Heavy, p.54
Heavy, page 54
There was a thump.
Jack twitched his arm, trying to stand. He felt the distant pressure of a cold, dead hand. Huge shadows loomed on the wall. A woman the size of a tree with untidy, Negro hair towered over him, wrestling with something.
Lieutenant Travers, thought Jack, woozily. She was here after all.
There was a second bang.
“Christ in fucking heaven,” said Jack, between his teeth.
Irene Gaitskill bent down over him. Her right hand was red to the wrist and held Foley’s service weapon. It was shaking.
The cold had ceased to bother him, and the floor, though rough and uncomfortable, seemed like the most intelligent place to remain. The walls streaked away into the darkness of the ceiling like a cathedral in miniature.
“Is that still loaded,” he mumbled.
“I don’t know—”
“Please stop pointing it at me.”
The pistol wobbled and wove around Jack’s face. He reconsidered.
“Or aim for the eye,” he said, after a slow breath.
“Sorry,” Irene said, pushing the pistol into his hand. His shoulder throbbed at the pressure. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean.”
Her voice was a soft grey veil of smoke. Her breath accompanied it, clouds of steam rising with the words, ascended to the heavens the torch light didn’t quite reach even inside this tiny hut.
“You should go,” said Jack, lifting the pistol from his right hand with his left. “Take it.”
“I don’t want it, I don’t. I couldn’t take it anymore. I’m.” Whispering like falling snow.
“Right between the eyes,” Jack said, feeling a chuckle forming in his throat like a parasitic infection. He lifted his left hand and tapped himself in the forehead. “Just here.”
“I don’t care what he wanted,” Irene said with sudden savagery. “What did Ernie ever do to him, that’s what I want to know – that silly girl Maureen – no one even – Ernie didn’t even do – there was nothing in the file that said—”
“He got in the way,” said Jack, as cold water lapped invitingly at his brain. He could sink. Down. Float out to sea like two ragged pink hands. “We were all in the way. All you have to do is squeeze it a little bit.”
“I’m a good person,” Irene said, moving out of sight. There was another thump.
“The temple’s good too,” Jack said, raising his voice. The sound of the sea was loud in his ears. Wind in the trees, he thought. Rev. Prewitt’s apples. Sheba’s tail like a heartbeat on the bare floorboards. “Someone will have heard it,” he added, “You should get this over with then go.”
“I don’t deserve this,” Irene said. Jack heard her kick Foley’s corpse a second time.
“I do,” he said.
She came back. He tried to give her the gun, but his arm wouldn’t work. It lay like a corpse on the hut floor.
“No,” she said, avoiding the handle of it.
“Take it.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t deserve it either.”
“You know what I am,” said Jack. He tried to push the pistol into her hand but she only moved out of his way. He turned his head to look at Miss Lin, less than an arm’s length away from her, eyelids shut, hands folded. “I did that.”
“You’re a very, very bad person,” said Irene, taking the gun off him. She stepped over his head, and put her hands under his shoulders. She pushed up; Jack bit down on his tongue to keep from screaming. He burned. Blood poured down over his body. “But you don’t deserve him.” She heaved at him as if she could stand him upright through sheer force of will. “And you are not going to die.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Jack complained, putting his good hand over his face. “Not you as well.”
Heavy: Twenty-Eight
Jack shook and giggled. The room breathed in time with him, like some huge animal. He put out his hand to stroke its hide, but something closed around his wrist and firmly held his arm in place. A roaring tide of fire surged through it. Something else, like a noose, wound tight about his neck and shoulder. It was choking him. He tried to pull it off.
“Lie still,” Irene said in a low whisper. “You’ll make it worse.”
He closed his eyes and opened them. The action made no difference. He must still be in Kabul. In the hospital. The rot had spread inside his face and taken his eyes, if it wasn’t the wire.
“I’ve gone blind.”
“It’s dark.”
“Where am I? Did Rankin get out?” The click of a mine underfoot.
“I don’t know who Rankin is,” said Irene. There was a small catch in her voice. She was lying, Jack thought. She was lying; she knew who Rankin was. His body ebbed and flowed; he could hear his own blood. He shook.
“I panicked,” he said, laying his head back on something hard and wooden – lousy beds in this hospital. He’d felt sure they had iron bedsteads, at least. Some kind of straw pallet. There must be too many casualties. The bare earth walls dripping with the sorrows of blinded and terrified soldiers. “I panicked and ran.”
“Shh,” said Irene, her voice low. “There are people sleeping next door. If they hear you—”
“Shh,” Jack agreed, confused and mortified. “Shh.”
“You can rest until they get here if you just keep quiet,” Irene whispered. Her voice shook, like his body.
* * *
Jack touched the side of his own face. He could have sworn he’d heard sobbing, but he didn’t know how long ago. When he turned his head he could see a small figure sleeping below him, on the floor. For a moment he couldn’t make out if the shape was human or animal, curled up like a cat in the deep shadows.
He tested his left arm. The movement made the right hurt.
He did not try to test the right arm. Even looking at it made it throb.
It was cold, all the way down inside his guts. His flannel uniform was stuck to his body with blood – he could feel the itching – but it didn’t seem to be getting wet again. The bleeding must have stopped.
There was a sound coming from outside, regular and naggingly familiar.
Thuwwppa thuwwppa thuwwppa.
It got louder.
Shh, he thought, a sudden mania in him. There are people sleeping next door.
He almost laughed.
“Shit,” said Irene, from the floor.
Jack looked down as she clapped a hand over her mouth, the movement bright in the darkness.
“You—”
“Shh,” said Irene. “That’s them.”
It took him too long to climb down off the table, even with her help. The pain ricocheted off his bones, rattled against his nerves as he moved. He felt something tear again. Blood began to flow. He felt that, too. In the next room he could hear voices raised in alarm and confusion, afraid in the dark.
Their words were foreign but their fear said: What is that noise? What is happening?
Irene pushed him towards the door. Jack harboured faint, unsteady memories of an unceasingly long walk to this place, dropping in and out of his mind like bread disintegrating in soup: dark and cold, cold and dark. His stomach made a pathetic noise at the thought of soup. He stumbled forward, into another, closed door, and the white light of agony temporarily blinded his whole mind.
“Shh,” Irene hissed, pushing him through this door and out into the cold air.
Lights were flickering on up and down the half-finished street. Faces peered out of windows: people stood in doorways. At home, they’d have worn pyjamas. Two torch beams picked out the chopper, hanging six feet above the ground like the angel of death, a vast insectile presence in a domestic suburb full of sleeping workers rudely-wakened by its roar.
There were shouts. Someone, Jack knew, would be trying to contact the police.
A man close behind him shouted at him. Jack took off to where Irene was already running, running over uneven ground, towards the aircraft.
Each jolting step ripped the face off the night and poured blinding white into Jack’s mind, throwing him off-balance, shifting the location of the chopper this way and that. He tried to run toward the sound, but it was everywhere; tried to follow Irene, but couldn’t keep her in sight. It was harder to run towards something with purpose than blindly away from it.
He could hear more shouts, saw people on the far side of the chopper running towards it in the hesitant, shambling run of people who do not want to reach their destination but know that it will be worse if they do not.
“Climb up me,” he shouted to Irene, as he reached the chopper. “Up.”
Without giving her time to argue, he lifted her with his left arm – the movement screaming in his brain – and tried to set her on his shoulder. She was heavier than she looked, heavier than he wanted her to be. He strained himself.
“Up,” he shouted. “Stand on my shoulders.”
“I’m not STANDING ON A GUNSHOT WOUND,” Irene bawled back at him, appalled.
“Get in the fucking chopper.” Jack twisted in the bindings she’d given him, wrenched his right arm around, raised her up as if he was offering a prayer to heaven—
God, take this woman with you.
And as the pain knocked him loose from the grip of consciousness entirely he felt someone else begin to draw her upward.
* * *
Above the clouds night stars twinkled like winking eyes and the whole of the heavens lay open before Irene’s eyes. So many of them that they blurred into a fine white dust, smeared in billowing clouds across the far-off night, staining the darkness with grey. A million, million points of light peeked in through the window of the aircraft and all of the Lord’s creation hung in perfect, unchanging harmony.
“Sandwich?” said Graves, from behind her. “We’ve got cheese.”
She shook her head.
“Good choice,” said Graves, with a sort of forced jollity. “It’s mare’s cheese. A bit of an acquired taste.”
In the pilot’s seat beside her, Lieutenant Travers rested one hand on the steering control and said, “He did tell us before he went there would be two of you on the way back.”
Irene closed her eyes. She could not close out the next words.
“We weren’t expecting it to be you two.”
“Hand on heart,” said Graves, “no one was really expecting you to come back.”
“Shh,” said Lieutenant Travers, soft and low.
“It’s a good tourniquet,” said Graves, ignoring the instruction. He seemed bent on keeping conversation going, even if he was the only person having one. “He’d have lost a lot more blood if it weren’t for you, Miss Gaitskill.”
Irene opened her eyes again and traced the countless lanterns of the angels in the sky ahead. She took two or three deep breaths, and tried to remember how to speak.
Instead she remembered Captain Foley’s triumphant smirk as Maureen sat doubled-up in the back of a police car. How had he known so certainly that it was her?
She said, “I have the radio codes.”
Lieutenant Travers said, “Expect a commendation from Braithwaite, then.”
Colonel Braithwaite. Irene didn’t want to consider it. There was no call for commendations. If anything, she deserved to be shot. She took another long, unsteady breath. The stars hung steady in the sky ahead.
“I don’t think I will be getting that.”
Neither of them answered her. The stars rained down cold light upon her eyes. She wondered why the roofs of churches never contained windows: this was surely the most perfect and irrefutable picture of the Lord anyone could hope for, strewn out across the night sky with no obstruction, no intercession from mortal man.
Lieutenant Travers cleared her throat.
After a long, long silence, she said, “You will feel better.”
To Irene this sounded like the madness of a street corner drunk. She wanted to laugh. There was a huge, hollow space inside her, and if she kept looking at the stars it would remain hollow, and she wouldn’t have to look inside it. If she looked away, if she thought too long – the noise he had made – no – if she thought too long – there was still blood, his blood, drying in her clothes. If she thought. It would be the end of her.
“You don’t know what I’ve done,” she said, at last.
There was another long silence.
Lieutenant Travers said, her voice soft, “You don’t know what any of us have done, or why we’ve done it. But we all go on living with ourselves, and you will, too.”
“He said we’d go back for him,” said Irene, looking down at the dark stain of his blood on her sleeve.
“He said a lot of things,” said Lieutenant Travers, without inflection.
“We were supposed to get her out.”
“We got you out,” said Lieutenant Travers, “in body at least. You’re going to have to do the rest of the getting out yourself.”
Irene stared at her, numb and dumb, as the pilot turned away from her controls and slowly readjusted her wig. In the back of the chopper Graves continued his ministrations. Irene saw the faint light of a torch, but she didn’t look back.
“I don’t understand—”
“When Captain Foley visited us the first time,” said Lieutenant Travers, picking her words with evident care, “I recognised him. Not because of who he was – I don’t know Richard Foley from Adam, and Graves here says he was one of the Surt boys, which… I guess that means more to your generation than mine and Graves’. We kinda had more on our minds at that time.”
Irene held her breath, and said nothing.
“You will learn,” said Lieutenant Travers, resuming her thread, with a penetrating look to Irene. “Now that you’ve seen it. And you will hate yourself a good long while for not seeing it sooner, but you must learn to forgive yourself, too. God will; follow His lead.”
Irene nodded, though she was sure God could not. A special place in Hell was already prepared for her. She could feel it already.
Lieutenant Travers sighed, and looked out over the stars. “They look for it.”
“What?” Irene asked, finally too confused to remain silent. She almost choked on the word, on her tongue.
“Men like him,” said Lieutenant Travers, still gazing out over the night like a Church angel, like no Church angel Irene had ever seen, but the one she thought maybe she’d always looked for. “Like my James. Like Foley. They look for something in you that hurts, and they lean on it. They will offer you what you need and you won’t be able to resist. They will make you feel no one else will give it. And then they take everything. They lean on you until you disappear. They stick their hand into your soul until you cannot exist without them; they make you think you cannot trust yourself.”
“It wasn’t like—” Irene began. Lieutenant Travers’ expression was a rictus of disgust, but it was not aimed at her.
“They come to you with all the love in the world,” said the pilot, her voice thick. “They will rain it down upon you as if they are God himself, because that’s what they want to be. They will fix you, and give you a purpose; James fixed me. The trick, once you’ve stopped hating yourself for what they do afterward, is to learn to keep what’s useful, and know that you made it, not them.”
Irene looked at the blood stain on her sleeve. “I killed him,” she said, in the sad, small ghost of a mouse’s voice.
The silence was vast and held suspended breaths in it. She felt the knife twist in her breast. The blade in his back—
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke,” said Graves, with derision.
“He has a wife,” Irene muttered.
“She has a pension,” Graves began, but Lieutenant Travers cut him off.
“Graves, put your fingers in your ears and hum the National Anthem, I have something to tell Miss Gaitskill you need to keep from your head.”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” sighed Graves. “But it’ll have to be one finger because we don’t have a drip stand so I’m standing in for one—”
“Hold it in your G-damned teeth.”
“Ma’am.”
Lieutenant Travers exhaled long and slow. Irene picked at the wool of her glove, where the blood was thick and stiff and itched her. The blood. His blood.
“When I was stationed in London,” said the Lieutenant, her voice almost dreamy, “Not long before I met James, years before the world turned to atomic glass and went crazier than it had ever been, I got a girl in trouble.”
Irene stopped picking, and said nothing. She did not look up.
“She wanted me to give her money to get rid of it,” Lieutenant Travers went on, her voice deeper even than it had been before. “Or to marry her. One of the two. She was practical. Girls like her usually are.”
“Girls like her,” Irene echoed. She knew the phrase.
“The kind you pay for sex,” said Lieutenant Travers, briskly. “Oh, I went some ways to pretend I was what I wasn’t, back in those days. I knew what I needed, but G-d knows it was not easy to admit. James was just the means of getting it, and for that, at least, he was good enough. But do you know what I did, for this girl? That I got into trouble?”
Irene shook her head.
“Nothing.”
Irene looked up. Lieutenant Travers had once again pulled her dark, handsome face into an ugly scowl of revulsion.
“I did nothing for her, sweetheart. I ran the aich-ee-double-ell away.” The Lieutenant’s face relaxed slowly, the scowl fading into angelic nothingness against the reflected light of the hanging stars. “And I took it as G-d’s punishment when James became the man he became. When he made me smaller than a gnat’s fart.” She gave Irene a weak smile, turning for a moment from the window. “D’you hear me? We all have to live with the things we have done. But we still have to live.”
Irene listened to the sound of her own heart inside her chest, as loud as the blades of the aircraft above. His blood was still in flakes on her gloves. “Did you kill James?”
“No,” said Lieutenant Travers, but she didn’t appear to be offended by the question. “He went on and married a girl – I hope she’s okay, as G-d is my witness, I hope she gets out okay – for the sake of his career, and it broke my d-mn heart. He is not dead.”
