by Ian McDonald
They are crying now: “Bearers! Bearers!” Stretcher parties.
I must sign this letter now, Mamaji, and place it for safekeeping. My love to my dear sisters.
Your devoted son,
Amal
* * *
After the museum, I suggested a drink. Thorn had an app, a beer app, for real beer. It directed us to a tiny drinkery the size of two armchairs pushed together. We fitted into a booth like segments of orange into its skin and she ordered. The app gave her trophies and rewards for new pubs, new beers, local specialities, potable Pokémons.
Thorn was still wide-eyed from Shahrzad’s secrets, served with bad coffee and chocolate Hobnobs. Shahrzad had repeated her promises of dark retribution as she packed away the material and escorted us to the elevators, but I knew as well as she that these were for Thorn’s benefit: one scanty account, from a battalion without survivors, was evidence that only conspiracists would accept. The Sandringham Pals had marched into massacre. The fates of two seeming deserters were irrelevant.
A photographer captured them outside a Norfolk pub. They ran up into the cloud of mystery. Twenty-four years later another photographer captured them in front of the Sphinx.
In the Sandringham photograph, they had been older than their chums. Late twenties, early thirties. In the Giza picture, they must have been at least in their midforties. We put the pictures side by side. There was hardly a day between them.
“There’s something nagging me,” Shahrzad had said as the elevator doors closed, her esprit de l’escalier. “I never forget a face. It’s a professional pride thing.”
“Abductees!” Thorn said with luminous excitement. We were on our second pints by them. “What Amal was describing, that’s a classic abduction scenario.”
“In the middle of the Gallipoli campaign?”
“War is a great time to abduct. People go missing all the time. Do you want to go on somewhere else?”
* * *
“All mystical experiences could be abductions,” Thorn said as her app led us to the next pub, a painstakingly de-decorated arch under Waterloo East where the frowns of the cool staff and drinkers relegated us to the back table in the farthest room. “Angel visitations, fairy hills, Moses on Sinai. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
“Arthur C. Clarke,” I said. “I read him a lot when I was a kid, I read a lot of SF, but I drifted away. I’m sort of a lapsed Catholic. But if you’re talking ancient aliens and all that stuff, you’d be surprised the money you can get for early-edition Erich von Dänikens. The Morning of the Magicians too. Some dealers specialize in esoterica.”
The staff turned the music up to get rid of us.
“Everyone has a camera on their phone and no one sees UFOs anymore,” I said.
“‘But you have to admit, Emmett,” Thorn said, her breath steaming, her beanie hat pulled down over her ears, “it’s a mystery.”
We wandered the South Bank as the sun threw long shadows across the raw concrete of the Queen Elizabeth II Centre. Skateboarders rumbled and clacked in their brutalist undercroft. I admire the resilience of a sport that is 90 percent failure. That evening the sky was vast and the city, awaking in lights, amenable and tender. Even the runners were smiling. We agreed that the app was excellent and true, but its virtue was effort and we settled for the best available in each of the riverfront cafes and bars. By the time we reached Doggett’s Coat and Badge we were six pints gone and the starlings were swirling out from under Blackfriars Bridge into the indigo sky and watching their ever-changing swirling and flocking—a meta-living thing—I thought that all the mystery we need surrounds us at every moment in a cloud of wonders, small and great and only manifest when we look at them.
But I was quite drunk then, and 70 percent in love, I reckon.
I walked Thorn back to her hotel—she didn’t invite me in, though she hesitated—and then back, electrically connected to everything in the universe, to Clapham.
* * *
Shahrzad woke me.
I get so few calls I’d forgotten my ring tone. I surfaced noisily, groggily, through my piles of duvets and quilts and slapped around until my hand hit glass.
“What the hell time is it?”
“Two o’clock, sweetie. Some of us do our best work in the morning.” Shahrzad time, of course. But only two days since I had seen Thorn off on her train to the Fens. “Sent you a something. I knew it, I knew I knew it.”
“Couldn’t you just have . . . ,” I began but Shahrzad had already rung off. Texted. No sweetie, no texts: itty-bitty fiddly stuff. For kids to pass notes in school. She couldn’t just send something. She had to ring to tell me she’d sent something.
I opened the attachment.
I studied the image until my eyes itched.
Then I called Thorn.
* * *
I met Thorn at King’s Cross and whisked her to the nearest decent pub her app could identify. It did not have snugs, but I insisted Thorn find the quietest, most remote table and waited for the small talk to subside before laying out my print of what Shahrzad had found between the pints of double-hopped IPA.
“That’s a modern-looking tank,” Thorn said. “Blue helmets . . . Where is this?”
“Bosnia. Somewhere outside the village Goritsa.”
“Goritsa? Why do I know that name?”
“There was a massacre. A Bosnian Serb warlord called Vlatko Vicic. He’s doing life in the Hague. This is the UNPROFOR unit after it had been ordered to abandon Goritsa.”
“Some heroes,” Thorn said.
“The picture is a screen grab from an old Channel Four documentary called Ten Days in the Death of Goritsa.” I rested a finger on the print. “Look.”
It took Thorn a few seconds to see what I had seen. Shahrzad had seen then immediately, remembered then from a fleeting viewing a year before.
“My God,” Thorn breathed.
The image was blurry and low def, snatched from a copy of a copy of a VHS tape. Three Warrior APCs were parked up at an overlook on a winding mountain road. The sky was clear, the sun brilliant, the day glorious and the vista of forested mountains and abrupt, plunging valleys heartbreaking. All the squaddies had their sleeves rolled up and wore shades and shapeless fishing hats to keep the sun from their English skins. Tea break.
Of course.
I couldn’t tell if this photograph was taken before the UNPROFOR force arrived or after it was ordered to abandon the village to the Butcher of Goritsa.
But they weren’t alone. In the background were the documentary crew’s vehicles, a tractor and trailer, a small country bus and a couple of UN ancillary vehicles. People looked out at the view or sat on the parapet. Smiling at the camera, almost recognizable under aviator shades and those same God-ugly hats: Seligman and Chappell.
Not unrecognizable to a talent like Shahrzad.
“When was this taken?” Thorn breathed.
“Nineteen-ninety-five.”
“That would make them . . .”
“At the very youngest, one hundred and five years old.” A shiver ran through me, chilling but delicious at the same time, the frisson of human reason running into the impossible yet undeniable.
“I was wrong,” Thorn whispered and I could hear the same awed tremble in her voice. ‘”Not abductees. Immortals.”
* * *
Ten Days in the Death of Goritsa had gone out late on a minority channel, been well reviewed in the broadsheet press and vanished, as had the production company that made it. I tracked down the director and persuaded her to meet us for lunch at a wine bar in Soho close to the post-production house where she was cutting a new film about child soldiers in Southern Sudan.
I think she was disappointed that we weren’t offering her work.
She frowned at the pictures in the printout, then called up the film on her MacBook. We crowded around the screen, straining to make out the voices from the tinny speakers. Chappell and Seligman were on-screen
for thirty seconds. Seligman smiled. Chappell spoke three lines. The film cut to the armored convoy driving off.
“Do you remember anything about them?” I asked.
She remembered the curiosity of two Englishmen in the middle of the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia, without any obvious connections or affiliations or mission.
“Everyone thought they were spies,” the director said. “Then again, they thought we were spies. Some side’s useful idiots.”
I pressed her for more details, but her head was full of South Sudanese boy soldiers and burning villages.
“They were trying to get to Belgrade and then on to Budapest,” she said. “I hope they made it. It was a hideous time. Anything could get you killed.”
She looked pointedly at the time on her phone. I thanked her and got the lunch bill. She gave me a DVD.
Shingle Street
I know Shingle Street in high summer sun, when sky, sea and stone are metal beneath its hammer; when the stones burn the bare foot, and I now know Shingle Street as the sun leaves and everything hangs, between moments, between worlds. These are the stolen moments.
As a boffin—the Uncertainty Squad, they called themselves, a white-coated coven in their little, separate cottage hung heavy with power cables—Ben has unquestioned access to the key to the Martello tower. He brings the key; I bring the motorbike. Wind in our hair as we ride up the beach.
I’m glad the leave didn’t work out as planned. I would have felt uncomfortable going up to Manchester with Ben, back to his friends and family. London would have been just more people and what we want is unpeople. Time and space for us.
We set up home quickly and lightly, with a thrill of shaping our own unregulated space. I lie naked on the grass before the Martello tower drinking sun while Ben negotiates the Primus stove and Tilley lamp. We eat soft-boiled eggs in the glow of burning paraffin and sunburned skin flakes from my too-Saxon flesh. The evening is immense, endless; the dawns, unfolding imperceptibly from the sea, overpowering. There is no need for words.
Endless summer, for two days.
The unsubstantiated rumors of the east wind in the tough, spiny grass.
The soft lop of the pebbles on a barely perceptible swell, day and night.
The long vapor trails of the high bombers, the curlicues of the Hurricanes sent to intercept. War poems written on the sky.
The low, lean strokes of warships, seeming to hover on the silver lines of heat haze along the horizon.
The stillness, the emptiness of the evacuated hamlet.
Nights in each other’s arms.
* * *
When heaven and earth and stone are in equilibrium, the slightest change will send ripples. I wake. Instantly, I know why. Ben is gone. I roll out of my bivvy bag and pad down the spiral staircase in my skin. The door is open. The night is fast and crystalline, each star a stress point where a new universe might break through. A glow from around the curve of the tower. Ben sits reading in the glow of the Tilley lamp. He moves; the light shifts; I recognize the set of the words, the formalism of the space on the page. He is reading my book.
And I am ablaze with jealousy.
I watch him flip the pages with a finger, a casual whip, no more than a glance at each poem. I can’t bear the thought of him carelessly tearing a page.
“Ben,” I say. I might have shot him, so sudden and extreme is his shock. My jealousy dispels.
Ben sets the book down, puts his hands up.
“Mea culpa.”
“You could have asked.”
“Mea maxima culpa.”
I slide in beside him.
“Are you not a bit cold?” he asks.
I shake my head. “It’s natural.”
“It’s just, well, Cheetham Hill boys don’t run around in the buff.”
“Can I have my book back?” I ask.
He hands it to me, eyes down-turned in guilt.
“I wanted to see what it was about,” Ben says. “I didn’t want you to see how I reacted. In case I didn’t like it.”
“How do you react?”
“I don’t have a poet’s soul.”
High, I hear the throb of bomber engines. It’s the dark of the moon, the sky the bomber pilots hate and hope for, when they can neither see nor be seen. The anti-aircraft batteries at Lowestoft begin, soft cracks building into a symphony. Behind the Martello tower the western sky will be alive with lights.
“Who was he?” Ben asks.
“A traveler. A man on a beach. He’d be here, about where you’re sitting. When I had to get out, just go somewhere, away from school, away from the village and the church and everyone wanting something from me, he’d be here. And we’d talk. Sometimes we’d go up the beach up to Orford Ness; sometimes, if the weather was good, we’d just sit here. You can’t be seen from the houses here. It’s a hidden place. Hours would pass. I’d get back home and my mam would say, ‘Where were you until this hour?’ and I’d say, ‘Just out, walking.’ I didn’t want to tell her about him. I knew what she’d say. It was never like that.”
“What did you talk about?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“I would never laugh at you.”
“Poems. Poetry. Poets. Books. Words, how strong they are, how agile and easy to escape, how they never quite tell the thing as it is. Language and how close it comes to truth, and how far away it is. What it can say and what it can’t say. Feeling: its irreducibility, how it can’t be broken down into any simpler or more explicable. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“I’m trying to.”
“He did. I told him things I couldn’t tell anyone else. Try talking in school about wanting to write poetry. Let alone anything . . . you know.”
“I shouldn’t have read your book.”
“He gave me the book the day before he left. He always said he couldn’t stay for long. I never heard from him again. But the book—this book—every poem, spoke to me. Every poem felt as if it had been written just for me. Everything I thought and felt and doubted but knew deep down, it was there. It’s not great poetry. It’s terrible poetry. But it’s my poetry. There was a thing he always said, after we said good-bye. He would wait here and I would go back down Shingle Street, and he would always look out to sea and say, ‘Storm’s coming.’ Even on the clearest days. I think I know what he meant, now.”
“The war.”
I lean close to Ben, for I’m cold now, and self-conscious.
“War brought you,” I say.
He leans his cheek against my head. A quick peck. The east is lightening, a line of bruise yellow along the horizon.
“Weather’s on the change,” I say.
The anti-aircraft guns have stopped. Bomber engines pulse overhead, beating back to the Low Countries.
* * *
In two hours we return to Bawdsey. I don’t want it to end. It will end. Everything good comes to an end. Pack up the bivvy bags and the camp beds, stow away the stove and the lamp. Load the motorbike and bury the rubbish.
He hops up behind he, locks his arms around my waist. I kick the engine; she starts like she always starts, true and beautiful thing. My weather sense was true: storm’s coming. I gun the bike up Shingle Street towards the radar masts of Bawdsey as the first fat drops burst on the sun-dry stones and the Dutch horizon crawls with lightning.
Fenland
There was no one point at which I could be certain that after this I lived with Thorn Hildreth. Points there were: That first visit. That night she invited me to sleep over on the sofa. You will wake up with a dog, she warned. Not one but three: the German shepherd/collie cross at my feet; the collie/spaniel cross between me and the back of the sofa, threatening to spill me onto the cigarette-burned carpet; and the Jack Russell in my right armpit. That breakfast when I asked, You’ve got plenty of space in the barn; would you mind if I stored a few boxes of books here? The afternoon I graduated from the sofa in the Thunor Study to the Frig bedroom: each room in the long, rambling hous
e—added to longitudinally by each generation of Hildreths so that one end was collapsing even as the other was a barely begun construction site—was named after a member of Leland Hildreth’s Hilderwic pantheon. The January morning when I looked out across the frost-sharp fields to the line of misted poplars and found the prospect not familiar but heart tugging. When I stopped smelling her patchouli from every furnishing and surface, realizing when I smelled it again that it was coming from my own skin.
Points that map a curve.
Hirne House, the manor of the Hildreths, was big enough to hold many lives and histories. Leland thumped around as if in a state of quantum superposition, not quite in the kitchen or the living room, not quite not. He never spoke to me, though he seemed aware of my existence. His greatest obsession was worrying whether the antique wiring would decide one night to burn us in our beds or the Doverhirne Drain would rise and sweep us all into the Wash. Thorn survived in the fashion of the New Rural: a job here, a gig there: part-time classroom assistant, helper at the local animal welfare center (the dogs, the cats, the ponies, donkey and chinchillas), charity shop worker, occasional manager for the local metal band—Elder Würm—bespoke motorbike repairs and, latterly, packing and shipping rare books from my two - by - four - and - fiberboard office in her cold but dry barn.
Moving the books that had imprisoned me in my two hideous rooms in Clapham turned out not to be such a Sisyphean task. I came back from my first stay to London and saw a city I recognized but no longer loved. I saw London grown cold, self-obsessed, arrogant. I saw the anti-street-sleeper spikes, the posh and pov doors to the same apartment blocks, the curtain walls of empty gold-brick houses defending wealth and unearned income. London, pre-eminently the city of literature, had turned away from books.
What I could not dispose of in a mass sale to my bibliophile friends went into the back of Elder Würm’s Transit. I squeezed in the front between the vocalist and the bass player, accompanied up the A1M by their Death Metal Drive Mix. The same metal friends occasionally laid a few courses of bricks or set in a joist or door lintel in the new extension to Hirne House.
