Hero (15 page)

“Your uncle must have been very handsome,” I manage at last as I crinkle the nightgown over her head and let it fall like an extending concertina.

She shrugs, and I hear the first pats of rain against the high window and a sudden breath of wind.

CHAPTER 20

Simon

T
he Green Man is full now. I no longer go to my local, the Barleycorn, nor do I patronize the Thrasher, the pub slightly farther along the road from the Barleycorn. The Green Man is a good five miles from my house, and I know no one here. It was empty two hours ago when I settled into the leather armchair and surveyed the rusted horseshoe hanging from a nail in the red brick chimney. Lower, almost at eye level, I was surprised to confront a withered grass snake behind a glass frame. At first I imagined it might be the necktie of some celebrated person, and that the reason for its presence under glass, and for its dishevelled appearance, may have been that he wore it while accomplishing some amazing feat—a trek through the Sahara perhaps, an expedition to the Himalayas. As though conjured by some mystic triptych effect of the horseshoe, the snake, and myself, one customer, then two together, then a group of five, came into the pub billowing clouds of smoke from pipes and cigars. None of them seemed real to me as they swam upright amidst this ghostly haze.

The last few people to enter talked about the rain in a somewhat histrionic fashion. It is, apparently, a “filthy night, and getting worse,” and “thatches will be off by morning,” but there was a curious exaltation behind these premonitions of disaster, a joy in the flourish of duffle coat and mackintosh being beaten before the fire. I was in any case glad I hauled the cover over my car before entering, although I'm concerned now I may not have fastened the cover clamps completely on both sides. It's out of the question to check. The warmth of the seat and the pleasant sting of Glenmorangie have lulled me like a baby into a secure world. For the moment I am a happy spirit watching the pageant of life from the other side of an impenetrable glass. Sarah, Lucy, Elsa, Mrs. Baxter, Smith—all these people are merely characters not appearing in tonight's performance. They are no more flesh and blood than the marionette revellers before me.

There's a sharp double clang, a chime to accompany the circling blue incense.

“Last orders please, gentlemen.”

My haunches rise instinctively and, tipping my wrist, I take a glance at the time, amazed at the drainage of hours made carefree by drink. Muscling my way among the tweed, the wool, and the smoke, I catch the eye of the stocky barman, whose red trouser braces are proudly on display. He gives me a nod, and I see that one hand is already pumping the Glenmorangie optic as the other draws a beer for another customer. I return the nod, leave a crown on the bar, and return with the glass to my horseshoe and my snake.

Perching this time near the edge of the chair, I drain my glass quickly. I don't want to get too comfortable, and I don't want to stay until the barman calls time. The word “time” became my enemy when, soon after my return from the war, I got into a pointless and ultimately humiliating argument with the proprietor of the Barleycorn. Repeatedly denied the cure for my raging thirst, I even stooped so far as to brandish my medal, an act of clownish idiocy rendered by the distorting lens of drunkenness both more vivid and more conflicted in its precise details. The only things memory does not dispute are the groans and mocking laughter from the other patrons, and the fixed, hostile stare of the proprietor, a thin man with dark, penetrating eyes. This was my secret shame, played out for the first time in public.

I have never again put myself in the position of hearing the word “time” in a pub. When it is spoken I must be either home, my cure within arm's reach, or sinking into sleep's soft oblivion.

I rise, lay the glass on the polished oval shelf and, hauling on my coat, weave unsteadily through the crowd. One or two white faces turn towards me, but I am not well known here, so I catch no smirks. The door opens to my advance as last-minute patrons, dripping from the downpour, exhilarated and joking, merge into the growing tumult. In a moment I am under the porch awning, a hammer-and-nail dance beating its rhythm upon the eaves, splashing cool droplets up from the cobbles. My motor's black hood rises from the glistening darkness like the arching back of a sea creature—a metallic walrus or oversized otter. I button my coat all the way up, sinking my neck into its collar, and my feet take flight through the shimmering puddles, tricking me into a decision while my mind stagnates and delays. Fingers pulling the cool metal of the door handle, I launch myself feet first into the driver's seat. Unwelcome patches of damp sobriety seep into my neck and scalp as the water continues to trickle, dribbling also into the corner of my mouth.

The taste of the rain—unaccountably sweet with some mineral—weaves my twenty-seven years into an unlikely whole. It brings me into the garden of Sarah and Charles with its magic, overgrown pond, the makeshift tree house where once, not so long after the storm amputated its venerable host, Sarah and I hid out talking of subjects that in our innocence we believed forbidden—God, eternity, death, and the afterlife. The sweet taste carries me also to the first months in the trenches, to Sarah's early letters full of such sublime concentration of feeling, such appreciation of the soft kernel of joy that we believed awaited us provided I could get through the present danger. The promise, at that early time, made the grime, diarrhea, constant damp, and ear-splitting noise almost glamorous, a ring of fire through which I had to leap to reach my destiny. The future I envisioned had a folkloric structure, a blushingly simple formula of obstacle and final reward that, almost imperceptibly at first, became more and more distant, until it finally disintegrated under my scornful inward gaze into the most childish of fairy tales.

Thunder grumbles from the darkness beyond the car, and the engine chugs into motion at the turn of my key. In a moment I'm speeding into the deluge, pumping hard on the gas to make the engine growl and ward any straggling drinkers from my path.

Despite the swift action of the wiper blade, a blurring sheet of water at turns elongates and compresses the illuminated bushes, trees, and fence posts that hurtle past. But I find myself unconcerned. Lulled somewhat by the silver bullets of rain that skim sideways from the wiper's rubber, I am navigating the road from memory. A resolution has formed from out of nowhere, it seems, which has muted my terror long enough for insight to merge with conviction. I must find Smith before he finds me. I must confront the man face-on. I am so at ease with this decision, if not the reality of such a confrontation itself, that I am almost light-headed.
Do your worst
are the three words that sum up the gut feeling that accompanies the plan. The phrase at the moment chimes inside my skull like an eternal truth, the last defiant statements of a thousand hanged men.

I follow the road as it veers eastward towards the coast, towards the ancient graveyard whose medieval bones poked through the eroded cliff-face—one of the childhood playgrounds of Sarah, Charles, and I.
Do your worst!
I repeat to myself, fortified by what seems like a sudden glimpse into the transient nature of death. My mind scrambles to put this into words: Charles's bones, I tell myself, like those of all the war dead, will one day be as irrelevant as those in the red clay of Dunwich cliff. The thought does not unfold the way I wish. Its tone is callous, ungenerous, and I intended only whimsy. I wished merely to invoke the idea of everyone's mortal remains contributing to the substance of the earth. The thought, properly expressed, might be both comforting and oddly respectful. No matter our sins, or our failures, we do at least fertilize the soil. But the notion is more apt for me than for Charles. His failures and sins at the time of his death had yet to materialize.

I return to the three words that have already bestowed both comfort and a sense of undefined virtue—
do your worst
. This time, I realize, I have spoken them aloud, gripping the wheel and talking through clenched teeth. The sudden awareness of myself mumbling the phrase as though it were a charm brings over me a sense of disquiet. What if I could be seen behaving in this extraordinary manner? In a way I have been. A cynical, and ruthlessly sober, other self is watching from my shoulder. It isn't the drunkenness he is judging, it isn't even the strange melodrama, but rather a growing moral hubris in the man behind the wheel.
Do your worst?
he questions.
The worst has
already been done, and it was done not by Smith, but by you. Who
are you to challenge and bully?

I shrug off the dissenter in the exaggerated manner of the drunk, with a hunch of the shoulders and a twist of the neck—a boxer against the ropes. In my present dulled state, defiance needs an exclamation mark. A measure of my resolution comes back, enough anyway to convince me it will survive the night, and that in the morning it will emerge a tattered, nervy, but still determined version of itself.

I will seek out Smith.

I stuff my ears against the sound. One moment it's little more than a grumble, but the crashes when they come are so sudden, so violent, that only constant preparedness can get me through to the next minute. Even with such vigilance, the breath becomes so trapped in my chest after each explosion that I have trouble opening my passages and coaxing it free. Only after the noise dies off into a restless moan do I manage to whimper out some of the air and then it's released only in a slow, constricted trickle. I can easily imagine dying of suffocation this way. No gun or bayonet is necessary for my demise. If archeologists were to analyze the secretions from my rotting body they would find a distillation of pure cowardice.

Damp, soft mud cradles my face. This has been my pillow for years, ever since I descended the grim honeycomb of trenches to this, the deepest of them all. Someone threw into my dugout a rag doll the size of a child—some vicious joke, no doubt, a dead albatross to mock me. Adding spice to the perversity, they have called it “Lucy,” a harmless, nursery name conjuring visions of hobby horses and building blocks— hideous indeed given its appearance. I daren't open my eyes or lift my head for fear of catching sight of its loathsome red smile, or the twists of ginger wool that make up the parody of hair. I especially daren't—and this I have trouble admitting even to myself—because I have a secret terror that if I let my head tilt in its direction and my eyelids part, I will see the monstrous object move. Its spineless neck might turn. The corners of its felt mouth might intensify their upward sneer.

I'm drowning in guilt because of the comrades far above my head. For weeks, months, and years, the red drizzle has fallen from the sky, sinking into their coats, sliding down their necks. It will dry clinging to the collars of their vests, just as it used to dry into mine. No one can explain why blood has taken the place of water. I remember a discussion that seemed a breakthrough at the time, before my banishment below. Rolling our cigarettes beneath a swelling crimson crowd, we said it has taken the place of the liquid element, that creation has merely realigned itself after a mistake. It was always supposed to be fire, air, earth, and blood—not water. “Some mistake!” a sergeant chuckled, and I had to remind him that, in the course of eternity, the passage of time already traversed is nothing, less than a second. It's the tiniest of blips.

Such comradeship is long gone. The men with whom I joked then wouldn't waste spit on me now.

There's another crash. The mud beneath my cheek slides with fresh moisture, and I know I must be crying. I keep my eyes tight shut.

There's a grumble of gunfire, retreating once more, but another sound supersedes this—a pattering such as I've heard when a bullet belt slides into a machine gun—and it's much closer than the battle above. A soft noise I recognize as a brass handle turning, comes next, then footsteps—not the sound of a bullet belt at all—footsteps, in this place of shame and isolation, footsteps as soft as felt, light as a stuffed sock. My breath leaves me completely for the moment. Like the intention that forms before a great wave is unleashed, the air is receding only to gather itself afresh.

An electric silence tingles on the back of my neck. My lungs begin to fill. Something, the presence whose footsteps I have heard, is hovering very close. It can only be one thing—the unthinkable with the red stitched lips and the spirals of ginger hair. My back arches over the sledgehammer thud in my chest.

I feel it—a soft, warm fingertip.

The wave thunders home, a surge of terror, spinning, ill-defined yet vivid in its larynx-ripping high notes, its churning volcanic roar, its noteless rasp. The scream encompasses all these sounds and every pitch and tone in between. Even as it leaves me I feel a fleeting sense of comfort: I, as well as the bombs, can create a world of terror. So if creation is a thing of blood, rock, and fire I may indeed find my home. Once beyond the mortal barrier I can reunite with the primal swirl from which I came.

My eyes open to darkness, and this surprises me. I expected to confront the rag doll's sneer. Darkness, by comparison, seems a torture too remote, too mundane to trust. My body, sheathed in wet, knotted linen, rocks from one side to another, then turns belly up. I wait, catching my breath. The grumble of gunfire sounds once more, this time in the guise of thunder—a trick perhaps? Is the enemy clothing its arsenal in nature's garbs? A blue flicker illuminates the walls of the bunker, which, oddly, are geometrically smooth. I hear the sound of dripping water and also a whisper, which is feminine, and out of place.

“It's all right, Lucy,” the voice says. “Daddy was just having a nightmare.”

A click and yellow light floods the space, which is not a bunker, not underground, but a bedroom—mine. My ears ring with the aftershock of my scream. The high, constant note a siren, warning of a humiliation which, once understood, will be fully deep enough to dwarf the imagined horrors of the bunker and the rag doll brought to life.