Vail (10 page)

Brown retracted his antenna, switched off the set and wrapped it away in his thick black overcoat. He appeared mordantly pleased. His ravaged face creased in a grin. ‘Didn't believe me, eh? You heard it for yourself: the big one is about to blow!'

‘The only thing I heard was a garbled reference to ‘Libyan logistical support'. Are they part of your outfit?'

‘Them and the INLA,' Brown said. ‘And the Red Brigade and Black September.'

These sounded to me, respectively, like the French national railway system and two heavy metal rock bands, but I didn't betray my ignorance. Instead I asked, ‘What's this big one that's about to blow?'

‘Dungeness B.'

‘What's that?'

‘A fast-breeder gas-cooled reactor.'

‘A nuclear power station?' When he nodded alertly, eyes alive in his thin drab face, I said, ‘That's going to cause a bit of a mess, isn't it? Won't it lay waste to large areas of the countryside?'

‘Towns and people too. You can say goodbye to Sussex and Kent for a start. If the wind's in the right direction London might cop it.'

I had never seen him so vibrant. He was positively brimming. It seemed to me that he didn't so much want to change the social order as destroy it altogether. He was motivated not by reforming zeal but by petty infantile spite. Either something horrible had happened to him in childhood, I surmised, or he had been born with a meanness of spirit, one of the world's natural runts or recklings. Given wealth, power and prestige (and he would have to be given them, he could never have achieved them by his own efforts)
he would have lorded it over the rest of us in the manner of the most aloof and disdainfully overbearing aristocrat imaginable.

‘I don't like the sound of that,' Mira said, cradling Bev in her arms. ‘That's where we're going. Hardly fair on us to wipe it out before we get there. Selfish if you ask me.'

Brown made a motion of the shoulders. ‘It's all to the good in the long term,' he said. ‘We can't pick and choose who gets it in the neck and who doesn't. Personally I think wholesale carnage is the only way to bring them to their senses.'

‘That's all very well for you to say,' Mira expostulated, rocking Bev. ‘What happens to our sick child? The whole purpose of this journey is to seek proper medical attention and you have the nerve to inform us there won't be a doctor left standing when we get there! Is this a sample of the ‘new social order' you keep rabbiting on about? Well, I'll tell you, I don't think much of it!'

‘We didn't start the war, they did,' Brown said placidly. ‘We didn't dump toxic chemicals adjacent to urban populations. It wasn't us who turned a blind eye to environmental pollution and let the chemical companies get away with murder. We weren't instrumental in allowing canisters of radioactive waste to be buried next to schools and council estates. Neither did we instigate the series of medical experiments on the children of the poor. Don't lay these anomalies at our door. Lay them fair and square where they belong. You can't blame your child's condition on us.'

‘Wait a minute,' I said, frowning. ‘If what you say is true, and all this is going on, I have two questions. One: what is the purpose, the objective, of this toxic and radioactive waste dumping policy or programme, and, two: how and why is what you're doing any different?'

The answers sprang instantly to Brown's lips. ‘The objective is to reduce unnecessary and unproductive urban population, and what we're doing is different in intent but not in kind.'

‘You admit then that you also want to decimate large numbers of the population,' I said. A thin chill wind from nowhere rattled the leaves of the bushes. There were few operating lights on this
section of motorway, which cast the embankment, a bridge farther along, and our crouching figures into murky gloom: these were the dead hours between two a.m. and the first rays of the false dawn.

‘We don't
want
to,' Brown said. ‘We
have
to. In this day and age shock tactics are the only ones that work. Killing soldiers doesn't grab the headlines any more. Killing horses grabs a few but you can't go on killing livestock without alienating the animal-loving public, which in the long term is counter-productive. Our strategy has been meticulously planned and coordinated at the highest level by people who know what they're about.'

‘Who are these people?' I interrupted. ‘Are you prepared to give us their names?'

‘I would if I could but I can't.'

‘You're not high up enough in the echelon to know?' I suggested mischievously. But this didn't have the desired effect, and he answered non-committally:

‘Have it your own way,' and added, ‘In any case, the names of the people at the top aren't important. Their identities are known to a very few. We serve an ideology, not personalities.'

‘How do you know they're not leading you astray?'

‘Because the authorities have proscribed our activities and would do anything to get their hands on us. We and our sister organisations are a thorn in their side. There wouldn't be a ten thousand pound reward out for information leading to our apprehension if we weren't a threat to public order and governmental stability.'

‘Ten thousand pounds,' Mira said in a voice of quiet awe, and from the position of her head I could tell she was looking at me and not at Brown.

I said, ‘That's a pretty good amount these days, even in dollars. It would tempt most people if not everybody.'

‘Temptation's one thing,' said Brown.

‘What's the other?'

‘What?'

‘The other thing.'

‘What other thing?'

‘You said ‘Temptation's one thing'. When people say that they qualify it by saying ‘and something-else-or-other is another'.'

‘What something else?'

‘I don't know. It was your thought, not mine. I don't know what else you were going to say.'

‘I wasn't going to say anything else.'

‘Just ‘Temptation's one thing' and leave it at that?'

‘Yes.'

‘In that case it doesn't make sense. ‘Temptation's one thing', on its own doesn't mean anything.'

‘Perhaps it doesn't to you.'

‘To anybody,' I said. ‘What does it mean to you?' I asked Mira.

‘What? I wasn't listening,' Mira said. ‘I'm cold. Can we go back in the van? Have we anything to eat, I'm starving.'

‘How's Bev?' I said, realising I was cold too.

‘She appears to be in some sort of coma,' Mira said, struggling to get up. I helped her to her feet. Where was Bev in her head? I wondered. In London? Still back at the Sandbach stat? Or somewhere else? I still wasn't clear in my own mind how
Temporal
worked. Presumably it displaced or telescoped time in some way, – subjectively, that's to say, as the boy or youth had said. The body moved through time in the normal way while the brain, or rather the mind, inhabited a different set of spatial coordinates. Mind you, I hadn't noticed anything untoward after taking it.

Wherever Bev was, I hoped she wasn't suffering.

‘What do you think, is it safe to leave here?' I said to Brown when we were inside the van. It was still very dark, the four of us merely shapes without substance.

‘The point is,
can
we leave here?' Brown said. ‘Will the van start or won't it? If the engine's kaput, then we can't.'

On the face of it this was a true statement, and in fact made far more sense than his previous ‘Temptation's one thing' nonsense. Of course he was right in the respect that temptation
was
one thing (as distinct from two), but where did that get us? Not very fucking far.

It reminded me, – why I don't know, – that for years and years I had gone around thinking that the word ‘varmint' was spelt ‘varmit'. I pronounced it as ‘varmit' too, and can still recall the shock of incredulity when the error was pointed out to me. At first I refused to concede that I was wrong, yet there it was in the dictionary's cold print, plain as a pikestaff. It was a most disorientating experience which for a while threw the entire fabric of existence askew, and one I wouldn't wish to repeat for all the tea in Ceylon.

However: this reminiscence, fascinating as it was, didn't help in getting us off the hard shoulder. Would the engine start or wouldn't it, – that was the question.

The deserted motorway in the thick of night offered no salvation. Nine times out of ten anything that did by chance happen to come along would be a sleek black bullet-proof limo en route from one exotic location to the next, the serried faces inside frozen into immobile tight-lipped greenish masks of somnambulance …

‘What's that!' Brown said abruptly.

‘What!' I said, startled half out of my wits.

‘Nothing.'

‘What was it?'

‘I thought I heard something.'

All three of us listened. I could hear nothing.

‘What did it sound like?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘Look!' Mira whispered.

A pillar of light was moving towards us along the central reservation. With it come the sound of enormous wings beating the air in rhythmic surges.

 – whoosh!

      
 – whoosh!

          
 – whoosh!

                
 – whoosh!

                    
 – whoosh!

The searchlight from the sky (for such it was) of several million
candlepower kept to a steady track, throwing a perfect blinding disc onto the tarnished and slipstreamed grass which sort of grew between the corrugated crash barriers. The
whooshing
increased in volume and intensity until the metal clips securing the van's interior light fitment reverberated in sympathy. How high the helicopter was it was impossible to gauge because there was no point of reference except the solid dark air, which was none at all; it might have been twenty metres or two hundred.

‘They couldn't have traced it,' Brown mumbled. ‘They couldn't.'

‘Here's your chance to add more scalps to your already impressive total,' I said, relishing his fear. ‘Knock them out of the sky and get a bagful in one fell swoop. You could be an underground hero!'

The air pressure rocked the van on its springs.

‘What will they do?' Mira said, almost having to scream it as the threshing of enormous blades came practically overhead.

‘According to your friend Urb here, machine-gun us without compunction,' I yelled back. ‘Splatter us to smithereens and leave what's left to the carrion.' I wasn't acting brave; for some strange reason I wasn't afraid, which confused me.

The light moved past our windows, neither deviating to left or right, throwing out a brilliant reflected afterglare which transformed the interior of the van into daytime.

Brown's face changed as I watched it, realising that the helicopter wasn't searching for us and hadn't seen us, continuing on its chosen path towards the bridge about three hundred and fifty metres away. The air still beat in our ears, just as the column of light was scorched onto our eyeballs, renewed with each blink so that the imprinted image kept interfering with the real one, now a silvery pencil diminishing in the direction in which the van was pointing.

Threads came from above and down these threads slid figures clad in black from head to toe. They swung onto the parapet of the bridge and swarmed over it like lice. The beam of light went out and the helicopter moved off until it was a distant throb.

‘All that performance surely isn't for us,' Mira said, rather awed and bemused.

‘Anti-insurgence squad on manoeuvres,' said Brown knowledgeably, having regained his starving rat composure. ‘In case they have to quell a riot, storm an embassy or rescue a pop star. In their spare time,' he added, ‘they rob mail trains.'

‘Why should they do that?' I inquired.

‘Boost battalion funds. It helps pay for booze-ups, stag shows and day trips.'

‘They're not after us then?'

I couldn't see his shake of the head in the darkened interior but assumed he had. I almost wished they
had
come for us: it could have meant ten thousand smackeroos for Brown's capture, as well as rescuing us from the Concrete Bowel, which apparently led to the arse-end of nowhere.

To my surprise it seemed that the fire had taught the engine a lesson, because for all its sulky recalcitrance the varmint started at once, and we lurched onto the inside lane and picked up speed to achieve a respectable 25 mph.

As I drove I wondered about the mood that lay over sleeping England this night. To tell the truth, I couldn't fathom it. Could anyone?

Another England slumbered in my consciousness, in my green memory.

A quiet country road. Sunlight dappling the hedgerows. Hovis for Tea. Bulky policemen on creaking bicycles. A whitewashed pub with a curl of blue smoke coming from the chimney (quaint!). The dozing drone of a Spitfire on recce patrol. A sign saying S-Bend Ahead. Or better still, Hump-Backed Bridge. Fields cut and stacked with golden cubes. A train belching sparks emerging from a tunnel. A cream-and-blue single-decker bus with big headlamps labouring up a hill. A tiny red bull-nosed Post Office van with parcels inside fastened with thick string and blobs of sealing-wax. A prospect of hills like soft green breasts. A woman wearing a tweed skirt and sensible shoes buying cauliflower and a pound of tea in a village store. The tip of a church spire gleaming goldenly in
the setting sun. The sound of fat car tyres on crunchy gravel. A schoolboy with an S-shaped snake belt and woollen stockings collapsed about his ankles. Two old men with pipes and a basking dog sitting on a bench outside a pub.

 – This was the probable universe I inhabited in my dream of dreams. A pleasant slumbering languorous landscape. Such a world I had experienced as a child, not directly, but in the yellowing pages of old periodicals, themselves redolent of hot dusty summers and damp autumns lush with decay. In this other, mythical England, before my time, more real to me than my own childhood, shock-haired children with pale spindly necks and jutting sandy knees busied themselves on beaches with buckets and spades. The boys had braces strung over their skinny shoulders, rib cages exposed like fossil remains, supporting an excessive volume of thick grey flannel on their lean shanks; the girls with freckled noses and straight lank hair tucked their flapping print dresses into blue knickers and scampered about between the sandcastles, legs flashing like thin blades. Not far away, across the tramlines on the promenade, the saloon bars seethed with romantic liaisons, betting tips and boisterous holiday spirit. Warm dark beer frothed from pumps and the ceiling writhed with nicotine. The young men, in smart V-necked pullovers and open-necked shirts, stood back on their heels at the bar and surveyed the world with confident masculine disdain, in between opinions casting their eyes about for the pretty young woman but not overly concerned because tonight on the dance-floor beneath the mirror-faceted globe and spinning flecks of light was the proper time for that, while here and now was for serious drinking and worldly debate, unless, of course, a fast tart happened by.