The Blasphemer: A Novel (13 page)

He checked his medals once more. Had Daniel lived in the shadow of his MC? He hoped not. He had tried not to talk of it, dismissing it almost. He hadn’t even shown his son the short version of his citation, the one not covered by the Official Secrets Act. It described how, at the height of Operation Desert Storm, Philip had gone on treating his comrades after a ricochet had ripped off the top half of his ear and pierced his eardrum. The longer version of the citation explained that it had been a friendly fire incident – a ‘blue on blue’ in which a US helicopter gunship had attacked an eight-man SAS team travelling in two armoured jeeps. Two were killed and another five wounded, most of them seriously, with missing limbs and third-degree burns. By the time Philip and his medical team were helicoptered in, the Iraqis were also arriving. The one uninjured SAS soldier held them off while the medics evacuated the injured. His friend Geoff Turner was one of the survivors. That, indeed, was how they had become friends. Turner had since left ‘the Regiment’ and joined ‘the Service’. Philip checked his mobile. Still no message from him.

The Bishop of London’s procession was arriving. The royal family should be next but there was as yet no sign of them. Big Ben started chiming the hour. People in the crowd began looking at
one another in puzzlement. Seconds passed and the silence filled with coughing and shuffling and distant traffic. Philip was too distracted to compose his thoughts. Something odd was going on. He could see the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition being led by a policeman back inside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Another policeman emerged, whispering into a microphone on his lapel. The two-minute silence ended with the traditional firing of an artillery gun by the King’s Troop and Last Post sounded by buglers of the Royal Marines. But before they could finish, a policeman ran out of the Foreign Office carrying a loudhailer. He stood in front of the Cenotaph facing the 10,000 former servicemen and women who were packing Whitehall all the way back to Trafalgar Square and barked. ‘Will everyone please make their way to Horse Guards Parade. Everyone back! Now! This area is being evacuated!’

Six other policemen in luminous green jackets formed a cordon and began directing people back with their arms. The crowd erupted in noise: talking, shouting, the scrape of shoes. Some began shoving when it became apparent there was no give in the crowd. A bottleneck was forming at the archway leading on to Horse Guards Parade.

The policeman with the loudhailer turned towards the side area where Philip was standing. ‘Will you people please make your way into Parliament Square. Quickly now! Move!’

Philip was almost carried along, so close were those around him huddled. He saw one old man stumble to the ground in the crush but couldn’t turn round to help him. When other hands raised the man up, he concentrated on staying upright himself. The human tide of shuffling feet and pressing bodies roiled past the entrance to Westminster Tube before losing momentum. People were slowing down and breaking into a normal walk now. Mobile phones were being switched on. He carried on walking over Westminster Bridge, feeling confounded and anxious. What was going on? There had been no explosion. Was it a false alarm? Police must have had reports of a terrorist threat and evacuated the area as a precaution. He didn’t stop until he was in Kennington, within sight of the
Imperial War Museum’s copper dome. This was familiar ground to him. He felt safe here. Still carrying his wreath, he walked stiffly past the giant naval guns in the museum grounds, past a spray-painted fragment of the Berlin Wall, up the steps and through the lichencovered columns.

Once inside, he stared ahead blankly as a broad-chested security guard frisked him. He paced back and forth, under a Sopwith Camel suspended from the ceiling, past a First World War tank, around ‘Ole Bill’, an omnibus that had seen action at Ypres, and returned to the entrance where he stood catching his breath, his heart palpitating.

He was in front of a plaque explaining that this building was the former Bethlem Royal Hospital – better known as Bedlam. Unable to take the words in, he stood for a few minutes reading and re-reading them. The museum was almost empty and so the same security guard who had searched him came over and asked if he was all right. He nodded in answer, turned and walked to the back of the hall, past a glass case containing the 1000cc motorbike on which Lawrence of Arabia had been killed, and down the stairs to the basement. Once there he followed signs to
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
and came to a framed poster of Kitchener pointing his finger at YOU. Beyond this was a cabinet containing wire cutters, chainmail body armour and medieval-looking weapons used for hand-to-hand combat in the trenches: knuckle-dusters with blades, a mace, a nail-studded cosh, a gauntlet punch dagger. Philip stared at them. The next gallery was dominated by a wall of wooden signs:
SUICIDE CORNER, PETTICOAT LANE, THAT TIN HAT YOU PASSED JUST NOW IS WORTH MONEY
–
PICK IT UP AND TAKE IT TO THE SALVAGE DUMP
. Above him a large screen was showing flickering images of the Western Front on a continual loop: jerky footage of horses wearing gas masks and soldiers bustling over the top in fast motion, one of them not making it over the parapet before sliding back down the bank of soil.

He continued on to
THE TRENCH EXPERIENCE
, a walk-through recreation of a front-line trench. It was too dimly lit for his tired eyes, and the sound and chemical-smell effects did not register on
his senses. He removed his gloves and ran a stiff hand over a sandbag that had been daubed with brown paint to make it look muddy. Beyond this was a cross-section of a recent trench excavation showing rusty shells, bayonets and bullets found below the topsoil. Philip thought again of his grandfather’s newly discovered letters and felt restless. It was as if a shelf of soil had collapsed, disturbing the long-buried dead. Realizing he was still carrying the cross of poppies, he laid it against the perspex-covered soil and retraced his steps. Once outside in the crisp London air he checked his pocket watch – noon – and turned on his mobile. He listened to a message to call Geoff Turner. He pressed the ‘return call’ option and waited.

‘It’s Philip. You left a message.’

‘Thanks for calling back. I can’t talk now. There’s been an incident at the Cenotaph.’

‘I know, I was there. Hello? ... I can’t hear you very well.’

‘We’re being told it’s a false alarm. But listen, I wasn’t ringing about that. It’s Daniel. I’ve just found out his seaplane never landed. I’m afraid it is being reported as missing … Hello? Philip? Are you there?’

‘The seaplane never landed?’

‘Afraid not.’

Philip was sitting down on a bench, next to the section of the Berlin Wall. The mobile was on the seat beside him. His hands were cupped neatly on his lap.

THE WATER HAD TURNED CHOPPY. DANIEL WONDERED ABSTRACTLY
if he had found the current that would pull him to the islands, but he was too exhausted to swim any farther and find out. Lactic acid had built up in his legs. They felt like concrete, and cramp was knotting them. Part of him knew his swim would now not end other than in his own extinction. The long swim. He felt he had been swimming this distance all his life and all he wanted was sleep. To compound his agony, his eyes were stinging and blurred from the seawater and tears, and he felt as if he had swallowed splintered glass. His lips were cracked and swollen. Only the imperative of rescuing Nancy and seeing Martha again was now keeping him clinging to life.

Over the next two and a quarter hours he drifted as much as swam. The pain from the jellyfish stings had become so intense he found himself retching every few minutes. He was also shivering convulsively and feeling delirious: symptoms of sunstroke, or shock, or swallowing salt water – he was no longer sure which. Nevertheless, he managed to calculate that if he had been swimming on the right course, the islands would have been in sight by now. He stopped swimming as he realized this; and pictured himself alone in a vast, cold ocean, waiting for death to bear him away. As he had done on the crashing plane, he resigned himself to the inevitable – only this time his death, he knew, would be a slow and agonizing one, from dehydration and hypothermia. His only
alternative was to remove his life jacket and allow himself to sink. Drowning is supposed to be painless. After the initial panic you feel nothing but tranquillity. Anyway, his life jacket had given him blisters under his arms. It was slowing him down. He would be better off without it.

The cramp moved to his feet and interrupted his thoughts. To relieve the pain, he pulled his fins off and watched them sink away into the velvety depths. With water-wrinkled hands, he removed his mask and let it float away, too, the snorkel still attached. An indifferent wind picked up and, as he bobbed in the swelling water, he thought about how he had abandoned Nancy, how he had pushed his hand against her face, how he deserved this punishment. As he fumbled to untie the cord across his chest, his head lolled backwards. So far, he had been avoiding staring at the sun but now, as he narrowed his eyes in its glare, he could no longer remember why. A stab of migraine jolted his head forward again.

Then he saw him. A young man with a lapidary smile and protuberant wide-set eyes was treading water no more than ten yards away, gently beckoning with his hand. Delicate-boned, oliveskinned and with contour, quiddity and mass, the man was completely present, yet could not be. Only his head and shoulders were visible – he wasn’t wearing a life vest – and in the trough that followed a cresting wave he disappeared.

Daniel reached limply to his other arm and, in order to recover a connection with reality, tapped his watch twice. It was 5.40pm. No longer knowing what the numbers meant, he looked up at the man again, but he was gone. A hallucination. His face had been familiar though. Daniel longed to see it again. Left with a feeling of post-coital languor, he closed his eyes and a yellow glow lingered on his retinas. Already he was uncertain whether he had actually seen what he thought he had seen. He opened his eyes again and began swimming towards where the young man had been, the point at which the blue of the sky met the blue of the ocean. Twenty minutes later he lost consciousness and drifted, held afloat by the life vest he had, in a moment of distraction, failed to take off.

*

The water was as black and glossy as lacquer when Daniel regained consciousness. He blinked, trying to focus his eyes on what looked like phosphorescence. He looked up at the sky. A full moon. A canopy of stars.

He was moving.

His life jacket had snagged on the rim of something and it – slimy, leathery, barrel-shaped – was pulling him slowly along in its wake. It was a giant shell, at least seven feet long. Large, spadelike hind flippers were acting as a rudder. He could see a beak opening and closing silently. A leatherback turtle. The cord of his life vest, Daniel realized, had wrapped around one of its elongated forelimbs, keeping it on the surface. He unwrapped it and the creature swam away, shuddering with each sinuous stroke, leaving a trail of silver bubbles.

Faltering, milky light was bleeding into the darkness. Seabirds, shearwaters and a lone albatross, were wheeling and screeching overhead. Daniel’s feet touched something soft. A sandbank. He slid out of his life vest, and lay half submerged in the water. Feeling warm – a symptom of hypothermia, he knew, of blood leaving the brain – he prepared to swim the final few hundred yards. A congregation of storm petrels appeared, soaring and swooping above high cliffs.

Cliffs.

He had reached the Galápagos Islands.

In the distance, he could make out a semicircle of jagged, black rocks. He recognized them: the Devil’s Crown, a half-submerged volcanic crater. The island beyond them must be Floreana. Post Office Bay would be there, too, the site where visitors, from Darwin onwards, left their letters and postcards to be collected. Daniel saw another turtle walking away, its movements blocky and hesitant. He followed it, walking his hands along the sand, the shallow water bearing his weight. When he reached a brackish lagoon, he stood up and, feeling buoyant and dizzy, waded unsteadily. It led on to an estuary and, soon after, he passed eroded
cinder cones, then a mangrove swamp framed by cactus clumps. He was navigating a gap between black lava rocks and could hear surf churning on a beach. The sun had risen and the water had turned emerald green, the colour of the engagement ring he had bought and lost. As he crawled heavily on to the pebbled shore, a sea iguana studied him unblinkingly and Sally Lightfoot crabs ran over his fingers, searching for food. He propped himself up on one locked arm and felt the full weight of his limbs, several tons of solid beached flesh. A wavering noise rose from his diaphragm, more an exhalation than a word, a cry to continue living.

Ypres Salient. Last Monday of July, 1917

ANDREW KENNEDY HAS LEARNED THE NAMES FOR THE DIFFERENT
types of trench – ‘support’, ‘reserve’, ‘communication’ and ‘front’ – but has never seen a real one before. Nor has he smelled one. This trench reeks of newly ploughed earth, petrol and mildewed wood. A wooden sign stencilled in capital letters above it reads:
KEEP TO THE TRENCH IN DAYLIGHT. BY ORDER
. As they begin a three-mile, zigzagging walk to their position, Andrew’s excitement turns to apprehension again. He is beginning to understand that fear and excitement, excitement and fear, are the twin emotions that define the PBI. The Poor Bloody Infantry. The fear this time is partly caused by the order to break ranks and walk in Indian file, a lonely feeling after the solidarity of the four-abreast marching.

Some of the reserve trenches are dry, but others dug below the water table are knee-deep – muddy water with which the drainage sumps cannot cope. Walking through the mud distracts Andrew from his morbid thoughts and when he sees his second trench sign –
PETTICOAT LANE
– and inhales the unfamiliar smell of chloride of lime, he feels excited once more. They have entered a properly built support trench system this time, with wooden fire steps, slatted duckboards and sides stoutly revetted with wood and piled with sandbags one and a half times the height of a man. There is a sump
hole at one end and a solid-looking gate wrapped in barbed wire at the other.