The Yellow Glass (37 page)

My mother came running up to
me.
 
Under her belted mackintosh, her
skirts were still ebullient, dipping up and down despite the driving rain.

“I’ve found my friend Magnus,” I
shouted at her.
 
“But where’s Uncle
Tristram?”

“They say he’s still alive,” she
shouted back.
 
“According to Mr
Piotrowski, he escaped earlier this evening and they think he’s inside the
cliff.”

Another wave sloshed over us and
Magnus’ caravan nearly toppled over onto its side.

“Come on, Rosa!
 
We can’t stay.
 
If we do, we’ll be drowned.”

We ran, hand in hand, up the
field, the full force of the wind bearing down upon us.

——

“Tell me one thing before you
incinerate me, Hutch.”

“Mmm?
 
What’s that?”

“Why give me the fake files on
Operation Crystal Clear in the first place?
 
Why ask me to investigate your own conspiracy?”

He had the gall to laugh.

“Oh, I chose you very carefully,
Upshott.
 
Who else in the Services has a
past like yours?
 
Quite the little thief,
weren’t you?
 
Plenty to work with should
things turn nasty.”
 

He strolled up to the distillery
and gazed into its churning, brown guts.
 

“At first, you were simply
keeping an eye on Reginald for me.
 
But
then . . you began to do rather well.
 
Unexpectedly well.
 
The slide and
the barge . .” he turned around.
 
“Jolly good
show, Upshott.”

“Come off it, Hutch,” I wasn’t
having any, “you sent men on bikes to shoot me well before any of that!”

“Me?
 
No, that was Reginald, dear chap.
 
I’m afraid he did have to be let off the
leash every now and again.
 
Reginald kept
some truly dreadful company.
 
Gangland
types and so on.”
 
He gave a little
shudder.
 
“I wouldn’t have bothered with
all that . . not then.
 
You were just a
barometer, you see, nothing more; there to show me how I was doing.
 
As I say . .” he came up very close and peered
at me, “I’m really rather delighted you’ve done so well.
 
I mean, I always had you down as a bloody bad
spy, Upshott.
 
Never dreamed you’d get
this far in the story.”

“That really is how you see it,
isn’t it?”
 
I marvelled.
 
“It’s just another story to you, Hutch, isn’t
it?
 
Another day, another plot.”

“I beg your pardon,” came a
female voice.
 
“I think you’ll find the
plots are mine, actually.”

My secretary, Dilys Arkonnen, stepped
into the chamber wearing a plastic rain-hood.
 
She glanced down at her white cardigan, irritably and brushed a few
flakes of desiccated seaweed from it.

“Well,” she asked.
 
“Is it done?”
 

“Oh yes,” he replied.
 
“Done to a turn.
 
If you like cinders.”

“Oh, Godfrey,” she said, “you
are a caution!”
 
Then, “Let me do this one,
dear.
 
Please!”

When an inhuman, ear-shattering,
cry screamed out from above, like a war-cry from the depths of history.
 
It was so terrifying that we all jumped and the
shadows dropped my arms to aim their guns.
 
A small figure swung himself across the ceiling, grasping the racks of
seaweed, hand over hand.
 
He paused above
the distillery to pour something into the glass chimney, before he swung back,
and began to climb down the wall.

A staccato volley of bullets
spat into the air.

“Stop!”
 
Cried the Monk.
 
“Don’t hit the distillery!”

I seized my moment, backing away
while they were occupied, aiming for the entrance that I knew was concealed
beneath the seaweed.
 
However Hutch clocked
me trying to escape and started to shout:

“Don’t let him . .” he began, before
a sinister, sizzling noise caught his attention and he stopped, mouth hanging
open in surprise.
 

The sinister, sizzling noise
caught the attention of all of us.
 
It
was coming from inside the great apparatus.
 
Where there had only been brown, churning sludge, bubbles of molten gold
had begun to collect, perfect spheres of brilliance bouncing through the gloom.
 
It looked like every alchemist’s fantasy.
 
They jostled with one another, multiplying
fast, gleaming bubbles the size of footballs bobbing against one another in the
race to mount the glass tower.
 
The distillery
had become an alembic, and we were hypnotized, to a man, by those orbs of the
purest, most dazzling, gold that rose up the long funnel of the glass tower, so
close to the lip of the chimney that they were almost . . .

Jay Tamang swung over the
up-turned heads of the shadows and grabbed my arm.

“Out!”
 
He screamed.

‘
Boom!
’
 

The distillery exploded,
vomiting red-hot, fetid intestines into the chamber.
 
Jay and I were practically through the
entrance to the cave, but it must have hit the others, full blast, in the
face.
 
All screams are fearful, but, once
heard, screams of agony are the hardest to forget; they last longer than anyone
would think possible and then they follow you into your dreams.
 

But it was a mere heartbeat, two
at most, and then:

‘
Boom!
’
 

The second explosion came, strong
enough to rip the cliff from the earth’s core and sound from the ear.
 
If there was screaming, nobody heard it but
the sea.
 

Even as we raced through the
operations room, the cave began to implode around us; chunks of cliff tore off
the walls and scudded across the ground, spitting chalk.
 
We were still running towards the lift shaft
when the sea surged in to reclaim the cave.
 
The waters rushed in so fast that waves crashed ten feet high against
the walls before the initial trickle of moisture had dampened our shoes.
 
In they crashed, roaring like hooligans, and,
as they came, they caught up the rocks and flung them at us, rock against man
and, then, man against rock as we were lifted clear off the ground and swirled
around the cave, like ice cubes in a glass.
 

I know I was on the verge of
blacking out when the sea took a breath, sucking back the tide, and Jay and I
made one, final, simultaneous, surge of our own, kicking out towards the lift
shaft and swimming in, our heads completely submerged.
 
Jay Tamang’s black eyes were wide open under
the water and his hair waved around his face.
 
I pointed upwards to the broken grille on the roof and pushed off, breaking
through the surface of the water as I propelled myself through the top of the
lift.
 
Thank God, the water had yet to
rise further up the shaft.
 
I clung to
the rope and looked down, watching Jay emerge beneath me, gulping his fill of fresh
air.

“You alright to climb, Jay?”

He looked up at me and nodded.
 

So we set off, shinning up the
rope with the sea snapping at our heels.
 
But, when we emerged, it was as if the sea had got there before us, for
waves seemed to hurtle over our heads and the gale roared, wilder than
ever.
  
We bent into the wind, half-blind,
feeling our way forward, until:

“
Boom!
”

The final explosion and a
tremendous fireball burgeoned into the sky, washing the clifftop with such an
intensity of light that we seemed to see the world through amber: the empty
yellow field churned into yellow mud and the final, yellow, caravan - pulled by
an old, yellow, Crossley - bumping through the gate and out to safety.

   
The sun had
slipped down into the arms of the English Channel and the white moon had risen
and only the scattered leaves of holm oaks, ragged amongst the shingle, gave the
storm away.
 
I went to pull the fat folds
of the black velvet curtains.

“Don’t,” said my mother.
 
“Look at the stars.”

The stars over the sea were
swimming through our dining-room window to join the stars that she had painted
on the ceiling.

“They bring to mind the stars
above the Las Wolski Forest,” said Mr Piotrowski.

“Above the mountains of Nepal,”
said Jay.

“Over the chip shops of Hull,”
said Magnus.

We all laughed.

“The same stars, I daresay,”
said Uncle Tristram.
 
“Although it can be
hard to believe.”

“Ta da!”
 
Boomed my father, by way of introducing the
enormous side of beef that he was bringing to table.

Mrs Dyminge followed with the
vegetables.
 
I eyed the platter,
uneasily, before helping myself to roast potatoes.

“Hey!”
 
Went my little brother.
 
“Rosa’s taking all the potatoes again!”

“She could do with them, Sam,”
said Magnus, from the chaise longue that my mother had pulled up to the table
and positioned next to her chair so that she could serve him his meal.
 
“She put in a heck of a lot of work last
night.”

“Yes, she is extremely brave,”
agreed Jay.

I may have smirked.
 
I certainly stuck my tongue out at my brother
when the others weren’t looking.

“Hey!”
 
Went Sam, again.

“Hey, yourself!”
 
I replied.
 
“How’s your shoulder, Uncle Tristram?”

“Just a graze, Gypsy; nothing to
worry about.”
 

He barely gave me a second glance,
he was so busy giving first glances to Aunt Kathleen.
 
They looked like two film stars who’d
unexpectedly alighted at our table; pushing their food around unconvincingly
while they waited to light up another cigarette and gaze at each other through
the smoke.
 
I sighed and ate another
potato.

“My goodness but this is divine,
Jerzy,” exclaimed Mrs Dyminge.
 
“I feel
quite the fraud, I must say; being invited to your special Shabbat dinner when
all I contributed was a little babysitting.”
 
She speared a carrot and looked pensive.
 
“Tell me again, dear Mr Tamang,” she turned to Jay, “just why uranium
reacts so when water is added to it?”

“Ah, well, Mrs Dyminge . .”
 
he put down his knife and fork, “ . . uranium
as a dust is
highly
combustible.”
 
She nodded, clearly taking
mental notes for her next book.
 
“It will
ignite almost instantaneously, generating hydrogen, of course.
 
Yes, the application of water to the molten
chemical - in the dust form - will intensify the burning to a point where a
severe explosion will be caused.
 
An
explosion which may only be extinguished by substantial amounts of dry sand, or
limestone which, happily, were both present . .”

“Because, if they
hadn’t
been,” Uncle Tristram
interjected, “the devil only knows how many sleepy Kent villages you’d have
blown to kingdom come!”

 
Jay smiled:

“I think it’s time I retired
from the field, Tristram,” he said.

“That makes two of us.”

“Three,” added my aunt.

“Goodness,” said my mother, “it
looks like Jerzy and I are the only ones who’ll be doing any work around
here!”
 
She cut up some more food and fed
it to Magnus.

There came a sudden, loud knock
at the front door.
 
Who on earth could it
be at that time of night?
 
There it was
again, even louder and more assertive than the time before.
 
My father got up from the table, adjusting
his beret and I couldn’t resist following him.
 

He opened up and stood there, not
saying a word.
 
Seized with insatiable
curiosity, I ducked under his arm to get a better look.

It was the police.
 
Lots and lots of police.
 
Blue lights were flashing like billy-o and
sirens were blaring and what looked like simply hundreds of men - in and out of
uniform and many wearing inexplicable sunglasses - were massing on the
beach.
 
Sergeant Riley stepped forward in
his brown suit.

“You left a message with
Scotland Yard switchboard, Miss Stone,” he said, bending his neck to address me
under my father’s arm.
 

“Oh.
 
Hello there.
 
Yes, I suppose I did.
 
But you’re
much
too late, Sergeant Riley.
 
It all blew up yesterday, didn’t they tell
you?
 
The local police dealt with it all through
the night and . .”

“The local police!”
 
He interrupted.
 
“But . . we’ve come all this way and . . I’ve
brought the CIA and everything!”

I gazed, blankly, at all those
policemen and several men sporting inexplicable sunglasses nodded, blankly,
back at me.

“I’m sorry,” said my father,
very politely, “but I’m afraid you have disturbed us in the middle of the
Shabbat meal.
 
You are welcome to come
back another day.”
 

He made an attempt to close the
door, but the handsome, brown-suited policeman stuck his foot in it.

“What?
 
You’ve got a nerve, when we’ve come all this
way!”
 
Sergeant Riley was losing his
cool.
 
“I mean, God Almighty!”

“God?”
 
Said my father.
 
“Why if God is not in food, then he is
nowhere at all.”
 

And he shut the door firmly,
bolting it from the inside.

We went back to the dining-room
and I hovered, for a moment, on the threshold, watching them all eat beef and
drink wine and look happy and thoughtful and sad and interested and happy
again.
 
The silver candle-sticks glowed
on the table.

“Come and sit by me, Rosa, man,”
Magnus called from the chaise-longue, his enormous, ginger cat asleep on his
plaster casts.

Jay glanced up from his beef and
offered me his lovely smile:

“Rosa?”

I sighed.

“I won’t be a sec.”

I went over to my little brother
and tickled his neck.

“Gerrof!”
 
He squirmed, and I let him punch me.

I caught Major Dyminge’s
singular, blue eye - so fierce, yet so kind - and I nodded.
 

Then I went to make my phone
call, fetched my carpet bag and stood outside - beneath the same stars -
waiting for the taxi to arrive.

THE END