Vail Page 8

  ‘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.

  In this memory I took no part. I was the omnipresent onlooker, the fascinated bystander, soaking up the atmosphere, senses all aquiver for sentient data, the memory made flesh.

  From the calorific seaside I swung my inner eye to a damp mossy churchyard under the dripping elms and a bird of some kind perched on a twig. Slanting rain emptied steadily from the skies, drowning the world in grey mist. A leering gargoyled spout gurgled and spewed clear cold rainwater into a stone trough, its incessant insane chuckle making the silence more oppressive. There, not far away, on the flanks of the hillside, stood a horse with head bowed at one end, bedraggled tail at the other. No figures moved in this grey vision; it was a sodden England under a perpetual downpour, drinking its fill, the thrust of growth checked and in abeyance until the watery sun broke through and burned off the excess of moisture in the saturated fields and in the narrow puddles formed by the rutted tracks. Long meandering walls of dark stone gleamed damply in the drab light, reaching away into the obscure distance.

  Another page turned, another vision beckoned, this time of smart people with groomed heads smoking du Maurier cigarettes, long delicate fingers dangling negligently over the sides of wicker chairs, grave seamless faces turned towards the camera as they prepared to fly the Clipper across the Atlantic. In the background hovered an anonymous white-coated attendant holding a silver tray, his bland closed expression apeing those of his masters and betters grouped around the glass-topped table. The gentlemen wore evening dress, the ladies gowns of clinging silken stuff which followed every line and crevice of their slender breastless bodies, for dinner above the clouds was a sumptuous solid silver affair. Their careless ease spoke of apartments in Mayfair and Bentley tourers and weekends in the country where they tramped the Downs in stout shoes and herring-bone capes, calling the setters to heel and debating the League of Nations.

  In contrast another image shunted into view, one of clamorous activity and swirling smoke beneath the ribbed and strutted vault of a large railway station. Carriage doors stood open, worn leather straps handing down, the carriages identified by their livery and ornate gold initials. Pungent steam drifted over the tracks, crept onto the platforms and sidled through the iron spokes of bogeys lined up in convoy and laden high with severe square parcels and grey sacks and shapeless brown paper packages. The giant arrowed hands of a moon-faced clock jerked the seconds away, a whistle sounded, doors crashed, a flag waved, and the grinding acceleration began to gather momentum with squealing wheels and explosive gusts of expended energy. Through the smoke the legends of a lost civilization shifted and fragmented, appeared and faded in mocking farewell: Craven ‘A’, Borwick’s Baking Powder, Nugget Polish, Colman’s Starch, Dr Scholl Zino-Pads, Mackeson’s Milk Stout, Bear Brand Pure Silk Stockings, Phosferine Tonic, Bovril Puts Beef Into You, Silvo Liquid Silver Polish, Wills’s Whiffs.

  Memory was fallacious of course. This England never existed, except in back numbers of National Geographic. Long, long before Europe became Urop. Yet this racial memory lingered in me, had made the necessary electro-chemical connexions via the appropriate synapses in my soft brain, and the pictures in my head were as vividly and muddily real as Eastman Colour.

  This present England was another kettle of fish entirely. Straight, linear, without U-turns. Obdurate and unyielding. Comprising black limos and melyn cribos. Helicopter gunships emitting symmetrical white shafts of several million candlepower. Huge screens and grotty stats and YOPs of shaved heads stamped with purple numbers. Starved rat terrorists and subversive cells. Toxic contamination we knew nothing of and wars we’d never heard about. Motorway flyovers ending in mid-air and signs pointing the way in but never the way out. Trouble was, this England existed only too literally. I couldn’t escape it… and the new day that was dawning at last, by Govt decree, made it all the worse and too terribly real.

  At the next stat, I decided, wherever that was, I would drop Brown, he was getting on my nerves. That performance with the radio! Who did he think he was trying to fool? Him and his friends would no more succeed in blowing up Dungeness B than assassinating the PM. I might come from the north but I wasn’t born yesterday.

  Amazingly I didn’t feel tired any more. The Temporal must have done the trick, I congratulated myself. I also felt a surge of unfounded optimism, always the best sort.

  This wasn’t such a bad planet after all, I hummed to myself.

  Something else I also now remembered: the boy or youth at Sandbach warning me about Watfo
rd Gap. Lucky we’d missed it during the longest night of my life. It was gone and forgotten, safely in the past behind us. As was the ‘deal’ I had done with him, a favour for his friend Fully Olbin in exchange for the Temporal. Sucker!

  Another such probable universe (the one I happened to be inhabiting) now hove into view in the broad light of day on the concrete horizon, and I grinned with relief at the sight.

  The blue and white sign said: Newport Pagnell Services.

  Not long after the sign flashed by we had to stop. Nothing wrong with the van, you understand, merely a build-up of traffic that stretched for what seemed miles ahead. I leaned out of the cab and called to a passenger in the adjacent car whose head lolled back on the padded headrest and whose rolling yellow eye regarded me balefully. He was in shirtsleeves, a hairy arm protruding out of the open window, and from my superior position I could see the straining girth of an expense-account belly overhanging his belt and straddling his knees.

  ‘Excuse me, cock,’ I said, matching my tone to the outward show of my appearance and vehicle. ‘Why the hold-up?’

  ‘Checkpoint.’

  ‘What checkpoint?’

  ‘Anyone travelling south of Newport Pagnell has to pass through the checkpoint. Verify your papers are in order.’

  ‘What papers?’

  ‘Resident Alien permit, National Insurance index, yellow card, Social Security number, National Health number, vehicle licence, road tax, insurance and MOT.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Personal body check, belongings and baggage check, vehicle maintenance check, health clearance and AIDS screening.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Rabies, firearms and explosive material, noxious or toxic substances, prohibited drugs, carcinogenic agents (asbestos, aerosols, etc), medical supplies and woodworkers’ glue checks.’

  ‘That doesn’t leave, – ’

  ‘Subversive or obscene printed material, samizdat, pirated audio and video cassette tapes, sexist literature, left wing or socialist-oriented brochures, pamphlets or tracts, statistical bulletins, private notebooks, personal letters, photographs and greetings cards of a dubious or doubtful nature.’