Jago (50 page)

‘’Tomic raddyation. Tha’ss wha’ss in they wires,’ Reggie said, pointing to the droopy fence.

Maurice laughed. ‘Don’t be silly. Atomic radiation comes out of bombs’

‘Weren’t no bomb got they bleddy spacyman bugger.’

That was true, he couldn’t deny.

‘That was outer-space radiation.’

‘Same diff’rence.’

Maurice was impatient, unable to explain to Reggie why he was stupid. He didn’t have all the facts himself, but knew the older boy was wrong.

‘If there was atomic radiation in the wires, we’d be dead. And the cows would die too.’

‘Not if’n i’ss they slow-type raddyation.’

Reggie didn’t even read comics, so he didn’t know what he was talking about. But he’d often try to make Maurice angry by arguing stupid things. Once, he’d called Maurice a red, and argued that only communists had televisions. How else were they supposed to get their orders from Stalin in Russia if it wasn’t through the television?

They were quite near the wires. Nearer than Maurice’s father had said he should go. Up close, he could see the wires weren’t nailed to the iron posts, but strung into little loops at the top of each. He thought he could hear humming.

Maurice felt itchy. He wanted to piddle, but the Major had told him not to relieve himself in public. When he was younger, he’d wet the bed a few times and his father had made him lie in it until it was dry, then quirted him.

In the Far East, the Major had been an officer prisoner-of-war, and had to keep up discipline in the camp. He had stories about troublemakers and slackers who let the side down, and how he brought them into line. He had medals and a letter from an important general commending him for spirit and bravery. He didn’t tolerate indiscipline in the ranks and came down hard on it. But when Yank Steyning saluted him, he got red-faced and angry, accusing the American of being disrespectful. Yank had been in the war too and had medals to prove it. He hadn’t been a prisoner, though; he’d loaded bombers at the airfield in Achelzoy.

The Major wouldn’t want Maurice to piddle in the field. Still, he had drunk most of a bottle of pop this morning and not been to the lavatory. He could feel the pop in his bladder, pressing to get out.

‘You can hear they raddyation raddyatin’,’ Reggie said.

‘Don’t be silly, it’s just a fence, that’s all.’

‘One touch, and you’m be a pile a’ they ashes.’

This was another of Reggie’s stupid arguments, Maurice could tell. Like the time he said the Bomb Site was haunted by the ghost of a German parachutist who’d come in the war. Or his attempt to convince Maurice that Danny Keough limped because he had a wooden leg the army had given him. He had persuaded Maurice to stick a pin into Danny’s leg to disprove that story. That had been worth twenty strokes of the quirt, with Danny watching quietly while his father did the business.

‘It’s just wire.’

‘Prove it,’ Reggie said, quietly.

‘Father says I’m not to touch it.’

Reggie’s sneer was out loud, a laugh of victory. ‘See, ’tis bleddy ’tomic. ’Ven yer red daddy knows it.’

‘No, I’m just not to touch it.’

‘Then don’t touch it, jus’ cluck-cluck-cluck chicken.’

‘But it’s not atomic.’

The wire looked harmless, a dead line hanging like an old skipping rope. It could be jumped over or crawled under. Cows would trample it soon enough, and they wouldn’t be turned to ash. Maurice knew the Major wouldn’t have anything put up that might threaten his livestock. He was always talking about how much money he’d invested in the farm.

Maurice was bursting. He turned to a ditch, unbuttoned his fly, and took out his knob. He didn’t like to with Reggie watching, but he didn’t want to wet his shorts and get the quirt.

‘Tell youm what,’ Reggie said, ‘youm piss on thic wire.’

That was one way to settle it. His knob in his hands, Maurice waddled over to a place where the wire sagged almost to his knees. He aimed, and let go. The stream of piddle missed the wire, but he brought it closer, until it touched…

There was a steaming crackle, and the worst pain Maurice had ever experienced shot through his knob. Sense shocked out of him, he collapsed.

T
his could turn into a rock-’n’-roll riot, even a disaster of tabloid-headlines-for-six-months, hospital-visits-from-the-Prime-Minister proportions. The pre-festival bacchanal was turning into ragged scuffling. A homicidal dickhead was tossing home-made Molotov cocktails into the street. A boy with fluid spurting from a burst eye slammed into Lytton and ran on, hurdling firelines. When the dawn came and the figures were in, this could rack up a kill-count to make an airliner crash or a football-stadium collapse seem a picnic on the lawn.

The Browning was back in the Gate House. Lytton wished it were with him. He’d left it behind because he didn’t want the discomfort of it in his waistband all afternoon. Now, that seemed like a beginner’s mistake.

An amplified cassette deck was playing the Ramones’ ‘Rock ’n’ Roll High School’. Some were passing buckets around the patches of fire in the road, others were dancing in firelight. Lytton saw Ursula Cardigan jiving topless, warpaint dashes of soot and lipstick on her cheeks. A milk bottle full of paraffin sailed across the road, burning handkerchief jammed into its neck. It burst against a parked Ford Escort, flames spreading over paintwork, fire dripping to tarmac. A leading edge of fire washed down the Ford’s body, swarming towards the petrol cap.

Lytton dragged himself over a low wall. He was in a flowerbed in front of a small cottage; he smelled crushed roses, felt thorns scratching, tasted soft earth. Crouching against the dry-stone wedge, he counted, as if timing the distance between lightning and thunder. After fifteen, the Ford’s petrol tank exploded. He felt the shudder in the ground. Even with eyes shut fast, he saw the flare, a white blast in the dark. Hot hail fell on his back, and he writhed in his jacket, trying to get the searing shrapnel off him. Heat poured over him in waves. The small garden was floodlit by magnesium-harsh flames. Someone screamed and leaped the wall, fire sprouting from back and hair, slammed against the house and collapsed into a bush, life shocked free of the body. A sick-making smell of scorched flesh smoked off the burning person.

Slowly, he got off his knees and looked at the main road. Fires were spreading, the exploding car having spat hot chunks against a row of cottages. One of the last thatched roofs in Somerset was dotted with burning debris, clouds of smoke boiling from its depths. The amateur fire-fighters had given up and joined the rock-’n’-rollers, thrashing heads in the firelight. The cottage front door opened, and a middle-aged woman in curlers came out, wearing only a pyjama top. Naked from the waist down, she tutted at the damage to her flowers, and started fussing with a row of carefully cultivated chrysanthemums, squatting down to talk to the blooms. She ignored Lytton and the still-burning body.

As a field agent, he’d never been mixed up in the wet end of the business before. Montreal hadn’t been Belfast, Beirut or Phnom Penh. This wasn’t like his training exercises. This wasn’t like anything.

‘Gabba gabba, we accept em, one of us! Gabba gabba, we accept em, one of us!’ the Ramones sang. ‘Gabba, gabba hey, gabba gabba hey.’

He looked up at the Agapemone, and imagined Jago sitting with his camera obscura, watching it all, half knowing he had caused it. Was Beloved pleased with the world he had made?

A boy from the car park crew pogoed too near the fire, his Bart Simpson T-shirt smouldering. He bopped harder, scraping at his burning chest with his hands, screeching lost in the music. He slam-danced into others, spreading fire. People danced in the flames now, shaking heads and hips like damned souls. The cassette player was burning too, its music snapped off. New music, new sounds, flooded in to fill the gap. There was a heavy-metal bass, overlaid with screaming and the crackle of flames.

Lytton knew he wasn’t immune to the madness. Earlier, he’d screamed with the rest of them.

‘Gabba gabba, we accept em, one of us!’

The crowd had taken up the cry from the Ramones song ‘Pinhead’, the chant from the movie
Freaks.
‘Gabba gabba, we accept em, one of us, one of us!’ New freaks joined the dance every moment. The physical fire was petering out, but the spiritual flame was spreading. Kevin Conway and Beth Yatman were dancing close, jumping off the ground and colliding in the air, collapsing, scrambling up, and trying it again. Beth was laughing, long skirt in ribbons like a Polynesian princess’s. Kevin had smears of blood on his shirt from his flattened nose. The couple were jostled into the crowd, swallowed by a mass of unrecognizable people. Burned people, dead or unconscious, were kept upright by the press of bodies. Lytton stood at the edge of the throng, his back to a cottage wall.

A wave of movement came through the crowd, stirred by something a hundred yards off. Maybe a thousand people pressed together, pushed to one side of the road. A wave of dancing, stumbling people came. He felt as if a hundred tons of mattress had just swatted him against a solid wall.

The smell of people was overpowering, and there was pressure on every bone in his body. This was how people died in panicking crowds: by inches. Broken bones were painful, but mainly asphyxiation got you, breath slowly squeezing from you. Pain came alive in his chest as his lungs emptied and bodies squashed close around prevented him from filling them again. Faces were pressed close, silent pain exaggerating their features. As you suffocated, you didn’t even have the wind to scream. A dozen elbows dug into him wherever he was soft. Caught as tight as the centrepiece of a three-dimensional jigsaw, he didn’t know if his feet were on the ground. He couldn’t feel below his waist. His back ground against plastered wall. The straining of strangled voices was all around, like the creaking timbers of a wooden ship. There was the occasional pop of a snapped bone, followed by a short, crush-defying yelp.

Slowly, his ribs constricted his lungs. It was as if he’d been mummified with strips of wet leather and left to dry in the sun, all-over wrappings shrinking around him. This, he realized, was how he was going to die. He thought of all the snake tricks he’d learned but never got to use: hot-wiring a car, killing a guard with his bare hands, disposing of a body, making a bomb out of everyday household articles. He thought how promising he had been as an undergraduate, and of how little he had actually done in the years—decades—since then. He thought of all the women he wished he’d gone to bed with, and they all came out Spook Susan.

Then, like a miracle, he could breathe again.

The human tide had broken against the row of cottages, lucky people spilling through gaps into back gardens. Now it was flowing back again, towards the other side of the road. Another crush of people, formerly at the back of the press, were being forced against another set of walls. There was a sudden gasp, and Lytton’s lungs were full. He was sliding down the wall. His back and hair were white from plaster dust. People all around him were coughing and choking. He had not been seriously injured, although his skin must be a bruise-mottled purple. He caught himself before he lost balance, and stood. Nearby, people who had not thought so fast were being trampled.

Susan was right. It was time to shut up shop. He listed priorities. He should get his gun, then he should get word to the outside. The obvious thing would be to go to Checkpoint Charlie, wave accreditation at Sergeant Draper, then use the police radio to call in the
IPSIT
equivalent of an air strike. Garnett must have teams of jumpsuited snakes ready, probably at the Fleet Air Arm base in Yeovilton, to move in and clean up the mess. The country had had enough disasters and terrorist atrocities since Lockerbie and Hillsborough to give doctors and troops experience in damage limitation. Jago could simply be switched off with an injection.

He fought through to the chrysanthemum-grower’s garden, and stepped over a pile of groaning victims. More than a few were unmoving, further casualties. There was a tiny alley beside the cottage, and he shoved himself into it. The half-nude gardener was still pottering about, ignoring her wounded guests. She applied a dainty watering can to a small nest of fire, dousing it with a sprinkle.

Round the back, it was dark. The row of cottages shielded the fires. Lytton’s clothes were wet through. For a heart-stabbing moment, he thought he was bleeding from a hundred gashes, then realized he’d had all the sweat squeezed out of him. Someone, he hoped not himself, had pissed down his legs in the crush. He scrambled over a back-garden wall of chickenwire threaded with dry climbers, tumbling into a mushy ditch. There was a powerful smell of compost. The ground broke rancid under his hands. This end of the village was just two rows of buildings either side of the main road. Once you got out beyond back gardens you were either up the hill or, as he was, out on the moors.

If he kept off the road, he could get to the Gate House. Trying to ignore the din, he crawled out of the ditch and, muscles protesting, began to run, crouched low, across fields. There was a scattering of people, even a few cattle, but they mainly got out of his way. Somewhere above a helicopter circled, and he hoped to God that meant this was tugging some bell cords, maybe even shaking the great web of the spook show to such an extent that Sir Kenneth would be hauled out of bed to make a decision.

He circled through the fields and neared the festival site, hoping to rejoin the road just by the Gate House, a short hike away from Checkpoint Charlie. As he got nearer the site, the noise got louder, more boisterous. There was music again, and singing and laughter. It was easy to mistake this whole catastrophe for a carnival. He made it free and clear without incident, and barged his way through a scrubby hedge, hacking the bushes apart with his arms. Scratched and aching, fouled and filthy, he tumbled back into the road.

‘Fuck I, James,’ Gary Chilcot said, ‘youm been in the wars.’

He lay on the verge a moment, struggling for breath again, feeling his bruises tingle. It was preparation for the siege of pain which would, he knew, set in within the hour. He should keep moving, outrun the agony. Faces loomed over him. Gary. And Pam, simpering like a black widow whose husband hasn’t quite escaped. Others he didn’t know.