Heavy, p.53
Heavy, page 53
Lian Lin put her hands in her armpits.
A new electric kettle. Just like the Americans with their candy bars and their promises of Charlie Chaplin movies; just like everyone else. Thinking they could buy people. Thinking she would be bought with comfort and chocolate.
The scarred man stood up and left Captain Fo Li with what must be his radio telephone.
He came to Lian Lin.
She tried to step out of his way.
He moved his arm in a quick, sharp motion that started around his midriff and ended by her chest. It came up from below, like an earthquake.
Lian Lin felt the pain like a sudden burst of flame. Her body was warm at the front, hot and wet and it must have been heavy, too, because she found she had fallen forward, into his arms. He caught her, and laid her on the floor.
She tried to tell him that he had made a mistake. They would need her. They would need her to translate. There were risks. They had hours left. She was necessary. Her lips moved like carp kissing the surface of their pond; she recalled Comrade Sheng’s cousin, the big fish. The waters closed over her head.
Lian Lin’s legs kicked by themselves, swimming for the surface.
The world turned slowly to white.
* * *
Pig folded her hands across her chest, and closed her eyes. He felt embarrassed by the gesture: it made no difference now, and they probably didn’t cross their hands here. But he felt better for doing it: no one had crossed Ernie’s hands. Swineheart’s had been flung into the sea, ragged at the wrists from a penknife blade. Someone must have buried the spiv by now.
She looked very young.
He sat on the floor beside the cooling body of the girl and rubbed his fingers until they stopped hurting.
The hut door opened and Foley looked down at him, casting shadows on the wall as he sat in the way of the torch beam. He looked down at Miss Lin, her hands crossed on her chest, her eyes closed, her face an ugly colour even in the low light, her throat livid.
Foley exhaled slowly. “Why do you do these things?” he sighed, looking Pig in the eye. “We’ve come all the way out here for this for Colonel Braithwaite and now I’ve got nothing to show for it.”
Pig noted without much interest that he didn’t appear to be angry or even shocked, only very slightly exasperated.
He swallowed, and sat on his hands.
“Ernie,” he said at last, looking at Dick’s feet. There were a lot of other names, he thought, but that was the loudest.
“Well that's not practical,” said Foley, impatiently. “You're not bringing him back by sabotaging this. This will gum up Braithwaite’s plans and severely impede the progress of the nation. You’re just being silly and inconvenient.”
Pig looked at Miss Lin’s slack face, and the marks she’d left in the dirt as she’d kicked and twisted in his hands. He drew his knees up under his chin. Someone else, he thought, would not have said silly. They would have called him a monster.
Foley would wait.
Foley would wait until he thought he’d been forgiven, and then it would start.
“They didn’t really expect you to succeed,” he said, his lips numb, staring at Foley’s feet. “Braithwaite sent you out here to fail.”
It fell into place slowly, everything that had been wrong, out of logical line the whole time. Foley was not a field agent; Foley was not meant for this kind of work. Foley had come, for Braithwaite, making his own plans, doing his own jobs, choosing his own team, and they’d let him, because he was to be made an example of.
Pig raised his head to look at Foley’s face, his eyes hidden in the shadow of his hat, of his hair.
You got too big for your boots.
“I am aware,” said Foley, with a tight smile. His voice was calm, almost blank. “I am also aware that when I did what no one else—what no one could even be expected—I was going to have anything I asked for.”
“No you weren’t,” Pig said, frowning in confusion, six inches from a girl he’d killed, his chest tight, trying to hold in the words. “No one would – that’s not how—”
“That’s what happened on Surt,” Foley said, with another tight smile. “Of course, this whole episode will call into question my judgement, but it need not be this particular defector I return with. There are others available. And no one will blame me for having to unburden myself of some deeply flawed operatives along the way.”
“That is not what happened on Surt,” Pig said, ignoring his threat. He held his face just above his own knees. “You didn’t save everyone. You didn’t do what you were going to do then and you haven’t done it now.”
The shed which had been black as a cave when Miss Lin died was now an open mouth. The darkness prevailed but the light, beamed in from a strange and low angle, created monsters on the far wall. The cold had long since seeped upward from the floor and into his stomach.
Foley laughed at him, and shook his head. “You won’t convince me you were doing Braithwaite’s bidding the whole time,” he said, with a snort. There was a brief, temporary flicker of something in the depths of his ice-blue eyes. “Not you. Irene, perhaps, if they offered her a big enough promotion – she does love the organisation so – but you? No.”
Pig looked at Miss Lin, who had become an object that blocked the light, and at Foley’s amused, warning smile. He shrugged with one shoulder, and said, “You brought me because you believed I was loyal to you.”
“Barring the odd incident,” said Foley, with a nod to the dead girl. “You are.”
Pig took a deep breath. It caught in his lungs, in his throat. It turned his words into a sad, soft croak.
“It’s not loyalty.”
“It’s love, yes, I know,” said Foley, dismissing the enormity of an entire emotion without a single acknowledgement. His gaze didn’t flicker; his exasperated smirk remained in place; as if he’d planned this, and found the execution just a little disappointing. Pig thought of Maureen, doing up her blouse. She’d been wrong, too. “That doesn’t resolve this problem. You have become a liability beyond a degree which the organisation can reasonably tolerate.”
Pig shrugged.
“I will have to explain this to Braithwaite,” Foley said, “and your corpse is the best explanation I can tender. Gunned down—” he pulled out his service weapon with the kind of put-upon patience Rev. Prewitt had once offered to Jack, caught in the act of scrumping his apples, “—in the act. A lapse of judgement on my part allowing you in contact with the prisoner. Perhaps I was called away urgently. We will never know.”
“You’ll cover for me,” said Pig, looking up at the muzzle of a weapon he had contemplated using on himself a short time ago. It gave him no emotion one way or another. He was weightless.
“You have ceased,” said Foley, his finger inside the trigger guard, “to be useful to me.”
“I covered for you,” said Pig, letting his legs fall open until he sat cross-legged on the floor, as he once had in a cave, beside a fire, surrounded by shivering boys. A hand clutched the inside of his throat: water lapping at the foot of a cliff, a cave mouth, the gulls wheeling as two pink little hands floated out to sea, a matching pair. Like shoes. “You didn’t even give me a choice.”
Swineheart’s body, broken on the rocks. His twitching fingers. His head, like an eggshell, cracked open already.
“I did no such thing,” said Foley, angling the muzzle towards Pig’s groin. “But, if you insist, I will make a desperate attempt to save you from a stray bullet which will unfortunately puncture your spine. I do so dislike killing people – it would tarnish my reputation to let you die, you’re right. Captain Foley always saves the day. You can be useless and crippled, and survive. How would you like that?”
He said this, as he had pushed the chocolate bar across a pub table; as he had, on board HMS Taunton, said: “I think we should be friends. I should like that. How would you like that?”
“Stop pretending I have a choice,” said Pig, the hand in his throat now clawing at his tongue. The breath in his lungs like water. “Stop pretending you let me choose.”
“I did nothing,” said Foley, with a gesture of his head to the dead Miss Lin, the silhouette who blocked the torch beam. “You killed Lian Lin. You killed Swineheart. It’s your nature, Pig.”
“Jack.”
“Make up your mind,” said Foley, with a snort. His breath made clouds in the air, the way Miss Lin’s didn’t. “Pig suits you. It is your nature to do these things, Ridell. You are a very evil man.”
Pig stared up at the barrel of the gun.
“I should never have given you another chance,” Foley said, gently, “but I’m a very forgiving person. I know there’s a use for everyone if one can just bring them around to the right way of thinking. You, it appears, are beyond salvation.”
Swineheart’s blood, splashed up his arms.
You killed him. You’ve killed him, Jack.
“You can’t do this again,” said Pig, rubbing his temple. His chest closed, refused any further air. He could feel himself drowning in the fumes. The smell of burning. The chair he couldn’t lift and the rubber-skinned face before him; the thumping in his head. The glass plate eyes. I can make this all stop.
“Save everyone from you?” said Foley, raising his eyebrow. “I’m afraid I rather have to.”
“Everyone,” said Pig, looking at the corpse on the floor and thinking of Ernie. Of Maureen. Even of the spiv.
Foley pointed the pistol at Pig’s belly. He nodded with a kind of wholesome regret, soiled by the low angle of illumination which made him seem as he stood over a raging fire, and said, “I will let you live, you know. I’m rather a lot more merciful than you are, and it’s not for me to decide if you die.”
Pig said, “No.”
“I can’t help,” said Foley, with a limp shrug and a soft smile, “who you decide to latch your strange, perverse persecution fantasies onto.”
“No,” Pig repeated.
“There’s probably something awfully Freudian about it,” said Foley, with a minute gesture with the pistol barrel towards Pig’s midriff. He did not tip it lower down in acknowledgment, only twitched, as if he might consider it. Torch light slid briefly on black metal. “But I’m afraid I don’t care to find out. Stand up and look menacing, there’s a good chap, or I shall end up shooting you in something important after all—”
“Get fucked, Dick,” said Jack Ridell.
* * *
The radio telephone weighed as much as all the world’s sins by the third step.
Irene gritted and regretted her teeth. Captain Foley had told her to carry it: she was going to carry it. Captain Foley had entrusted it to her, so it was she who was responsible. The righteous and Christian did not shirk their responsibilities and they did not burden others with them; Mother and Father had said so. They had said: We do not complain when you are costly and difficult and make people stare, because it is a burden we have undertaken. You must not kick or curse or cast ugly looks about you. We are only brushing your hair. We are only helping you, Irene. It is a sacrifice we have made. Jesus suffered, and we must all suffer.
Some sort of gurney, she thought, or a couple of sled runners. The wind blew the snow into banks and she, unseeing, ploughed through the middle of them, being too heavy to climb over. The pack just wasn’t practical.
“I can carry it,” said Ridell, looming over her like the spectre of death. He came out of the darkness so suddenly, his haggard face with its deep, ugly ruts balanced on top of a giant’s body, that she would have yelped if she had the strength.
“No,” Irene said, shortly. “My job.”
“It’s heavy.”
“It’s my job,” Irene heard herself say peevishly. “Do as you’re told.”
He melted away ahead of her as if he’d never been there, and she walked on, bent double like firewood men, in the drawings of The Poor Stick Seller in pamphlets packaged up for distribution to the Americans.
They walked for hours.
Each step sank her further into snow. Her legs went numb. Her chest went numb. Her fingers, already catatonic, made a bid for further numbness.
“Foley says hurry up,” said Ridell, materialising before her again like some malevolent spirit. “I can carry it—”
“No,” said Irene, ploughing on, “you cannot.”
Cold wind bit at her hands as she held up the straps, letting the radio telephone rest on her back at a height that wouldn’t simply drag her over backward into the snow.
Mr. Shoe—
Don’t think about it.
Ernie would have known a song about it, she thought, defying her own orders. He probably knew some disreputable song like the ones the Irish sang at her when she went down to give them literature about the Lord. He probably knew a ditty about a girl carrying the world on her back. It was probably about unsuitable things.
He had been shaking. He had been so angry that he was shaking.
She raised her head in the snow and thought how his hair, his curls, long and tight, growing out. How they had hit the floor. How he had gone down. How he had—
“We’ve still got a mile,” Ridell said, stopping in her way. “I could carry it. I could probably carry you.”
“No one,” said Irene, going around him, “is carrying me.”
“I can take the bag,” he insisted, tall and indistinct.
“Captain Foley gave it to me,” Irene repeated.
What else did he give you, she heard a voice like Ernie’s say, on the wind.
“Shut up,” Irene muttered.
Do you think Maureen is still alive?
“Shut up,” Irene said.
He was my friend, said Ernie inside her head. He was my friend.
“Shut up,” Irene whispered.
“I didn’t say anything,” said Ridell, now behind her. He sounded like a sullen farm hand, muffled by his scarf. “I’m not going to offer again.”
They stopped, at last, in one of the city’s unending building sites. It was deserted, winter-emptied. Captain Foley had Ridell break the lock off the door to what appeared to be the foreman’s hut. There was a table within. Some papers. The cold was abated by the thin plyboard walls.
She laid down the radio telephone on the table and her back gave an almighty spasm that made her want to cry. She tried to stand to attention all the same.
Captain Foley said, “I doubt anyone will have followed, but one can never be sure.”
Irene nodded, exhausted.
“Keep an eye out behind us,” said Captain Foley, with a half-reach towards his hair, which had escaped from under the peak of his cap to attack his forehead, “but don’t go any further back than the last road. I shall have a look at a two-hundred yard circumference, and then, Irene, we can finally have a bit of a sit-down. I’m quite fagged.”
She nodded again, and went back out into the cold.
The route back to the road was deserted. There was a locked tool shed. There were footprints filling up with snow. Brick hods with cloths stretched over them to keep off the snow. Several had collapsed under the weight of what lay upon them. The sky above was clear and cold; if she tipped her head back she would see every star in the universe. Their light provided a reflection on the silent snow, but Irene didn’t turn to look up.
Someone must have heard the shot, she thought, turning back to the foreman’s hut. Someone must have gone to him and found him. They would – they would take him in. Maybe he could come up with a good story. He knew lots of those. He could – they would – Maureen would have told—
She stubbed her toe on a metal rod and picked it up absently. She wasn’t sure if it was a tool or a piece of detritus, but she was quite sure it shouldn’t be sticking up out of the snow. It was a little shorter than her forearm.
Irene carried it back to the foreman’s hut, not knowing what else to do with it.
The door was ajar. Captain Foley’s circumference walk couldn’t have taken long. He walked so fast, had such long legs—
She pulled it open a little further.
Lian Lin lay on the floor with her head turned at an angle no living person could have held, her arms and legs splayed. She looked like a discarded toy. Irene put her hand over her mouth; there was no—
Ridell stood with his arms raised to his shoulders, his fingers outstretched. His head almost touched the ceiling. He looked vast, threatening: the torchlight on his face only served to throw the shadows of his scars into mountain ranges across his features.
Captain Foley had his pistol trained on him. The angle of his arm, Irene thought, would place a bullet directly into his stomach. Not his heart, not his head, but his stomach. A gut shot left a man to die slowly. Sometimes it took more than a day. She had filed the reports: men gunned down in the streets. Enemy agents, field agents abroad, home agents gone rogue. The gut shot was a wound of last resort. It was not merciful.
Ridell saw her. He caught her eye. He said to Captain Foley, “Ernie wanted her dead.”
“Ernie isn’t in charge of this mission,” said Captain Foley, exasperated. “You have fucked everything up.”
Irene saw him tense.
The metal rod in her hand went into the small of his back with more force than she thought her body ever could.
The gun went off.
Irene tried to get out of the way, kicked the fallen pistol, scooped it up, pointed it blindly with wobbling hands. The gun went off again, almost wrenching her shoulder from its socket.
She dropped the hot metal to the floor.
Captain Foley fell, landing half on her, and half off her, face-down in the dust of an unfinished hut.
His blood began to spread around him. She felt it warm on her leg as she tried to lift him off her.
His blood began to freeze.
* * *
Foley opened his mouth. It remained open. There was a deafening bang; the pistol fell to the floor, and Jack’s shoulder, his collar, his torso blossomed.
A horse had kicked him. Someone had let a horse in and it had kicked him. He lay dazed on his back, counting dust motes.
