A Page 6

  – He definitely won’t want to see me, said Belle.

  – But we don’t have much choice, do we? said Fay. And no-one’s seen Angus for months. I mean, it’s mushroom season about now, isn’t it? You never know, we might quite enjoy it.

  She glanced over her shoulder.

  – Mushrooms?! said Tim, a moment later.

  Pete finished the cigarette and released the handbrake, letting the ambulance roll cautiously back towards Richmond Road – peering both ways for police cars – and accelerating between semi-detached facades, lines of balding oaks, evergreen hedges, all-night garages, parkland, sports grounds and phone-boxes.

  Overhead, the breeze was tearing holes in the clouds’ orange awning.

  h: another lunatic plan

  Six little airplanes, gleaming in the afternoon sun. When I next came back into focus, they were there before me – stumpy machines with bulbous noses – configuring at the four kilometre cruising height and setting a course for the south.

  The spacing between each of us had an accuracy I felt certain that we had never achieved before. We banked in unison to starboard, the Earth appearing suddenly beside us with a level at 75 degrees to our own: the distant blue arc of the Pacific horizon, the surprising green of Kyushu with mountains, rivers, forests and, perhaps in a second as the Zeroes righted, the cinders of Nagasaki spread across the western coast. We passed through walls of white – cumuli, altocumuli, cumulonimbi – into leaden blindness and out again suddenly into sunlight, every time in the same exact formation. Being the last, I could see these things.

  Finally, the target was becoming an actuality. This was the dream that had dangled before us all since infanthood. Not the Sergeant Major, barking, erect and elegant in the training yard:

  – Pain and pity will make men of you!

  Not the boots and the fists, but the glorious consummation of the samurai. The sacrifice. The place in Yasukuni: pantheon of the Gods. Except – facing it now through flickering propeller blades – this too was grown insubstantial. It was the dream, and that was all it was: an after-image lingering in the air, torn apart and for the first time exposed to interpretation.

  To my uncomprehending eyes it now seemed a barrage of questions, out of which I found one rising into prominence: Who, or what, had volunteered for this insane enterprise?

  For whom were we giving ourselves, if not the Emperor? Did even the commanders know? And, of all that Radio Tokyo had told us over the last twenty years, was this too without basis? Had the foreign infidel ever even planned to bayonet our babies? And what of the A-bombs, that the Vice-Admiral had so humbly deemed Wonders?

  I was, of course, no more able to answer – even to confront – these questions than I was to turn my head. The only answers were questions in themselves, in their turn prompting more questions: a chain reaction of their own.

  Again the formation was passing through clouds, and for some minutes we were lost to everything but the occasional glimpse of another plane. Re-emerging, however, we were configured as precisely as we had been when we first came together. Seven Zeroes between cloudbanks, the bombs in place of ventral drop-tanks like progeny in some early stage of gestation.

  The radio had been silent for some time now – since indeed the climb from Oita – but here between cloudbanks static resumed suddenly in my ears, bringing in a rush the memory of surrender. For a moment it continued, then a voice began talking: the pilot of the plane behind the Vice-Admiral’s.

  – Vice-Admiral! he exclaimed. A cylinder has exploded! I cannot remain airborne!

  The plane had started to shiver noticeably just before the voice appeared on the radio, and smoke was spouting from beneath the left-hand 7.7mm machine gun.

  – Alas! he went on. I must return to Oita!

  The airplane departed our formation as if it had thrown a hook into the passing world and been plucked away into reality. My eyes turned upwards to follow it as it banked, its engine screaming. Neither the Vice-Admiral nor anyone else offered any comment. The spaces between us were not compensated through any kind of reformation. The mission continued, rigid as ever in its design.

  Glancing around, Angus realised suddenly how dark it had become. He had no idea what time it was, but the lingering grey streaks of cloud above Llandefalle were stained red along the edges and the vacant spaces of sky were so pale they were barely blue. Inside – by contrast – it was now so lightless it was all he could do to make out the woodburner, far less the hand-scrawled words he’d been writing moments earlier. Closing nights were getting to be a serious problem. He was practically going to have to start hibernating soon.

  – Oh Lord! said Angus, picking up the vodka bottle, rising and heading towards the door.

  As ever there was no-one around outside. Except for a fortnightly appearance by the redoubtable Mrs Lloyd – checking to see if he was still alive – Angus had only ever had one visitor: Pete, his best mate, who had turned up one night two and a half months earlier, having driven down from Middlesbrough. Actually, a rambler had stopped and leant on the fence behind him one time as well, when he was chopping wood; but the sound of his voice had alarmed Angus so much that he’d missed the log and nearly caused them both an injury. So the rambler had run away.

  – Coca-colonisation! Angus yelled randomly at the darkening sky.

  It was a curious thing. The longer Angus spent in isolation, the less he felt distinct from his immediate environment. He was, of course, talking to himself, but he was definitely directing his remarks at separate objects. In the absence of anyone to define himself against, the stream seemed as much a part of him as the nape of his neck, as the squirrels were in the roofspace, as the wart was on the back of his left-hand thumb. It wasn’t that he felt himself especially At One with everything, just that the need to differentiate and assert himself had somehow waned.

  – Amphetamine-annexation! he addressed the footbridge.

  – Amyl nitrate-appropriation! he told the elder tree.

  Angus tipped up the vodka bottle, filling his mouth and swallowing, steadying himself against the elder tree as the numbness spread outwards through his stomach.

  He was having to drink a lot now, when he finished writing. Where the story might be helping him – shoring up his own feeble structure: alcohol, weather, meals and squirrels – when he re-emerged from it, he felt as weak and vulnerable as he did when he woke in the mornings.

  – Ecstasy-expropriation! said Angus to the fence that divided his garden from the field.

  He turned and went back into the kitchen, picking up the two twisted, blackened old kettles from the flagstones beside the woodburner and carrying them through to the little side room to fill them with water. First the larger one, then the smaller. Then he took both of them back to the woodburner, placing them on the hotplate before opening the door at the front and – careful to avoid disturbing the baked potato – restoking the fire with a few choice pieces of wood. Such was his routine.

  Such were the threads of his web.

  Crossing back to the other side of the room, Angus took two candles down from his dwindling supply, stuck them into a pair of tasteless floral candlesticks and lit both with one match, then picked up one in each hand. At once their reflection came back at him from one of the countless mirrors arranged around the walls. He moved the candles about till the shadows allowed a fair impression of his face, then he slipped one next to the other between his right-hand fingers, leaving his left hand free.

  Angus’s hair was a mop-like mess – shaved about four months earlier – and he pressed it back from his forehead, holding it there to inspect himself. His face looked gaunt: thinner than it should have done, with clumps of stubble on his cheeks and chin and a frown mark starting between his eyebrows. He was good-looking, though. His nose and jaw had a preciseness about them that looked quite dignified in some lights, and did at least offset some of the hair. His eyes looked back at him – pale blue and open-looking – the reflected flame of the cand
le shining from just below his pupils.

  Burning, in his eyes and in his mind.

  A mouse squealed in the bottom of the woodstack.

  i: would that i had seven lives to give for my country!

  Sonia started jogging as she turned off Richmond Road, pulling her hood down over her face to try and keep the drizzle out of her hair. Feeling for the openings, she buried her hands back in the pouch above her stomach. Her head was bowed. Her mouth was set with purpose, moving in and out of shadow as she hurried beneath the regular streetlights.

  Perhaps Nick really had had a surprise for her – something wonderful – and she’d only stormed out because of what Paolo had said. It was a possibility. Not much of one, admittedly, but one she wanted so much to be true she could scarcely bear it. For two or three minutes she’d been stared at by her solid, glossy white front door, the rain running down it in strands, before eventually realising she was just going to have to go back and sort things out. It was all Paolo’s fault. It was always Paolo’s fault. Every time she and Nick had problems, there he was, lurking around in the background.

  Sonia had gone a good way down Burnell Road, her eyes on the glistening pavement, when the sudden roar of an engine made her look up. A decommissioned ambulance very much like Pete’s was rolling down the street towards her. She hesitated between streetlights – jeans slit an inch at the ankles, trainers ragged, hair sandy, headlight-illuminated eyes wide and brown – and, momentarily, she saw Fay looking back at her from the passenger window, her face waking with recognition.

  – Hey! shouted Sonia. Hey!

  But the ambulance rolled on towards the junction, pulling away briskly into the traffic: car horns and, not far away, the squall of police sirens. Strange. So far as she knew, no-one had been anywhere in Pete’s ambulance for months. She’d have to ask the others when she got to the house.

  Sonia resumed jogging, jumping the puddles spread across the gateway and landed, breathing heavily, on the doorstep to number six. Light filtered through the door’s frosted glass. She pulled her hood off, shook out her hair, and pressed the doorbell.

  Through the hiss of the drizzle, the police sirens were now becoming deafening. Blue was throbbing in the trees near the end of Burnell Road. Sonia was reaching up to re-press the doorbell when suddenly she noticed a scrap of paper jammed into the metal grille beside it. It had been put there in a hurry and, on it, in almost-illegible capitals, was her name.

  The sirens stopped, more or less simultaneously. With the splash of wheels in puddles, cars were pulling into the yard behind her, their engines cutting out.

  SONN, said the note. WE’VE HAD TO GO TO ANGS. WE’RE IN SHIT BIGTIME. WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T TELL ANYONE YEAH? PLEASE! I LOVE YOU, SONN. I SWEAR TO GOD I’LL MAKE THIS UP. NICK. (I LOVE YOU).

  Sonia stared at it for a second, scrambled with emotions, her hands shivering; then, carefully, she raised it up over her stomach and chest and pressed it into her mouth, chewing until it was pulped enough to go down her throat. Around her shadow, the glass was glinting blue.

  – What the hell’s she up to? Teather whispered, leaning across the roof of the Fiat Punto.

  Hooey said nothing. On the doorstep, the girl was finally beginning to turn round, her arms held out awkwardly to either side of her as if she was unsure whether to stick them straight upwards. She was skinny, freckled; pretty almost, in a direct kind of way.

  – Do not be alarmed! announced Hooey authoritatively. Do exactly as you are told and everything will be okay!

  Sonia blinked a few times, then squinted while her eyes attuned to the lights. The trees hanging bedraggled above the yard were cut in blue pulses from the dirty orange of the sky. A few feet in front of her, a grey Fiat Punto had its headlights on full beam. Its two front doors were open, and behind each, steadily, a man was becoming discernible. The one to the left was tall and stern-faced, with a dated flat-top and a bushy moustache. His left hand was on the roof, holding a mobile phone the size of a brick. The other man was a more haphazard figure: shorter, soggy-faced, crowned with an unfortunate swept-over hairstyle. From the two police cars and the van behind them a stream of black figures was emerging, bent double, scurrying silently down the path to the garden, a couple with rifles clutched to their chests.

  – Come down from the step, Hooey instructed. Keep your arms where we can see them.

  Sonia complied, her muscles so rigid that her gait was like a zombie’s. Around the house, the figures were now crouched regularly behind tree trunks, dustbins, a decomposing grass-roller, parts of the rockery. The rifle barrels were turned towards the front door.

  – Wh…? said Sonia. Her voice was tiny in the quietness. Wh… What the hell’s going on?

  – I am sure, said Hooey, his tone condescending, that you know the answer to that far better than we do.

  – I don’t! said Sonia. It came out as a bleat. I really don’t! I don’t even live here!

  – If you would be so good as to sit down in here, Hooey continued, pulling open a back door of the Punto, we would like to ask you a few questions…

  – But I don’t know anything! Sonia protested, looking round desperately, getting in. I mean, how could I? There’s not even anyone here! I don’t know a thing!

  – Well, I think you do, said Hooey, waving an arm in a sideways motion above his head.

  At once a twitch of readiness passed across every bush and potential place of concealment as far as Sonia could see. Hooey bent down through the driver’s door and reached between the seats. He reappeared holding a sleek black megaphone that might have been modelled on a bugle. This he switched on with a practised flick of the thumb and raised to his lips, directing the bell at the louring bulk of the house. For a moment, the only sound was the water dripping from the eaves.

  Hunched on the back seat, squashed against a mound of shopping bags, Sonia was beginning to wonder at the man with the flat-top. She watched his back – the checked high street-casual jumper, the nape’s suggestion of a mullet – with a nervousness that was fast becoming perplexity. He reminded her irresistibly of a schoolboy showing off.

  – This is the police! Hooey was barking. I repeat, this is the police! The house is surrounded! Come out through the front door with your hands in the air! You cannot escape!

  He lowered the megaphone and, carefully, turned the volume up another couple of notches. He then paraphrased what he’d said before.

  From behind the vehicles parked in the yard, a team of six men in black bulletproof outfits scampered towards the house – still doubled up – and pressed themselves against the walls on either side of the front door.

  Hooey took a loud intake of breath.

  – This is your final warning! he told the house. Come out now or we will be forced to bring you out ourselves!

  The eaves dripped to themselves for a second or two.

  – Very well, said Hooey. Teather, would you mind keeping an eye on this young lady?

  – Glad to, said Teather equably. He continued leaning on the car door.

  The men pressed against the wall of the house were now so eager they were practically salivating. It took the very slightest nod from Hooey for one to step back and level a kick at the Yale lock, which gave way at once with little more than a splintering noise. One by one the men sprang into the living-room, busily issuing grunted instructions to one another and trampling in boots over piles of ashtrays, saucepans, hip-hop records, crumpled beercans, British Empire magazines spilling from maroon binders and the endless other junk that was littering the floor.

  Within seconds, three or four others left the bushes to follow them inside, Inspector Hooey leading in chequered jumper and beige slacks. They fanned around the house, taking the front and back stairs two steps at a time, kicking bedroom doors open, lifting the lids of large boxes, ransacking cupboards, peering cautiously under beds, sideboards, sofas and the larger heaps of rubbish, looking behind hot-water tanks, washing machines, chests of drawers and ’70s dust-
laden curtains.

  Hooey realised at once that the house was empty. Not that there’d been any great sense of habitation on his earlier visit, but you got a nose for presence once you’d been doing this sort of thing for long enough, and this was, if ever he’d been in one, an empty house. Now he came to think of it, he’d known it was empty even before that girl had told him so. Partly he’d just sensed it but, if he were to be honest, it was hardly to be wondered at. The whole business of the raid had taken far too long: the traffic, assembling the men, the tap on the phone call.

  He’d had to go in, though, obviously. He could hardly have stood around outside with Teather there, smoking nonchalantly. Hooey had had the nickname Bronson when they were at school together, and it was how he still thought of himself. Bronson: the brooding loner, honourable but dangerous. A hell of a good nickname, Hooey reflected, even if it had had more to do with the uncontrollable hair on his upper lip than his fighting prowess. Bronson was the man he wanted Teather to see. The man who went into houses!

  By this point, the more zealous officers were scouring the walls for hidden cavities and the garden for a refuge of some sort: an old air-raid shelter, for instance. Hooey was elsewhere, and he didn’t attempt to stop them, even to point out that the house had obviously been built some years after the end of the war. Instead he turned his attentions to finding a pole: a line of enquiry which took him down the landing, through two heaps of books, clothes, broken furniture and mould, and finally into the peeling pink-carpeted mess of the bathroom. Where, in a corner, he found a suitable, never-unwrapped mop, which he took back out onto the landing and began prodding at the attic’s trapdoor.

  Even with the two front doors open, the smell of fish in the Fiat Punto was becoming unbearable. The bags beside Sonia were spilling slowly in every direction – upset, presumably, by frenzied cornering on the road to get there. The nearest, at any rate, contained a number of poorly wrapped packages which were in the process of toppling onto her lap. Sonia suspected they were haddock.