A Page 17

  – Evenin’, said Angus, hoping that he might make her smile.

  Fay did smile, faintly – like she had in the field – but she still didn’t say anything.

  It was more than a burden. The worry was different to the blinding affliction of the past few months. Fay’s eyes were on her plate. She looked so troubled, Angus realised, that he wanted to cheer her up for her own sake as much as for his own.

  They all had a potato split open with a daub of long-life margarine in its middle, convincingly butter-like in the candlelight. On the woodburner the sausages were spitting noisily, blackened and smelling tasty.

  – Sausages for you, Paolo? said Pete conciliatorily.

  Paolo was inspecting his fork.

  – I’ll have the vegetable ones, he said. Please.

  – There’s not enough, said Pete. Paolo… You know we only got them for me and Belle.

  – Then I’ll have none, said Paolo.

  – Oh, for Christ’s sake, said Pete. You always have meat!

  The look on Paolo’s face was intense enough for Pete to rub his hand on his forehead and give up. He spooned a couple of the vegetable ones onto Belle’s plate, which she sniffed at critically.

  Fay smiled faintly again when she received her sausages.

  – Ta, she said.

  – No worries, said Pete.

  He served himself last, his piercings glinting in the candlelight, then he reached for the salt pot, sprinkling it liberally over his plate.

  Fay, Angus realised, was looking at him from a corner of her eye. He waited for a second or two, then cautiously looked back. She turned away at once, but in the split second their eyes did meet something seemed to fall into place.

  He saw her, and he saw the Fay that he’d known in Kingston, and he saw both of them in the Fay that he’d been with on the hill that afternoon. The two were like constricted versions: semi-deliberate projections that would probably fool you indefinitely, so long as you’d never seen the real thing.

  – I think, said Angus, finishing a sausage, that I might go and lie down for a bit. Could anyone, er, lend us a fag? Pete held out a packet.

  – I thought you’d given up, said Fay quietly.

  – Yeah, said Angus. I had.

  v: you damned

  It was an instant. We were nearing the southernmost tip of Okinawa, the formation banked precisely for the approach to Kerama-retto. To our right there were lights on the coastline: Yonabaru and, isolated further south, villages, households, fires and bolts of mirrored moonlight. The shore was a pale streak between the dense subtropical undergrowth and the blackness of the Pacific. Waves were threads of whiteness – twined and untwined – frozen in the limits of my right eye. In the window to my left, the moon was a single, immediate reflection. Before me the Zeroes were still in their impaired arrangement, thirty degrees from the horizontal as we turned towards the west, when on the far side of the formation the propeller blades of a Zero faltered.

  All five of us understood that any laden Zero departing from Oita would find Kerama-retto at the very extent of its range; that if one propeller were to falter, then, soon enough, others would certainly follow.

  The Zero to my right lost impetus sharply, caught like a leaf by the rules of the passing world, falling from its place and lapsing behind us, with a crack! from the headphones and a cry of such volume and anguish that the radio must almost have burst from it.

  The cry was terminated by a short, concrete blow; in my mind, a little patch of moonlight white on the endless surface of the ocean. Yet it was as significant to me as the sun-brilliant blasts of the A-bombs themselves. The target was eighty kilometres westwards: twenty minutes at our laden velocity. I rolled my eyes towards the fuel gauge – the needle leaning left – then to the artificial horizon where a pair of pictured wings were returning to a level.

  The five of us were scattered across the sky, the south coast of Okinawa to our right and the Earth in shadow around us.

  – Alright? Pete was standing in the mouth of the stairwell, a hand on each jamb.

  – Huh? said Angus, looking up.

  – The cigarette…

  – Oh. Angus rolled the half-smoked Marlboro between two fingers, then dropped it into the ashtray. Pretty fucking horrible to tell you the truth.

  Pete removed his hands and glancing, not entirely easily, across the porcelain and crumbling plaster, he wandered over to the end of the bed and sat down. He swung his legs up so they ran parallel to Angus’s.

  – What you up to? he asked, one-eyeing the pile of A4 paper on his lap.

  – I’m, er, just writing this story… said Angus.

  Pete raised his eyebrows in an expression of interest. He pulled a pre-rolled joint from a pocket of his khaki combats and lit it, leaning back against the bed-end.

  – It’s… Angus thought a moment. It’s about this kamikaze mission that happened after the end of the Second World War, after the Japanese surrender. A squadron went from Kyushu to crash into the US fleet, as a final act of defiance, but… they vanished. You know? No-one knows where they went.

  Pete blew a couple of meditative smoke-rings.

  – Fuck of a way to go, he said.

  – The thing is, said Angus, when the Japanese Emperor declared surrender on the radio, that was the first time he’d ever been heard by his subjects, you know? He was a God. He was invincible. So the first time that he spoke to his subjects he was effectively denying his own divinity.

  Pete frowned. His dreadlocks were loose down the sides of his face, the candles shining on his piercings and picking out the shadows on his temples: two principally, converging into a V shape between his eyebrows.

  – Dying for a dead divinity, he said. Poor sods… What were they? Like, twenty or something?

  – Yeah, nineteen or twenty, most of them. I mean, in some ways they were still like children. Their identities were so bound up in their culture that when the surrender came – you know? – either they gave up their spirit, or else they had to kill themselves.

  – Kamikazed either way… Pete murmured.

  Angus tapped the joint on the rim of the candlestick. He sucked on it cautiously.

  – Yeah, he said. I guess so. You know what kamikaze means, yeah? Divine wind… Like, twice in the thirteenth century, the Mongolians tried to invade the Japanese islands, and both times a typhoon blew up and wiped out the entire fleet… The idea in the Second World War was to do the same thing to the Americans, except using humans, of course.

  Angus’s head was spinning. He took another puff on the joint and handed it back to Pete, trying to pull his thoughts together.

  – Incidentally, said Pete a moment later, I did come up here for a reason. Like, you were looking kind of freaked out downstairs. You, er… You talked to Belle today?

  – Ah, yeah, said Angus. Yeah. Whether she heard me or not I don’t know, but I did talk to her… You know about Rob, I suppose?

  – I surmised about Rob, said Pete tactfully, dropping the roach into a tea cup, tapping his toes to the funk music coming up the stairwell.

  – Yeah. Angus smiled weakly. Well. Belle was so off her face she probably didn’t even know what was going on. But it’s not a problem. You know? Suddenly. Not like I thought it’d be… Something happened up there. Something sorted itself out, though I haven’t quite figured out what. Besides, there’s other things to think about for once.

  – Like? Pete raised an eyebrow. He was rolling a scrumpled ball of paper around the palm of his right hand.

  – Like… Angus hesitated. Well, like everyone turning up here, for a start. This raid. Whatever…

  – Ah yeah, said Pete. Yeah. There’s something to think about.

  – How do you mean? said Angus.

  – Aggh! shrieked Belle, through the funk and the ceiling. A moth! Get it away from me! It’ll go in my ear!

  Pete had an absorbed look on his face. He gripped the stud in his lower lip between his teeth.

  – Well,
said Pete. I don’t know. It’s just a gut thing, but… well, basically I think Paolo knows something. I mean, more than he says. Maybe Nick does too. The thing is, though, realistically, what? Like, okay, Paolo gets enthusiastic about peculiar things and that. But what could he possibly be up to that’s worse than what the rest of us get up to the whole time anyway?

  For a moment the two of them sat in silence, both with their arms folded.

  – Except, he said, there is this one thing I keep coming back to. When the house got raided, this pig told me they thought we had an acid factory… I mean, I know it sounds daft, and I’m not saying they’ve got one under the bed or anything. But, I just got this feeling that there was something behind it. Like, the pigs knew something about them but couldn’t prove it, or Paolo and Nick do know who’s actually got it and can’t say anything, or… I mean, they looked scared as fuck during that raid. Do you know what I mean? Paolo never looks scared.

  Angus nodded slowly.

  – Well, he said, I’ll try and keep my ears open.

  Angus felt better, having talked to Pete. When he’d gone back down the stairwell he stayed where he was, propped against the bedhead: calm – tentatively – sparse fractals evolving inside his eyelids.

  Snippets of conversation were creeping in between his thoughts.

  – No, really! Well, it was my great-uncle, I think. A moth got into his ear and started eating his brain. It couldn’t get back out.

  – Yeah, his brain… scoffed Paolo.

  – Really! Belle insisted. It ate some of the numerative part! He was never able to add up odd numbers again!

  Silence was hanging over the cottage, defiant to the voices and the Meters on the stereo. There were other sounds too, upstairs. The wind in the trees. The stream, growing prominent the moment you noticed it, like a clock, ticking away in a sleeping household – less a noise somehow than a foil to the wider silence.

  – A fish, though?! Jesus Christ!

  Nick and Paolo walked past him, entering the spare bedroom, Nick quarrelling drunkenly about mattresses.

  Once they’d settled and the door between them was closed, Angus reopened his eyes and took the half-cigarette from the candlestick beside him. Someone was turning the volume down slowly on the stereo, till finally it was silent and the sounds from outside began to assert themselves. Downstairs Pete seemed to have made his bed on the chaise longue. There were Goodnights, the roar of the tap, then – Angus shut his eyes again – Belle’s footsteps creeping up the stairs, becoming almost silent as they passed him.

  Fay too, it seemed, was sleeping downstairs. There was no further noise beside the odd drunken snore or witty comment through the wall behind him; so, taking the half-cigarette, Angus resumed his seat on the rug beside the window, sitting cross-legged and watching the moon, close above the nub of Llandefalle.

  There were cirrocumuli across the western quarter of the sky – ripplings that made the moon seem even milkier. At the top of the field were the stark silhouettes of trees. Then, quietly, the front door swung open and Fay walked out onto the grass, Nick’s hat pulled down on her head and his old green coat wrapped tight around her. He watched – still not lighting the cigarette – as she stepped carefully over the end of the fence, and set off up the hill towards the wood.

  w: under the moon

  As a non-Christian recluse, it always surprised Angus how much he was able to wring out of a Sunday morning. It was the only time when he’d have absolutely no guilt at all about anything. There’d be the formless warmth of the bedclothes, enough awareness to understand it was a Sunday; and that, for once, would be all there was to it.

  The business of prolonging this condition had, over the past few months, developed into a bit of an artform: a delicate balancing act that any sort of disturbance could scupper immediately. So ideally he needed no rain, a light breeze, and the nose alone exposed to the room outside. There was more to this than crankiness. A mile away, at around nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, the bellringers of Boughrood would burst into activity, providing Angus’s sole direct contact with regular human society – shopping excepted – and music too, for that matter. Under perfect conditions, the breeze would have him steeled against the notion of sudden sounds while the bells wandered into a dream’s background, easing him awake with a volume much like the stream’s. The fractured runs, in fact, did sound a lot like water. Running water, that is. Not rain, which just eclipsed everything.

  This morning, thankfully, it was not raining. Indeed, there was something in the breeze to suggest it was sunny again. Way off in the distance the bells were rippling jerkily down a major scale, the stream talking away beneath them. The two might almost have been a single music and, for some reason, they were tirelessly evoking an image of Fay: on the riverbank that day they first moved into the house in Kingston.

  It was in this reverie – drifting along at any easy pace – that Angus first became aware of a popping, crackling noise. Instantly the half-sleep was shattered. He sprang upright, blinking, dragging himself across the bed towards the sounds of fire, remembering the houseful of people only as his feet touched the floor.

  Someone had lit the woodburner. That was all. For a moment Angus sat there, absorbing the surprise, the pleasure when he’d settled something deeper than relief.

  A few minutes later Angus found himself quite taken with the idea of getting up. He shuffled down the bed till his head was adjacent to the window, looking out across the wheat stubble, the few sheep picking at weeds about halfway towards the horizon, the scraps of greyish cloud passing west through an otherwise pristine sky.

  Perched in the elder tree about four feet away, a squirrel was watching him; their eyes met through the thin glass. The squirrels’ eyes were feral. More so at least than the mouse’s the previous morning. Angus stuck his tongue out at it and pulled himself over to the other side of the bed.

  The church bells were clearly audible as he trod down the stairs. The flagstones seeped cold into the soles of his feet. There were smells: woodsmoke, mouse shit, dust, damp.

  Tim had his back to him. He was standing on the rug beside the woodburner, a china basin of steaming water on a chair to his right, soap in his one hand and a rag in the other. He was wearing only a pair of Y-fronts, his back and legs sagging like they’d been left to him by someone much larger. He appeared to be lost in the sound of the fire, his head hanging forward. Across the lower part of his back a cluster of thin, deep scars ran down into his Y-fronts, cut into the flesh so nubs of vertebrae stuck out white against the scar tissue.

  – Er… said Angus. Tim span round. He grabbed at a T-shirt, concealing a chest like an old man’s.

  – Oh. Ah… Alright, Angus?

  – Alright, Tim. Angus glanced around the room. Carry on, huh? I was just going to do a bit of tidying up. You know. I shan’t look.

  – Oh. No, said Tim. No. I was just finished. Sorry. I… I thought everyone was asleep.

  Tim’s face seemed dangerously grey. His eyes were sunken and bewildered. He was almost falling as he fought with his mud-spattered jeans and the T-shirt, which read E-Z in day-glo lettering.

  – Tim? said Angus, crossing the room and starting to assemble a pile of dishes. I hope you don’t mind me asking, but those scars on your back? What the hell happened?

  – Oh, said Tim. Just, er… Just some shit one time. I fell through a window.

  Angus looked at him, and remembered something Pete had said once, about meeting someone who’d known Tim at school. He’d been fat back then, apparently, and pretty badly bullied. It had only stopped when someone pushed him through a plate-glass window, when his parents had moved him to somewhere else.

  – It’s, er, no big deal… said Tim, seeing the expression on Angus’s face. It was just an accident. Ages ago.

  When Paolo and Nick came crashing downstairs about half an hour later, Angus was clean-shaven, his hair brushed back from his forehead with a decent pair of combats on and a fresh, tight black
T-shirt.

  The kitchen was tidy: the flagstones swept, the plates, cutlery and saucepans washed and put away, the new tablecloth shaken clean outside before being replaced on the newly arranged table. The door was open so they could hear the church bells when they resumed.

  – What? Nick was stammering, a T-shirt halfway onto his fleshless frame. What the fuck?!

  – We’re going to move the ambulance, hissed Paolo as they arrived in the kitchen.

  – What the fuck do you want with me? Nick whimpered. My head! You’ve no fucking idea…!

  He collapsed into a chair, grimacing and doubling over. Angus selected a large, particularly elaborate teapot from the shelf – Broad Way Victorians strolling all over it – throwing in a couple of tea bags and filling it with boiling water.

  – I’ll have some tea ready in a minute, he said. If you want some…

  – Tea! croaked Nick.

  – No! said Paolo.

  – What’s the fucking hurry…?!

  Paolo said nothing. He was scowling, twisting a piece of hair at the front of his ramshackle Afro, peering around the room. He was still wearing the clothes from the day before – the muddy, crumpled flares and cheesecloth shirt – and for the first time Angus could remember, his endless stubble had finally turned into a beard.

  – What are you after? said Angus.

  – Keys… said Paolo. Ambulance keys.

  Angus pointed to a hook on the right-hand doorpost, and Paolo exhaled gently, going over and stuffing them in his pocket. They were halfway across the field when Paolo resumed talking, a scribbled map in his right hand and the sleeve of Nick’s T-shirt in his left.

  – Nick, he said. Che cazzo! What the fuck is the matter with you, huh?! You ask what the fuck the hurry is in front of the others?!… Never! Fucking never do that again!

  – What? Nick was stumbling on ruts in the stubble, breathing so hard he could barely speak.