The Blind Light Read online

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘It sounds like something we might have done at least.’

  She looked at the walls, the stone flags, the stove, drank her wine. After four decades, you are a different body; different cells, different biology, let alone different character. And yet Anneka was so much the same; the same slight judder as she inhaled, the same skittishness as the weeks before her A-levels. Welcome home, Anneka. You have been missed. Hated sometimes, but always missed.

  ‘You cooked?’ she said, pointing to the pan on the hob.

  ‘I thought you might be hungry.’

  Anneka carried her wine glass to the oven and stirred the pot, held up the spoon and let the liquor fall, the sauce slapping as it hit the surface.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’ve not eaten meat in twenty years.’

  ‘Really?’

  She looked back at him from the stove, as though cooking there a long-standing chore.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But it’s possible, isn’t it? You should have done a ratatouille or something.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had ratatouille, let alone made it.’

  ‘I don’t care for it much myself,’ she said. ‘I’ve never liked aubergines. Don’t think I’d even seen one before we had that moussaka at the Carters.’

  ‘That I remember,’ he said. ‘Mam gave us that face that meant we had to eat whatever it was on our plates. And you looked up all innocent, and said, “What’s all this purple stuff?”’

  ‘They had a good old laugh at us, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A good old laugh.’

  Nate lit the gas ring under the casserole and took the wooden spoon from Anneka. The two of them, side by side, her getting down bowls from the shelf above the stove, placing them on the table, like they did this every Friday night. Once hot enough, he brought the pan to the table, set it on a trivet, got them a ladle. Anneka filled the bowls; Nate cut them slices of bread.

  Steam from the bowls, from the casserole, and all the things to say and nothing right to say. She could not quite look at him; he could not quite look at her. He picked up a slice of bread and buttered it to the very edge of the crust, dipped it into the sauce. She did not move and did not eat; the clock did not tick.

  ‘They’re here, you know,’ he said at last, looking down into his bowl. ‘They’re both here. Carter and Tommy.’

  ‘You’ve seen them?’

  ‘Yes. I saw them out in the garden. Tommy at least.’

  They looked at each other then, met eyes across the table, and suddenly so much to say and still unsure as to how to start.

  ‘We don’t have to do this, you know,’ he said.

  She shook her head.

  ‘We have a deal,’ she said. ‘You agreed. I have the emails to prove it.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts, Nate.’

  He looked at his sister, his sister older than he could have ever imagined, still the girl with the lucky elastic band.

  ‘You agreed too,’ he said eventually, going back to his bowl. ‘Mum’s looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. You promised, so no welching.’

  She put down her spoon.

  ‘You sounded like him then,’ she said. ‘Such a Dad word, welching.’

  Nate smiled. A big chip-tooth smile.

  ‘As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew you’d say that.’

  He put his hand across the table, and she accepted it, squeezed it.

  Her there, definitely her. In that face, looking back. He smiled and drained his wine glass. She did the same and Nate passed her the bottle. Anneka poured for them both. At their most together there, at their most together then.

  Doom Town and the One

  1959

  January

  1

  Floodlights pool at the western edge of the civil defence base; their beams hazed with low-lying fog. They are lit but are usually dark in the mornings, no matter how bad the visibility. From the stoop of a Nissen hut, Drummond watches his former comrades dance the last steps to the parade ground; the waiting transports idling there, ready to take them to railway stations and bus depots. They are a ragtag rush of men, youths really; like him all just shy of majority, all reacquainting themselves with the lightness of shoes, the thinness of suits. He hears their chatter, their whoops and hollers, their fetterless joy. It is the joy of men who are alive. The joy of men who have survived. The joy of those who have earned their liberation. No joy like it, that joy. The fools that they are.

  Two years of enclosure; two years and now no longer prisoner or protectorate. He is free to leave. Expected to leave. To take a wagon with the lads, board a southbound train, ride a Tube carriage, walk the last stretch to home, open the door to backslaps from his grandpa, kisses from his great-aunt, something rustled up in the kitchen, never mind the hour. He looks at his wristwatch – a quarter to eleven – and calculates the distance, the time it would take to reach home. From Cumbria to Essex. North-west to south-east. Home for midnight. Midnight latest.

  A transport drives off, another quickly follows it. The grind of tyre on pebbledash, the hammer of accelerating engines, the cheers of men, the opening of a gate, the closing of a gate, and then nothing. No voices, no bootsteps, no shouted orders. The windows of the surrounding Nissen huts are unlit; the study block, the mess room, the kitchens are similarly dark. Drum stands, the last man alive. That’s how it feels, upright in the chill wind: the only survivor, kit bag in hand, alone in a deserted coastal town.

  He could leave. He could stay. He has, for once, options. Two years of being told, of being instructed, of obeyance, and now expected to make a decision alone. Sometimes it’s better just to be told; it’s easier that way. Heard it’s the same with criminals. His Uncle Nudge, the black sheep never out of prison for long before being sent back, said he preferred it inside. ‘Four square and a bed every night, no one mithering,’ he’d say. ‘Who’s going to argue with that?’

  Drum walks towards the parade ground, eyes left, distracted by the floodlights on the training ground, their beams glinting from wire and strut and mesh. There are no exercises planned – all men are to be off site by midday – so why the floodlights? No such light was ever afforded the servicemen ordered there; they were never even given torches. Must be for the benefit of others. Ministry men, government officials, field marshals. Likes of them. Dignitaries given a short tour of the civil defence training ground: its reconstruction of a town in the aftermath of an atomic strike. Look! The bombed-out houses. Look! The stricken roads. Look! The fallen church. A slow shuffle around, floodlights picking out authentic touches. A shoe burned into a floorboard. A dead-body dummy behind the wheel of a Ford Anglia. The melted keys of a Remington typewriter.

  Or perhaps this is when they add those details, when the sergeants and staff add more provocations, more images to harrow, more smashed glass to the asphalt streets. Maybe this happens every time the men leave, Drum never noticing because usually he’d be prepping dinner in the kitchens by now. Perhaps that, yes. Preparations for the next show.

  The lights are a distraction, one welcomed, open-armed. His eyes are on the floodlights as he makes his way towards the parade ground. A walk to Millom. A walk to Gwen. Walked it many times, takes no longer than half an hour. Or wait for another transport. Cadge a lift to the railway station. One of two things. To stay or to go. A binary option. He looks at the lights. There’s time enough to make a decision. Plenty of time. No rush. He can go to Doom Town for a final time, take a last look, to fix it fast in the memory. He has the time to do that.

  The pathway between the study block and the mess hall is cinder and stone; it scuffs boots, let alone shoes. He’s wearing his good shoes, the oxblood brogues, the pair Carter bought him. He does not look down to the damage done; he does not want to be reminded of Carter. In the hospital, in the infirmary, Carter. Not to think of him. Nor think of Gwen. Concentrate on the lights instead.

  Between the main campus of the b
ase and the civil defence training ground, an open stretch of scrub and turf; an untended no-man’s-land. He walks across it and does not think of Carter or of Gwen, of staying or leaving. He does not mine the past, though it weighs on him; does not consider the present, though it is pressing; does not look to the future, though he knows he might glimpse it. He concentrates only on walking; the eating up of time and of distance, the distant light.

  At school he was told if he found himself stuck on a question he should move on to another. His mind, without him realizing, would still be working on a solution, and on revisiting the problem, he’d be more likely to know the answer. A kindly tip from his mathematics teacher, but one that sat uneasy. How can you trust yourself if the mind works without your consent?

  Reaching the outskirts of the town, the first ghast houses behind the fence, he remembers something from a book Carter lent him, a poetry collection: the words grimly gay. His face, he imagines, is that: grimly gay. He says the words as he walks – grimly gay grimly gay grimly gay – until they are white noise and companionable gibberish.

  The gate to the training ground is open; its padlock and chain coiled inside the fence. The roofless houses and brick-strewn streets are boldly lit despite the fog. On his unauthorized visits, so many of them over the last three months, he’s seen it only by torchlight, by thin sunlight at dawn. The lamps make it seem stage-set, ready for cameras; actors waiting somewhere for their scene. It is no less terrifying for that. No less real. No less choking.

  On the street, close enough to kick, amongst the masonry and glass, he spies a rusted washboard, its frame cracked, but still recognizable as a washboard. He does not think of Gwen, of Carter. Instead he is reminded of a washboard strummed percussively; a skiffle band from back home playing a song in a room underneath a pub. The sweat on the washboardist’s brow, the tubthump in the heat, the rolled shirtsleeves, the loose strings of the guitars. In the silence, he hears the song they played. ‘The Rock Island Line’. You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.

  2

  The pub has a thick-beamed door and three solid locks; it is a job to open: the bolts requiring guile and power; the mortice an unhurried coaxing. Gwen is practised, but it still takes longer than she’d like. Once it is unlocked, she sets her mouth, touches her hair, checks the clock. On the stroke of eleven, a half-hour earlier than most other pubs, she opens the door, its gaoler clank, its whine and scrape. Always on the stroke. Pride herself on it.

  She opens up onto pale winter light, sky a shade of cinderblock; so dull an illumination. So dull and no one there to darken it. She fastens the door to the latch and someone is swiftly behind her, his smell familiar.

  ‘Morning, Nick,’ she says, turning around. Old Nick smiles between demented side-whiskers, below hood-lipped eyes. He shakes his head and from the hip pocket of his tattered herringbone jacket takes out a fob watch.

  ‘Late this morning, my dear,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ she says, hands across the door, barring his entry. ‘On the stroke, as always.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Late. Late by five minutes . . . six now.’ He taps the dial. ‘I wound it this morning and set it to the pips.’

  He smiles, gently forgiving, a pastoral look; an aged, reverend face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, accusing eyes on the smug clock.

  She releases her arm and he walks into the bar, a ream of paper under his arm. He brings his smell gusting inside: clothes half-laundered; cooling sweat, woodsy almost. He hangs his overcoat on the hatstand, drapes his white-fringed scarf on top: just so. Eleven in the morning and his cheeks red from rambling hills, from the salt-spite of the coastal pathways. Always mud on his boots, always mud on his trousers. Like he’s missing a dog. Like he’s lost one out in the fields.

  Gwen lifts the hatch and starts pouring his black and tan, layering stout on pale. Old Nick sits at his table, the biggest of the barroom, closest to the fire, and organizes his work into three neat stacks.

  With a pencil, he scores through a line of text. He licks the pencil tip afterwards, quickly, as though tasting his words. The pumps gutter beneath Gwen’s feet; Nick’s black and tan settles, the stout floating, still miraculous. With care, she carries it to his table and sets the jug down on the beer mat. Same as every day. Exactly the same.

  She remains there, but he does not look up; one hand on the page, the other absently filling his pipe. Such thin and filthy fingers, long nails luned with tar and dirt. He says he can’t work without slag under his nails, without earth on his palms. It’s never looked like work to her.

  ‘There you go,’ she says.

  ‘Ta,’ he says. She looks down at his pages; he covers them with his arm. He glances up and there is a cold blue in his eyes, like the gas burner on full blast.

  ‘Let me finish with this,’ he says. ‘And then we’ll talk. I think that’s best, don’t you?’

  3

  The frosted turf on either side of the path gives way to the beginnings of the terrace. The first house he comes to he enters; its front gashed open, like a wrecking ball has been taken to it. The houses are like those on the estate on which he grew up; smaller, but similarly proportioned. The kind of properties everyone lives in, familiar to all.

  Entering the town that first time, three months before, he noticed the church most of all, its absent spire, a small flock of seagulls on its still-standing archway. Ordered in through the gate on the south side of town, and there it was in front of them. Deliberate, this. To remind them that the bomb respects no god, no society, no man or ideal. A true leveller. They were made to stand to attention, to look straight ahead, to take it all in. The exploded terraces, the paneless windows, the motor-car husks, the church. The town smelled of smoke and something malty, a brewery stink. The sergeant walked behind them for a time, then marched them to the makeshift field hospital for instructions.

  The inside of the house is typical: dust and brick and reminders of the lives once lived there. The upstairs is obliterated, there is no roof or ceiling. In what once was the kitchen, a stove is partially melted. Above it, on the last remaining plasterwork, somebody has scored their name. Chazzer. Underneath, somebody has added Spud. Underneath that, just three letters, b-o-n; the graffito unfinished, its author clearly interrupted.

  *

  At Ford’s they’d called him Tin; at Ford’s they’d called him Kettle. Sometimes they’d called him Kit; sometimes Bass. So many names for the same Drum: so many names for the tall young man with the chestnut-coloured curls who riveted doors in silent shifts, who always kept pace with production line speed, who listened and nodded and never complained when the men went out on strike. Unassuming, shy, but a good bloke. Agreed by all. Told that all the time. A good lad. A good worker. Two good years at Ford’s; two good years of being a good comrade, of being called Roll, or Stick, or Oil. Then service. Where they called him Horse.

  The first morning of his initial training, at the National Service base in Shropshire, they were called to the shower block. The first time he had been seen naked by anyone since boyhood. The other servicemen saw his cock. They did all but point. Even in the cold, so much bigger than everyone else’s. He looked down and it appeared grotesque. Animal. He hid himself. It did not matter. From then on he was Horse. Even to the sergeants.

  Newly named, he undertook the first days of training, days of blade-sharp trouser creases; boots shining like fresh paint on bonnets; sergeants’ voices loud and close. Nissen hut and drill ground, Nissen hut and mess hall. At night there was light bullying: some lads mocked for prayers; some for wanking once the lights were out; some for quietly crying. At dawn, the sergeant banged a copper kettle to hasten them from bed. Wakey, wakey, girls!

  He talked only when spoken to, same as when he’d started at the factory, advice from his grandpa. Listen as much as you can, say as little as you can muster. There were other factory lads there; they seemed to take to it easier than the others. Understood routine. Understood to do what was neces
sary and no more. He wrote to his grandpa and told him he was taking his advice. That he was showing no fear, and all was well.

  Before lights out on the fourth night, a card school opened at the end of their hut, a small group involved, the rest of the thirty watching. Drum saw the con by the fifth hand, had seen the same scam at the factory: new lads taken for their first pay packet. There were six in, four skates and a pair of marks. The posh lad was called Carter, was up by a lot. He would be dealt an enticing hand, one almost unbeatable, then be soundly beaten.

  Over his cards, Carter looked up to the assembled servicemen. A small, satisfied smile. Drum could have watched him lose; could have looked away, could have quietly predicted the hand Carter would be given as incitement. But their eyes met and Drum tipped him the slightest of winks. A suggestion of a wink, nothing more. Enough though. Enough for Carter to go back to his cards, study them again as the skates hurried him up. After reconsidering his cards two or three times, Carter folded. He took his winnings as the skates cleaned out the other mark. Factory smarts. Always have someone else to fleece.

  The following night, Carter stopped Drum midway between Nissen hut and mess hall.

  ‘Not tonight, Josephine,’ Carter said. ‘Tonight we eat with the officers. My treat.’

  ‘You’re an officer?’ Drum said.

  Carter smiled. Drum had never seen a smile like it. A smile of intense pleasure, one derived from providing something another man could not.

  ‘No,’ Carter said. ‘But tonight we’ll eat as officers. My way of thanks.’

  In the officers’ mess, they were sat at a table for two. Drum looked around, expecting to be turned out, sprung from the room; something that seemed to amuse Carter.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’re all friends here,’ Carter said. ‘Thank you for bailing me out last night. That showed some guts.’