Heavy, p.36
Heavy, page 36
“Maintenance failure?” Jack asked, making a slow grab for Maureen’s arm. “Is that what he thinks this is?”
* * *
Pig took the heavier supplies, including the canister full of U-250 rods in their jars, dragged on a line behind him. He felt their weight, but it seemed to pale into insignificance alongside the echo of Ernie’s words: I don’t think this is an accident. I don’t think anyone forgot about the turbines at all.
They followed Foley down the river valley, spread out in the snow with yards between them. Miss Gaitskill brought up the rear; her pack was light but her legs were short, and she seemed to be struggling. Maureen ploughed ahead of them, not far behind Foley, a sack over each shoulder. Her gait was uneven, and she had to wrap the sacks around her wrists to save her palms, but she did not seem to be taking the journey in anything other than her formidable stride.
In between them, Ernie caught up to Pig with some difficulty, and said, “Think about it, Jack. The process of maintaining those beasts is like walking and breathing to us by now.”
“So one of us miss-stepped,” said Pig, dragging the U-250 rods in their husks behind him. He hadn’t given much thought to who. It hardly seemed fair. They’d all suffered for it, and blaming them wouldn’t get the grit from their hands or the smoke from their lungs any faster.
“I’m not so sure we did,” said Ernie, bent almost double under rations and what in the Army had fallen under the euphemistic heading of ‘sundries’. “It did happen conveniently close to where they were being decommissioned.”
Pig wanted to point out that in Service you didn’t throw things away until they were completely useless, and then you made absolutely sure the enemy couldn’t use them. The sun began to race towards the horizon to their right. What he said was, “Shut the fuck up and march.”
“Can’t march, hips don’t move that way any more,” Ernie said, short on breath. They took a few more yards in blessed silence, and Ernie added, “We’re surplus to requirements too, aren’t we?”
“Shut up,” Pig said, tugging the rope around the canister harder. The weight of the U-250’s cladding acted as an anchor, and until Ernie’s physical state overcame him there would be no pulling away from the conversation by speeding away.
“When you came back drunk that night at the Station—”
“Shut up.”
“You seemed to pick up that cold awfully quickly,” said Ernie. “Smelled weird, too. Not just booze. Maureen mentioned it the other night.”
“He needs us,” said Pig, acknowledging the thread of the conversation without wanting to. He stopped, and changed his grip on the rope. “Or he wouldn’t have brought us.”
“Needed,” said Ernie. “What’s going to happen now we’re not necessary?”
“He needs us,” said Pig. “What do you think Dick Foley: Boy Hero will do if we’re surplus, any road?”
Ernie drew his eyebrows, or what was left of them, together, and said, “Boy Hero, yes. I’m not so sure about the man.”
“He needs us,” Pig repeated, and to his own ears he sounded like a man at sea, “or he wouldn’t have brought us.”
“I—”
“He needs us or he wouldn’t have brought us,” said Pig, pulling the rope.
“If you say so,” said Ernie, falling back. “Irene! How’re you holding up?”
* * *
One evening before it happened, after a meal of Compact Rations was enlivened by the presence of a fish that had been frozen into place in the river bed, Maureen dropped her feet almost directly into the fire for the sake of warmth, and asked Mr. Shoe what he’d done in China.
She had not been expecting a straight reply – the man was a spy, after all – but to her surprise, he took one of her cigarettes, lit it, and said, “My brother and I collected intelligence.”
“Well yes,” said Maureen, who had known that much already, and she stopped short as Mr. Shoe gave her back her lit cigarette. “Brother?”
“Simon and I were identical twins,” said Mr. Shoe, with the air of a man beginning a long tale. Irene seemed to have fallen asleep, wrapped up in her coat, and Mr. Ridell was assisting Captain Foley in hacking up a fallen tree as much by kicking it as by using any sort of blade.
“Use the bloody sab,” she heard Mr. Ridell say.
“They’re for the mission,” said Captain Foley. “This is personnel maintenance, Pig.”
“Simon was in Chengdu, which is in the centre of the Chinese states,” Mr. Shoe went on, drawing a sort of map in the air with his gloved fingers, “and I was in Nanjing, which is on the coast, here, by the narrow bit of sea where the Japanese first landed in the thirties. Not all the time, but those were our bases.”
Maureen drew her knees up to her chest in imitation of the man’s own position. “So anyone reporting the activities of an Englishman in Chengdu even with a photograph—”
“Still had to contend with the fact the man had been in Nanjing the whole time, yes,” said Mr. Shoe, with a nod. “You’re not daft, are you?”
“Kick it in the middle,” Captain Foley said in the voice of someone talking to an idiot child.
“He settled in with a couple of contacts he was careful never to mention,” said Mr. Shoe, “and I made a mistake.”
“Trusting the wrong person?” Maureen hazarded. In all the books she’d read, that was the problem.
“I have a history of that,” Mr. Shoe said sourly. Maureen thought it might not be terribly useful for a spy to have that tendency, but she kept this to herself. “No, I made friends. It’s a bad idea to start caring about people when you’re operating undercover. Even if they aren’t wedded to an ideal you don’t share—”
Maureen waited for him to continue, but he only frowned at the fire for a minute.
“Go on?”
“I suppose no one knows about her work, here.”
“Whose?” Maureen asked, her chin resting on her folded arms.
“Xiao Huli. The Little Fox.” Mr. Shoe seemed to be addressing the flames. Maureen held her breath. Anyone with a nom-de-guerre, especially a woman, was worth discussion. She wondered if they’d been lovers – the expression on Mr. Shoe’s face was one of acute, if detached, suffering.
“I don’t think so,” she said, at last. “Was she a guerrilla fighter?”
Mr. Shoe shook his head. “She was a poet.”
Maureen tried to maintain her interest. One could wield weapons through the use of words – wasn’t that what the Germans had supposedly done, before they got made into nuclear glass in Forty-Nine? Hadn’t her teachers talked about the value of Roman propaganda when they were covering Fallen Empires?
“She wrote what was deeply subversive work and printed it, and I helped to distribute it,” said Mr. Shoe, looking up at the stars. “You’re supposed to ally yourself to the power structures and find yourself a position within to extract information of use to your handlers back home, Maureen, if you ever find yourself a spy. You don’t attach yourself to the underground movement unless that’s your mission.”
“I see,” said Maureen, fascinated. She had finished her cigarette without noticing. “But you became friends, and—”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“What?”
“She was old enough to be my mother,” Mr. Shoe said, with a small laugh. Halfway through it turned into a far sadder noise. “She had a daughter – about Irene’s age now, I didn’t see her so much, she left – and—” He put one hand over his face, and the conversation slowed.
For a moment Mr. Shoe stared at nothing in particular, and seemed to be feeling with his tongue inside his mouth. Diane occasionally got the same look when she was examining her molars for fragments after dinner and she thought no one was watching.
“Sometimes,” he added, apparently changing the subject. “People don’t turn out the way you hope they will.”
“They can be a terrible disappointment,” Maureen agreed, thinking of almost every interaction she had ever had with another person in the whole of her life. One never got excitement in real people that lived up to what one expected; they did boring things or wouldn’t take risks or weren’t curious and every single one of them eventually took the Queen’s Shilling and turned their back on Subversive Works.
“Love doesn’t buy loyalty,” Mr. Shoe said, tipping his head back. “I just never realised she’d do something like that.” He added something else in another language, apparently for the benefit of the sky.
The phrase struck something in Maureen’s head which had been rattling around unheard for a while, since the Station, and she dissented. “It seems to be at the moment.”
“Mm?” asked Mr. Shoe, lost in the past.
“Well,” she said, gently skirting around her indecorously-acquired evidence in favour of her theory, “I can’t think of any other reason for Mr. Ridell to stick so to Captain Foley.”
Mr. Shoe gave a hoot of laughter, and clamped his hand over his mouth. “Oh God. Maureen Phelps, the things I could—” He made a face, as if he was eating something disgusting, and his charmingly Cockney accent came back over the foreignness that had descended a moment before. “That’s guilt. Not love. Guilt.”
“Guilt?” Maureen leaned forwards, crushing her breasts into her knees in her eagerness to her this tantalising piece of evidence. “Whatever for? Is this about what happened to Mr. Ridell’s face?”
Mr. Shoe waved it away. “No. For what he did on Surt.”
“Mr. Ridell was on Surt?” Maureen exclaimed. He’d certainly never mentioned that, although it did almost explain why Mr. Wallace went out of his way to keep him on Despite Things. “He was a Surt Boy?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
Maureen gnawed on her own glove for a moment. Another cigarette would have been just the ticket, but she was trying to make them last – who knew how much longer they’d be out here in the infernal cold. “How fearfully interesting.”
“All of us were,” said Mr. Shoe. “That’s how we met. Dick – Foley, I mean – Jack Ridell, Simon, me…”
“Good heavens,” said Maureen, reaching for her hairpins as a matter of habit. She only bumped her hand on the saboteuchine skull-cap and gave it up as a lost cause. “You mean—”
“I mean,” said Mr. Shoe. “I mean I can’t tell you this, you’ll go running off into the snow.”
“Mister Shoe,” said Maureen, roundly offended. “Do I seem flappable to you?”
“Then you mustn’t tell Irene,” said Mr. Shoe, glancing at her sleeping form. “Or let on, at least to Ridell, that I’ve told you.”
“I can jolly well keep a secret,” said Maureen, indignantly.
“Keep your voice down.” Mr. Shoe stole a look at the firewood hacking as it continued, Mr. Ridell breaking down wood into smaller pieces, and Captain Foley pointing out new areas to focus on. They looked as if they had been friends for an awfully long time, accustomed to working together. Maureen recalled Mr. Ridell’s poor health at the base, his bloodshot eyes. He must be a disappointment to Captain Foley if they had known each other so long.
“Do, do go on.”
“When we first washed up there – you know about the sinking of the Taunton?”
“Yes, of course.”
Mr. Shoe shrugged, and said, “You seem too young to remember it.”
“Mummy and Daddy told us about it. I was two and a half at the time, but these things do linger.”
Mr. Shoe looked uncomfortable. “When we first washed up on Surt, Dick and Jack were the oldest among us – I mean, the oldest survivors. We looked to them. They made sure we were alright. Dick had learned all this stuff from his father – something high up in the Army, he’d served, was serving, his grandfather had been a Colonel in the Great War, you know… but he’d learned all this, survival stuff. Natural born leader.”
Maureen held her breath again.
“And Jack, Jack Ridell was from a gamekeeping family. Surt was a tough place. He understood the countryside. I’m from – you can tell where I’m from. I wouldn’t know a chicken from a bloody ostrich. He went around the place: you can eat this, don’t touch that. Built the fires. Dick found the caves. They figured out the geothermal heat thing. All of us would probably be dead if it weren’t for them.” Mr. Shoe looked pained again. He put his hands over his face. “Are you sure,” he said, in the same tone of voice, “because you’re not going to forget this. I’ve been trying for twenty years.”
“I have a very sturdy constitution, Mr. Shoe,” Maureen said, stoutly.
“I don’t doubt it.” Mr. Shoe exhaled slowly, and lowered his voice. “Food was scarce. Boys were starving. We started to sit around and do nothing because no one had the energy to move any more. You just… kept falling asleep. There was this one boy, a boy named Swineheart, who took it very bad – we didn’t know, you see, that there was anything to go back to. We thought everyone had been killed.”
Maureen nodded. Mummy and Daddy had been very, very firm on the horrors of those waiting in England for the A-bombs to come to them. The suicide rate for that year, recorded in their history books at school, had dwarfed every other year around it like a cathedral spire. No way to cover it up, not like the old days. You can’t imagine how it felt, they’d said, over and over, you were too young at the time.
“Swineheart went off wandering,” said Mr. Shoe, with a visible shudder. “And Dick and Jack split up to look for him. And. Listen. You mustn’t tell anyone.”
“Roger,” said Maureen, impatiently.
“Afterward,” Mr. Shoe said, with such emphasis that the fire danced before his words, “Dick was smitten by conscience. He told us he couldn’t keep it down. Neither could I, after that. None of us could. We had a miserable bloody time of it even by Surt standards, until the plane came. But he didn’t tell us what it was until afterward. They just said: We found a pig. We’re going to be okay.”
He repeated this line with evident disgust, his lip curling painfully at the memory.
Maureen tried to puzzle out what Mr. Shoe was hinting at, but all that she could come up with seemed so fantastical that she was sure she must have missed something. People in Real Life never did things like that. Not English people.
“What had happened,” said Mr. Shoe, his hand still on his face. “I. Have never, ever said a word of this. To anyone.”
Maureen nodded, though he couldn’t see her. The power of the confidence was immense, and she could feel the strength of some impossible secret rising up on the far side of the fire like a vast shadow.
“Dick said he found Swineheart at the bottom of one of the cliffs. Jack was already there.”
“Oh, no.” There didn’t seem to be much else to say. Of course, little boys had probably died all the time, at the time, but it seemed to have touched something in Mr. Shoe, and it never did well to point out that hundreds of little boys like Swineheart had needlessly been suffocated by their terrified parents back home, in fear of the things that never reached them.
“And Jack talked him into it. They argued, but not much.” Mr. Shoe shook his head, under his hands. “They both knew if we didn’t eat something soon there wouldn’t be anyone for the planes to pick up. They agreed they’d… just say they’d found a pig. At that point I wasn’t picky,” he said, with a sudden, almost manic laugh. “Kosher? Who cares? You’re dying!”
“They fed you this boy?” Maureen asked, only just remembering to keep her voice down.
“Yes.”
“He was already dead?” Maureen said, trying to picture them all as children. Mr. Ridell, especially, seemed as if he must have been born more than six feet tall, already pre-scarred and short on words. The child he had been, in her head, seemed like a blank space. Captain Foley was easier: he just looked as he did now, but younger. And Mr. Shoe, duplicated, must have been a terrific little boy: he was good-looking now, even after all of his suffering, and the curls and the little snub nose and the dark little eyes of two of him as a child would have captivated the kind of women who thought children were ‘adorable’.
“He was when Dick got there,” said Mr. Shoe. “Do you understand why I don’t think it’s love, Maureen?”
“But,” Maureen said.
“And why you can’t trust—” began Mr. Shoe, but Maureen cut him off. The picture in her head didn’t make any sort of sense. Loose ends flapped about all over the place. It had begun as a story and ended as a man’s memory of a child’s nightmare. Nothing added up.
“No, look here,” she said.
“What?”
“He was a boy.”
“Boys do terrible things,” said Mr. Shoe, looking hard at her across the fire. “He was eleven, there are boys with guns lying in wait in mountains in Kashmir that aren’t that old.”
Maureen shook her head. “You mistake me, Mr. Shoe.”
“Do I? You’re gearing up to defend the indefensible.”
“What a boy does doesn’t define what a man is,” said Maureen, firmly. “Daddy used to believe in the eugenics before the War. He was little and people told him it was good science. Then his neighbour took in some children from Warsaw.”
“This isn’t the same,” said Mr. Shoe.
Maureen scouted around for her cigarettes. “No,” she said, “a desperate, frightened little boy with the weight of someone’s lives on his shoulders may make bad decisions, but I don’t think that damns him forever. Desperation can make people do funny things, and if we can’t change… what point is there?”
“You’d feel differently if it was you he fed,” said Mr. Shoe, as Maureen stuck the cigarette into the fire. “See how you feel about being alone with him when the supplies run out.”
“Perhaps, Mr. Shoe,” said Maureen, thoughtfully, “the fact that it wasn’t me means I can see rather more clearly.”
* * *
The following day, the sabs exploded.
Maureen had thought there was something fishy about their operation that morning, and the idea of synchronous lifting didn’t make any sense either, but by the time she picked herself out of the cradle and stopped being on fire, there were rather more pressing problems to consider.
