My Brother's Keeper (2 page)

"I haven't been up there for a couple of months," I said. "But it's well looked after."

"Good. I want to go there so we can talk in peace for an hour or two." Leo was looking all around him as he spoke, very edgy. I was picking up his nervousness, and I didn't like it at all.

"We don't have time for a trip north if you have to leave tomorrow." I accepted his need for a place to talk privately without even thinking about it.

"Yes, we do." Leo managed a grin. "I called in here from Zurich and booked a helicopter. By the time we get over there the flight plan should all be cleared."

"Up to Middlesbrough?"

"Right. No Chinese meal tonight. You'll have to feed me on black pudding and tripe."

He faked a shudder. I'd been raised on them, but Leo's American palate had trouble with some of the delicacies from the north of England.

It was clear that he didn't want to talk any more serious matters until we were out of the airport, so I didn't push it. We chatted about trivia on the shuttle bus to the pad, about two miles away, and when we got there found a little BMR-33 four-seater waiting for us. She was a lovely trim job, blue and red painted, with the engines all warmed up for us and ready to go when we walked up to her.

"Want me to fly her?" I asked. Leo and I both fell in love with flying and with helicopters fifteen years ago, when we were still in our teens, and we both held current licenses.

He shook his head. "No way. That's my privilege as Big Brother."

Leo was forty-three minutes older than me, and we never forgot it. Other people suffered some confusion when he referred to me as his "younger brother," or I talked about his great age.

"All right, old man," I said, and went to stow his bag in the rear. While Leo signed off for the 'copter, I climbed into the passenger seat and checked the weather report. It was nearly six-thirty, just getting dark, and there was cloud cover at three thousand feet. Not the most perfect conditions. Leo was shaking his head in annoyance when he finished with the paperwork and climbed aboard.

"Lots of traffic, I guess. Look at this lousy flight plan. We have to head way off to the west before they'll let me swing up north."

"What do you have as the Middlesbrough ETA?"

"Eight twenty-eight."

"That's not bad at all. I've done this before. You'll find that everything clears up once we're past Cambridge—it's just this mess round London that's a pain."

He grunted, and settled in at the controls. Visibility was good in spite of the cloud overhead. I could see the dark flats of the Water Board reservoirs off to the southwest as we lifted, and away behind us the haze of London itself was a blue-grey ball over the city. We rose to two thousand feet and slid away to the west.

I hate to say it, but Leo was a better pilot than I was. That was a surprise to me, since on all the standard tests that we had been taking together since we were in our early teens, I scored higher on manual dexterity than he did. Leo had his own explanation for that. He said it was training, not talent, that gave me more nimble fingers. "What do you expect?" he would say. "You wouldn't expect a pianist to act as though he was all thumbs. It's mechanical aptitude that counts in being a good pilot." And of course, on mechanical aptitude he usually scored a tiny fraction higher than I did—but not enough higher, in my opinion, to explain his easy skill as a helicopter pilot. I suspected that was training, too, rather than talent. Leo simply got in more flying hours, though it was hard for me to see how his job offered the opportunity for it.

He had relaxed a good deal as soon as we lifted off, and now that we were moving west towards Reading he began to whistle softly, just loud enough for me to hear him. It was the first movement of the
Unfinished
, taken a little slowly.

"You realize that you're a semitone flat?" I said. "It's in B, not B-flat."

He turned his head and grinned at me. "Sorry, Little Brother. I just wanted to see if you were awake still."

He had the ear, all right, but he had simply never got around to learning to play a musical instrument. When I thought of the huge chunks of my life that had been swallowed up on practice, I sometimes wondered if Leo had the right idea and I was off my head. But it was too late for that sort of thinking. I leaned back in my seat.

"All right, accept that I'm awake enough. How about a little light on the big mystery, and the rush to the north? It's not like you to miss the chance at a good Chinese meal."

He nodded, looking straight ahead, and sighed, "Too true. But this is really a tough business, Lionel."

It was, too. I knew it as soon as he spoke. We never called each other "Leo" and "Lionel" in private unless some really serious matter was involved. I didn't speak, but just sat and waited.

"You know," he said after a few moments. "I've kidded you a lot about your job over the years, and told you you have to work your fingers off just to stay in the same place—you have the real Red Queen's Race. But sometimes I envy you. It'll pass in a few minutes, but I'm envying you right now."

"That's a first. You mean you're disenchanted with your job? I thought you loved those AID jaunts, hopping all over the globe and dishing out the dollars. What's up, have they stopped treating you like royalty all of a sudden?"

"Not quite." His tone had changed. I realized that he had not listened to me, and was only able to reply from an instinct as to what I must have said to him.

"What's wrong?" I looked at the instrument panel.

"She's not handling right." He was frowning at the gauges also. "Everything shows as though it's fine, but it's not. She's yawing, and I can't trim her to correct it. The hell with this, I'm going to take her back to Heathrow. Call in and request an emergency landing for us."

I reached for the radio, but before I could make connection it became irrelevant. The helicopter lurched sickeningly to the right, levelled for a moment as Leo struggled with the controls, then swooped sideways again, vibrating madly.

"I can't hold her at all," Leo grunted. His face was tense and flushed with exertion. "We'll never make it to Heathrow. What's down there on your side? I'll have to try and slip her that way and straighten us when we're really low."

Off to my right I could see a dizzying pattern of fields and roads, leading a mile or two ahead to the more heavily built-up area of East Reading.

"As soon as you can," I shouted, still concentrating on the ground. "It gets worse the further we go. We're better off here than nearer the town."

Leo did not speak, but I heard his grunt of effort. The air was rushing past us and the helicopter was rolling and yawing crazily as we lost altitude. At three hundred feet we straightened for a moment. I could see a hedge, a muddy pool, and a plowed field, and beyond that the line of a major road with houses on the other side of it.

"Right here, Leo. Turn her
now
." My voice was high-pitched and panicky. "Watch out, you'll have us on the road."

He did his best, pulling us close to level at the last moment. It just wasn't good enough. I saw the ground coming towards me—much too fast—and in the moment before impact I could see so clearly that I could have counted the individual weeds that grew in the plowed furrows. When we hit there was a noise like the end of the world.

In a way, that's exactly what it was.

Nobody would believe me when I told them that I had not—repeat
not
—lost consciousness when we hit. They pointed to my injuries as proof that I must have been knocked out. I couldn't offer my proof for many months. But I was right. The idea that I had hallucinated in post-accident trauma was plausible nonsense.

To make this strictly and absolutely accurate, I actually did black out for maybe a second or two at the moment of impact, but I feel sure it was brief. I came to when the noise of settling metal and bending struts was still going on around me. Although I was in no pain, I couldn't move a finger—or a toe either. The helicopter had struck almost flat, thanks to Leo's last-ditch efforts, but fast. I had been thrown forward and to the right, to smash against the side panel and window as the machine jerked to a violent halt on the uneven ground.

It's hard to say how long I lay there, listening to the creak of twisted metal and wondering what I would do if the wreck caught fire. (Answer: nothing, which was all I could do.) The right side of my head was flat on the metal, and I was looking out of the window at the dark brown earth. From where I lay the perspective was distorted. It seemed that my nose was flat against the steel surface, just as though my head had been sheared in two to the right of my nose, and the left half laid on the cold metal panel.

All the fear and emotion that I felt before the crash had gone. I remember thinking,
About time, too
, when I finally heard footsteps moving on the broken frame of the helicopter. Surely it couldn't be Leo? He would have dragged me clear of possible fire before going to look for help. As the footsteps came closer I realized there were at least two people, stepping cautiously over the angled floor. There was a sound of labored breathing, and a grunt as some heavy object behind me was lifted and moved to one side.

"It's not on him, Scouse," said a voice a few feet from my head, "There's no sign of it."

"Bloody hell, it's got to be," said a second voice, this one with a strong Liverpool accent. " 'Ere, you let me have a look at him, an' you try the other one. Mebbe he already gave it to 'im. Are yer quite sure yer got the right one 'ere?"

"Of course I'm bleedin' sure. He's unconscious, but that's Foss all right. See that tie pin, same as 'e 'ad on 'im last time? I'll take a look-see at this one, but that's Leo Foss."

A pair of black shoes, leather-soled and black-buckled, appeared a few inches in front of my face. Hands were moving lightly over my body, patting and probing.

"It's not on 'im, either," said the first voice. " 'Less it's underneath 'im. I'd 'ave to lift 'im up to see that."

"Well, get on an' do it, yer great git." Scouse sounded uneasy. "Lift him an' do it sharpish. We don't have all bleedin' night 'ere."

Up to that point there had been no pain for me, not even a twinge. But now hands began to raise and turn me, and that was murder. My long-suffering body began to protest, all the way from my toes to my neck. Streaks of agony were like darts shooting into my spine and my right side. It was too much. When I slid dizzily into unconsciousness I was very glad to go. My final thought was of Leo. I hadn't seen him since the crash, but the words of the two men told me that he was at least still alive. That was some comfort during my descent into darkness.

The first waking didn't count for much. It was a blurry, mush-minded few minutes of staring at an unfocused white ceiling, wondering who I was, where I was, and why I was aching all over. I didn't even try to move, which I later found out was just as well.

The second time up from the pit was better and worse. I found myself in a firm bed that was raised at the head end ten or fifteen degrees. I was in no danger of falling out, though—not with the tubes and wires that hung all over me like spaghetti. I was the central meatball. And I hurt even more than the first time.

I lay there, blinking. My right eye was providing me with a set of strange and uncoordinated images, and I spent the first few minutes trying to get things into focus. It was hard work until I learned the trick, which was to concentrate only on the object and not on the way my eye did the focusing. When the image in front of me finally became sharp it was debatable if the result was worth the effort. I was looking at a fat, bald-headed man with bulging eyes. He was sitting on a chair at the end of the bed, holding an apple in one thick-fingered paw and stolidly munching on it.

He nodded at me cheerfully when he saw that I was awake and finally focusing on him.

"With us for a while, eh? Good. I can stop guarding you for a little bit. D'ye know who you are?"

I made a miserable croaking noise, and he looked sympathetic.

"Try again."

"Ah—ah—Li'el Sa'ki'."

"Terrific." He threw the apple core somewhere out of sight, wiped his hands on the pants of his crumpled blue suit, and stood up. "That's the first question answered. I think you'd do well now to have another little nap. Don't go away now, and I'll bring the nurse."

His voice was deep and self-confident, with a West Yorkshire cut to the vowels. He moved out of my line of vision—I was getting nothing from my left eye—and I heard the squeak of heavy leather boots as he went out of the room. A minute later a nurse in a blue uniform slipped a needle into my right arm, and I went under again. As I did so I wondered why I needed the services of a policeman to guard me. My name is well-known enough, but I'm certainly no celebrity.

As I became unconscious I wanted to ask about Leo, but I had left it too late.

Third time lucky. I was improving a little when I woke, and I knew it. My overall ache had progressed to sharp points of individual agony, but the feeling of being disembodied and unfocused was much less. My head still buzzed and reeled, but it felt like my head and not some anonymous cauliflower. I came out of a strange dream of my childhood, back before Leo and I were reunited. The familiar views of Middlesbrough and Stockton where I had grown up were overlaid with alien images of surf, flat palm trees, and fast-moving freeways. The harder I tried to concentrate, the more the images mixed and moved.

I finally worked my eyes open, to see the same fat man sitting there staring at me. He had taken a big clasp knife out of his pocket and was opening it when he saw my eyes blinking at him. He put the knife away again and moved quietly out of the room, still betrayed in his movements by the squeaking boots. When the nurse came in to crank my bed to a higher position for my head I turned to look at her.

"What's happening?" My voice was still rusty, but in better control. "Why do they need a policeman here to watch me?"

She looked worried, shook her head, and slipped out of the room again without answering me. I heard her voice nearby.