The Dynamite Room (27 page)

She was standing in Alfie's room, just standing, and it was dark. Model planes lined up along the shelf. The carved wooden soldier. The poster with the pointing finger. All of Alfie's things. The picture frame above the bed with butterflies, moths, dragonflies, and bees. There was now even a silver-studded blue in the center and, although it was pierced through its body with a pin, it was still alive and flapping, trying to wriggle free. She walked across the room to pick the wooden soldier up from the desk, but when her hand went to it, the soldier wasn't there but a few inches away, as if by the blink of her eye everything around her had shifted. She turned then and saw him: Alfie sitting on the sill with his feet on the bed, as if within that same blink, he had appeared; her Alfie but different, for he had such glorious wings that reached almost to the ceiling. The feathers were so fine and white as to hardly be there at all but for a shimmering of light. They spanned out in three layers, turning tawny brown where they joined his shoulder blades, while the lower feathers at the end were torn and ragged but glowed a soft-hued silver, and within them the bones burned bright white. He wore his cricket white trousers but his feet and chest were bare. Alfie, her Alfie, and yet more perfect. He had muscles in his chest and stomach and arms that she had never seen before, and he gave off a vague light so that even from within his cricket trousers she could see the glow of his skin. His hair was longer than she had ever known it, falling across his eyes and down to his nose and hanging in wet, dripping threads. He tilted his head as if to take her in and his cheeks swelled as he smiled at her. And she was not afraid; she was happy and safe—and even when, in another blink, he was gone and the room was dark and empty again, she could still feel his smile wrapped warm across her face.

She skulked aimlessly
about the house, slumping heavily into chairs or slouching against door frames. Once, a long time ago, after a bad dream, her father said,
missy,
you can't be scared forever,
and she was only now beginning to believe it. Boredom was something else though; there was no limit to it.

She watched him from her bedroom window, filling her mother's watering can from the pump and walking up and down the vegetables with it, trying to bring them back to life. Eventually he came back in and she lolled about on the four-poster bed, listening to him downstairs. She imagined him lying next to her, his arm around her waist and how it might feel. If, in years to come, she had to marry him, she supposed that she would. He had wrists she wanted to curl her hands around, a face that she wanted to touch. She wondered if thinking things like that made her a traitor. Perhaps God would send her to hell. After all, she had spied on him in the bath. She had seen his naked body and had even caught herself thinking about it since: his pale white bottom, the scratches and cuts on his thighs, the wound in his shoulder that even now still looked sore.

In her bedroom she bent her hair clip in such a way that she could sit on the floor and flick it across the room at the window and hear it go
tink
against the glass. Every time she went to retrieve it she glanced down into the garden and hoped to see soldiers coming through the woods and across the lawn, half crouching, rifles at the ready, but the garden was always sunny and empty. She wondered if Rosie or any of the others were missing her, whether Miss Mountford was worried, whether any of them cared. Perhaps someone had come looking for her, whilst they had been out in the wood—searching for her, but she hadn't been here.

She tried walking on the paint pots, but her feet kept slipping out of the handles and she wasn't in the mood. She did handstands against the landing wall because there was no one there to tell her not to, and it was only when her dress slithered down over her head and she realized that her underwear was showing that she got embarrassed and tipped herself upright again. It was too hot and tiresome anyway. All she really wanted to do was sleep, but she didn't dare in case he was no longer there when she woke again.

She took another turn of the house, this time taking Mr. Tabernacle with her for the ride. Occasionally she would catch the man's eye as their paths crossed. Or she would walk into a room and see him there, hunched over his maps again, or repacking his kit bag, or sitting on the front doorstep, relacing his boots.

“Will you play cards with me?” she finally asked. “I know Snap and Beggar-My-Neighbor. Or we have Happy Families.”

“Later,” he said. “I have to concentrate. I don't want you playing by the windows either. I don't want you being seen.”

She nodded and hung about in the hallway for a while, sitting on the bottom step of the stairs and watching him on the doorstep.

He had told her that they were to get the house ready for when the rest of the men arrived, and now the house was as ready as it could be—but nobody had come. Together they had pushed the beds in her parents' room and the spare room against the wall to open a big space where they would lay down blankets, towels, and coats for the soldiers to sleep on. With all the furniture pushed to one side, the bedrooms echoed and seemed emptier than ever. There would be tents in the garden, he told her. Stolen cars and trucks parked on the gravel. They'd need diesel, oil lamps, torches, food. They would have to loot the houses in the village for anything else they required: extra plates, bedding, toothpaste, shampoo, socks, towels…

They would come when the rain came. Or in the early hours of the morning when everything was dark. Not on a bright, hot morning like this at the end of July. She wished they would come now, if only so there would be a change. On the horizon puffs of clouds stretched out in woolly ribbons across the sky. Seagulls were coming inland. She could hear their cawing as they circled the house. Through the shutter slats she looked around the garden for the bobbing tail of Jeremiah, but the rabbit was not there.

She was hesitant about entering Alfie's room again, but she wanted to know if he might come back for her. It wasn't a dream, that first time; it was too vivid for that. She pushed the door open and stood in the doorway. Then she stepped in and shut the door behind her, leaned across the bed, and, pushing her fingers between the slats at the window, opened them as wide as she could so that he could come in. She stood where she had been standing the night before, her eyes firmly fixed on the wall ahead, the chest of drawers, the bookshelves. She wouldn't look at the window ledge. She would close her eyes and see if he would come back to her, sitting there as he had been, his wings tucked in, his skin faintly glowing. She pressed her eyes shut.

“Alfie,” she said. “Alfie…”

A soft breeze found its way in through the shutters, and there was a gentle ticking somewhere in the house, coming up through the floorboards like the beat of a wooden heart.

“Alfie?” she said, and she turned and opened her eyes but the bedroom was still empty. The only movement came from mites of dust blowing about in the air.

They found Eddie's body in the mudflats just three days after the news of Alfie's death. His clothes had been neatly folded and placed on the dry ridge—a pale white heel and the crook of an arm sticking up from the mud that he had given himself to, opening his mouth to it, his throat to it, his stomach, disappearing in the night and being taken by the mudflats and marshes like many before. No one spoke about why he had done it.

His mother had not gone to pieces like Lydia's mother had. Instead, she had driven to Wales herself in an old Austin Six to tell Eddie's brother, Arthur, who was lodging in the same street as Lydia, next to the working men's club. She stayed with the family for two whole days. Lydia saw the both of them out walking on the hills and had felt bitterly jealous.

She listened to the quiet, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine her mother clattering around in the kitchen, Father reading the paper and listening to
Henry Hall's Guest Night,
Alfie swerving on the gravel as he pulled up on his bicycle. She thought of Button coming down the corridor, the sound of his soft footsteps and the rattling of the lamb as it trundled over the floorboards with squeaking wheels. She imagined him at the end of the hallway, wet and dead now from a drowning; the silhouette of him and the lamb, the gas mask over its head.
You've got to take care of him,
her mother had said. But she hadn't. She had left him. She wondered what the boys were doing to him now that she wasn't there to protect him, to say
No
and
Stop it
and
Leave him alone.
He didn't have the words let alone the voice to defend himself. They would taunt him worse than ever. His face seemed to ask for it. His arms and legs begged to be bloodied.

In her own room she hauled her suitcase out from underneath her bed, then clicked open the catches and lifted the lid. Boys can be such animals, Heiden had said. And he was right. She couldn't go back to Wales, but she needed to go somewhere.

She put in clean underwear, socks, and a change of dress, then took a small towel from the spare room where it had been put aside for the soldiers and her toothbrush and toothpaste from the bathroom. She collected a bar of soap, lipstick, blusher, and a brush from her mother's drawer. For the time being, she shut the case and pushed it under her bed. At the window she looked at the line of seashells laid along it: the rose petal tellin with both halves still attached to each other like a pair of pink wings; half a cockle that her father had varnished for her so that the smear of brown in its ridges looked like caramel. There was a king's crown, a Florida cone, a Scotch bonnet, and beaded periwinkle, all of which she had found herself somewhere along the shore. She picked up a giant conch that her father had brought back for her from one of his trips abroad and held it to her ear. From within the smooth shining twist of the shell she could hear the breath of the sea.

On Shingle Street she and Alfie had once found a line of white cockles leading down to the water's edge. They had followed it over the shingle as it arced around the spreading mats of sea pea and campion, and in between the clumps of kale. With the late afternoon sun still shining, the line of shells had been bright against the shingle, as if glowing in the heat.

Alfie told her that they'd been laid out by sea nymphs in the dead of night, and for a moment or two she had believed him, or at least had wanted to.

The line stopped abruptly several feet from the lap and swilling of the waves.

The tide's gone out,
Alfie said.
The nymphs won't be able to get out onto the shore unless we take the line down to the water.

So for an hour they scoured the beach for cockles, then laid them out, extending the line right down to the surf so that under the night sky the sea nymphs could follow it up onto the beach and sing and dance on the sand.

He held the six metal dog tags in the clench of his hand and blew into the curl of it as if he was blowing them good luck. The tin was some distance from the doorstep, nestled into the scuffed gravel, and he had been flicking the tags for almost half an hour but only got one in. He could sense the girl behind him, sitting on the stairs, watching.

He opened his hand, and with his thumb he positioned one of the tags and flicked it so that it pinged off the side of the tin and into the gravel.

Lehmann, Kappel, Pfeiffer, and Theissen. If you said the names in order it gave them a rhythm that he would never now forget. The faces of all but Diederich were burned against the back of his head. Five men, with Heiden the sixth, blacking out their faces in the cabin of the S-boat as it had sped out from Zeebrugge. How long ago had that been now? Four nights? Five?

They had packed and repacked their kit bags, ensuring everything was tightly wrapped in oilskin, then huddled around the table beneath the deck, poring over maps and photographs. Shingle Street. Bawdsey Point. The manor house and radio masts, the fenced perimeters and pillboxes. From behind the twin mounted guns and the cannon, men up on the deck studied the sky for aircraft and the sea for British torpedo boats, binoculars held to their eyes as the boat cut its channel through the water.

Lowering his head so only the men at the table could hear, he had drawn a tiny cross on the map with the tip of his pencil. If anything untoward happened and they were split up, he told them, he knew of a place near to the landing point where they could reconvene: a house on the edge of a village, nearest the shore and beyond the marsh. He wrote the name lightly on the map and left it long enough for them to read it before he rubbed it out.

The idea had been like a growth, getting larger and clearer and making him believe in it. He sometimes found himself wanting to laugh at it, at its sheer audacity, because—despite everything—he was here and still alive. Perhaps he had suffered enough and deserved a second chance. When he stepped out of this house again he would have a new skin, his old self rubbed out. Heiden would be dead.

He stood up from the doorstep and listened, then quietly pulled the pistol from his pocket. He had heard something crack, and something was moving the branches in the undergrowth between the garden and the narrow country lane. His eyes scanned back and forth, until a blackbird burst from the bushes. He raised his pistol as it took to the sky but he did not fire.

“What was that?” said the girl.

She was still on the steps behind him, now standing anxiously.

“Nothing,” he said. “A bird.”

He sat back down again and rested his elbows on his knees. He could hear the girl edging a few steps lower down the stairs. Her nervousness was making him uneasy.

It had started with a name on a map and a memory of a conversation held with an English naval officer. A village called Willemsley. A house called Greyfriars. Sitting with Lieutenant Schöller and the others in that blown-out café on the beach at Dieppe, he had barely been able to take his eyes from the map. How close would they be to this man's house? A mile maybe? Two at most?

Greyfriars.

He picked out another dog tag and flicked it at the can, where it hit the rim and pinged off. Five tags in the gravel. He was beginning to wonder himself why no one had come. He had been here for four days and there had been no sight or sound of anyone but the one single soul wandering around the side of the house and halfheartedly trying the door. The boredom was eating at him, just as it had done in Norway, his mind wandering to places he didn't want to be taken, to faces he didn't want to see. A naked boy half-buried in the snow. Vomiting into a gutter outside a railway administration building in Narvik. A knife going deep into a man's neck. Eva's dead eyes.

In the S-boat coming over they had been too caught up in their own personal anxieties to talk much. It would be easier to blank these men out of his head if he knew nothing about them. He didn't even want to see their faces and yet now there they were, scratched into his mind. When the man called Kappel tried to show him a photograph of his girlfriend in Koblenz, Heiden had looked blankly at the face but said nothing, as if nothing had registered with him at all. Then he turned back to sorting his kit bag.

I'm just trying to make conversation,
said Kappel.
That's all. Fucking asshole.

They had gathered on the deck—the night was cloudy but serene—and carefully lowered themselves over the side of the boat, slipping into the water. The sea glistened and prickled through their uniforms, catching at their breath. Lights off, engines still and silent as the huddle of hooded silhouettes watched from the side. Then, with a nod and a hand signal, one by one they peeled away from the boat, six men fanning out, their breaststrokes barely etching a ripple. Their rucksacks, strapped to their chests, clung like limpets, their ammunition boots, tied and hanging from their necks, dragging beneath them through the water.