The Blind Light Page 5

  ‘She looks lovely,’ Drum said.

  ‘Yes, that’s how she looks,’ he said. ‘Exactly that.’

  Going home, Drum did not look changed, act changed, speak differently, Drum was careful not to; but he imagined Carter doing things, hearing things, being things Drum could not fathom. Drum resented the telephone. The knocks on the billet when Daphne or Carter’s mother were on the line for him; the touch on the back of Carter’s whites if they called during shift. Sometimes Drum would go into the vestibule and watch Carter speak into the Bakelite mouthpiece, twisting the flex around his fingers as he spoke.

  Carter’s father called just once that Drum knew of. Called with news that he was transferring Carter to a civil defence base for the last three months of his Service. A specialist course, a selected group, to learn the rules of post-nuclear engagement.

  ‘He’s building a shelter,’ Carter said as some kind of explanation. ‘My father, the mad old trout, is actually building a huge atomic bomb shelter under the family pile. Says he’s been planning it since Sputnik. State of the art, it is, apparently. “No point surviving the bomb and not knowing how to live afterwards,” he said to me. Thinks I’ll get an insight. An instinct for how to cope once the big show starts. Get us ahead of the game.’

  Carter spun the globe.

  ‘I tried to get you on the course, too,’ he said. ‘I tried, I promise. But best I could do was a transfer.’

  With a finger, he stopped the globe, somewhere over Russia.

  ‘You did say you wanted to see the world,’ Carter said. ‘Some people get to see Korea, you’ll get to see Cumbria!’

  Carter laughed that laugh. Drum looked around the billet, the boots by the door, the turned-down beds, the gramophone playing be-bop.

  ‘I always thought the Far East sounded too hot,’ Drum said. ‘I’ll get on fine with Cumbria.’

  ‘So you’ll come?’ he said. ‘I did hope you’d say yes.’

  ‘Yes,’ Drum said. ‘What else am I going to do?’

  He didn’t want to make it sound angry, didn’t know if he had or had not. Carter wasn’t really listening anyway, he was already taking books from the bookcase, stacking them into a box. Drum followed his lead, packing up his kit bag, quickly, easily done.

  Afterwards, they opened brown ale and Carter proposed a toast.

  ‘To real war,’ he said.

  ‘To real war,’ Drum replied.

  Within a week, they were at the Civil Defence Training Base in Haverigg, ready to join the two-week course usually undertaken by men in the last fortnight of their service. It had been decided that Carter and Drummond would complete the training in their first two weeks, after which Carter would join his course-mates and Drum would go into the kitchens.

  They were split into different billets, thirty men to a hut. Bunking with others again presented challenges. He was careful in the showers. The men were lighter of mood than the ones he was used to, these men so close to their One, the longed-for last day of Service. Drum saw Carter around the base, often in the company of the CO, a man called Jerrick, a close friend of Carter’s father; but Drum and Carter did not speak for almost a week. Back to silence. Back to talking only when spoken to.

  They did not take it seriously, his fellow servicemen, or so it seemed to Drum. Perhaps they saw it for what it was: grown men playing war on a two-square-mile playground. They slept well, did not dream of the destruction, thought only of demob and their One. Of heading home, of the lives they would now lead. That’s how it seemed. How it seemed as he envied their snores.

  In the mornings there were field exercises in what they all called Doom Town; in the afternoons, short lectures in which they learned of blast radiuses, fallout drift, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ‘Essential preparations,’ Jerrick said as he put on a radiation suit and mask, the men invited in groups of ten to try them out. Carter was in the first group; Drummond was called towards the end. He breathed heavily in the suit’s interior silence; walked and felt the sensation of wading through deep water; heard his own heartbeat, terrifying fast.

  Eventually, in the second week of training, Carter and Drum were paired on rescue detail. They’d been allocated the east side of town, each building to be searched, any dead-body dummies to be stacked and left kerbside; the living, as played by their fellow servicemen, to be assisted if found. Mainly dummies, though.

  Inside the bakery, Drum saw flour in the dust, spelt on the floorboards, crusts in the debris. Underneath the oven’s rusted door, someone had arranged an oversized dummy and a long, blackened peel. A point (Drum). A shrug (Carter). A nod (Drum). His turn. Drum dragged the baker, fat even in mock death, to the threshold, his straw lining shedding over the cold stone flags.

  When Drum returned, Carter was working the peel in the oven, fishing for imagined loaves.

  ‘Yesterday, I was in the pub,’ Carter said, the peel moving deep inside the oven.

  ‘Lucky,’ Drum said.

  From his tunic, Carter took a cigarette; from his trouser pocket a box of matches. The flare and smoke in the gloom against explicit orders. He leaned against the oven, hawk nose pinked from cold; cheek-stubble blading despite a first-light shave. Fringe grown out and brushing his eyebrows. Six foot and muscled now, meat on his once-lean frame, man-shaped and man-sized. Face not. Not the defiant confidence of the parade ground, but a little-boy face; whiskers from calling for Mummy.

  ‘I swear I could smell the beer,’ he said. ‘Like they were still serving. Just for a moment I could see Bobby from the Wolf. The smallest hands you’ve ever seen, Bobby’s. Like a child’s. I saw those hands and I cried for him. The rescue detail came and they were carrying me on a stretcher, and I was crying for Bobby, and for Johnson, Dirty Mac, Syd . . . Imagine crying for that bunch of skates.’

  Carter shook his head; Drum looked beyond him to the oven, its dead and empty mouth.

  ‘You see all this,’ Carter said, ‘and you just know. The scale of it, the absolute violence of it, the terror of it all. You see it and it’s no longer an exercise. What was it that Collins used to say? “Enough to make your shit shiver.” That. Exactly that. They want to make us shit ourselves with fear. It’s what they want.’

  Drum looked away, wondered if his fear was coming through his pores, through his skin. When he closed his eyes, he saw the glass on the street, the maws where once there were walls. He saw his grandpa and his great-aunt melted into fat, a slick outside the fishmonger’s window.

  ‘Maybe,’ Drum said. ‘But I think we’re also supposed to feel hopeful. That we can survive all this.’

  ‘And do you feel hopeful, Moore?’

  ‘I feel sick,’ he said. ‘Like I could puke out my whole stomach.’

  Carter threw his cigarette into the oven. There was a moment’s glow and then nothing, the black insides black again. Two piped lines from his nose, smoke folding, wicking away. His smile. That smile.

  ‘Tonight we go out,’ Carter said. ‘Get the stink off. No more talk of it.’

  ‘Cocktails at the Savoy, is it?’ Drum said. ‘Or pink gins at the Palais?’

  Carter shook his head, the dramatic way he did, full force of perceived disappointment.

  ‘There’s a pub. Not too far. Beer’s good apparently.’

  ‘And there’s a way out?’

  ‘There’s always a way out.’

  They heard voices, loud callings for survivors. A nod (Carter). A nod (Drum).

  ‘And there’s girls,’ Carter said. ‘I met one last night. Jerrick was good enough to drive me to town after dinner. She has a friend. We’re meeting at eight.’

  ‘What about Daph—’

  ‘We’re at war,’ he said. ‘Things are different. You need to realize that.’

  As if he didn’t. As if only Carter saw what he saw. Carter looked up and down.

  ‘And for God’s sake,’ Carter said, ‘wear the good suit. The one I bought you.’

  *

  He lingers in every shop, picks up cans and tin
s, sees rats scurry over char and burn. Carter is somewhere. Gwen is somewhere. They are breathing, walking, thinking, and he is here, with the rats; with the cracked bricks and bloated wood. Marking time, letting it run. If Doom Town says anything, it says there are consequences. That decisions have implications. He could go home and it would be safe. It would be safe to take up the old life, for nothing to change. What does he know of love anyway? Better to go home alone than to promise a better life he will be unable to deliver.

  10

  Nick has been warned not to set down his pipe on the beer towel, but he does it anyway. She pours his second black and tan and places the jug beside his briar. He looks around the empty saloon, checking for company. His gust has turned to stink.

  ‘I saw you with your serviceman last night,’ he says.

  And so to it. Remember, Old Nick is watching. Nick lives in a simple apartment above the milliner’s; his study, a dormer on the top storey, views out over the whole of town. Those with something to hide know the streets to avoid, the secluded areas beyond his purview; the lovers’ lanes and cobbled ginnels. You could end up in one of his books or poems or plays if not careful. Best to play safe. For two months, she and Drum have played safe. Each morning she’s poured the black and tan and waited for Nick to say something. About having spotted her heading out to the Queen’s Head, or getting into a car with an unrecognized man. At first Drum thought Gwen must have a jealous boyfriend, a violent ex-lover, such was her care and diligence. She always blamed it on her father.

  ‘You must be mistaken,’ Gwen says to Nick. ‘I don’t have a serviceman.’

  ‘I’m certain it was you,’ Nick says, eyes wide for guilt or shame. ‘You were on the way to the Queen’s, by the look. Eight thirty or thereabouts.’

  ‘He’s not my serviceman,’ she says. ‘Even if I was there, which I wasn’t.’

  Nick takes a sip of his beer, delight beneath the hoods of his eyes.

  ‘Well you weren’t here,’ he says. ‘I popped in for some matches and Jessie was behind the bar.’

  ‘I was probably upstairs with Da,’ she says. Should have known he would stop by one night. Just to be sure, just to get his facts in order.

  ‘If you say so,’ he says. ‘Though this was far from the first such sighting. What you might call a pattern emerging.’

  ‘A pattern?’

  ‘You were observed with him as he got into a taxi on Albert Street. Near midnight. Wednesday week. Spotted with him three times since then. Like I said, a pattern.’

  The magistrate eyes, resting his prosecution. Albert supposedly safe. Binoculars or telescope the only explanation.

  ‘He’s not my serviceman,’ she says.

  ‘I suppose the men come and go so quickly they never belong to anyone,’ Nick says.

  He sits on the barstool, the way he often does before discussing the book he’s lent her. He smiles like a hunter baiting traps, already anticipating the rabbit in his stew. He strikes a match. She blows it out before he can light his pipe.

  All service is performance. Her father told her this. Always remember you’re playing a part in which you know your lines, but the punter does not. On her first shift, she applied bright-red lipstick though she usually went for more muted shades, and has done so every shift since. A mask of sorts. In the company of Nick, however, its colour seems to have faded. Over time she has revealed herself, and she can no longer rebuild the walls he has broached and vaulted.

  ‘A handsome enough fellow from what I could tell,’ Nick says, striking another match and lighting his pipe. ‘Though my eyesight is not what it once was, and streetlight can be so forgiving, don’t you find?’

  She knows her anger is visible, despite her laughter, despite the quick peal of it, despite it being met by Nick’s low dirty chuckle. Hot at the cheeks, the first sign, a tensing of the hands, a tendency to look too hard in the eyes. And it is rage she feels; rage rather than just ire or anger; rage, full-blooded and bold-pulsed, a feeling of tightness across the chest and at the base of her neck.

  She pours herself a soda water from the syphon, loses some of his words in its hiss and rush.

  ‘. . . his face and I thought, aye, this is a Londoner. One can always tell a Londoner. Something about the mouth, a kind of slackness. In London they all look like that, you know. You see them on the buses, on the Underground, on the filthy streets, they all look the same.’

  She has asked Drum about London. She has imagined walking its streets with him. The small house they will share, the bed in which they will sleep. The library she can see herself working, no longer a nocturne.

  ‘He’s not from London,’ she says.

  ‘From the South, though?’ Nick says.

  ‘He is a long way from home, yes.’

  ‘And you,’ he says, ‘are comforting him for homesickness?’

  She should end it here. End it with a quick now, now and a matronly wag of finger. His eyes are eager, his lips slightly parted. She should say nothing.

  ‘Patty’s in love with his friend,’ she says. ‘I’m merely being polite.’

  She begins to wipe the bar down, though it needs no wiping. She does not look in his direction. He will not let the last word go to her; words are his master after all.

  ‘An attitude which does you great credit,’ he says. ‘I am sure he appreciates your attentions.’

  ‘Mr Oldman,’ she says. ‘There are no attentions for him to appreciate.’

  He nods and smiles, looks to the triptych above the mantle. He takes a long pull from his pint and puts down his pipe.

  ‘I think the young believe their mating rituals are a mystery to the old,’ he says. ‘But let me tell you, the dances may look different, but the steps remain the same.’

  He chuckles to himself, carries his drink back to his table. He takes out his battered copy of Wordsworth that’s always to hand, and everything is as it should be, if things were the way they should be.

  She watches him read, the way he turns the pages, waiting for her to go to him. He exerts a pull as well as a stench. He sips his drink. Is he even reading the words? Even following the lines?

  If someone comes in, she will not go to him. If someone comes through the door, she will serve them and smile. No one comes through the door. She watches him make a note in the book with his pencil. He looks up from his book and to her.

  ‘Now, come on, tell me what’s to do,’ he says. ‘Come here and sit for a time. We share things, do we not? Our little secrets?’

  ‘I fear you will be jealous,’ she says, across the bar.

  He laughs.

  ‘I fear you may be right, my dear.’

  11

  In the town library, one of the few buildings to have both walls and a roof, the chair and table he set right have been moved, upended again, and put back in the same position he’d found them. An overzealous serviceman looking for dummies, perhaps; or maybe the rooms are swept every so often, rearranged according to a detailed schema. He heaves the table up again, scorched but usable, puts the chair under it, sits at the desk, checks his watch.

  There is a space where a clock once hung on the wall, its glass is shattered over the floor. Some of the books have been spared. Not many, but a few. They are encyclopedias. A boon for any survivor.

  *

  Gwen told him she dreamed of working in a library. The light of the lamps, the stamp in the books, shushing those who talked. The first time they met, she told him that. In the bar of the large hotel, Drum surprised at such an opulent, if slightly faded, accommodation being situated in a place like Millom.

  A boom town once, she told him. Iron ore discovered years back, the largest deposits found in Europe, maybe even the world. Her family were Welsh, they’d come in dribs and drabs over the latter half of the last century, them and the Cornish the only ones with the skills to tease out the bounty. She spoke and he listened, and heard the pun. Doom. Boom. Wondered if that was deliberate too. A joke for those in the know.


  There had been women before. A posh friend of Carter’s who’d enjoyed a bit of rough; a couple of girls in Shropshire, accents sounding Welsh, excited by his difference to the local lads. They had not lasted. Without Carter, he found himself stuck for things to say, save for things Carter had already said. The girls liked his silence at first, but soon tired of the increasingly uncomfortable exchanges. When they first met, Gwen did not appear to care for him either, whether in quiet or in conversation.

  Carter’s girl Patty looked like she might work in the typing pool at Ford’s: carefully made-up, knowing of what men said to one another, clever at keeping them just at a distance. Gwen wasn’t like anyone he knew from home. She smoked and sipped her gin and her mouth was wide, and so red-painted, her hair piled high, her eyes kohled and bored. He could not imagine her in Dagenham, could not imagine her in Millom either. Like she would pass through any place she found herself.

  He asked Gwen the usual questions – Where from? Where do you work? How was your day? – and she answered him shortly. There were other places she could be. Clear that. He thought she’d give it two drinks before making her excuses.

  ‘You know,’ she said. ‘You sound like you’re from Australia.’

  Drum laughed but she remained serious, had not laughed at even the most tried and tested of Carter’s routines. Yet there was something in the way she said it, an interest beneath her cool. There was a response to this, something expected, though he had no idea what it was. And then the moment passed and Patty was telling them a story about a friend who’d once stolen a brooch from her, then denied it, while actually wearing the piece in question. Not listening, having clearly heard the story several times, Gwen picked up her handbag and rummaged through it for something. The bag gaped and she took a book from it, set it down on the table. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

  ‘I’ve read that,’ Drum said. ‘Carter bought it for my birthday.’

  She found her cigarettes, lit one and put the pack down on the table.

  ‘Did you like it?’ she said. Eyes no longer bored. Surprised, not bored.