomach. Maybe everything else has stopped, too. I look up at the clouds but there’s not enough wind to move them, not visibly. Even the machine’s seized, in front of the metal barn. There are sounds, but they don’t count. When time stops, spirits can be summoned. They slip in and out between one moment and the next, I suppose.
You never know.
I stay very still and look at the ground, saying her name quite loud, my body bent over, hands on thighs. I probably look as if I’m about to be sick. Picture her face, as it was. Her loveliness. Say her name, again. Picture her face. Summon her, summon her, summon her up, cancel the slander, get her back as she was. Pigeons still frozen. But something catches my eye, something in the hedge.
A face.
The face of a hag. Utterly hideous. Green and mouldering. She’s come straight from it, I’ve pulled her straight from it, the earth still on her.
Oh. Oh no.
‘Mornin’, Mr Arkwright.’
The face melts into a leer I recognise. The man, the coalman, Muck. He’s leering – no, grinning – behind tatters of green plastic hung on the chicken wire. A steaming thermos-cap in a gloved hand. Perhaps he didn’t mean me to see him. Perhaps it was all my fault.
‘You were miles away there, Mr Arkwright. I could see that.’
My face hot.
‘Looking for Ray Duckett,’ I reply. Hoping my heart, flailing around in my throat, will be thrown back into the deeps of my chest. He must have heard. Thank God the names are homophonic.
‘He’s not been along here, Mr Arkwright, and that’s a fact.’
Still grinning. Front teeth worn away almost to the roots, nutty and purple-veined skin, a great disc of a face, tinted glasses. Belgian Army camouflage jacket, hood over his ears. A canvas stool next to his boots, with a packet of Jaffa cakes and the thermos. A gun on its canvas casing in the leaf-mould between us: F.A.P. painted on in white, not Muck. No dribbles on the letters.
‘Shooting?’
‘That’s right, Mr Arkwright. Pigeons.’
My fists clench. Thank God the chicken wire with its fake plastic bindweed stands between us. Turn to the field. Still alighting, the pigeon, wings spread wide. Bobbing slightly in the breeze.
‘And those?’
‘They’re dead, Mr Arkwright.’
Ah. Dead.
Impaled on a wire, like an office toy. Mouldering invisibly with the others, about thirty of them. Not feeding, not alert for danger, not ready to scare and wheel, even at a gunshot. Crude and obvious, now, in awkward positions, like a child’s lead miniatures spread on a thick carpet.
‘Decoys,’ I say.
‘That’s right, Mr Arkwright. Decoys.’
I turn with a glare but he’s dropped the grin; he’s seadog serious, knows the ropes, wants to show it.
‘Thousands of ’em, yesterday. Very few today. Bin ’ere twenty minutes, bagged a couple. I’d have had three, but one got up an flew away when I come over.’
‘He fell from the sky?’
‘Dropped like a stone. Creased the skull, I reckon.’
Duckett must have passed more than twenty minutes ago. Hours ago, maybe.
‘What’s the gun?’
‘Twelve-bore. Bagged hundreds yesterday. Strange, that. The field was crawling with them. A carpet. Very few today.’
Divert him. Put on a mask. Play the boss.
‘They learn from bitter experience, Muck. Or maybe they smell death when it’s near. Do you eat them?’
‘I do it for the sport, Mr Arkwright. My bit of indulgence. Sell ’em for the cost of the cartridges. Mainly to Belgium, Holland. They like our pigeon over there. Keep one or two for the pot, as it were. For the oven, Mr Arkwright.’
His face beams through the steam of his tea as he sips it. A little king in his den, plumed by the green and yellow beech leaves, veiled by the green tatters of plastic. The fanged machine’s trundling back along the track, away from the metal barn. Point it out, ask him what it is, keep him chatting, mollify him, because I somehow have to persuade him that what I was saying was something else.
‘That there tackle’s for handling the hay rolls, Mr Arkwright.’
Ah, I see, not a digger, not as savage as it looks. Men and women with pitchforks in my day, helping them up at the Jennets’. So did he, mind, but a little younger than me. One of the brattish boys who threw the hay about, squealing.
‘Sorry if I was miles away, Muck. I was rehearsing a play.’
‘A play, Mr Arkwright?’
‘Yes. I have written a play about – my uncle. His early years, and so on. I was rehearsing the lines.’
‘A lot of words in your play, are there?’
Don’t rise.
‘As many as there are living birds in the sky.’
He chuckles softly.
‘And what’s up with Duckett, then? In your play, is he?’
Look at him straight.
‘He’s gone missing. We’re all very worried about him. If you spot him –’
‘I won’t take a pot-shot, Mr Arkwright. Don’t you fret. I’ll tell the others, too.’
‘The others?’
He waves a hand towards the field, bounded on three sides by a raggeder version of his covert. Either he smells, or there’s a fox nearby.
‘There’s a couple of others over there. Dougie Barret and John – John Wall.’
The field as still as its hedges, pure regulated tilth. Three guns trained on it, three pairs of eyes behind the sights. Me the fool gesticulating and shouting far away on a vast stage. And my cries? Wasn’t I just shouting for Ray? But John Wall and Muck will compare notes. The bursting servant of Midas, whispering the truth to the reeds on the river’s shore and with every gust of wind the reeds whisper of his ass’s ears. You used to tell me that story, Mother. It was your favourite story, wasn’t it?
John Wall is no doubt keeping his telescopic sights on us, or I’d pay Muck off. Wall knows already, of course. It was his father, after all! Young Jack the peeping poacher. Sniffing the crushed ramsons, afterwards, like his dog. Poaching my warm and trembling treasure – stuffing its skin, nursing it, bobbing it up and down in the pub like a glass-eyed puppet, raising cackles. I turn to Muck. He’s happily munching a Jaffa cake.
‘Can’t offer you one, Mr Arkwright. Holes ent big enough, see.’
He gestures at the chicken wire, but something lewd beats in the air. Maybe a wink behind the tinted glasses.
‘I’d better be off. Ray Duckett is in extremely poor health. Might have made his way right up there this morning. On crutches.’
I point to the hill and its copse, the flock of lifeless birds scattered between, like grit in the eye. The one hovering is still hovering, its stretched wings streaked with white, white marks on all the throats. Ring dove, of course. Father reciting the lines at dusk on the veranda, the bush a crescendo, his regular joke: ‘The moan of doves in immemorial elm
s of And murmuring of innumerable bees!’ I hear the click of a gun. Muck is checking his cartridges, snug inside the breech. He lifts his face, grinning again.
‘Hopes as you bags yours, Mr Arkwright. We’ll keep our eyes peeled. I’ve helped Mr Duckett quite a bit in my time.’
A far white figure, like an angel, is coming towards us across the stubbled field. Herbert E. Standing never stumbled like that, flapping his hands about. I nod briskly and leave. The path goes straight on through a gate, which means I can avoid John Wall.
Into the next field, I stop to wipe my face. Something has spattered me with glycol again. The angel’s now out of my sight line, flitting behind the hedge.
I climb up the slope. There’s a stretch of long grass and I plunge in, up to my chest. A gun-shot from the field below. You could hide a massacre in here. I shout Ray’s name and push on through, the dry grasses sounding like the sea and then even more like supermarket trolleys being stashed in the car park – of all things! Not very Jefferies, I suppose. No. Rather as a woodpecker sounds like snoring, your light snoring in the hot afternoons, Mother, mouth open, on the bed, me at the door, gazing on you.
Breaking out sweatily to where the hill rises clean between the odd nest of hawthorn, I see a white blur down there around where Muck surprised me. Brut. Or Ginger. Not Herbert E. Standing.
Oh, the fun of the chase! The Black Spot, the Black Stone! I reach the top of the hill and am utterly spent. Jelly legs, throat sore, face a mask of heat now chilling, like the old fevers. I feel a bit sick, too. The angel at the fork stands like the stubborn type of white hunter in Africa, refusing khaki – and I’m in the shadows of the beech trees, camouflaged. Now he’s climbing towards me. I lope quickly and quietly to the stones of the long barrow, adjust my eye to the black, crawling into the chilly cave with care in case Ray’s face lies under me.
Empty.
There’s a gnawed bone on the damp floor, a bit of cellophane, sweetpapers, the wriggle of a condom. A withered mistletoe entwined around an oak branch, laid like a wreath. The grass-cutting rota for Effley parish church, Ratsbane written across its crooked type, its innocent names.
