Heavy, p.35
Heavy, page 35
“What about that kid with the duck vest?”
“I said shut up.”
“What’ll you do if I don’t?” said Ernie, childish in a sudden acute stab of fear. They were in the middle of nowhere: it was cold, and they had no food. Exactly the same conditions as before. Dick was even out of sight.
He looked at the fire and thought, Does it matter if I die?
When he looked up, Jack was staring at the sky. He hand one hand over his mouth, and breath came out in jets of steam between his fingers.
Ernie put his hands, rendered normal by gloves, into his armpits, and said, “I’ll give you this, you were both trying damn hard to keep us fed.”
“For God’s sake,” Jack said, between his fingers. “Enough.”
Who do you think you are? Ernie asked himself. He remembered Xiao Huli, face-to-face with her daughter – the girl had grown up taller than her mother – as he pretended not to be there, as he shuffled through his treachery, his little missives back to the motherland, under all of their noses. Who do you think you are? Xiao Huli had said, to the girl: Who do you think you are that you choose who must be punished and who must be saved? What do you think you know that makes your fists righteous and not brutal? You were never raised to be a monster.
Ernie stretched out his hands to the fire. You were never raised to punish anyone. He’d been made for something else, and he’d been good at it, once. Good enough for the bloody wireless. Good enough for the applause.
“I remember singing God Save the King,” he said. “I’m not singing it again. You’ll have to find a different song.”
“Queen,” said Jack.
He meant to correct him: Ernie realised it almost immediately. In the second where he didn’t, his breath came out of him as if Jack had reached over and punched him in the stomach. Winded, all he could think was: If you knew, why did you never say?
Ernie collected himself. The cloud of his own breath in front of him hung like a sign labelling him for a bloody fool. He said, “I can’t say I care to have either of them saved. Your church songs are all about salvation, aren’t they?”
Jack said, “Some of them.”
“Sing one of them,” said Ernie. “I’ll work it out.”
“No,” said Jack, turning back up to the stars. “No hymns.”
“Why not?”
The answer he got shut his mouth for him like a slamming door.
“God left me,” said Jack. “Sing something else.”
The fire danced and flickered. Ernie sank down until his hat no longer protruded above the wall. His arse was already beginning to hurt from the hard ground. He swallowed once or twice, and tried to remember anything that wasn’t A Revolutionary Song. “Didn’t you learn nothing in the army?”
“Fuck that,” said Jack, with equal force. “Wait. Yes I did.”
Ernie put his fingertip in his mouth, unthinking. The glove tasted repulsive and the pain of pressure on his nailbed jolted him. No time for innuendo: no time for jokes.
“Go on,” he said, grimacing at the pain.
“My voice is fucked,” said Jack, with real sorrow. A monster sobbing in the starlight, Ernie thought. Beyond comprehension.
“Mine too,” he said. “We’re both fucked. Who’s going to hear?”
Jack opened his mouth, and in a voice which came from the depths of the earth and hit flats in the roof of his throat, but which had lost none of its drive and clarity, sang, “Mama, he treats your daughter mean.”
Well fuck me, Ernie said to himself, either you are a damn queen or you know more than you’re letting on.
He replied in kind, wincing at the effort, wincing at the sound of his voice, wincing at the last time he’d sung this, when he could still dance, when he still thought he had something to smile about. It was slower, now, than the radio.
They got tangled. The verses came out of order. Jack tripped over his tongue and said something about women who fucking well deserved to be treated mean; Ernie lost his place and forgot the words and heard himself wander out of tune as he tried to reconcile Jack’s basso profundo with the piercing treble he’d aired two decades ago.
He laughed. In that moment it wasn’t the same bitter, skulking laugh that accompanied half of his thoughts, drenched in irony like a gravy. It just came out of him like blood from a wound, pressed out by the absurdity: their broken voices, their broken bodies, their cold and alien resting place, the unfathomable coincidence that had brought the three of them together again. His broken heart, and whatever had gone missing from Jack Ridell that made an atheist of a would-be clergyman.
Jack laughed. He sounded stupid, empty-headed. He laughed again, and sounded like the angelic little boy who’d shown up with Dick, dragging wreckage out of the waves while his hair stuck to his face. Eleven, twelve, and heart-wrenchingly beautiful.
They ploughed on into another verse, colliding with each other’s lines.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” Dick asked, as his foot fell on the top of the wall behind Ernie’s head.
Ernie ducked out of the way.
“We’re in the middle of enemy territory,” Dick snapped, a sack in each hand. “We’re trying to escape detection so that no one else has to die, and you’re sitting here making a racket that would wake every last track worker including the ones Ridell just killed.”
He dropped the sacks between Ernie and Jack, and stepped off the wall, his boots flinging snow onto Ernie’s lap.
“Are you mad?”
“Just trying to keep our spirits up,” said Ernie, peering up.
Dick’s head, silhouetted against the stars, showed no visible expression.
“Please,” he said, exasperated, “don’t make this mission any more taxing than it already is. What if someone had caught you unawares?”
“Then we’d be dead,” said Ernie.
“Precisely,” said Dick, picking up the sacks again. “Do try to think of quieter ways to keep your spirits up, Ernie. There have to be some.”
You’ve been at my bloody file, Ernie thought, as Dick paused on the far side of the fire. He’d heard the inference in the Captain’s voice as loud as a scream. You know. I’m hardly going to find any of that out here.
He glanced at Jack, who was sullenly poking the fire, silent as a statue.
“I’d rather not come back and find you dead,” said Dick, warmly, hoisting the sack again.
“I don’t see that’s my problem,” Ernie said, and meant every word of it. Die now, or in a week? Was it any different?
Heavy: Eighteen
It happened without any kind of warning that Pig could see.
One minute he had the pincer of Number One fitted under a rail, midway between two rivets, ready to pull upward in synch with Maureen in Number Two, diverting the rails until they broke, and the next—
When he tried to determine what had happened, all Pig could think was that he had been kicked by a very large horse. In the absence of horses, he had to suppose he had been electrocuted.
—There was an unpleasant sizzling noise. Pig found himself staring at the sky, straight up into a darkening blue in which not even the smallest smear of a cloud could be found. His chest felt as if someone had slammed a tonne of lead into him at a speed he had only ever seen from flying shrapnel.
His skin was singed around the places it touched the bare metal of the machine. His heart beat erratically, a ringing in his ears. He couldn’t understand why he was looking at the sky. He was still strapped into the cradle.
The straps were uncomfortable, but he lay on his back – the gyro must be completely out – someone was talking.
Eventually Pig grasped that he was, in fact, lying in a toppled saboteuchine, listening to the hiss of snow vaporising.
He lay in the cradle for a little longer, trying to remember how to move his arms. They twitched once or twice, but he succeeded in slipping them out of the gauntlets. He undid the straps, and tried to coax himself into sitting up.
Pig shoved his hands into the snow banked around him. It stung as badly as the burns, but he held them in place, his tongue clamped between his teeth.
Somewhere to his right he heard Maureen swearing like a docker.
She seemed to be unhurt, in the main, although she interrupted her own tirade to add, “Bollocks, I’m on fire.”
Pig turned his head very slowly, his hands still shoved into snow banks and his legs still strapped into the sab – and now that he looked, smouldering very slightly – to watch Maureen rise out of the saboteuchine cradle like a phoenix and roll energetically in the snow until her coat stopped burning.
“Are you hurt, Irene?” she asked, getting to her feet and shaking off the snow. “Hrm. I should say, are you badly hurt? I don’t imagine falling that distance is good for anyone. Good god—” she started to laugh, “—my hands are shaking. I think my hair must be standing on end. Is it standing on end?”
Miss Gaitskill answered in a voice which shook as much as Maureen’s hands that she could stand up, and would do so as soon as she could get her breath.
“You’re a trifle singed,” said Maureen, “I’d offer you my hand but it appears to have bits of wool fused to it. I do hope we have bandages. Perhaps I should – see, Mr. Ridell has the right idea, I shall commune with the snow some more. Ow.”
Pig looked about him. The rails remained intact, although a tree some yards away was now alight, burning like a pile of tinder, surrounded by melting snow. It occurred to him that if he’d fallen backward with Ernie hanging from the back, there was a very good chance the man was dead beneath him.
It also occurred to him to wonder where the hell Foley was. The Captain had taken it upon himself to scope out the land ahead once more – they had come to the edge of the handkerchief map and he seemed jittery – but something like this should have brought every person for miles. The accident couldn’t have been quiet.
He took his hands out of the snow, and began to unstrap his legs.
“I’m alright,” Ernie said, in answer to something Pig couldn’t hear, some distance beyond his head. “Not dead, nothing broken.”
“That,” said Maureen, still rather shaky in her voice and too loud to seem sincere, “was a close bloody shave.”
“No,” Ernie said, apparently addressing Miss Gaitskill, “I’m going to lie here a little longer and then see about getting up.”
Pig released the last of the straps, stepped out of the cradle of Number One, and promptly fell flat on his face in the snow.
“Yes, I—” he heard Mauren say, as he levered himself to his feet again.
“Shut up a minute,” Ernie said.
Pig brushed snow out of his mouth, spat snow onto snow. There was a little blood. He hadn’t noticed it. As he looked about he found himself surveying them all with fresh eyes: a stranger coming upon them would think they were vagrants, beggars lost in the snow, if he didn’t see the hulking bodies of the saboteuchines. Maureen’s dirty red hair protruded from the bottom of a leather pilot’s cap – the woollen hat clearly lost to the smoke – and her coat was blackened. She had soot and grease on her face and wild eyes. Miss Gaitskill, struggling to stand up, had sparks still burning out in the ends of her hair, which had recently become the home of a certain amount of debris from the snow. She had scorch marks on her hands, her face grimed with the exhaust of the machine.
Ernie lay on his back in the snow and swore at the sky.
“Alright?” Pig asked, coming to offer his aching, blistering hand.
“No,” said Ernie, spread-eagled like Christ on the cross. “And neither are you.”
“Like being kicked by a horse,” said Pig.
“I wouldn’t know,” said Ernie, “I don’t go near the bloody animals. I think my hair’s gone straight.” He squinted up at Pig, and avoided the offer of a hand a second time. “Leave me be, I’ll get up when I’m able.”
“Someone forgot to re-flange the turbine,” said Pig, turning away to look for Foley again. Someone was running toward them from the next twist of the river valley, but at this distance it could have been anyone.
“Don’t try to pin that on me,” said Ernie, from the ground. “I checked that thing three times.”
* * *
Ernie had been told: the charge delay on the encased nitrate was supposed last until they had dragged the clumping saboteuchines out of the reduced blast range.
The stuff came out of the recently-retrieved trunk, wrapped and cradled to save it from bumps. Further encased, it was supposed to drive a chisel very hard into several of the concrete bedding sleepers which raised the iron rails.
“Additional damage,” said Dick, when he explained. “We’re closer, now, and I want them to be slowed down enough that they can’t find the stuff further out until they try to connect up.”
“Belt and braces,” said Ernie, examining the encased nitrate. It was heavy, and the whole device made him want to set it down very carefully a long way from him. “That’s the Dick Foley I know.”
“Caution is our watchword,” agreed Dick, with a smile. “Try to spread the problem out a bit down the line. The casing should muffle the noise a little but I have to admit, this isn’t something I’ve ever tested.”
“And these walls echo.”
“Well,” said Dick, as Ernie put it down very carefully, “as long as you don’t feel the need to start singing again to test the acoustics.”
Ernie had left them with the saboteuchine pincers clasped around them, and clambered laboriously onto the back of Number One. The idea was that they tore the track, laid the charge, detonated, backed off during the grace period, and then returned to some cracked sleepers that could be dragged further apart.
What happened was not as prescribed.
He watched Jack lay the charge, and he watched the charge detonate, and he opened his mouth to shout, back, and then the world erupted in a flurry of motion.
He had a brief, strange feeling that he was flying.
The snow hit him in the back and knocked the wind and sense out of him with one almighty kick.
Ernie contemplated the sky above as his breath clouded it in irregular puffs.
“Bugger me,” said a woman’s voice some way off, “I’m on bloody fire.”
Ernie lay still, trying to fit the words to the tune of Blow Me, I’m The East Wind, but it wouldn’t quite scan. He blinked a few times, felt his jaw, tried to work out if the ringing in his ears and the smell of cooking meat were real or imagined.
It smelled familiar, and his stomach growled.
He brought his hand up over his face. The glove was intact, although some of it was now stuck to his skin with more than mere sweat.
“What the fuck happened?” Jack demanded, looming over him like a storm cloud, blotting out the sun.
“Foley’s wrong about the charge delay on those things,” said Ernie, scrambling upright and almost colliding with Jack’s legs in his haste. “But besides that—” he glanced over to Number Two, where Irene was throwing handfuls of snow onto the smouldering back of Maureen’s coat, “—I don’t know.”
“Something shorted out,” said Jack.
“Chisel in the circuit,” said Ernie, watching Irene trying to flatten her hair. His own, he thought, probably looked similar. He could smell burnt wool, burning hair. Jack’s mouth and ears were bloody. “Must have got them while they were touching the line.”
“Bloody awful luck,” said Maureen, in answer to something Irene said. “I think it’s out now. Is it out now? I want a cigarette. This is not the sort of escapade that one can shoulder through without a smoke.”
“How’s the sab?” Ernie asked, looking back at the fallen giant.
“Not good.”
They walked to the blackened metal figure and peered inside. Several of the hydraulic lines had melted. The side of the diesel tank, thankfully empty, was stoved in. Under the rim of one metal plate Ernie could just about see several shattered tube valves, melted resistors, and some wiring which had torched the backboard it was screwed to.
“That’s an understatement,” he said, putting his hands into his overall pockets. They chafed, but he supposed he was going to be getting used to that, as he had the new arrangement of teeth in his mouth and the tenderness of his fingertips. “I don’t know much about machines but I’m betting an auto mechanic would tell you this is fucked.”
He sucked his teeth in imitation of the lads in question.
“Rotten luck,” said Maureen, coming up behind them.
“Luck,” Ernie repeated.
* * *
When Dick found them, they were sitting on the sled as Irene pried wool out of Ernie’s palms and Jack tried to persuade Maureen to let him put some of their meagre medical alcohol onto the burns on hers.
“Why’ve we stopped?” he asked.
“Because we’re down two sabs,” said Ernie, flinching away from Irene’s fingernails, “and your squadron have been on fire.”
Dick went over to the machines and peered inside first one, then the other. He straightened up, took a very long breath, and said in tones of saintly forbearance, “That’s unfortunate.”
“You’re taking this awfully well,” Maureen remarked, “Ow, you son of a—” she jerked her hand away from Jack’s ministrations and clamped it between her thighs.
“We’re not too far from Station V’s remains,” said Dick, as if this explained his demeanour. He looked more annoyed than devastated: a man reassessing his options, not mourning the complete failure of a mission. “I thought we weren’t far off. I should have preferred to have left these under cover for future use, but it can’t be helped.”
“And if the SinoSoviets get their hands on them?” Ernie demanded. Irene caught his wrist impatiently and he squirmed as she dug out another fibre.
“Good luck to them,” said Dick, raising his eyebrows. “I am going to compound this maintenance failure with my pistol and they shall have no evidence left to go on.”
He jumped down from the sled.
“You’ll need to divvy up supplies between you,” he added. “You’re going to be walking the rest of the way.”
