The Yellow Glass (36 page)

“I didn’t know you two knew each
other . . but what’s to remember?”
 
I
whispered back at him.
 
“Magnus is best
forgotten, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” he bowed his
head.
 
“I have done a very bad thing.”

What on earth was the matter
with him now?
 
Jay Tamang seemed to
possess a whole set of standards to which I’d never even attempted to aspire
(it wasn’t often that I’d glimpsed the moral high ground, never mind set foot
on it).

“I’m sure you haven’t done
anything bad in your entire life, Jay.”
 
I tried to pat his hand, but he yanked his palm away rather rudely.

“Mr Arkonnen is a
good
man,” his voice broke with
emotion.
 
“He saved your life when his
relative shot at you.
 
That is the
truth.
 
I must tell you that he broke both
arms and both legs while he was doing this.
 
He cares for nothing in this world as he cares for you, Rosa.
 
So you see, I am a very bad man indeed; one
who has taken advantage of a young girl in a time of terrible trouble.
 
One who has thought of nothing but himself
and brought dishonour to the name of . .”

“Stop it, Jay.”
 
My cheeks flamed.
 

I was beginning to feel
strangely sick; trapped at the top-most point on the Big Dipper, buffeted by
the wind.

——

 
The Monk stood up.
 
He’d donned safety glasses and a pair of
silver-coloured gloves that reached up beyond his elbows.

“Yes,” said Hutch, as if a
question had been put to him.
 
“I think
it’s time, don’t you.”

The Monk picked up a gigantic
pair of what looked like out-sized sugar tongs and disappeared around the back
of the apparatus.

“Time for what, Godfrey?”
 
Arkonnen asked.

“Oh, time to get the poker out,
old boy.
 
Stoke the flames and so forth.”

Reg Arkonnen gazed up at the
monstrous distillery and I thought, for one heart-stopping moment, that he’d
seen me.
 
But no.

“I can’t believe the job your
scientists have done, Godfrey,” he marvelled.
 
“Would you take a look at this bloomin’ great contraption!
 
It’s bloody mind-boggling.”

“Mmm.”

“I’ve just got one question,
though.
 
Well, two questions if I’m
honest.”

“Oh, please be honest,
Reginald.”

“Well . . where’s the
glass?
 
I mean to say . . I’ve not seen
them put it into the glass.
 
Where do
they do that, then?”

“Eh?
 
You’d like to see that, would you?
 
Well I’m sure that can be arranged.
 
It’s only fair after all the hard work you’ve
put in.
 
For which we will be eternally
grateful.”
 
He strolled round the back with
his hands in his pockets, following the Monk.
 
“Come on, Reg.
 
This way, old
boy.
 
Let me show you the business end.”

It took so little time.
 
Yet he must have realised what was about to
happen and that may have been the worst of it.
 
There was a falsetto scream - no, less than that, a squeak
 
- before they pushed him in.
 
The distillery gave an almighty whoop and a
stinking gust of putrid heat burped upwards.
 
My eyes watered and stung, but I was completely unable to look
away.
 
For there, within the glass,
emerging from the churning, brown weed like a swimmer from the sea, I saw Reg
Arkonnen.
 
For one split-second his
entire body glowed, converted into radiant, yellow flame, before he atomized to
dust.

“That’s for my little sister,” I
heard Hutch say, conversationally.

I swayed, tried to right myself,
swayed some more and pedalled in thin air, even as I plunged downwards.

 
Jay told us to park
at the end of a country lane.
 
When the
headlights were switched off, blanket darkness descended.
 
The sea was so wild that Mr Piotrowski had to
rap several times on the car window to get our attention, and, when he did, he
looked so uncannily like a wraith emerging from the mists that I think we all
blanched with fright.
   

“Sorry, Mr Piotrowski,” my
mother wound down the passenger window.
 
“What was that?”

He pointed in the direction of
Crab Bay and then at himself, mouthing his intention to proceed first.
 
At least, I think that was what he mouthed;
the wind whipped his words off him before we could grasp anything of his
intentions.
 
I tapped my mother on the
back:

“Surely
he’s
not going first?”

But he’d already
disappeared.
 
She rolled the window back
up and we sat quietly in the dread dark, docile and somewhat subdued.
 
I wondered whether the gale might scoop us up
and deposit us into the sea; the old car rocked back and forth on its axles in
a fashion that was far from reassuring.
 
Mr Piotrowski seemed to be gone for an interminable length of time.
 
Trepidation mounted.
 
Well, it certainly did for me.

“I hope he hasn’t been blown off
the cliff,” my mother said, suddenly.
 
“Do you think we ought to . . ?”

The car door slammed beside me
and I jumped.

“Jay?”
 
I asked.
 
“Jay?”
 
And then,
 
“I don’t believe it!
 
He’s gone without us!
 
How
could
he?”

“I have a torch in the glove
compartment,” went my father.
 
“Pass it
to me, will you, Millicent?”

She found it and passed it over
and my father pushed his beret down over his forehead and put a hand on the
door.

“I’m coming with you, Jerzy,”
she said.
 
“Don’t ask me to stay.”

He sighed.
 
I knew he didn’t want her to.

“I don’t think you would listen
if I asked that, my love.”

“No.
 
I’ve
got
to come.
 
For Albert.”

They actually began to get out
of the car as if I wasn’t there.

“Hey!
 
What about me?”

My father mouthed something at
me through my window, something authoritarian and deeply unfair; something
patriarchal and rooted in the dim and distant past.
 
Whatever it was, the wind snatched it
away.
 
It was welcome to it.
 
I counted to twenty and then I opened my door
and got out.
 
Major Dyminge came up
behind me carrying a torch.

“They’ve let you come,
then?”
 
He shouted into my left ear.

“Oh yes,” I shouted back.

“Kathleen’s on standby in the
car, in case we need to make a quick getaway.”

I nodded, vigorously and took
his arm, following the powerful beam of the torch down the lane, cleaving
through hummocks of gorse and sea buckthorn.
 
Brambles lunged at my legs, maddened by the gale, and I fancied I heard
horses whinnying somewhere nearby, frightened.
 
The faint glow of my father’s torch, some distance up ahead, bobbed
about in black space.

“Stay by me, won’t you
Rosa?”
 
Major Dyminge said.
 
“I’ve got the gun and I’ll use it if I have
to.”

I shivered.
 
What would we find?

——

 
The rack snagged at
my fingertips, catching me seconds before I hit the ground.
 
I swung, madly out of control, smashing into
the wall.
 
A small avalanche of dried
seaweed flakes whirled into my mouth and eyes before they settled over me.
 

“Guards!”
 
Screamed Hutch.

But nobody was around.
 
I jumped down and squared up to him:

“You’re not acting under orders,
are you, you filthy bastard?
 
You’ve gone
solo.”

He tried to run, but I caught
him by his shabby suit and pinned him against the glass wall of the distillery.

“Aargh!”
 
He screamed.
 
“It’s burning me!
 
Help!
 
Help!”

“Hot is it?”
 
I held him firm.
 
“I saw what happened to Arkonnen.
 
May you burn in hell for it.”

His grey face had turned bright
red and sweat streamed off him.

“Help!
 
Help!”

Out of the corner of my eye I
saw the Monk creeping round the distillery with those bloody great sugar-tongs
still in his hands.

“Oh no you don’t!”

I punched Hutch hard in his
paunch, let him slide onto the floor and sprang at the scientist.
 
He may have known how to distil uranium, but
he didn’t know the first thing about a brawl.
 
I went for him with nothing held back, pummelling the living daylights
out of him until he was an unconscious heap on the floor.
 
I didn’t care what I did, I was so furious at
what that pair of murderers had done.
 
I’d seen war and I’d seen men die in appalling ways, but I’d never seen
anything as cold-blooded as what they’d done to Arkonnen.
 
I was still going at it, hot and strong, when
the shadows shot me.

——

 
When we got to the
gate we found a body slumped on the ground.
 
Major Dyminge aimed his torch at him and bent to feel his pulse.

“That’s odd,” he whispered,
“he’s breathing steadily, as if he’s asleep and I can’t see a mark on him.
 
I wonder how he did that?”

“Who?”

“Kathleen’s friend, I presume.
 
Come on.
 
I’m going to hold the torch down low, so the beam’s by our feet and we
don’t announce our arrival.”

The field was full of caravans -
a few quaint, painted ones standing amid the modern, white variety - and
electric lights shone through the small, square windows of the more up-to-date
models: yellow dabs of domesticity pointing all the way down the field to the
edge of the cliff.
 
The caravans
shuddered in the wind, altogether too close to the sea for a night like
that.
 
I saw a pole that held a
washing-line yank clear out of the earth and fly into the air, before smashing
back into the side of one caravan.
 
The
uncanny sound of terrified horses - whinnying and snorting and trampling at the
ground - was all around us now, rising and falling through the wind.

“What do we do?”
 
I asked the Major, still clinging to his arm.

“We find Tristram,” he replied,
matter-of-factly.
 
“He’ll be here
somewhere.”

But what if he wasn’t?
 
What if they’d killed him and thrown him off
the cliff and he was tossing about in the waves, broken to bits by the storm?

“Ah, there they are.”
 
He lifted his torch, briefly, to illuminate
my parents and Mr Piotrowski standing among a group of men.
 
“They seem to have found a welcome party.”

We ran over and my father turned
at my approach, looking daggers.

“What’s happening?”
 
I asked my mother.

“Mr Piotrowski speaks Romanian,
or Roma, or whatever language it is these people speak.
 
I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but
they seem to have taken to him.”

She was right.
 
Several men were clapping Mr Piotrowski on
the back, while they all gabbled and gesticulated wildly.

“Where’s Jay?”
 
I asked.

“I don’t know.
 
I haven’t seen him.”

A tremendous fork of lightening
ripped along the length of the sky, followed by the loudest rumble of thunder
I’d ever heard.
 
Moisture slapped me in
the mouth and I tasted salt; not rain, then, but sea.
 
Major Dyminge pushed through Mr Piotrowski’s
admirers to get to him and grabbed him by the arm.

“This is becoming dangerous,” he
shouted.
 
“Can you tell them to vacate
the field?
 
Put it to them in no
uncertain terms, will you?
 
If the waves
are reaching over the cliff, it’s time to go.”

Just then - as I turned to assess
the cliff - I saw a woman dash out of a caravan and run over to where a car was
parked.
 
The woman had one of those
transparent, plastic head-scarves on and was holding the edges of her white
cardigan up over her shoulders, as if it could protect her from the rain.
 
I hadn’t expected hooped ear-rings and
multi-coloured scarves, but she
really
didn’t look remotely like a gypsy.
 
Not
only that, but the car she’d run over to inspect was a long, fat number.
 
It was some way off, but I’d have said it was
a Rolls Royce.
 
I slipped away from the
group, ran down the field and peered through the window of her caravan while
she was preoccupied.

Crumbs.
 
No, honestly.
 
I’d found Magnus.

——

 
The storm was
walloping at the caravan that hard I could feel the mattress shake under
me.
  
Pablo paused in his marathon
washing project for a moment and gazed off into thin air.
 
I’d imagined I could hear animals
screaming.
 
Did he hear them, too?
 
There was an almighty clap of thunder and he
spat in disgust and leapt off the bed.

“It’s alright, boy.”

The tempest chucked stones at
the window like it wanted to break the glass.
 
Like spatters of gunshot.
 
What a
night!
 
I looked up and saw Rosa Stone.

——

 
I climbed down the
lift shaft with the container grasped between my knees.
 
I had not thought to put that radiation suit
back on, but was wearing Mr Stone’s clothes; it was too late for such matters
now.
 
Perhaps it was too late for
everything.
 
What had made me wait so
long?
 
(She had.
 
She hadn’t meant to - I knew that - but she
had simply gone to my head.)
 

I’d searched for him in the caravan,
but found it empty, the door un-locked and banging in the mighty winds,
beginning to come loose at the hinges.
 
I
couldn’t search the entire field, not in that weather.
 
There was much that was beyond my control - a
scientist must be able to admit that, or he is a dangerous man - and yet, all
was not lost.
 
I’d strayed; had forgotten
the right way to go.
 
But, as long as
there remained one honourable path left to follow, all was never lost.

I had just jumped down through
the broken roof of the lift and into the power-house within the cliff, when,
behind me, the lift began to ascend to the top of the shaft.

——

 
It was a flesh wound
to the shoulder, but it was enough to bring me to my senses.
 
They pulled me off the scientist and one of
them stuck a gun to my head, while another stuck his in my back.
 
A face I knew all too well leered at me;
young, sleek, swollen with contempt.

“Permission to finish him off,
sir,” said Joe, breezily, as if he were doing a wounded dog a favour.

“One minute,” Hutch murmured
somewhere in the background.
 
“Interesting
to see
 
what he knows.”

I struggled against his thugs,
but it was just a gesture.
 
They had me
hog-tied and we all knew it.

“Everything,” I spat. “I know
every bloody thing and so does Tamang and he’s spreading the word and you
haven’t a hope in hell of containing this, whatever you do to me.”

“Now, now, Upshott,” said Hutch,
drifting into view.
 
“Surely you’ve
worked with me long enough to know better than that.”

He came up close, so close I
could see the grey hairs sprouting in his nostrils.
 
The freckles on his pale, nebulous face were
liver spots.
 
Patches of pink scalp shone
through his sandy-grey hair.
 
The man was
older than I’d thought; much older.

“Burn in hell, Hutch,” I
spat.
 
“It’s the only place they’ll have
you after this.”

A smirk travelled over his mild
face and was gone.

“Funny you should mention
burning, Upshott old boy.”

——

 
Even as I pulled
faces through the window at Magnus, a wave broke over the cliff-top and
frittered itself away over the caravan roof.
 
I waved goodbye and peered up the field to where Mr Piotrowski was
directing the Romanies, rather as if he were their long-lost leader come to
reclaim his men.
 
Major Dyminge, too, was
rushing about giving orders, helping calm the horses and hitch them up, or
directing cars one by one through the field gate, so that a queue of caravans
built up, waiting to depart.