Fallen (29 page)

Hubie's eyes were warm and dark, like rare, fabulous stones, tiger's eye or topaz. I stood in front of him, unsheathed and bare. The feel of air on my skin was different when he was there. Those honeyed eyes passed over me, cupped the air and moulded it around me, changed it. I dropped my chin. My hair slid around my shoulders, fell down my back.

‘You're beautiful.'

‘Thin as a stick,' I said, quoting Florrie. Odd, to think of Florrie now – her blighted, postponed wedding. All this still ahead of her.

‘Curved,' Hubie said, calling me back. ‘Like a scythe. Come here. Slay me.'

He'd planted something in me. Rooted behind my ribs, its shoots stirred. I was pinned to the bed by pleasure, a melting lassitude, my bones like jelly. All my life I'd walked around inside my skin not knowing what it was, what it opened to. I didn't know what my body could do or want. How easily it could break. ‘Why does no one ever say?'

‘Maybe there are no words; we can only go around it.' He drew a narrowing spiral on my stomach.

‘Strange how shy and stubborn words can be when you try to hook them to ideas.' Alanna's paper dolls came to mind, the flimsy tabs, how interchangeable they were.

‘So I'm an idea, am I?' His hand stopped over my navel, rested there, called up a pulse I'd never known before. ‘What are you thinking now?'

‘That you'll leave. When this is over, you'll go back to your own people in the country.' Maybe even tomorrow.

‘Will you miss me?'

I wrapped my legs around his and laid myself along the length of him, pinning him to the sheet.

‘I found out what happened to your Peace Man,' he said later, when we were quiet again and Paschal was snoring on top of the wardrobe. ‘It's not good.'

Cold crept through me while he told me that a priest saw Skeff's body when he was called to administer the rites to a dead boy who'd been told to kneel down in the street and pray while an officer shot him in the head.

Like a kick, it would have been. Sudden. I pulled away from him, sat up.

‘There's a lot of bluster, but I heard your man who did it is off his head.'

‘He should be shot himself.'

‘It's just the one story. There's fault on both sides.'

‘You don't know this man. Everyone loves him. This is a bad, a rotten thing to happen.'

He gave me an ironic look. I went on, defiant. ‘We're all worse off, if something's happened to him.'

‘Not just him. There were others. Journalists. The twist of it is, they wrote for government-friendly papers. Which only goes to show, your man wasn't thinking straight. They're trying to smooth it over, but another officer reported it.'

‘Don't.' I hated his brittle, flippant tone. It made him sound like someone else, someone I would never know or want to, and that hurt nearly as much as the idea of that big bear of a man and his untidy beard, of all people, having been killed. Even children used to tease him in the street. ‘This is the worst,' I said. ‘The worst they could have done.'

He pulled me back down against him. ‘You don't know what the worst can be,' he said into my hair.

‘Con says there's not enough coffins. They're burying people in gardens, storing bodies in halls.'

He went very still.

‘What?'

‘One billet we were in, they were busy making coffins outside our window. All night, they were at it. And in the morning they were stacked against a fence we had to march past. Those coffins were for us. That crowd out there' – he gestured towards the window – ‘the things I've heard people say – you'd think they invented sacrifice. You'd think they'd never heard that a million or more young men have sacrificed themselves already.'

I told him about the soldiers who'd stopped Vivienne and me. His good hand stroked my arm and calmed me. Through the empty windows, fog crept into the room to listen to me tell about the hatred in the soldiers' voices. How that private had smelled, the rough feel of his hands. These were men
that Liam and Hubie might have loved, out there in Flanders. Their companionship, friendship, brotherhood – whatever it was that bound them – had kept Liam safe, up to a point. Then it destroyed him.

‘It was the strangest thing. Liam was there. For real. I felt his hand on my mouth. Telling me to be quiet and not provoke them.'

‘Good advice.'

‘You don't believe me.'

‘You'd be surprised what I believe.'

‘Do you believe that he's still with me?'

‘Why not, if you carry him?'

‘I thought I saw him once. I hear his voice, in my mind.'

‘Did Liam ever mention Thatch Doyle to you? An abrasive man, face like a ferret, but handy in a fight.'

Yes, he had.
I saw my first corpses today. We moved into some German trenches that had been cleared by shelling, came to a place partially blocked by a spill of earth. Made our way around it and there they were. One lay across another's lap, a pietà. Their uniforms in shreds. Skinless faces. Empty sockets for eyes. The seated one still wore his helmet. The most surprising thing about them was their teeth, ordinary in the strangeness. Grinning. Waiting for us to get the joke. Doyle worked the jaws, made them speak obscenities. No one laughed. He gave it up soon enough and set about burying them with the rest of us
.

I'd imagined worse. The dead have no power here
.

‘There weren't many officers could box, but Doyle was good. Quick on his feet. One day after a skirmish – one of many that played out exactly the same that winter, gain ten yards in the morning, lose them all by nightfall, lose at least one man in each – I saw Doyle, leaning against a tree, during the roll. As close as you are now. But he didn't answer when his name was called. I looked right at him and said his name again. The third time I said it, he went.'

‘Went?'

‘One minute he was there. Then he wasn't. One of the men brought up his tags and his notebook, taken from his body an hour before. But I saw him.'

That night was a candlelit cave or a chapel. Gold and amber lozenges roamed the walls. Only a river I loved lay between us and a ravening, roaring beast, all red and black billows, snapping and loud, crushing buildings and stealing air. This flame was of a different order. When I held my glass to the candle, it kindled to shapes, a tongue, a globe that broke apart. He tilted his head and looked at me. I felt peeled, raw. My hair sat, heavy, between the bones of my shoulders.

When he touched me, I had the strangest sense that he was making me flesh, making me real in the world again. Making the world real.

‘There's something I have to ask you. Tell you. About Liam. Something he did.'

It was all in a letter, the last one before the terse, two-word message:
No more
. The one that told me he didn't want to come back. The one that explained his long silence to Isabel, a silence I didn't break for him, because it would have felt like a betrayal.

I'd told no one. Not Isabel, not Dad, not even Eva. I couldn't hold it in any longer. It poured out of me.

All leave postponed, we went up the line again. Something was up. Transports rolled night and day, moving artillery, the horses struggling through muck. Then a bombardment. Hell on earth. Three days, it lasted. I was in a hole with three others, all dead. I'd lost my bearings. The earth out here's been wrenched inside out – hills become pits, heaps of muck where there used to be trench. Bits of men strewn around and all landmarks blasted. There's no knowing which direction to take for your own line, which would bring you to theirs. You could jump into a trench, thinking yourself safe, and land bang in the middle of a nest of
Germans. I was parched, tongue rasping with thirst. Sporadic fire in the distance, the fight burning itself out. There were trees nearby. I crept in, for shelter and to take my bearings
.

I leaned against a trunk for breath. When it steadied, I saw a field-grey uniform, not thirty yards away, and over it a ruddy farmboy's face, staring at me. My pulse throbbed so hard in my ears, I thought they'd burst. Neither of us moved. His eyes wary and alert, as mine must've been. Blood on his chin. He held out his two hands. His rifle in one of them, held by the barrel, harmless as anything. No blade. He took a backward step. Away. Then another. We could let each other be, go our separate ways. All this was in his eyes. He turned his broad grey back to me. It came to me then that if I let him go he could use that rifle against anyone, any of the men, Doyle or Wilson, or the priest. That's when I raised mine
.

I thought I'd missed. He lurched, stopped still. I thought he'd spin around and shoot me in return. I wished he would. I'd have ripped my heart out and held it towards him for a target, if he had. I prayed for the shot that would end it all. Instead, he crumpled. Six feet of Imperial uniform. Folded up and fell
.

I sat beside his body. Night crept in. Some men from my company found me, brought me back. I began this day a soldier and finished a murderer. I could be dead myself, for all I know. If so, I'm not writing this at all, but dreaming it. I can say what I like. Nothing will change
.

The brother you thought you knew is gone. All the love in the world won't bring him back
.
This
is life, now. Hardly worth fighting for
.

A pulse throbbed in Hubie's neck. When I couldn't stand his silence any longer, I said, ‘Well? What do you think?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Nothing? He killed a man who was no threat to him.'

‘And?'

‘And – I think he put himself in harm's way because of it.'

‘Do you, now.' He lit a cigarette. Didn't offer me one.

‘I think it was himself he killed, when he fired that shot.'

‘Stop it!' he roared, making me jump. His eyes bulged. His voice was a splintered thing, bouncing off the walls. ‘Stop!'

I kept my head down. After a while he said, hoarse but calmer, ‘Does it make you feel better, to think that?'

‘Of course not.'

‘Good, because it doesn't make one damned bit of difference. How many men do you think he might have killed in, what, six months of fighting?' The scorn he showed us all at first was back in his eyes; he was blind with it. ‘I'm sure he didn't know. This one – yes, he could have let him go. But what he says is true. That same soldier could have gone on to kill me. Or Jonesy. Or a hundred others. Kill or be killed, is the logic of it. Liam's loyalty was to his own, not to some peacetime code or other. He knew that.'

‘Then, why? Why would he stand up like that, with the flares lighting up the sky the way you say they were?'

‘A moment of madness? Maybe he wanted to pull down the sky and smother the whole filthy war. Choke it to death and bury it. Maybe he forgot, for a split second, where he was and what might happen. Maybe he thought luck was on his side. We'll never know. Multiply that unknowing by a million. What does it change? Nothing.' He took a long breath. ‘Whatever hellish frame of mind he was in, it's over. If he brought it down on himself, at least he took no one with him.'

I left the window, the dark grass and knotted trees, the canal, the sentries. Slipped into bed beside him, as naturally as though I'd been doing it all my life.

Until now, I'd barely been aware of my body, other than as a shell to carry me around, needing minimal care and attention to keep it fed and clean. Now it was wide awake. It rushed forward, pushed past me in this strange matter of love, of loving him – what else could I call it?

‘Something bigger is dying out there,' he said into the floating, half-sleeping dark. ‘And we'll never know what it was.'

‘I thought you were asleep.'

He raised himself to sitting, propped by pillows, struck a match. His features swam towards me and away. The sweet smell of a fresh cigarette. I wondered what time it was. Hard to judge, in those dim hours, half-night, half-morning. Somewhere a bird sang, a sweet triumphant note that settled it. Another day. What would it bring? We fastened the wooden shutters across the gaping, unglazed window-frame and we were back in our own black cave, the rage of the fires shut out.

My parents could have been among the refugees, about to lose everything to fire. It's true they planned to move, but that would have been a matter of packing what they wanted to save, books and photographs and letters, long discussions and sessions of do-you-remember-this? Fire would destroy it all. Every trace of Liam. Eva as a child, before she challenged them. Matt, the petted baby of the house.

‘That world has gone,' Hubie said. ‘Have you not listened to anything I said?'

He slid his thumb along the underskin of my forearm. ‘Once I could have circled your waist with my two hands.' He held me by the wrist instead, loose as a bracelet. ‘Come away with me, Katie. Let's leave this godforsaken place and not look back. We'll go somewhere new.'

‘Where?'

‘I've been thinking about Canada.'

A sun rose through the word. A place of light and snow, long hard winters. ‘Why there?'

‘There's room there – and to spare – for anyone who's willing to work.'

‘It's so far away.' I looked at the shape our hands made, braided, on the sheet. ‘Liam was never there.'

‘Has it occurred to you that Liam might not be haunting you, that it's the other way around?'

Everything stilled. This was the heart of it. One way or
another, there was the rest of my life to face. Keeping pace with me in that queer way I was getting used to, he asked, ‘What do you want, Katie?'

Again I couldn't answer his question. ‘What will you do?'

‘There's a whole new world out there, waiting to be built. I can't do the building, but I know about planning, and moving men and equipment, and materials. I have ideas, designs, in here' – he tapped his forehead – ‘for machinery to make the work faster and safer. I can't make them myself but I'll find people who can. I'll find someone to back me. They were fine men, the Canadians. Clean, brave fighters and practical. I could get on in a place that breeds men like that. If it doesn't work, I'll try something else.'