Fourth Horseman (11 page)

With a sudden flash of inspiration it became clear to me. ‘He’s a rebel. He’s angry, his horse is thin and nervous. The emperor is ruling his land and he’s rebelling.’

‘A freedom fighter,’ said Javed.

‘So were they fighting each other?’ said Alex.

I shook my head. ‘No. But it still fits. It’s like they’re showing us two sides of the same coin or something.’

The boys seemed to accept this analysis, but the sense of satisfaction it brought me was short-lived.

‘And so what?’ I said. ‘Even if that’s what it means, so what? What does that have to do with Dad and the squirrel project?’

Nobody could answer that, and that was the end of it, our analysis session. I don’t know whether it had got us anywhere or not, but that night I dreamed about the white horseman. He was enormous; straddling the world. I could see the curve of the horizon under the horse’s belly and the blue glint of the oceans. There were flies around him, like there had been in the woods, but when one of them flew close to me I saw it wasn’t a fly at all, but a war plane. They all were. There were thousands of them, clouding the air; the show of force of a huge, dominant power. As for the red horseman, I couldn’t see him at all. But I knew he was there, waiting in the wings, nurturing his own hidden forces of destruction.

I
T WAS HARD FOR
me to concentrate at school over the following days. I couldn’t find any enthusiasm, even for my favourite subjects, and I’m sure some of the teachers noticed that I was quieter than usual. No one said anything, though, and I did my best to keep up, even when my mind was miles away.

On Thursday I took my old transistor radio into school. I had a much smaller one but it didn’t get Long Wave, so it was no good for listening to the cricket on Radio Four. It was harder to hide, but it fitted into my school bag and I was able to sneak it out and into a quiet corner of the yard during our morning break.

Alex and I, along with one or two other cricket fans, were listening to the first of the one-day internationals. That was how we became the first ones in the school to hear about what had happened that morning in Birmingham. The commentators kept referring to the morning’s ‘events’ and promising to keep listeners informed of any developments. We turned over to the FM channel and learned that four bombs had gone off in the centre of the city.

I went to the staff room and told the teachers there, and they turned on the TV and got the latest news. There was nothing new about terrorist attacks in England those days. There had been several in London the previous month. But these were the first in Birmingham, and Birmingham, to us, was almost local. When break was over the teachers returned to the classrooms and explained what was going on. Any students who had close relatives in Birmingham were given permission to use the school phones. We were all allowed to have our mobiles on. I sent Dad a text. He was in the lab and hadn’t heard anything. He rang us both.

After that the day went on pretty much as normal, but the teachers kept us informed whenever they got new information, and the whole school was in a state of nervous tension. It wasn’t until the lunch break, when I had a few moments of quiet to myself, that the connection dawned on me. When it did, a horrible hot tide washed through my bones. The horsemen. The emperor and the rebel. That was what they had come to warn me about. The emperor represented the western world—America, Britain, Europe. The red rider represented the rebellion against their power. Only the red rider wasn’t a freedom fighter, as Javed had suggested. He was a terrorist.

It frightened me, but it thrilled me as well. I’d seen a vision, a presentiment of the horror that had struck Birmingham. I wondered whether I ought to have been able to interpret it better, to warn everyone that it was coming. But as the initial excitement wore off, I began to have doubts. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. Why me? Why Dad? We hadn’t been involved in any way. We couldn’t have had any effect on the outcome.

I didn’t hear a single thing that was said by my teachers during the remainder of the day. My mind went round and round in circles, teasing at what I knew, trying to make sense of it. Emperors, rebels, terrorists. Somehow I was sure that there was truth in that interpretation of the visions, but why they should have appeared to Dad and me, and what their connection with the squirrel project could be, I couldn’t begin to work out.

A
WEEK OR SO
later our school holidays began. From then on I cut my working days down to three a week. I would have been happy to do more, but I couldn’t justify taking money for work that didn’t need to be done. The squirrels were nearly all manageable by that time, and an hour or two every second day was enough to keep them placid. Once a week, usually on a Saturday, I cleaned out the cages, which was a time-consuming job, and it was my responsibility to keep the whole of the cage room spotless. It worked out to about eight hours’ work a week, which kept me in pretty decent pocket money.

On the first Monday of the holidays I got another phone call from one of the coaches on my cricket team, asking me if I was ready to come back. He was really sweet about it; said I could come and go as I pleased, and take my time, and that I wouldn’t be asked to play on the team until I was good and ready. To this day I can’t understand why I continued to resist. I knew that the only way I was going to get my nerve back was by going along to the practices and getting my eye in again. Cricket was my passion in life. I wanted to play. But instead I mumbled excuses about having a job, and getting twinges in my elbow, and, to my shame, about Dad needing me at home because Mum was away so much. After I put the phone down I stared at it for about ten minutes, hating myself for my cowardice, half hoping it would ring again so that I could change my mind. It didn’t. It wouldn’t either. I could change my mind whenever I liked, but no one was going to ask me again.

The Birmingham bombings gradually fell from the first item on the news to further down the programme, then disappeared. But they were never far from my consciousness, and although we didn’t see them again that summer, nor were the horsemen. Sometimes I almost succeeded in convincing myself that it hadn’t happened; that it had all been a dream; but then I remembered my conversations with Dad, and knew that it hadn’t been. I still hadn’t grasped their significance and it troubled me.

After the bombings there were endless new programmes on the TV about Shasakstan and the increase of Islamic fundamentalism there. It was believed that Bin Laden was hiding out there, and that it was the new centre for Al-Qaeda’s operations. There were training camps in the border regions where people went from Britain and other places to learn how to be a terrorist.

I watched them all, and I read articles in the newspapers that never would have interested me before. It seemed to be almost universally acknowledged that the oil wars in the region had been big mistakes, and had opened up a hornet’s nest of trouble for the western countries involved. I talked about it with Javed. He said that the present government of Shasakstan was unpopular with the majority of people there because of its close links with America and it was, according to his mother, only a matter of time before it was overthrown by the fundamentalists, who were rapidly gaining strength. I was as absorbent as a sponge, taking in everything on the subject from whatever source I could find. It was a logical step, after the Birmingham bombings, for Shasakstan to become firmly associated in my mind with the appearance of the red horseman. But I could find no such logical step which would shed any light on the connection between the horsemen and Dad’s work. Sometimes it drove me half mad, thinking about it, and many times I resolved to leave it alone and forget about it. But I never could. Not quite.

From the first test at Lord’s it was clear that the series was going to be a good one. Alex and Javed and I dug ourselves into the sitting room at the beginning of every match and emerged four or five days later, wading through a knee-high drift of crisp, popcorn and chocolate wrappers. Dad joined us whenever he could, and, owing to the tense, close-fought nature of most of the matches, we agreed to allow him to smoke indoors, and his overflowing ashtrays joined the accumulated rubbish.

I think we all suspected that Australia would eventually win, despite the fact that we had beaten them last time, but we also knew that it wasn’t going to happen without a fight. They had a dynamic new team who were absolutely determined to get the Ashes back from England. They won the first match but England, by the skin of their teeth, won the second. It was brilliant cricket, and I loved it that Mum was there, watching in the wings, instrumental in keeping the players fit. I was always on the lookout in case I spotted her, but she only ever appeared once and that was when she was replacing the strapping on a fielder’s elbow after he’d made a diving stop. There was a close-up of her face and Alex and I cheered and yelled for Dad, who was out making a cuppa. By the time he came in she was gone and, naturally enough, there was no action replay.

She came home on the Wednesday before the Family Row, and the same evening there very nearly was one. A real row, I mean, not a cricket match. She hadn’t expected to get away until the following day so she took Dad and me by surprise. She was there when we got home from the lab, and she had already got the dinner on the go.

Alex was at a cricket club party so there were just the three of us at dinner, and it was brilliant. Dad was thrilled to see her and was flirting outrageously, and she was enjoying it but determined to fill us in on all the latest cricketing gossip. The third test match had been a nail-biting draw. By this stage half the population was following the series on radio or TV, and I felt privileged to be getting the inside track on all the players and the politics. I was perfectly content, but the best was yet to come. Mum had bought a huge cream cake on her way home, and when she put it on the table she dropped an envelope beside it. I opened it and found four Pavilion End tickets for the final test at The Oval.

I leaped up and threw my arms around her.

‘It’s not until September, so it’ll mean you’ll have to take a couple of days off school,’ she said. ‘Do you think Javed’s parents will let him come?’

‘They’d better,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to kidnap him if they don’t.’

We talked about the details; which of our London friends we would stay with and how we would get from their house to the ground, and then I asked who would look after Randall while we were away.

‘I’ll be looking after Randall,’ said Dad.

Mum’s face dropped. ‘Don’t you want to come?’

‘I’d love to, but how can I? Who will take care of the lab?’

‘But it’s only for a few days,’ said Mum. ‘Surely you can get someone in to take over?’

Dad shook his head. ‘You know the way it is with this job,’ he said.

Mum shook hers. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I do.’

With an effort she turned away from him and gave me her ‘everything’s fine’ kind of smile. But everything wasn’t fine. The atmosphere was toxic. The cake was too. Dad tried his best to cut it but it behaved like a trifle and he had to use a spoon to get it on to the plates. My splodge of it tasted like polystyrene with whipped anti-freeze. I ate it dutifully, in a heavy silence, then left them to it.

But I didn’t go far. I know you shouldn’t eavesdrop, but I wanted to hear in case there was anything Dad hadn’t told me about the job that I needed to know. Anything that might give a clue as to why mounted emperors and rebels should turn up on his doorstep and look at him.

‘I don’t see why you’re making such a big deal about it,’ he said to Mum. ‘It’s only a match. What difference does it make whether I come or not?’

‘It’s not about the match,’ said Mum. ‘It’s about what sort of job it is that doesn’t allow you ever to take a holiday.’

‘But you knew it was going to be like that.’

‘I certainly didn’t,’ said Mum. ‘And I’d be willing to bet you didn’t either. Or if you did, you didn’t tell me.’

‘Well, maybe I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I should have been,’ he said. ‘If I misled you, I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to.’

‘But it’s not just about me, James. No one can keep on working like that without a break. It’s unnatural. You’ll ruin your health.’

‘I won’t,’ said Dad. ‘I’m doing what I love. If I was stuck at home all day I’d be more worried about my health.’

‘Are you?’ said Mum.

‘Am I what?’

‘Doing what you love?’

Dad sighed but didn’t answer.

‘Because there’s something very fishy about it all if you ask me. A project that’s so secret you can’t even get a replacement for a few days.’

‘We’ve been through all that,’ said Dad.

‘Well, maybe we should go through it all again. Like who is this Mr Davenport and why does he keep changing his mobile number, and why do you have to have this top secret lab like something out of James Bond? Why couldn’t you have done this research at the university, like you did with the flatworm?’

‘Look, love’—Dad said it without sounding as if he meant it—‘I’ve been working on this project and taking government money for nearly a year now. Do you want me to turn round and say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind”?’

‘Well, how much longer is it going to go on?’ said Mum. ‘How many more years?’

Dad’s voice brightened a bit and became conspiratorial. ‘I’m not making any promises but I think I might not be too far off. I’ve discovered a significant difference in some of the cells in the nervous system. I’m going to start investigating it very soon. I think I know where I’m going. It’s just impossible to say exactly how long it’s going to take to get there.’

Mum waited.

‘If everything went really well it could be a matter of months, or even weeks.’

‘And if not?’

Neither of them said anything for a while, and I heard them moving around the kitchen, gathering the plates and loading the dishwasher. Then Mum said, ‘And you’re not worried about the ethics of it?’