If Then (21 page)

Daylight breaks, lifting the soft blue and grey bands of mist that lie over the ridge. From the trench, he gathers more medical supplies, bandages and morphine. Jordison makes another overcoat stretcher from the debris. They can see what they are doing. It’s not a blessing.

With daylight comes heavier and more accurate fire from the Turk. From somewhere deep in the ridge, a great clang and then the first shell of the day whistles overhead, exploding in a white and black plume on the salt lake. Soldiers run back and forth, the divisions are intermingled, orders are confused, maps lost, briefings missed. On Lali Baba, the command peer through eyeglasses at the battlefield, looking for patterns so that they can figure out where to deploy the battalions. Without clear directive, the army ceases to be a rolling force of intent and becomes more like the waves caught in the bay, advancing and retreating across the rocks; some waves build, and break further up the shore than others. The mass of men undulates across different points of space and time according to local agents of causation. Hector’s voice cuts through the confusion. Where other men shamble and stumble, his directions remain sharp, his bearing straight. With pith helmet, braces and shirt sleeves rolled up, he really is the most fearsome pacifist.

“We must push on to the firing line,” says James.

“What are our orders?” Jordison has been brave thus far. To push on of their own free will seems foolish.

“We don’t need orders,” says James. “We know what we have to do. The battle is ahead.”

Hector wipes the perspiration and soil from his face with a rag. “Have you heard any more from the sniper?”

This morbid obsession with the sniper disturbs James. God knows it is hard to hold onto reason when the sun is up and the salt lake shimmers in time to his heartbeat.

He takes out his Zweiss glass and gazes east across the Sulajik plain. The key to the entire operation is the high peak of Tekke Tepe. If the Allies could secure the high ground and hold the ridge then the landing would be a success. Whatever assault had been undertaken that morning upon the peak had failed. The gateway to the ridge is guarded by, on one side, the curved peak of Scimitar Hill and on the other, the W hills, so named for the pattern of the vegetation upon them. These two modest high points watched over either side of a long spur that is the route up Tekke Tepe.

“We’ve no water,” says Jordison. The creases in his face are grimy with sweat.

“Neither have the wounded,” says James.

“Do you remember, that first night, I asked you to shoot me?” Jordison says. His thin khaki uniform is hot with exertion. “You should have done it. Shot me and sent me home. What difference would it have made?”

“None whatsoever,” says James.

“I’ve seen fingers shot off on purpose.”

“Do you want to join the cowards?”

“I have a family.”

“We go to alleviate suffering.”

Jordison closes his eyes and slowly puts his hands over his ears. Mutely, he shakes his head. He is spent.

“We are nothing,” he mumbles.

James kneels down next to Jordison; he speaks carefully and with a threatening emphasis.

“To a wounded man, lying in the scrub, you are everything.”

“You want to get yourself killed. I’ve got children.”

“If you don’t get up now, I will shoot you,” says James. “And not in the hand.”

James hooks his arms under Jordison’s armpits and hefts the big man up, and when he tries to stumble back down onto his knees, he hefts him up again. Sergeant Hector takes out three woodbines. James lights one. The dry tobacco scorches the back of his throat and tars his senses. Jordison refuses a coffin nail with a slow shake of his head.

“I had a vision,” says James.

Hector opens his mouth and the smoke finds its own way out.

“I want to tell you about it before we go. In case we don’t make it back. It came to me when we were underground. You were in it.”

“In the dream?”

“No, it was more like a memory. Of a different time. We walked together across the Downs near my home in Lewes. The towns and villages were empty. The people had been evicted.”

“Before the war?”

“We were on our way to war together. The memory felt as if it had been placed within me by God.”

“The Christian God?”

“The Absolute. I sensed another force within me. It draws me in. Yet it remains hidden.”

Hector takes almost indecent relish in his woodbine. The simple act of inhalation and exhalation is enough for him, in that moment.

“We are exhausted. Men are dying all around us.”

“Do you remember walking on the Downs with me?”

Hector thinks, then quietly shakes his head.

“I glimpsed something,” says James. “A world beyond this. Or next to it. There is a great convergence.”

From the direction of Scimitar Hill, shaggy men shuffle away from the heaving black smoke. He feels faint again. James drops his cigarette. His fingers are weak. He has no strength to hold. To hold things together. He feels a force pressing down upon his thoughts, a great inner weight that is suddenly lifted and then he feels too light.

“Steady,” says Hector. The sergeant catches James. He almost faints. He does not faint. It is not permitted for the men of the 32nd Ambulance to fall. That has been decided. Even Collinson, loose trousers tainted by dysentery, carries a stretcher.

Jordison points with alarm.

“The scrub is on fire!”

Nausea breaks over James. The back of his hands ripple. Hector puts the cigarette back between James’ lips and the dog-end is large and painfully dry.

“We need to move the wounded away from the advancing fire,” says Hector. He attempts to rally soldiers and stretcher squads for the advance to Scimitar Hill. The men who have just returned from the battle push the sergeant aside, and stagger on toward the beach.

Jordison takes up the empty, folded stretcher. Now it is his turn to haul James to his feet.

“We can’t let those poor sods burn alive,” says Jordison.

Scimitar Hill lies three quarters of a mile to the east, in the foothills of the Anafarta ridges. The East Yorkshire regiment had taken Scimitar Hill the day before, but with unclear orders, had abandoned it. Here the battle breaks up into absolute chaos, a nauseous confusion, the boundaries blurred between the living and the dead.

Jordison and James advance through a mob shuffling away from the front. The limbs of the stumbling men are burnt black from the sun, their uniforms ragged and torn, their faces covered in dirt and streaked with sulphurous yellow from the acrid exhalation of shells: it is as if the bodies they buried that morning have returned from hell.

The Turkish soldiers move up the hill in twos and threes and fire upon the retreat. Bullets veer around James like bats. Another twenty yards to the trench and he can see the men clawing their way out of the grave. He shoves Jordison ahead of him and, at a running crouch, the stretcher bearers weave through the field to the trench. The wounded and the sick are scattered all along the lines; Jordison tries to stop the fleeing soldiers, shouting at them to each take a wounded man. He cuffs a corporal around the ear. The corporal fights back with desperate lunging punches. Jordison gathers half a dozen men from the retreat to serve as bearers. James drops down into the trench and walks along the sandbagged bloody rut searching for the most desperate case: he finds a dozen. At the aid post, the MO is dead and the injured men lie in stranded ranks. James inspects the cases, identifies the ones who are to be moved first, and the bearers begin hauling out the wounded back along the trench.

The strong north wind carries thick smoke with it. A fire has been set south of the battalion lines and it spreads hungrily across the parched scrub. James scrambles up the side of the trench. The fire burns as tall as a house and advances towards them at a serpent’s watchful pace. The smoke pulses upward in muscular waves. Tattered scraps of uniform are carried up on the rising heat. He tries to calculate how many of the wounded they can carry before the fire reaches them.

James takes the head end of the first stretcher in line. Jordison takes the foot end; as they run, the trench side rakes the skin off his knuckles, then some flesh. Once they are on open ground, they set down the stretcher and return for the others. An olive tree burns. The brambles char and spark like fuse wire. He can feel the heat of the approaching fire on his face as he stumbles back down the trench. At the aid post, the wounded men feel the hot approach of the fire too, and they cry and try to get off their stretchers.

“Where are the other bearers?” asks Jordison.

“They didn’t come back,” says James. He considers the wounded men on the floor of the trench and their imploring, tear-streaked faces. Six more.

“We should take a man each, on our backs,” says James.

“What about the other four?” asks Jordison.

“We should kill them before the fire does,” says James.

The yeoman grabs James by the collar.

“You made me come,” he shouts. “And I did not come to kill!”

Acrid black smoke rolls down over the lip of the trench. The stretcher bearers cannot hear one another for the fearful cries around them. Jordison hefts a crying lad up onto his knee, turns and lifts the wounded man onto his shoulders. Sorry, he whispers to the remaining men. I am so sorry. James takes a lungful of scorched air, ducks down, and hauls up the first wounded man to hand. He is too heavy on his back and he stumbles into the side of the trench, feels the muscles in his arms and his back give; he has no strength left. All at once, something has gone from his legs. Overhead, fire arches over the top of the trench, burning the oxygen from the air. The wounded man clambers over him, knee in his face, boot scraping his chin, then collapses. The side of the trench slides in, half-covering his face with dirt. If he does not move now, then he is going to be buried then burned alive. It is an underwater kind of panic, desperation to take a breath but with the water’s surface still a kick or two away. He is up on his feet again and he stumbles away, leaving the wounded man behind. Forgive me, forgive me. Ammunition explodes in a flurry of bangs and sparks, like the rookies on Eviction Night. The pitiful yowls and mother-cries of the burning men. He stumbles along the trench, greatcoat over his head, stopping here and there to check for a break in the fire.

“Here!”

Jordison has come back for him. He holds his hands out to the yeoman. Jordison pushes past him and runs back into the trench. He hauls up the wounded man James left behind.

Blinded by the smoke, roots and brambles searing his palms, James crawls away from the heat. The cries come from all around. And then he feels hands on him, a voice asking if he is alive. Yes, yes, I am alive. A hot broad blade is slid under him, and he grabs onto a wooden shaft; Hector drags him across the scree on a shovel. Overhead the smoke forms a vault. The trench is on fire. Jordison goes over the top with a man on his back, the sinews in his neck pronounced with the colossal effort.

The burning trench is the extreme edge of experience and sensation, the boundary between what is known and what is still in the process of formation.

James hears the distinctive sniper’s rifle fire, its concussive hoot like an enormous blow-pipe. Jordison falls, clutching the side of his head, blood seeping through a tiny hole in his skull and trickling across his scalp. Through the wall of flame, the sniper stands; he is disguised with vegetation so that branches rise like antlers from his brow. His weapon is a smooth cylinder with a needle-point barrel. And then he steps through the fire. The vegetation burns on him. The figure is wearing a dark suit and an oval mask that retards the flame. He is taller than a normal man. Some demon that has come through the veil. Jordison raises his head, eyes rolling back. The sniper fires again, casually downward, a fatal pinprick through the back of Jordison’s head. The white figure moves steadily through the fire, here and there, putting burning men out of their misery.

17

T
he armour approached
from the other side of Newtimber Hill. With every iron footstep, the hillside tremored. A sine wave of starlings loosed across the sky. She was vulnerable. The armour could be coming for her. Ruth ran into a witchy copse and hid within the exposed root system of an old oak tree.

A horse and cart piled high with possessions came over the crest of the hill, followed by a long line of people, tired and dirty from the evicted life. More came, and the line broadened. So many familiar faces, but out of context. They were thinner too, from the life outside, their hair long and matted. She recognized clothes that had passed under her needle a long time ago. There was Arnold, a Dutch parent from the school. He had been evicted two years earlier. Arnold and his wife Martha moved in the same countercultural circles as the Von Pallandts. They had their own ideas about parental discipline and their daughter Cecile had gouged her initials into the kiss-kiss tree with her father’s knife. Arnold was evicted soon afterwards.

More familiar faces, a procession of incidental acquaintances from town life, people she was on nodding terms with because their morning or evening routine intersected with her own. Here was a man, grey-bearded and goatish, in his ancient polyester shirt, whose walk up Station Road coincided with her walk home from the school. He had been a commuter. Something in the public sector, she imagined, probably maintaining some terrible computer system. He seemed largely unchanged by life outside. Here was a woman she once met in the Lewes Arms. They’d enjoyed a nostalgic discussion about books, but never spoke to one another again. Ruth remembered how this woman had wailed and kicked when the armour threw her onto the cart.

After the Seizure, most people were redundant. The baron had explained it to her with characteristic cynicism.

“The likes of us have become a burden upon civilization,” he said. “In the past, we were tolerated because our vanities could be manipulated so that we took on debt. Vainly we aspired to better ourselves and thereby society. But meritocracy was only for the poor.” He had a pointed grey beard and aristocratic, almond eyes. “In reality, for all our high ideals, we were merely pretexts for debt; debt was our contribution, debt was how we created wealth. Our houses were debt. Our educations were debt. Our health was debt. Our trinkets, debt. Without debt, all we have is our data. We are data beasts in some fucking zoo, and it’s just a matter of which specimens are required, which pairs are to be bred.”

The baron was a defeated idealist. He had given up his estate on Eerde to a group who promised a revolution in consciousness. They were still on his land, working their way through the mystic traditions, pushing back the boundaries of their preconceptions, eating the food grown in his garden, sleeping in his bed.

He was an advocate of the Process. He agreed that the sole remaining value of the Lewesians – all they could take to market – was their data, and that data might offer spiritual understanding. What an opportunity the Process presented, to study the mind of the town! Perhaps, in the patterns of data produced by the group mind, elusive insights could be discerned. A quantitative study of thousands of inner lives would reveal what centuries of introspection and religious tradition had not.

“We will make the subjective into the objective and vice versa,” said the baron. “Capturing everything that happens here will allow us to recreate it in the future. Memories will not die. The past will become the present.”

The ground shimmered under the armour’s unsteady heavy gait. The armour did not seem out of place on the South Downs, its grinding iron sections and groaning vents reminding her of agricultural machinery: the armour as a plough or a furrow, a technology mankind had used from the very beginning. An ancient punishment device. Behind the misted colloid, the face of the son of the baron, Christopher Von Pallandt, was a flesh blur.

The evicted had been gathered from camps and other towns, with methods more carrot than stick (although, as the baron was fond of pointing out, both could be used as a weapon). The armour had appeared to the evicted in the car parks of the housing estates of St Leonard’s Warrior Square, at the perimeter of the tent cities outside Brighton, and pulling aside the barricades of the charity-maintained hotels of Eastbourne. The armour had cast the evicted out. Now it sought their return. Hope worked its magic on desperate souls and they came willingly.

The stragglers shared their stories of hardship, as if better times lay ahead. The old rumours of intervention by the administration, of a coming restoration, were aired. When the evictions first started, Ruth had asked the same question of the baron: “When will the government wake up to what has been happening?” He replied, “A better question is: what will happen when we wake up to what has been happening with the government?” She pressed him further, but his answers were swingeing and apocalyptic, his rhetoric digging a hole just large enough for himself.

She followed the evicted down into the hamlet. Saddlescombe consisted of a few cottages ranged around a farm. On a field of pasture, a serried rank of bell tents had been pitched, and it was to these that the evicted were directed. The colloid clanked open to cool down the bailiff: Christopher’s head was tipped back, resting after subjugation to the Process. Two soldiers supervised refuelling the armour. They wore the same khaki uniforms as Hector. It was hard to tell, at first, if they were manufactured men or not. One of them, a slight boyish figure with an experienced wise face, popped the armour’s engine cover and drew a cup of scalding water from the radiator, which he then used to soften his beard and wet his razor, concentrating upon his reflection in an aluminium panel. He raised a sardonic eyebrow that made one eye appear distinctly larger than the other. She walked by with her head down, and when she looked back, he continued to shave in the metallic reflection; his gaze did not follow her departing figure.

A cottage had been converted into a café for the soldiers. The ceiling was low, and around an open iron stove, the men sat six to a bench, drinking thin beer and smoking thin cigarettes. Like Hector, they were indistinguishable from real people. She hesitated in the doorway, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom. She took a seat in the corner on a low wooden stool. The soldiers ignored her.

The café owner appeared with plates of omelette and chips, a woman with her dark blonde hair tied back in a ponytail: Jane Bowles, the mother of Agnes, the child Ruth betrayed.

Jane set the plates down in front of the soldiers, wiped her hands upon her apron, collected empty tin mugs from their table onto a tray, and then returned to the kitchen. She did not see Ruth, or if she did, she did not acknowledge her existence. Ruth followed her out back.

“Jane?”

Jane retied her ponytail. She had once told Ruth that, before she was a mother, her hair had been the colour of golden thread. After the birth of each of her children, it had turned progressively darker. Hormones no doubt, but Ruth regarded this darkening as an indication of the serious responsibility of parenthood, a deepening of the self unknown to her.

A coffee pot spluttered on the range. Jane wrapped a tea towel around the handle and put the pot to one side.

Ruth said, “I’m so sorry about what happened.” No, that was not enough. “About what I did.”

Jane unhooked a small cup from the wall and poured herself an inch of strong coffee.

“I would do anything to undo it.”

Jane sat wearily upon a high stool, sipped her coffee, then whispered, “
What can you do
?”

“We will take you back to Lewes.”

Jane unhooked a second cup from the wall, and poured coffee into it. She did not offer it to Ruth. The cup steamed.

Ruth said, “Have you seen James? Has he come through here?”

Jane tipped her head back and called her husband’s name. And then she repeated, in a resigned whisper, “
What can you do
?”

Ruth heard tools set down in the yard, the rasp of a boot scraper. Tom entered and the sight of him made her gasp: his head was shaven, and the right side of his face had slipped as after a stroke. His scalp was stained with haphazard splashes of iodine. He moved slowly across the kitchen, put his hand on his wife’s shoulder, leant forwards and nuzzled the back of her hair. Both of them had new implants, but whoever had performed the operation on Tom had been brutish. Jane’s implant was neater and almost concealed behind her ponytail, the pinched scarring exposed by her husband’s attention. Tom blew on his coffee to cool it.

“Where are your children?” she asked. “Euan and Agnes?”

Neither Jane nor Tom responded to her. She was a ghost to them. Not part of their pattern.

What can you do?

What had happened to the children? She walked out of the kitchen and trod quickly up a narrow staircase. On the landing, there were four doors, and one ajar. There, sitting up in bed reading, was the woman from the Institute, Alex Drown, with a violently bloodshot eye. She did not acknowledge Ruth’s presence either. The next bedroom held the empty marital bed, a chamber pot beneath it, and a grate of ash. The pillows on one side of the bed showed dull, scrubbed bloodstains. Clothes hung over the back of a chair and veins of green damp broke across the bowed ceiling. The bathroom contained a tin bath, no running water, and two wooden toothbrushes, his and hers, together in a clay pot. The last room was the children’s room. It was empty. Bare warped boards, a cold fireplace, and a cobwebbed window with a broken pane.

She walked into Alex Drown’s bedroom, closing the door behind her. Still Alex did not acknowledge her. The fire was lit. A grey dress and a white apron were drying on a clothes horse. Alex put her novel on the bedside table and turned over to sleep. Ruth crouched beside her, gazing intently at the woman’s resting face, hoping to spark the instinct of being watched. Alex’s small fists were bunched in the coarse blanket fibres. She fell asleep. The hands relaxed. And then she stirred awake.

“Ruth,” said Alex.

“You can see me.”

“Where am I?”

“In a cottage in Saddlescombe.”

Alex put her hand to her bloodshot eye and groaned.

“They put me under. It’s dangerous for me to go this deep into the Process.”

Alex looked askance at her blowsy nightie, then squinted painfully at the nurse’s uniform on the clothes horse.

“That’s mine, isn’t it?”

“You didn’t recognize me when I came in. You didn’t even see me.”

“When the implant is engaged, the Process puts layers over my perception. It must be screening you out. I had a safeguard put in which disengages the implant when I fall asleep, to prevent them from putting me under permanently. This isn’t the first time he’s involved me in his games.”

Alex looked around the room, then under the bed.

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen my real clothes?”

“Do you know where James is?”

“He’s part of the landing. He’s on the beach with the others.”

“The landing?”

“The war game.”

Alex glanced out of the window, at a squad of soldiers marching by.

Ruth was indignant. “A game?”

Alex hauled her big nightie over her head, exposing her neglected body, then reached over to the clothes horse; she flicked the grey serge dress out to see if it was dry, and finding it acceptably so, climbed into it and fastened the shoulder straps.

“It’s a game to him. Just because it’s a matter of life or death, doesn’t meant he can’t be
playful
,” said Alex, her face registering annoyance at her dowdy nurse’s shoes.

Anticipating Ruth’s next question, Alex said, “By
him
I mean my colleague at the Institute. I say colleague but I mean my patient. My employer. He often involves me in his games because he likes to exercise
droit de seigneur
over my mind.”

She picked up a white muslin cap.

“Do I have to wear this?” she asked.

“I saw the bailiff bring the evicted into the village. Some of them have implants.”

Alex looked concerned.

“He needs more players.”

“James said he wouldn’t be gone for long.” Then Ruth went quiet. She could not say another word without crying.

“Don’t cry. It won’t help,” said Alex. “We must get away from here.”

“I must take the children. A little girl I evicted.”

“James told me about that.”

“We’ve been so unkind, Alex. So caught up and confused.”

Alex buttoned her red cape, fixed her white cap.

“What are you suggesting?”

“That we stop collaborating with the Process. We could take control of our lives again.”

“You have more control within the Process than you ever had without it.”

“But this war…”

“How many wars were there under the old ways?”

Unsteadily, Alex led the way down the stairs.

“Malted milk,” she called back. “I must give the soldiers their malted milk.”

She jogged across the yard, her nurse’s cape fluttering behind her, and then onto the dirt track leading deeper into the farm. On the wind, Ruth caught a smell of something bad, something more corrupt than the usual farmyard odour.

The barn lay at the end of the dried mud track. The soft textures of poplar trees in the late afternoon sun. Rusted farm machinery. Troughs of rainwater. Birdsong. The lowing of cattle. No, not cattle.

She tried but failed to keep her fear out of her voice.

“What’s in the barn?”

“Wounded soldiers,” said Alex. But she was uncertain. A lock of black hair slipped from out of her nurse’s cap. She corrected it.

“I think the children may be in there too,” she said. Alex gathered her cape around her and walked with her head lowered into the barn.

The barn had been filled with cots, a hundred or more, arranged in a grid with narrow paths between them. Alex hung up her cape, washed her hands in a trough. Her gaze lengthened as she quietly slipped under the layers of the Process. Then she was just another nurse, administering tea and sympathy.