Five Boys (17 page)

Apart from the odd slipped slate or broken window the first few houses they came across were disappointingly intact. There was nothing smoking, nothing smoldering—no sign of annihilation at all. In fact, the land appeared to be flourishing. The crops came right up to the Boys’ shoulders, the hedgerows billowed out into the lanes and instead of the wasteland they’d set their hearts on the Boys found themselves in a burgeoning wilderness—a world almost healed of humanity.

They hacked their way through the undergrowth like explorers, with no idea where they were headed. They reached a lane and followed it for a mile or so, weaving between the corn marigolds and burdock which had sprung up everywhere. Their only discovery during their first hour was a small crater which Lewis insisted was the result of a shell or bomb, and he made a great show of crouching down and placing the palm of his hand inside it, as if he might still pick up some trace of an explosion’s warmth.

As they pressed on their sense of adventure steadily diminished. They began to tire of working so hard for such scant reward and Aldred was already contemplating the difficulties of the journey home when they stumbled upon a cottage in its own dark gully with a back door hanging off its frame.

A drift of leaves spilled right into the kitchen. The
remains of what looked like a small bonfire were scattered around the range. The chimney breast and the ceiling were blackened, the floor was peppered with cigarette butts and one corner of the room was piled high with old tin cans.

Finn went over, gingerly picked up one of the cans and read the label. “Chicken soup,” he said.

The Boys slowly worked their way through the kitchen like detectives. Imagined American soldiers sitting around the fire, smoking cigarettes and eating chicken soup. The others went through to the parlor but Lewis lagged behind, picked up a couple of flattened fag ends and put them in a pocket. When he got back home, he told himself, he might try lighting one up.

He joined the other four Boys—Finn had found a stick and was prodding some rags with it, and Harvey was kicking at the baseboard. If they’d brought some matches, Aldred was saying, they could have made a fire, but he was interrupted when Finn suddenly raised his hand.

“What?” said Hector.

“Upstairs,” whispered Finn. “I heard something.”

The Boys all stared at the ceiling.

“There’s nothing there,” said Harvey.

“No,” said Finn. “I heard something.”

Hector, seeing the chance to boost his own stock at the expense of Finn’s, ambled over to the staircase, listened, then set off up it. The others gathered around the foot of the stairs and slowly clomped up after him. There were two rooms upstairs, but neither had anybody in them, which was greeted with disappointment and a good deal of private relief.

The Boys resumed their meticulous examination of the house. Of the two rooms, the one at the front had been
more comprehensively ransacked. The baseboards had been levered off the walls and some of the floorboards were missing, so that half the joists were bare. The windowpanes were either cracked or shattered and Hector went over, had a look at them, then squeezed himself into the sill.

“They must have sat here while they kept watch,” he announced from his cubbyhole.

The fields rolled and turned in the breeze and Hector glowered out at them, thinking what a fine spectacle of vigilance he must make, but his little performance was spoiled by a squabble breaking out behind him and he turned to find Aldred in the middle of a tight little ruck.

“Get ‘em off, Heck,” he was screaming. “They’re going to
rip
it.”

Hector climbed down, waded in and dragged Harvey and Lewis off him. Aldred managed to slip from Finn’s grasp and leaped across the missing floorboards. He stood in the corner, clutching a magazine to his chest.

“What’ve you got?” said Hector.

A coy smile played upon Aldred’s lips. His eyes widened and he slowly slid his fingers down the cover of the magazine to reveal a woman waving from the top of a sand dune, with both bosoms out. The Boys made another lunge toward him and Hector had to hold them back.

This teasing and lunging continued until, under Hector’s supervision and through Finn’s negotiation, Aldred was eventually talked into returning, and taking his magazine over to the window where it could be seen by everyone. It was agreed that, as he’d found it, Aldred should be allowed to turn the pages and he placed the magazine on the floor, and the others huddled around him until he was almost collapsing under their weight.

The magazine was a little bigger than his mother’s Be-Ro recipe book and had the same chocolatey print. In fact, some of the women were about the same age as the Boys’ mothers and had similar hairstyles, the difference being that the women on the magazine’s pages had not a stitch of clothing on.

They danced naked, hand in hand with other women (“The Three Graces”), stood naked in a field among the ricks of corn (“Summer Idyll”) and admired the view from a ferny hillside (“The Sun Goddess”), apparently oblivious to their predicament. Such a hearty lack of inhibition was having a dramatic effect on the Five Boys. They felt their blood being distributed in new and unusual ways. All sorts of ungovernable thoughts and emotions began to stampede through them. Harvey felt sick. Hector felt like fighting. Lewis was stricken with what felt like a feverish infirmity.

On one page, naked men and children gamboled alongside the women. Whole naked families erected tents, played cricket and paddled in the sea. A row of naked gardeners stood by their shovels on an allotment (“The Leeds Sun and Air Society dig for victory”), under the watchful eye of an older man who was also naked apart from his spectacles and the pipe clenched between his teeth. But most unset-ding for the Boys was the outdoor PT class in which a dozen naked women gaily swung Indian clubs about their ears.

As soon as they reached the end Aldred was inundated with demands to return to particular pictures so he turned back to the first page and began working through them again. Lewis, while being enthralled, had a growing conviction they were committing a crime heinous enough to have them thrown behind bars. Harvey had no such qualms and at one point tried to kiss the picture of an especially ample-breasted
woman, only to be dragged off like a dog by Hector. Meanwhile, Finn managed to thread his stick through the Boys’ arms and elbows and tap her on her bare behind.

But each time they returned to a photograph the Boys found that some of the potency of the breasts and buttocks had dimmed a little. The lady beside the rick of corn began to grow familiar; the Three Graces failed to jiggle as they danced. And the Boys turned instead to some of the advertisements and articles between the photographs, hoping to find further revelations there. Like any other magazine, there were adverts for Hovis and Tate and Lyle’s Treacle. There were also public announcements regarding Mind Power, Vigor and Vitality and newly patented cures for Stammering and Underconfidence. But it was the news that “Eight Glands Control your Destiny” that stopped the Five Boys in their tracks. None of them was entirely sure what a gland actually did or looked like, preferring to nod sagely as Aldred read aloud that “a man is as old as his glands.” Something profoundly glandular had been happening in the confines of their underpants. The idea that there were another seven, equally powerful glands secreted about their persons (which could be boosted by sending off for a jar of “British Gland Pills”) was almost too much to bear.

Lewis got to his feet, unbuttoned his trousers and was about to urinate against a wall when he noticed a tuft of fur poking out from a gap in the baseboard.

“Dead rat,” he said.

The others looked over at him.

“You sure it’s dead?” said Aldred.

“It’s not moving,” said Lewis.

Harvey suggested Lewis give it a poke with the stick by his foot.

“Give it a smack,” said Hector, “and see if there’s any more in there.”

Lewis was not particularly keen on the idea, but was not about to surrender the stick to one of the other boys. So he moved them back to give himself some room for a little run-up, drew his stick back, summoned every ounce of vigor and vitality, then leaped forward, swinging the stick down into the rat as if he were hitting a cricket ball for six.

Rats came flooding out from every corner. Went scuttling over the Boys’ feet, brushing up against their ankles and leaping at the walls. The whole house was suddenly full of them. And the Boys ran screaming down the stairs, with rats under their feet and tumbling around them as they fought to get to the door.

They ran out into the sunlight and kept on running, crashing through the branches that blocked their way. Ran until the cottage was far behind them and, even then, checked over their shoulders to make sure the rats weren’t after them, before daring to slow down and catch their breath.

They made their way home, sniveling and shuddering, and had been walking for almost a mile before Aldred realized he’d left his magazine behind and that his newfound intimacy with the naked ladies was at an end. A couple of steps behind him Lewis followed, convinced that the rats were some sort of retribution for their lecherous behavior and, in a bid to purge himself, threw his cigarette butts over a hedge. Only Hector Massie contrived to find the whole thing funny, although, as Harvey pointed out, he had been the first one out of the door, and Finn marched ahead without saying a word to the others, hoping against hope that
he might get home without anyone noticing that he’d wet his pants.

As they passed the woods just outside Duncannon, Lewis had the peculiar feeling that someone was watching him, and when he glanced over to his right thought he saw a man stretched out in the branches of a nearby tree. If things hadn’t been so strange already he might have said something to the others but all he wanted to do was get back home and put the whole day behind him. And within a matter of seconds he wasn’t sure whether he’d actually seen the man in the tree or not.

I
F ANY OF THE
villagers happened to notice Aldred’s balaclava hanging from the gutter they never drew attention to it. Only the Boys knew what it was, how it had got there and the punishment Aldred had suffered when his mother learned that he’d lost it and realized she was going to have to knit him another one.

By the time Hector and Finn gave up trying to talk Aldred into retrieving it, it had become a knitted flag, raised in honor of Bobby’s bravery. The rain drenched it, the four winds blew through it and its wool slowly turned to string. But in the gutter a few feet away, HMS
Victory
sat in its dimple bottle as dry as a bone, and the only danger was that the sun might heat the air around it to such a degree that it might fire the cork across the roofs.

It didn’t move until one dismal Tuesday when black clouds rolled in from the southwest. The temperature dropped. A curtain of rain swept up the valley. Its tiny outriders spat and scratched at the windows, then suddenly the rain was hammering at the slates. The water swept across the roof like riptides, flooding the gutter, then followed its gradient to the same drainpipe Bobby had clambered down.

For a while the bottle held its ground and forced the rainwater to bilge and roil around it, but such quantities of rainwater backed up behind it that eventually the bottle
began to shift. Then it was afloat and moving in a manner it had never dared dream of—was sailing beneath the rolling clouds—until, almost immediately, the abyss opened up before it and it was teetering at the end of the world. It fell forty feet, cork-first. Had its fall broken by the bend at the bottom of the drainpipe, which smashed the bottle, and the ship was delivered into the gutter in full sail.

Miss Pye had just made a delivery to an aged customer at the top of the village. Had borrowed an umbrella and was trotting back down the high street and looking forward to a bit of butterscotch, when she spotted something in the gutter—something unusually intricate in its design—snagged between a couple of crossed twigs. She stopped, picked it up and had a good look at it. Peered through the Captain’s window, but there was no one there. She stood with the rain drumming on her umbrella for a few baffled moments, then put the model ship on the sill of the window and hurried on her way.

There was no better diuretic for the Captain than heavy rainfall. The sound of the skies opening up and the smell of the earth taking a soaking was guaranteed to fire his bladder into life and once he was out of his chair he tended to put the kettle on. On this particular Tuesday he’d climbed back into his sleeping bag and was sitting with a cup of tea in one hand and the saucer under it in the other, when some intensity of color caught his eye. He turned and saw, beyond the window, what looked like the billowing sails of a ship. The black and yellow hull was instantly recognizable as that of the HMS
Victory
—the ship on which he had devoted countless hours’ drilling and tapering and which had inexplicably vanished several weeks before. The ship had somehow got free of its bottle. As if it had blasted its
way out. The Captain froze with his cup of tea halfway to his mouth, and for that single haunting moment the ship seemed to be looking in at him rather than the other way around.

It didn’t take him long to kick off his sleeping bag and charge out into the rain, but it was long enough for three or four raindrops which had been slowly racing each other down the window to unite and, with their combined momentum, finally nudge the
Victory
off the windowsill.

The ship turned twice in midair and landed in the flooded gutter. The bow swung around, the current took hold and carried it forward over the cobbles. And the Captain came around the corner just in time to see his precious ship cover the last few feet and disappear down the grate, off on its way to the sea.

H
E HAD NO
shortage of buildings in which to shelter, the Americans had left plenty of supplies behind and as long as he kept moving and went from one vantage point to another he could see his pursuers coming and have time to hide away.