Heavy, p.33
Heavy, page 33
Maureen contemplated this a little further over her supposed breakfast – there was rabbit today, and to her surprise Mr. Ridell, always so vehement in his refusal of meat, ate a leg. He refused any other part, but seemed quite comfortable with the tiny bones. Quite comfortable, too, with the presence of the head.
Diane’s birthday wasn’t all that important, she thought, but it was jolly interesting to wonder why the Manual Labouring Classes didn’t Throw Down Their Tools. One understood rather better now what they had to gain simply in terms of not being bent double by bloody work.
Outside the snow had abated. It still lay everywhere like someone had sneezed while carrying cheese curds, but the glaring white landscape with its prominent black rails was free of any cold wet stuff falling down the back of her neck.
“There will be track-laying gangs before long,” Captain Foley said, as they towed the sled to the chains and sabs. “Don’t let them take you unawares. And don’t let them raise an alarm.”
Maureen stopped before the great grim body of Number Two, her hands already on the grip-holds, the turbines re-flanged, the fuel cap secure, and turned to Gaitskill. “I suppose that means he’s going to have Mr. Ridell snap more necks, does it?” she said, with severity she hadn’t been intending upon. Doubtless the Captain Had His Reasons, but even out of earshot she had been able to imagine the noise. Mr. Ridell had returned with a face that matched the snow for whiteness, around the stark red lines of his scars.
The whole episode seemed cruel, not only to the poor chaps who’d had the misfortune to be doing their job, but to all of them.
“No talking about that,” the woman said. “Just do the job.”
Maureen thought she would far rather have either ridden on the back, where she was substantially less likely to be bruised by the straps, the pistons, the pinch of the plates, and substantially less likely to have sparks spitting into her hair; but adjusting the cradle for Gaitskill’s much smaller height would take an unconscionably long time. She climbed in.
“D’you do much Union surveillance when you’re back at home?” she mused, as Gaitskill got to work on the straps. “I mean, it must come up. Do you ever wonder about what the chaps you’re watching are thinking about, what they believe in?”
“Please stop talking,” said the woman in a resigned voice. She finished the last of the straps, and checked the gyro.
Maureen put her hands into the clutch bars and tried to stretch a little under the yoke. The turbine wasn’t even running yet and already the whole contraption felt heavy and somehow soporific, as if it were sucking the will out of her. She twisted her head.
“You know if you were to observe my Chapel you’d see terrifically little in the way of Subversive Activity. Everyone’s so very cowed.”
Gaitskill didn’t reply. The turbine began, rumbling and buzzing, and the engines followed suit.
Maureen sighed to herself. The highlight of the damn day would now be getting out of the wretched cradle either to pee or to sleep. What a ghastly, dispiriting business – destroying the work of chaps like the ones – the ones that Mr. Ridell had been obliged to – well. Destroying chaps’ works and apparently also destroying chaps themselves. Unsavoury.
Quite bloody unsavoury.
As Number One, piloted as ever by Mr. Ridell himself, took several clanking steps forward, Maureen urged herself into lockstep with it. She imagined the sensation of walking a saboteuchine was not dissimilar to walking in leg callipers. Mummy had told her that when she was born there had been a polio outbreak and that she was jolly lucky to have survived it – her twin brother, for example, had not. She had escaped without fever, without stiffness and without muscle waste leading to callipers, and proceeded to never come down with the mumps, either. On the whole, Mummy had said, Maureen had a remarkable constitution.
“It’s just me, really, that does anything,” she added.
Remarkable constitution or not, she did feel that the sab played merry hell with one’s arms and legs. She was quite sure she was slowly being stretched.
“Miss Gaitskill,” Maureen said, above the roar of the turbine, as the woman hung from the back like a prim jockey on a vast and wilful mechanical horse, “did you know that the Organised Labour Movement after Forty-Nine campaigned to take in refugees from France and the Low Countries and so on? And the Interim Government said no?”
She received no reply. The white landscape ahead rose, far away in the clear air, into mountains.
“The Union of Farmers tried to warn about French Wheat too,” she said, “but the Interim Government complained that it was Protectionism. Imagine if they’d listened! We’d have thousands more people to run the country!”
It occurred to Maureen, briefly, that if the machine she was operating really did run on U-250 rods, it would be as if she had eaten nothing but French Wheat since the day she was born. There might be some degree of protection in the casing – certainly the fuel slots were well-protected, and didn’t look as used as the diesel tank – but from what they’d learned about radiation in school it didn’t seem awfully likely that it was doing her a great deal of good.
“The Allied Armies have to present a unified front,” she heard Gaitskill saying, far away and very small. “You can’t – oof – ow—”
“Should I slow down, Miss Gaitskill?”
“You can’t,” Gaitskill said in a louder voice, “allow us to look indecisive in the face of constant observation by the SinoSoviets. They use it against us.”
“Well yes,” said Maureen, as the tracks came into view. “But they use everything, do they not? And one rather thinks that the ability to dissent and come to a mutually-beneficial détente is one of the things that separates socialism from communism.”
Gaitskill went silent.
Maureen brought Number Two to touch the rails with one claw. They had neat rivets holding them to concrete sleepers. The snow had fallen into the ruts of vehicles below. The railway was still in progress, here, she thought. It was still being built, or repaired.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that,” she added, when she realised Gaitskill had spoken again.
“You’re a ‘revolutionary’ fantasist,” Gaitskill said, in a rather unflattering tone. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand that everyone I’ve ever met has been too scared to stick their head up,” said Maureen, fitting one claw under the rail with a sense of regret. “And it’s not the bally SinoSoviets they’re afraid of any more.”
“I can’t hear you,” said Gaitskill, quite distinctly.
* * *
“Thank you,” Maureen said, four hours later, as Gaitskill helped her from the cradle to find a bush to relieve herself behind, and to take a cigarette. “God, I can barely feel my knees. One does suppose that’s an improvement, I think if I could feel them they would only ache. If knees could talk!”
“Maybe you’re at the wrong angle,” Gaitskill suggested, as Maureen took out a cigarette and took several hasty steps back from Number Two, recalling earlier admonition.
“I’ve been in every blasted angle that God-awful machine can offer and they are all turning me into paste,” Maureen objected. “I will be seven feet tall and luminous with erratic electrons by the time we finish this.”
She stomped over the snow to a work hut some few yards to the side of the now-severed track. For the sake of whomever normally occupied the ruddy thing she hoped they weren’t there now.
Returning from her undignified substitute for a women’s convenience – and of course they’d not brought napkins with them, because the entire mission had been planned by men – Maureen found Gaitskill trying to adjust the gyro on Number Two. For a moment she wondered if the woman was trying to sabotage her.
“I’m not sure,” said Gaitskill, “but I think it was out of alignment.”
“We shall see,” said Maureen, heaving herself back into the cradle without enthusiasm. “Oh good God it’s like tipping back on a school chair, how odd.”
“I never did that,” remarked Gaitskill, adjusting the ankle strap. “Mr. Forties caned people who did that.”
“The trick is not to get caught,” Maureen advised.
“Did you?”
“Well I’m sure you have files on this sort of thing,” said Maureen, testing her arms under the yoke. “I got a thrashing once or twice. Hurts like the devil, but once you see they’ll do that to you for merely swinging on the back of a chair it does rather diminish its effectiveness in keeping one from, say, breaking into tuck shop.”
“I don’t think we have anything on you being a juvenile delinquent.”
“My sister broke into tuck,” Maureen said, recalling the episode. It had been formative in her views on the effectiveness of corporal punishment. “I ratted her out. She got beaten black and blue and I got a pummelling for being a snitch.”
Gaitskill, apparently finished, remained standing in the snow. “From your sister?”
“From the housemistress. Oh, and from Diane, and Diane’s friends. Couldn’t sit down for a week.” Maureen craned her neck as Gaitskill began climbing up the back of the machine. “All aboard?”
“Ready,” said Gaitskill, a little later.
She took two or three steps in the sab, further down the track: passing damage already done by Number One. Further, and further, following the guidelines Lieutenant Travers and Graves had left them with; space out the ruination of the track to make it harder to repair.
“So you and your chums were very prim, at school?” Maureen asked, trying to imagine what the little woman must have done. Charitable Works, probably. Knitting For The Lads At The Front. Perhaps she was an impossible swot. “Chess club? Were your friends those girls who always seem to hang about the school chaplain making eyes at him and calling it piety?”
Gaitskill said nothing. For one worrying moment Maureen thought she might have fallen off, but there was the loud hiss of water on the joints of the sab, and further ‘silence’, punctuated by the eternal deafening sounds of the machine in motion.
“I didn’t have any friends,” said Gaitskill at last, so quietly that Maureen could have attributed it to the call of a bird, if there had been any birds to blame it on.
“Nor did I,” she said, cheerfully. “Just as well, really. Half the girls in that school wanted for courage and the other half wanted for brains and all of them were dull. Don’t see any of them out here having the adventure of a lifetime, do you?”
That night they were back in the open, under the meagre canopy of the parachutes stretched over the sled. One was far too hot inside the cradle – the proximity of the motor and the exertion made one sweat like a pig – and as soon as one got out and stopped hefting things one became exceptionally cold. The fire didn’t seem to help.
Maureen munched on the disgusting compressed ration and tried to will another bunny rabbit into showing up. Mr. Ridell had looked as if he wanted to be sick, butchering the little thing before, but Mr. Shoe had simply said, He knows what he’s doing.
Captain Foley had said, “He knows what he’s doing, he’s a gamekeeper’s son, aren’t you, Ridell?” in a tone of voice which Maureen thought was not altogether friendly.
Shortly after they stopped for the night she saw Gaitskill go to Captain Foley. There was a conversation too quiet for her to catch the most of. She came away sharpish after Captain Foley laid a hand on her shoulder. She looked quite crestfallen.
Maureen squinted at Gaitskill across the fire. The woman had wrapped herself in one of the blankets and was experimenting with turning her compressed ration into soup with the addition of snow, fire, and patience.
“Is that working?”
“Needs pepper,” said Gaitskill, trying some.
Maureen put her hand over her mouth. It hadn’t occurred to her, in all this time, with all this pursuit and privation and jolly hard going, and Gaitskill’s tough little exterior, and her unstinting devotion to Captain Foley, and to her Cause, and to her God, that she might also have a sense of humour.
In the morning the sun rose red and watery as a drunkard’s eye, and Maureen fell face-first in the snow as she got out of the sled.
“Very refreshing,” she remarked, hauling herself to her feet. “Brr. I’m awake now. I bet I still smell like a horse’s backside, though.”
Mr. Shoe, who was closest, gave her an experimental sniff from five feet away. “Yes.” He turned his head and sniffed at himself. “It might also be me,” he conceded.
They all ponged, Maureen thought, but at least they ponged together. She had read oodles of books which said that shared hardships could forge unshakeable loyalties, but it never seemed to work out with her Chapel and it certainly hadn’t worked on the shop floor at Golding Holdings.
It was supposed to be her turn riding back for Mr. Ridell, and Gaitskill’s in the cradle for Number Two, but when Maureen came to the sabs Gaitskill said, “Would you mind taking the back on Number Two today?”
She said, “Do you mind being in the cradle? I’ll take another go if you want.”
* * *
The morning they had something which purported to be rabbit for breakfast, which Irene knew from observation to look more like a large rat, she felt the cold all the way into the very marrow of her bones. Captain Foley said that they had made excellent progress so far, and need only continue their current rate to make the mission a success, but he seemed to be withholding something.
They’d left the church behind days before. She said a prayer at the doorway with a sinking heart, murmuring the words, asking for forgiveness for her laxity, for her doubts; asking for strength, asking for guidance.
Irene got onto the back of the saboteuchine on the morning of the possible-rat meat with a sense of gloom descending about her. On the adjacent machine, Ernie – Mr. Shoe – Ernie had looped his hands through the straps and looked as if he was dangling there like old clothing.
She thought of the descriptions in his file again. The Standing Cure: When a man stood on his tiptoes, suspended from his wrists, for as long as was deemed necessary.
It seemed, on paper, so ordinary, so unremarkable. And there he was, with his shoulders out of shape, forever. His curls made loops the breadth of fingers, and he screamed whenever he was pushed into a confined space, and it was she who had let it happen.
Braced on the back of Number Two, trapped in this thought, Irene found herself confronted with Maureen’s sudden enthusiastic ideology and a history lesson which seemed determined that no wrong had ever been done by her precious Unions.
Irene slumped in the straps, caught between the rock of her conscience and the quagmire of Maureen’s seditious bluster.
“Of course then the Unions recognised the Women’s Union and the Labour Movement and the Suffrage Movement joined hands,” Maureen hectored, as Irene put water on the sab joints to help them cool. “Which is really quite symbolic of what the Labour Movement is all about, you see – we help you, you help us, all of us are stronger for standing together against those who are, when you think about it, rather few in number.”
Something prickled on the back of Irene’s neck.
“Alone we are weak, together we are strong,” said Maureen, in a sing-song voice. “You know, even the most remarkable individual can’t go far without help. That’s what the Labour Movement understands, you see. Not just ‘contribute and we will run things for you’, the way things are now. With full socialism, everyone’s individual voice is heard and creates a mighty chorus.”
She went on like this all morning; Irene tried not to listen. Sometimes it sounded like a tirade against the order which protected England from the SinoSoviets, and sometimes like she was deliberately hinting at something. Irene feigned deafness several times, and when the apparently unflagging woman got down to have a cigarette and promptly fell down, all she said was, “Whoops, knees are buggered,” before enthusiastically outlining what socialised healthcare could do for a nation.
Finally she went away.
Irene stood shivering, the smell of mechanical lubricant clinging to her. Maureen was walking awkwardly, and it occurred to Irene that perhaps the gyro wasn’t sitting properly. The mission couldn’t afford more dead weight, with Mr. Shoe unable to pilot a saboteuchine, and she couldn’t operate the thing day in, day out the way Ridell did, with Maureen out of action.
Irene took the initiative, and examined the gyro.
Ridell, who had remained in his cradle, was bleeding from the face again. Day in, day out didn’t seem to do him good either. When she replaced the thing she wasn’t sure if it was an improvement, but if Maureen wasn’t in pain any more maybe she’d stop talking to cover it up.
Of course, if she was simply trying to turn Irene against Captain Foley, the way it sounded, there would be no respite.
* * *
By the end of the day’s work Irene felt unusually exhausted. She’d been about to caution Maureen not to talk politics any more when the woman leapt, of her own volition, into nostalgia.
Irene was perturbed. She had never had the opportunity to review any materials on Maureen Phelps, because no one had ever considered Maureen Phelps a potential problem. The woman took it as a matter of course that she was watched, judged, and potentially imperilled by her activities, but continued with them anyway.
“And then there was the time my sister pinned a whole scheme with stolen tuck on me,” said Maureen, who had been spitting out tales of school japes as if the work wasn’t tiring her and as if school had existed purely to muck around. Irene was amazed she’d learned a single thing, if half of what she was saying was true. Probably not, Irene thought: Captain Foley had assured her back at the Station that the woman could only be a fantasist of the most preposterous order.
Irene clutched the straps.
“Kicked the SWEARWORD out of me,” Maureen finished, with a certain triumphant tone.
There’s no call for language, thought Irene, but she said nothing.
