Devastation Road (29 page)

Not a pilot then, but a flight engineer.

Always his brother’s sidekick.

The role he knew was designed for men like him – monitoring and operating the plane’s systems, the fuel management and engine oil and temperature coolants. While Max pushed the plane
through the sky, hands at the yoke or edging forward the throttle, Owen had logged and noted and recalculated those fussy little details, his eyes fixed not on the sky ahead but on the dials in
front of him. Was that why his natural instinct all those days ago had been to log everything that came to him?
BOY
=
CZECH
=
BREAKFAST
.

It had always been Owen, not Max, who had snuck away to read copies of
Flight
or spend his evenings hunched over
The Aircraft Engineer
supplement, trying to understand the
articles on wiring lug design and airscrew performance, all the strange equations and terminology that had intrigued him with their mystery, while Max had been the one on his pushbike bombing it
down the lane. It had never been the accolade of flying an aircraft that had fascinated him; it was the science, the physics and aerodynamics, the nuts and bolts and wiring and pistons that somehow
got the crate up into the air. Beneath the gleaming skin of a Lancaster there were 55,000 identifiable parts all playing their intricate role.

In the end, he thought, leaning back and considering this with a strange relief, everything came down to mechanics: the workings of a plane or a watch or a frog; the joints that held a man
together; the mechanics that propelled him forward and walked him through the snow and dust.

Max and he, of course, had therefore been on different training schedules, not even at the same station half the time. That must have made the thing with Connie easier, allowing him to duck and
dive the days when Max might be around. For a month she had even given Owen a key; and on leave days he would take the number 2 tram from Victoria Embankment, following the rails through
Kennington, Stockwell and Balham, along Tooting High Street to Colliers Wood and then Wimbledon. There at the station he’d hop off, changing on to the 604 trolleybus that took him along the
Kingston Road until it dropped him on Caversham Rise. Sometimes before he went in he would sit on the front steps, collecting up the fallen geranium petals while he took a cigarette, satisfied by
the warm weight of the key in his pocket.

Only once more did he ask her to leave Max.

You know I can’t do that
.

He poked his finger into one of the boxes he had been sitting on, where under the weight of the others one of the sides had split, and pulled out a lipstick. It must have been the delivery that
Haynes had been complaining about. Still, no one had bothered to move them. He took the lid off and wound it up. He held it up, a slight wetness to the crimson colour in the sunlight. There must
have been hundreds of them in the boxes. He would give it to Anneliese. She would look pretty with a bit of colour.

‘Oh, hello.’ A young man in army overalls had appeared out the door and was standing beside him. ‘You busy?’

‘Not especially,’ said Owen. He slipped the lipstick into his pocket.

‘Guvnor wants this lot shifting. I don’t suppose you could gi’s a hand. They just need running up to the stockroom. Jesus.’ He scratched the back of his head as he looked
at the boxes. ‘I didn’t realize there was so many.’

Owen said that would be fine.

‘I can probably take three,’ said the boy. ‘Do you want to load me up?’

He handed the lad a box and piled another on top, then moved some of the boxes around, getting the one from the bottom that was split so he could put it on the top of the pile in the boy’s
arms. As he moved them away from the wall he stopped. He bent down. My God, he thought. There was the symbol – the swooping wings and the ‘v’ for a head, the box around it
scratched into the side of the wall with something sharp, like a nail or a knife.

‘You all right there?’ said the boy.

Owen got down on his knees to take a closer look. He ran his finger over the scratches in the stonework. This wasn’t the work of Janek. It was a wound that was old and weathered. The
symbol, he realized, had been there in the wall for some time.

‘What is it?’ said the boy.

‘Nothing.’ He stood up again and passed the box.

Then it quickly dawned on him who must have left the marking.

‘Actually, do you know what? I can’t help after all. Sorry. I need to see someone. It’s urgent. Sorry, but I just remembered.’

‘Oh, all right,’ said the lad. He seemed a bit disgruntled but Owen was already running.

Martha said it would take some time – time she did not have – but she would go through the cards that the nurses had started to complete and there were new
noticeboards going up with names from other camps.

‘You’ll need to be patient, mind,’ she tried to explain, but Janek would not.

He went from block to block, ward to ward, and bed to bed – a Czech man, he said, Petr Sokol, showing them the photograph and newspaper clippings, saying all manner of other things that
might prompt someone to remember.

The two Czech boys – Otmar and Mikoláš – went with him. Owen too. They paced from ward to ward.
Does anyone know anything of a Petr Sokol?
But Owen kept on
forgetting who they were looking for. His eyes kept being drawn to the women in the beds, seeing reminders of Connie in every face: the shape of her eyes, the line of her jaw, the indentation of
her lip.

The same nurse from yesterday appeared at the doorway. She held a familiar-looking card in her hand. ‘Petr Sokol?’ she called.

But there wasn’t any answer.

Strange how things came and went. In all the turmoil of the day he had quite forgotten about some things, but seeing the button on the ground stopped him. He bent down to pick
it up where it had been trodden into the dirt. It was covered in mud, round and metallic, almost the size of a threepenny bit and with four eyelets, dusty broken threads tangled between them. It
looked familiar.

He took the tin button out of his pocket and weighed them both in his palms, and then held them up to the sunlight. They were the same – the same size, colour, style and shape, and each
with the same four eyelets and broken strands of thread still knotted and tangled around the holes. It was only when he laid them each in the palm of a hand and brought his hands together that his
palms seemed to form a face; the two silver-coloured buttons stared back at him like eyes.

A single tin button lay in the shadows. It was only the sunlight streaming through the carriage window as the train clattered on that had made him notice. It soaked in through
the glass and was sliced by the wooden slats of the seat opposite him where the girl sat, a dusty shaft cutting through the dark beneath the seat and falling on the button so that in that moment it
had caught his eye. For a while he had looked at it, hidden there behind her ankles, the stark white of her socks and the red gleam of her sandals, her suitcase parked beside her. She held the
teddy bear on her lap, the same styled button for an eye, the other fallen from it, and now he saw it lying beneath the seat. Behind him he was aware of the SS troops making their way through the
carriage, getting closer, checking everybody’s papers.

He bent down and said something in German like
Excuse me
, before he reached under her seat.
Ich glaube, es ist Ihnen etwas heruntergefallen
. I think you’ve dropped
something. He pulled out the button.
Hat Dein Bär ein Auge verloren?
Has your bear lost an eye?

What made him pick the button up? What made him bend at that moment, just as the SS officer making his way through the carriage, going from passenger to passenger, had finally reached them? Owen
looked up –
Has your bear lost an eye?
– the button still in his hand, and something in that moment had passed between them. Perhaps she had seen the help he needed, the ink on
his hand, the now smudged and useless documents. Or something in his own eye that told her that he was not who she thought he was. For even though he had said it and she had quite clearly seen the
button there in his hand, the bear still held tightly in her lap, when the officer had approached them and said ‘Papers’, she had still made a fuss.

Mein Bär!
she said. My bear!
Oh, mein Bär!
she cried. She was up on her feet and then down on her knees looking under the seat, scrabbling around on the floor of the
carriage and between people’s legs, making them move, getting everyone up.
Sein Auge!
His eye!
Oh, nein!

Papiere!
He needed to see their papers.

But no one was taking any notice. All around them people were lifting their feet up or bending over to look beneath their seats, moving luggage, shaking out coats, and saying things like:
Oh, let’s have a look
.

It must have rolled somewhere
.

Are you sure you’ve lost it?

Yes, look
, she said.

Papers! I need to see your papers!

She held the bear up with its missing eye and then started to cry, so that in that moment’s distraction while a dozen people at the end of the carriage looked for a button that both she
and Owen knew very well Owen was holding in his hand, she created for him an opportunity.

And there it was now – this button that in those crucial moments had distracted the officer from his papers long enough for the plane to come over, for the sound of it to fill the carriage
just as it filled his head now, the train slowly rattling over the bridge, while all around him the good passengers hunted for a button to appease a distraught child travelling on her own. In that
briefest of commotions, merely seconds, he had pushed past the officer to the outside door and, unnoticed, opened it and stepped out on to the end of the platform. The train had slowed to cross the
bridge. Up above them the plane had passed overhead but when he looked up he saw that, slowly and deliberately, it was beginning to turn, curling back towards them as it started its descent.

That night the Czech contingent threw a farewell party. They lit fires around the parade ground and sang Czech songs, encouraging the other refugees to join them so that before
long, the whole square was filled with a throng of people. There were trumpets and accordions and percussion played on anything that would hold still long enough: pots and pans and the bonnets of
jeeps, discarded tins strung up on twine, the back of someone’s head . . .

The two boys from Janek’s room – Otmar and Mikoláš – had made firecrackers that popped and fizzed through the dirt, crackling as they scurried beneath
people’s feet, making them jump, or shoot off somewhere like miniature rockets. There was alcohol, of course, taken from nearby houses, and Owen was not surprised to hear rumours that earlier
a nearby farm had been held up at gunpoint, a group of ‘liberated prisoners’, it was claimed, forcing their way in and stealing a wheelbarrow piled with bottles of homebrewed beer.

Many of the military team came out to join in. They had as much to celebrate as the Czechs, said Martha. Every refugee sent home was one less to worry about.

‘You don’t get many moments like this,’ she said, ‘when you get a chance to take stock and realize that actually, yeah, we’re doing all right.’

Most of the medical staff and volunteers sat around on chairs outside the tents in the square, smoking and swigging beer. Guppy sucked on a foul-smelling cigar that a Hungarian had given him,
and for a while there was some debate as to what was actually in it.

With a drink in his hand and puffing one of Martha’s Luckies, Owen allowed himself to relax. He thought only of that night and his strange sense of belonging, and his gratitude that come
tomorrow, Janek would be on his way, and then him too, and Martha had at least made promises about Anneliese and that she would do everything she could to ensure that Little Man would be all right.
The only moment when the past crept up on him was when someone released a makeshift Chinese lantern from a top-floor window. For a while they watched it floating up into the sky, where it drifted
over the rooftops.

‘God. Looks like a bloody lung,’ grumbled Haynes.

But Owen had seen it as a scarlet heart or a box kite sent up on a string held by him and his father.

In the bedroom of The Swallow hotel, booked under the name of Gainsborough, he had sketched her. Not the mechanics of her. No guidelines. Not the muscles or structure of bones
or where the heart might sit or the liver or lungs or how the major arteries ran through her body like wires. He sketched her clothed in only her skin as she sat on the end of the bed, her head
turned to the window.

My face
, she had said with a smile.

He glanced up at her over the edge of the paper.

I want you to draw my face
.

The man was called Myska. He was a small, timid creature with surprisingly large earlobes and a diminishing hairline that had retreated to such a degree that it now formed
little more than a crown around his head.

At first Janek didn’t seem to know him but the man was evidently pleased to see him, grabbing him out of the throng of people, talking fast and excitedly, all the time holding
Janek’s arm and gesturing at perhaps how well he looked or how tall, and then talking just as fast at Owen, not realizing that he was English and hadn’t the slightest idea what the man
was going on about.

‘
Myska?
’ Janek said eventually.

‘
Ano! Ano!
’ said the man.

Janek’s face cracked into a smile and then a laugh. ‘Myska!’ He clutched the man by the arms and they gave each other an awkward hug, squeezing each other hard.

‘Josef Myska,’ Janek said. He held his head between his fists and circled about. He clearly couldn’t believe it.

Owen wondered whether he should wander back to the tents and leave the two of them to it. Nearby a couple of French girls from the Mission Militaire de Liaison Administrative were trying to
teach a group of Russians how to dance the jitterbug. Someone shrieked. Another firecracker whizzed through. Otmar and Mikoláš were shouting and laughing.