Mercury Falling

by Robert Edric

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  ‘Tell him to spend some of it on that aerial.’ What did an aerial cost? A bit of wire, a few brackets.

  Back outside, fastening Skelton’s scarf over his mouth, he began to wonder why he’d gone, what he’d achieved, what purpose the visit had served. Keeping his options open? Prolonging the agony, more like.

  He turned his back on the house and followed the road away from the sea. A line of recently pollarded willows stretched ahead of him like raised fists, the rounded tops already lost to sight in the falling cloud.

  36

  THE INSTANT SULLIVAN unlocked the door, Devlin pushed it hard into the man’s chest, causing him to fall backwards and to shout out in surprise and pain. Devlin went into the house and pulled the door shut behind him. In the narrow hallway, Sullivan made no attempt to get up. He wore a stained white vest and his braces hung at his thighs. He was unshaven and there were dark rings of sleeplessness around his eyes. The house smelled worse than Devlin’s abandoned prefab.

  ‘It’s just that I’m getting a bit sick and tired of people peering through doors at me,’ Devlin said, ‘like they’d rather I just went away.’

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ Sullivan said from where he lay propped on his elbow.

  ‘None other. Who were you expecting, Lord Mountbatten? I take it you do remember me?’

  ‘’Course I remember you. What’s all this in aid of?’ He held out his hand for Devlin to help him up, but Devlin ignored this and stepped over him, going into the small front room to sit by the fire.

  Sullivan rose, pulled his braces over his shoulders and followed Devlin into the room, where he sat on the cluttered settee opposite him. Newspapers were strewn on the floor at Devlin’s feet. Three ashtrays sat on a low table, all of them overflowing.

  ‘You’ve let the place go a bit,’ Devlin said, already starting to guess what had happened to him since their last encounter.

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘You’ve got me there,’ Devlin said.

  Sullivan coughed and then struggled to regain his breath. ‘As it happens, I’ve not been having too good a time of things lately.’ He scratched both his armpits and then sniffed at his fingers.

  ‘You and me both,’ Devlin said.

  ‘I’ve been laid off.’

  ‘Sacked?’

  ‘Laid off pending the outcome of a so-called inquiry.’

  ‘Finally got caught doing something you shouldn’t have been doing?’

  ‘Nothing like that. We had a runner. The kid I pointed out to you at the drainage. Nasty little piece of work.’ He rubbed his elbow where the door had caught him. ‘I’m going to have a bruise there,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll survive,’ Devlin said. ‘I read about it. They caught him.’ He waited to see what more the man might reveal.

  ‘They did indeed. And now the evil little runt’s telling anybody who’ll listen to him all sorts of tales about the place and about his time on the run. “On the run”? Don’t make me laugh.’

  ‘“Anybody” meaning …?’

  Sullivan searched through several empty cigarette packets before finding one half full.

  ‘That’s just it – they’ve shipped him off to Lincoln. Who knows what he is and isn’t saying? But whatever it is, according to the Ministry, we’re too slack. Too many backs being covered when we hold our own inquiries.’

  ‘Stands to reason,’ Devlin said.

  ‘It might do, but it’s still how things work best. Nearly thirty years I worked at that place. Ask me, the Ministry were just looking for an excuse to make the changes they want.’

  ‘And all the new guards they were looking for – the job you told me I’d get just by turning up at the place?’

  ‘Gone with the wind. Out of the Governor’s hands. He’s been given his own marching orders. End of the month.’

  ‘So you’re saying my interview counted for nothing?’ Devlin said, feigning disbelief.

  Sullivan sat staring into the low fire for a moment. ‘Is that why you’re here? To tell me what you think of me?’

  ‘You said you’d let me know. Everything’s been a bit up in the air of late. You’re not the only one with problems.’

  ‘I honestly didn’t think you’d be that bothered,’ Sullivan said. ‘You never seemed particularly keen in the first place. I was doing you a favour, that’s all.’

  ‘Some favour,’ Devlin said.

  ‘And now they’re talking about pressing charges,’ Sullivan went on. ‘Against me and some of the others. Apparently, all the things that were being done wrong were our fault, done at our “contrivance”, whatever that means. The little bastard who ran off is staying in what amounts to a three-star hotel up in Lincoln. Got all sorts of bigwigs coming to talk to him. I can’t even begin to imagine some of the tales he’ll be telling them to save his own neck.’

  ‘Yes you can,’ Devlin said. ‘How many have they laid off?’

  ‘Twenty of us. The place won’t even function. Twenty, and all of them good blokes, blokes who were good at what they did.’

  ‘Blokes like you,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘When will you know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  Devlin shrugged. ‘The outcome of the inquiry, whatever the boy’s telling them.’ He almost said ‘Egan’.

  ‘Who knows? No one’s said. Whatever the result, it won’t be a good one. At least not for the likes of me and the others.’

  ‘I read they caught him on a train somewhere,’ Devlin said.

  ‘On his way to start scraping up all that gold off the streets of London, by all accounts. Stupid little bugger. He should have stayed put, wherever he was.’

  ‘Does nobody know where he went beforehand?’

  ‘Not yet. I daresay he’ll get round to telling them when it suits.’

  ‘And then what?’

  Sullivan considered the question for a moment. ‘You seem very interested all of a sudden,’ he said.

  ‘Not particularly. He might have lost both of us a job, that’s all.’

  Sullivan rubbed his face. ‘You might be right.’

  Devlin looked again around the untidy room. A bottle lay on its side beside the settee.

  ‘Go on,’ Sullivan said. ‘Have a good look.’

  ‘I’ve seen worse,’ Devlin said.

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’ Sullivan stopped rubbing. ‘Thing is, my wife’s gone. A week ago, when all this blew up. It’s been on the cards for some time – me and her – and everything got a bit much for her.’

  ‘Where’s she gone?’

  ‘Doncaster. Her mother’s. Woman’s in her seventies. She never liked me. Lives by herself. Council. The pair of them will be loving it.’

  ‘And meanwhile …’

  ‘And meanwhile I’m left to fend for myself, waiting for the axe to fall. We’ve been hung out to dry, the lot of us, that’s the truth of it. Best I can hope for now is to cash in whatever pension I’ve still got coming to me. One of the lads said there was even talk of that being put on hold until everything’s sorted. What am I supposed to live on until then?’

  ‘You should have known something like this would happen one day,’ Devlin said. ‘You got away with things, that’s all.’

  ‘Thanks for your concern. I know we got away with things, bent a few rules here and there, but that’s how places like that work. Nobody plays by the rules – not us, not them – because if you did, nothing would ever get done and the place would be even more like a holiday camp than the prison it’s supposed to be. Rehabilitation – don’t make me laugh.’ Sullivan rolled the empty bottle across the floor with his foot. ‘I’d offer you a drink, but as you can see … I fell asleep. You woke me up with your knocking. It’s all a fucking mess. I don’t know where to start.’

  Devlin wondered whether to tell him all he knew about Egan, but quickly decided against this. There was little left for Sullivan to salvage, so why should he get involved? W
hy point the finger at himself and the McGuires when all those other pointing fingers already had a target?

  ‘They probably won’t believe even half of what he’s telling them up in Lincoln,’ he said.

  Sullivan shook his head. ‘Truth is, it hardly matters what he’s telling them, because it will be enough. They’ve already decided who’s to blame’ – he jabbed a finger in his own chest – ‘yours truly, that’s who. That woman who showed up from the Department for Prisons, she knew exactly what she was doing from the second she set foot in the place. Ask me, everything was a big sham.’

  ‘Even my interview?’

  ‘Especially your interview. Believe me, you can count yourself lucky on that score.’ Sullivan paused and half smiled. ‘I was thinking of applying at the nuclear plant down the coast. One of the blokes said there was a lot of building work about to start. Nuclear. It’s the future. Electricity and all that.’

  ‘First I’ve heard of it,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Same stuff as was in the bombs,’ Sullivan said, his voice low now. ‘We could go down there together, you and me, have a look-see. Unless you’ve got something better lined up, that is.’

  ‘I’m not doing too badly,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Thirty years, me and her were married, solid as a rock.’

  ‘You got kids?’ Devlin said. He tried to remember what Sullivan might already have told him, but nothing came.

  Sullivan glanced at the mantel as he considered his answer. A framed photograph of a boy in uniform.

  Devlin stood up and went to look more closely. He brushed the dust from the glass with his sleeve.

  ‘That was taken on his eighteenth,’ Sullivan said.

  ‘Did he see Active Service?’ Devlin wiped his thumb across the boy’s face. Smiling, trying not to.

  ‘Put it down,’ Sullivan said. ‘Please. It’s all we’ve got left. His name was Stuart – her choice, after her father.’

  Devlin put the picture back in its pride of place amid the clutter.

  ‘Was he killed, then?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘What does that mean? Either he was or he wasn’t.’

  Like the trip to his sister’s a week earlier, Devlin wondered what he’d expected to achieve from this visit. Loose ends, that’s all. Letting all these others know where they stood, where he stood.

  ‘What that means,’ Sullivan said, ‘is that the fucking Army, in all its fucking wisdom, put him on a troop carrier two days after that photo was taken and then sailed him straight to Singapore, down the gangplank and into a Jap prison camp. Seven weeks it took them to get there. Seven weeks, they had, to work out what was happening in the place and turn the boat back. Seven weeks and nobody lifted a fucking finger to do anything about it. Four years, he was held, best part of, camp after camp. Ended up in Japan itself. Ask me, only the Yanks ever had the first idea what that little lot were up to.’

  After a long silence, Devlin said, ‘Did he come home?’

  ‘He did, as a matter of fact. One of the few. They sent us word of him. November time. Apparently, he went from Japan to Australia and then to India. Came through the Suez to Cairo and then on past Gibraltar to Southampton. Hospitals all the way. After Southampton they took him to a place down in Hertfordshire. He wrote to us, told us not to visit him, to wait until he was fully recovered and able to come back home under his own steam. Told us he needed to build his strength up, that sort of thing. I saw things in that letter she couldn’t even begin to imagine. She cried solid for two days after.’

  Devlin already heard the story’s bad ending, like a gathering storm ready to break in the small room.

  ‘What happened?’ he said. It was probably what had scuppered Sullivan and his wife in the first place. He avoided looking back at the mantel.

  ‘When he was finally ready to come home, I went to Peterborough to meet him off the train. He called from London to say he would definitely be on it, but when it came in I couldn’t see him. I waited an hour and then went back out to the car. I was crossing the road to where I’d left it and this bloke came up to me. It was him, Stuart. Apparently he’d walked straight towards me and I hadn’t recognized him. He said he’d seen me waiting, but that he saw by my face that I hadn’t spotted him and so he’d walked straight past me. Didn’t want to cause a scene, not in the station. You know how it is with some people. Said he’d come out of the station and then waited for me to follow him. March time, that was, spring, seven months after the end of hostilities. His face was all altered. He hardly had any hair left on his head – some kind of skin disease he’d picked up, a lot of them had the same. Joked about it, said he was having trouble growing it back. Seven months and he was still all skin and bone. God only knows what he must have looked like to begin with.’ Sullivan rubbed his eyes again. ‘When we’d last seen him, me and her, he was just a kid. A kid in a uniform. By the time he got back to us … well, you can imagine the rest.’

  It was why he hated the boys in the borstal so much. Hated them or felt something for them: it was all the same thing and it hardly mattered.

  Tears ran over Sullivan’s cheeks and gathered at his chin. ‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘Eight years ago that was, nearer nine.’

  ‘What happened?’ Devlin said, guessing the tale had perhaps already ended.

  ‘He killed himself. The following September. We found him hanging from one of those trees over there.’ He gestured towards the window. ‘I honestly didn’t think we’d be able to go on living here after that, but it seemed to give his mother a bit of comfort, being so close to him. To be honest, it’s probably the only thing that’s kept us together these past few years. And now she’s gone. Perhaps enough was enough. Perhaps it all just stopped mattering to her. She cried for a week when they found him. On her knees, she was; she could hardly stand. Everything that had happened to him, and then this. She spent half the time he was back home fighting with the Authorities to get him his back pay and whatever else he was owed.’ He paused and wiped his eyes. ‘I tell you, if anyone ever tells you that these bigwigs in Government and whatever are on your side, doing things for your good, then you can take it from me, they’re lying to you. Every time he went out, she wanted to follow him. Not that he went out too often. The doctor said we should try to get him to talk about things – encourage him to “open up” – whatever that’s supposed to mean when it’s at home – but he wouldn’t say a word. And especially not to me and her. He had a girlfriend before he went off, but she made herself scarce fast enough when he got back and she saw the state of him. Mind you, I can’t say I blame her. If I’d had the choice, I’d have done the same. If only he could open up, they said, then he might be able to share things and lessen his load. That, and that we’d understand things better. All I ever needed to understand, I understood perfectly well the instant I saw him walking towards me outside Peterborough station.’ He stopped talking and let out a long sigh.

  Devlin felt uncomfortable sitting so close to the man. All the air had gone from the room. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said eventually.

  ‘You? What you got to be sorry about?’ Sullivan sounded suddenly hostile. ‘You – you’re nothing, nobody. You, me, her and him alike – all of us – we’re all nobodies who count for nothing in the eyes of our so-called lords and masters. And once you’ve learned that particular lesson in this life, then there’s nothing else left to learn.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Devlin said.

  Sullivan shook his head. ‘You suppose so. You suppose so. You’re as lost and clueless as the rest of us.’ He waved at the door. ‘Go on, get out. Get out, and do yourself a favour and stay out. You suppose so? You suppose so? Dear God.’

  37

  ‘I’M BETTING YOU’VE not got a licence for that thing.’

  The voice surprised Devlin and he turned to see Samuel, the old shepherd, standing behind him. He wondered how the man had come so close to him in the vast, empty space. It was not yet mid morning. He’d come there to
fire the stolen shotgun, to get the feel of it.

  ‘You’ve finally managed to get yourself a real gun, then,’ Samuel said. He raised the barrels in his palm and stroked a thumb along the maker’s name. ‘This yours?’

  ‘It is now,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Like that, is it? I had one similar when I was younger. Fired shot like sand. “Lark shot” we called it.’

  ‘Besides, since when did I need a licence for a shotgun?’ Devlin said.

  ‘Since they changed the law. It’s why I haven’t got one any longer. I went to register my last one like they said, and they told me I was too old. Infirm.’ He held out his arm and rolled back his sleeve, his hand close to Devlin’s face. ‘You see any tremor in that?’

  ‘Tremor?’

  ‘Tremble, then.’

  Devlin watched the thin brown fingers. ‘A bit,’ he said.

  ‘Enough to stop me firing at a duck fifty feet up?’

  Devlin shrugged.

  The old man lowered his arm and shook his sleeve down. ‘Said if they caught me with a gun I’d get a fine and prison. Where’s the sense in that? I’m nearly seventy.’

  ‘You could have a shot or two with this if you like,’ Devlin said. He handed the shotgun to Samuel, who took it, caressed its stock, balanced it on his finger and then opened and closed its barrels and looked along each. ‘Somebody kept it nice and clean,’ he said. ‘What you shooting?’

  ‘Not too fussy,’ Devlin said.

  Samuel raised the gun to his eye and turned in a half circle. He cocked the hammers and then pulled each trigger, the loud clicks echoing in the cold, still air.

  ‘I thought I might get a few ducks,’ Devlin said. He’d seen some birds earlier, out over the receding water, but too far away to shoot at. After that he’d aimed and fired at fence posts. He should have brought some bottles or cans with him. He found some fresh pellets in the posts, but not many. It was a disappointing exercise.

  ‘You back at the chapel?’ Samuel said, handing him the gun.

  ‘I got a prefab. Kirton way.’

  ‘The ones they put up and then never really filled? A real waste, that. The story at one time was that families from Coventry were coming out there, but those few that did eventually turn up took one look at the place and decided they’d rather take their chances with Coventry.’ He laughed at the story.