by Adam Thorpe
‘I’ll put one in your Christmas stocking, then, along with y’ tangerine. Do you want to see the horse?’
They stood up on the gallops above Lambourn in the chilly gusts, drinking brandy out of a silver flask with HM engraved on it in fancy lettering. Andrew kept some way off, in his trench coat, gloved hands folded in front of him: he looked exactly like a heavy in some TV crime thriller. The horse was beautiful, shiny as a conker and with a flash of white on its brow.
‘Isn’t he just fantastic?’ shouted Al.
His investment tore up and down, throwing out divots from thundering hooves, the young jockey unsmiling on top. The downs spread all around under scudding clouds that were grey and creamy-white and, at one point, purple. Al was lord of all. A frigging flight engineer. The brandy burned in Bob’s throat.
‘I’m planning on building a biplane from scratch,’ he shouted over the gusts, apropos of nothing.
‘Now listen to me,’ shouted Al in return. ‘Andrew reckons these guys are serious. Next time it won’t be your study, it’ll be your intestines. Do what I say for once, skipper.’
‘Which is?’
‘Get the fuck up to the isles. Bonnie Scotland.’
‘Sounds like an order,’ laughed Bob.
‘Advice is all it is,’ Al yelled into his ear, as the hooves drummed over the green and English turf.
Bob drove back over the limit, which was not Winrush at all. If the police stop me, he thought, I’ll never fly again, unless I go into really shady outfits with aircraft kept together by parcel tape, flying everywhere by night. The sort that keep the cargo crash statistics decently high, make it look riskier than it is.
What this meant, though, was that he drove back slowly and carefully. The two crew-mates had slapped each other’s upper arms, punched each other’s chests and separated before it got embarrassing: Al was wet-eyed, but that may have been the east wind. He’d gripped Bob’s shoulders and said, ‘Skipper, take care. Use that number, whenever.’
‘There’s just one thing I have to say, Al.’
‘Say on.’
‘You’re the best bloody flight engineer I ever had.’
‘Get off of you. Why d’you have to say that now?’
‘What’s wrong with now?’
‘Because you’ve had years and years to say it in.’
‘That’s how it always is, you silly bugger.’
He drove, however, as though he had a full pint on the back seat. He was rage-honked a few times by BMW types too busy on their mobiles to bother to look at the road. As he entered Crowthorne’s outskirts down a leafy short cut of bungalows, there was a stench of burning plastic. At first he thought it was a wheelie bin on fire – a favourite sport of the locally produced louts. Then he realised the smudges on the windscreen were smoke, rising in serious wisps from his own bonnet.
He pulled in to inspect. He was fond of the Healey’s little satisfied smile, but now its radiator was all gritting teeth. The black smoke that hid the bonnet (in a matter of seconds) flickered yellow. Not wanting to perish in a fireball, he made no effort to approach, but searched about for a bucket of water. Of course, this not being an airport apron, there was neither bucket nor fire truck. The underside was dropping flames that began to rivulet, like brandy on a Christmas pudding. Then there was a quiet whump and the flames leapt through the windows, curling over the soft top. It was a newsreel, taken in somewhere like Iraq. Except that on telly you didn’t have the fumes scalding your throat.
The car’s nose was now entirely engulfed in flames more than twenty feet tall. He backed off in case the petrol tank went up: he’d let it run low, which meant vapour. There were further smaller whumps, more like a brick being dropped from a height into water: the more inflammable parts. Paint bubbled, the tyres sent up blacker smoke along with a rubbery stink, and the tan soft top collapsed in a shower of sparks. The empty street of bungalows had filled up with about twenty onlookers.
‘Must have been the battery,’ Bob said, as they waited for the fire engine. ‘I hadn’t used her much.’
‘You’ve got bits of glass in your eyelashes, look.’
* * *
His first instinct was not to think how lucky he had been, let alone that it might have been destroyed by something like a rocket launcher. This was not Afghanistan, but even so: he did not take cover. He simply assumed that the small bomb planted under the car had been faulty. The onlookers – mostly elderly with shopping trolleys – all shook their heads in the same way and said cars weren’t what they used to be.
‘Mine certainly isn’t,’ he joked.
He dismissed the idea of running away – it wouldn’t help. He wished he had some mints.
The firefighters were told the same story, when they arrived fifteen minutes later, along with the police and a lot of dramatic siren effects: smoke had suddenly begun pouring from the bonnet, he’d got out smartly, it had exploded.
‘You sure you’ve not got enemies?’ the large policewoman joked.
‘Only grumpy passengers in business class,’ he joked back, keeping his head turned, wondering why he wasn’t being breathalysed. Perhaps it was because his non-fake driving licence showed his rank as well as his occupation. Or they felt sorry for his loss: the other copper, barely out of nappies, had a thing about Healeys.
‘It’s all yours,’ Bob said.
‘Sitting in the garage doing nothing, was it?’
‘How did you guess?’
‘Experience, sir. Half the vehicle fires we deal with are elderly folk who haven’t driven their old car for months. Poor maintenance.’
‘It was a replica. And I’m not elderly. And I could take it apart and put it back together again in the middle of Africa, if I wanted to, with only one screwdriver.’
‘Go ahead, sir. It’s all yours.’
The firemen used up a lot of foam, the blue lights flashed on a blackened and steaming shell, the police took notes, a big trailer eventually came and towed it away for a fortune, leaving a black star shape glistening with unburnt oil, smaller than he had expected, and a coil of plastic that might have been the device. Or the CD player. Onlookers drifted away, this month’s entertainment over. He was on his own.
He searched the tarmac and spotted the gleam of something silver by the scorched kerb: a possible bubble of mercury. It would have been a standard tilt-switch job, quite small, and presumably less sensitive than intended, since he’d gone over quite a few speed bumps on the trip back. He guessed it had fallen from its magnetised grip for some reason (there were a number of minor potholes in the road) and only then completed the circuit. Either that, or it was on a timer. There was also something looking like flour, if you crouched close enough. Fertiliser, maybe. All fairly amateur, but then it doesn’t take a PhD in chemistry to make a minor car-bomb. Or maybe it was the battery. Or a loose fuel line. Or the head gasket.
If a bomb, he reckoned he had a few hours’ grace: the time it would take for someone to know Bob Winrush was still up and about. So he walked in the wrong direction: right for his safety, that is. Thankfully, his wallet had been on him when he’d left the car. A close shave. He got to the High Street and headed for the charity shop, where he suddenly had to sit down.
‘Are you all right sir?’
‘Sorry. Someone’s just blown up my car.’
‘Really?’
The young assistant, with bright pink hair and freckles, laughed nervously. Another dafty. Get them all the time. Lonely men. As long as he isn’t a loony from the hospital (though the real dread in Crowthorne isn’t that someone’ll make it over the razor wire and eat your brains with a spoon, but that it’ll close down). He staggered to the tiny lavatory and was sick, contemplating a poster of a skeletal Asian mite, mostly eyes, holding the usual plastic bowl, with a muddy gutter as background. He seemed fairly poor himself, in the mirror, but with all five of his senses turned right up.
Back among the knocking coat hangers, Twin Peaks-era dresses and dry-cleaning s
olvent smells, he bought a homburg with a black-leather strap above the rim, a rawhide greatcoat with a hairy collar, a slippery mauve shirt and a walking stick. They said nothing except the right things when he went to the counter.
‘It’s for a play,’ he said.
‘Oh, a local one, is it?’
‘Not really.’
‘About terrorism?’ The pink-haired girl smiled. She was more piercings than face.
‘Annie Get Your Gun,’ he said, which the twins had done at school a few years back.
‘Oh, I like that. What are you?’
‘Costume feller. Helluva job. You’re a marvel, thanks.’
It was adrenalin that saw him through. Pilots are good in emergencies: the usual cockpit emergency lasts less time, though. He slipped back to his flat in a whiff of mothballs looking like someone dressed up as an old man, but there was no one else in sight. It was five thirty, already dark, and he groped about in the rooms to pack, using the orange light spill courtesy of the municipal council. He then slept (or pretended to) till dawn, and slunk out to the whine of a milk van, humping his two suitcases and a rucksack, quite a feat for a man in a terrible hat and coat. His breath’s smoke hid the rest, or so he imagined.
He joined the early commuters for London and sat back in the train to the patter of keyboards. They all had places and people to go back to, he thought. Gardens to mow. Holidays to think about. Christmas trees to decorate. The two young jowly chaps opposite never stopped talking numbers and acronyms the whole way, with the kind of zeal he thought only priests and mullahs could summon up.
He received strange looks. He felt strange – growing into his costume, as he would instantly grow into his uniform, which he’d left on the bed. He detected a slight smell of urine from his quilted inside lining: probably the heat.
He checked into a reasonable hotel in Kensington, ditched the Oxfam chic and kitted himself out for the far and distant north in an overheated branch of Cotswold Outdoor; it was full of white-fleshed and bobble-hatted dummies, some of whom were not real. A Christmas tree sparkled in the corner. He’d sent the twins a cheque and had planned on keeping out of the festive season sight line by volunteering for a soup-kitchen run, the homeless reimbursing him with a sense of his own blessings; but that now fell into the category of good intentions. Olivia would spend it with the twins and, of course, her new skipper. He wasn’t sure he could see friends.
‘What should I assume about the weather?’
‘The absolute worst, mate. Four seasons in a day, summer included. Certainly off the beaten track. Fab hills. But you look the experienced type.’
‘Definitely. This tan’s Annapurna.’
‘What tan?’
He bought rather a lot of gear: retail therapy, he reckoned. Why folk love Dubai, more shopping mall than city: no need for psychotherapists, just browse under angel fish and sharks.
Why did he tell the shop assistant where he was going? It was so hard to vanish.
It was only back in his small room that he began to wonder how and when the bomb had been stuck under his car. Not in Ulverton, surely: he wasn’t followed. Perhaps it had been hanging there for days, inches from his feet, the other side of the floor. Weeks, even. It might even have been a non-persistent bomb, like a non-persistent landmine that blows itself up after a while. That’s progress.
Or it might have been poor maintenance. Mice nibbling at rubber.
Or not. At any rate, he was fairly confident the types out to get rid of Winrush would think the job was done – unless they checked into the Bracknell News website just a single click away:
Car destroyed in blaze
A crew from Bracknell fire station was called to the incident at 4.30 p.m. in Hedgers Lane, Crowthorne.
The Austin Healey Sebring had begun to smoke on entering the street and the driver escaped before the blaze took hold.
The car was almost burnt out by the time the firefighters arrived.
The police are not investigating as the vehicle had not been driven regularly for some time.
Not exactly breaking news, but still. At least they hadn’t called him elderly.
He phoned the B & B via a phone box several blocks away from the hotel. Al sounded surprised.
‘Oh, Bob.’
‘Oh, Al.’
‘Drowned in fucking suitcases. Jane’s doing her nut.’
‘Can’t find her rocks?’
‘Sorry, skipper?’
‘The Healey’s gone.’
‘How?’
‘Small car bomb. No casualties.’
‘Shit shit shit. Are you OK? Nothing, Jane. Aye, it’s fine. Bob had a prang. Too much ale. He’s fine.’
‘Not even singed,’ he called out, as if to Jane. ‘Someone’s keeping an eye on me in the heavenly control tower.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘Somewhere with a lot of other people.’
‘London?’
‘But heading north, right to the edge. I give in, friend.’
‘This is a bit last-minute. You’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for the new paperwork. And there’s Christmas in between. Jane, please will ya stop talking for one second!’
‘Al, I just need the fresh air.’
‘Oh, you’ll get that there. In heaps, and moving past very fast. You sure it was what you just said it was?’
‘Almost home, and she started smoking. An inferno within two minutes. I loved that car.’
‘Bob,’ Al said in a stage whisper, ‘it may have been a normal auto fire.’
‘Since when has an auto fire been normal?’
‘Police?’
‘They came and went. I think one of them who looked about seventeen thought I was an elderly snowhead who wouldn’t piss if his pants caught fire.’
‘Elderly? You? Jesus wept. Your hair’s not even grey in the offing.’
‘Thank you, neither is yours.’
‘That’s because I’ve hardly got any, skipper.’
Bob headed for the edge in his new vehicle, a boring Volkswagen Polo, going cheap because it was an exhibition model and white (the insurance was being difficult about the Healey). He made a stopover in Newcastle. He wanted to see Sophie before he went to ground: a natural impulse. He’d spent two weeks in Kensington battling his solemn promise not to see friends, and let his stubble carry on. He’d jogged round Hyde Park at different hours, reacquainted himself with the dinosaurs and electrons, seen films, then fallen on his sword and visited the V & A, Olivia’s favourite. Feeling in jeopardy all the time gave everything a slight fizz, even museums. Life carbonated by danger. Perhaps that’s what he’d missed in Dubai. Oh, Leila. He sat on various bar stools and eventually accompanied an Irish woman called Caitlin back to her Chelsea basement flat. She was forty-one and busty and drunk. When he managed an erection she said, ‘And on the third day he rose again.’ ‘That’s Easter,’ Bob said, ‘and today’s Christmas.’
Sophie generally took her mother’s side. Bob wasn’t sure why she reckoned her mother to be beyond reproach, but it’s not something he could have changed.
At fifteen she’d fallen heavily for horses in Worcestershire, was given her own, socialised with blue-blooded types living in houses with grounds you’d notice from cruising height, then got stepped on by Emulsion. Bob had carried a few top thoroughbreds by then and knew a horse’s tonnage. She was off school for three months, had several operations on her foot and she could still stick magnets to her instep. She certainly upstaged her father’s accident, despite its open fractures. So they both had this slight lameness; with her it was more a minimal roll to her gait, an awkwardness cancelled out by a life of fun, friends and laughter.
What it did was bind her closer to her mother. It also made her appreciative of not being in pain. Sophie reckoned the first time she went back to Elts in Worcester (to choose an ordinary pair of shoes) was ‘the best day of her life’.
She had a slight but charming lisp and a tumble of blonde hair that was a
throwback to Bob’s mother, judging by a Super-8 film of the latter: a woman in a cherry-red macintosh grinning and waving by a cliff, the wind tousling her hair through the dust spots. The other films featuring his mother were ‘lost’, not surviving two successive stepmothers.
He stayed a night in Sophie’s shared accommodation, a Victorian house with five doubles in Jesmond. He told her he was heading north to think about things on his own for a few months.
‘Why?’
‘Burnout. Doctor’s orders. Relocating.’
‘Where?’
‘Scotland,’ he said vaguely. ‘I’ll let you know.’ He wasn’t sure this would be wise, in fact, but he was too tired to work it out right now. ‘It’ll only be for nine months max. They have serious gales in September.’
‘Where’s the Austin Healey?’
‘Phew. So many questions. Swapped it and kept the change for my travels.’
‘That’s really bad news, Dad. Now I can’t look forward to you popping your clogs.’
‘You’ll get the life insurance.’
‘Nah, it was the Healey I was after.’
He gave her a hug. She patted his back as he did so.
He had one of the high-ceilinged doubles to himself, as the resident was away for the weekend. He imagined that, if he had gone to university, his room would have looked much the same: a vinyl player – no, two of them – took up a corner, the desk was awash with books on psychology, and the posters were mostly retro souvenirs of 70s rock: Led Zep, Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper … with the exception of a huge image of a fantasy machine, like a spiky cockpit, flying between mountains; all Sophie could tell him was that Gavin was a geek and that this ‘plane’ was called Siegfried and had devastating guns. It responded to the pilot’s nervous system. ‘You’d love that, wouldn’t you, Dad?’
‘I can visualise all sorts of drawbacks. Supposing you’re in the middle of a divorce and having a nervous breakdown?’
What she meant, he supposed, was that he’d appreciate the weaponry. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
She laughed. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t think what?’
‘That you’re having one. Anyway, it’s just too boring for David and me if you’re both having one.’
