Turbulence (16 page)

As I watched Ryman's tall figure stride across the field, I realised what it was, that half-familiar noise I'd been hearing. It was the German plane, coming in low. That is what I had heard. We both turned to look. Without stopping to think, I ran as fast as I could to the start of the beech tree walk, where I had set the first of my release switches.

The Junkers came over, already in the curve, readying itself to turn. They could have shot Ryman by now, had they wanted. Perhaps they really were just taking pictures …

I pressed the plunger. Up they went then, from behind the line of trees, dipping and drifting, one after another … a host of cracker balloons, each packing a charge, each with a sting in its tail.

I came out from among the trees to see Ryman running back towards the rising tail of the last balloon, his face full of fury. What was he doing? It was as if he wanted to pluck the offending weapon from the sky. Some of the balloons had already begun to detonate. The plane, coming in on its second pass, was now faced with a line of balloons rising through the air at irregular intervals, with the wind making it impossible to predict where they would rise.

Crack! Crack!

At every level they were going off. Large patches of red fire in the sky.
Crack!
Then white flashes as the magnesium caught and flared.

They made a tremendous noise. The sky quickly filled with
smoke and the air was acrid with the smell of burning petrol. I heard an exultant laugh come out of my throat.

Black smoke was falling. Through the pall I saw Ryman, closer now. Above him, the plane's engine droned. To my dawning horror, I glimpsed Ryman standing in the path of one the balloon wires, the last in the sequence, which had drifted down. It missed him. As it passed by him the tail made a loud pop and burst into flames. I saw Ryman flinch and duck, and then, to my relief, straighten up amid the new puff of black smoke, apparently unharmed.

At that moment, however, the wind changed. The balloon doubled back in his direction, its wire swinging from side to side, the blackened carton spinning round. Twisting as it followed the eddy-driven movement of the balloon from which it was suspended, with the remains of the carton acting as a sort of anchor on which the wind could catch, the copper-wire aerial caught him round the neck, looping rapidly round. All this happened in an instant. I watched, stupefied, as the balloon began dragging him along the field. There was a ghastly comedy in the mechanical movement of his legs.

I ran towards him. What on earth did he think he was doing?

Above us other balloons continued to blow. Flaring pieces of magnesium were tumbling onto the grass beside me. When I reached Ryman his face was bright red. His weight had anchored the balloon a little, but he was still sliding across the field. I grabbed hold of his kicking legs and pulled him down to me, clawing frantically at the wire around his throat.

I was making things worse. The wire grew tight. A noose. A killing snare like one of Mackellar's for the rabbits. My knees began to shake. I felt the
kizunguzungu
feeling returning.

Ryman was frothing at the mouth. I tried again to pull the balloon down, but now it made no difference to the tension on
the wire, which had knotted itself and drawn close. Panicking, I twisted the wire tightly with my fingers, still trying to loosen it, but all that happened was that it bit deeper into his Adam's apple, crushing his windpipe. His eyes bulged and his face began turning from red to blue. Ryman's head slumped forward, a trickle of blood at his nostril.

It was no use. I needed something to sever the wire. Leaving him suspended, I ran to the cot-house to search for a suitable tool. I remember frantically sweeping everything off my desk and overturning half a dozen crates before I eventually found a pair of tinsnips. I rushed back outside in a daze to find Ryman's body still hanging from the balloon, wreathed in smoke. Stumbling and falling on the grass, the plane still swooping overhead, I ran back to release him. I snipped the wire above him and he fell to the ground, enabling me to get at the strangling copper. But I was too late. His face remained as swollen as the balloon whose aerial had just garrotted him. I think he must have been dead even before I'd run to the house. Moaning, I fell to my knees by the body. The earth seemed to quake, as if rocks deep below were being rent asunder.

The plane passed overhead again. At that moment there was another explosion in the air. I looked up. One of its engines was smoking – I assumed from drawing into its propeller housing another wire and carton, followed in short order by a hydrogen balloon, just as intended.

But there was no grand finale, at least not then. The Junkers just seemed to wobble for a moment, then sailed on imperturbably into the blue light of the horizon, leaving me and my disaster to run their course. What I did not see, what happened later, in another part of the picture, were parachutes opening, men falling to earth.

The rest of the day passed in a blur of ambulance men and vehicles and police. I half-dragged, half-carried Ryman's body to the cot-house, laying it on the grass outside, then went inside to make the necessary telephone calls. Afterwards, appalled at myself, I sat beside the body on the porch, unable to look at the face. Something inside me had broken.

Confirmed in a sense of personal futility, I sat on the step as the officials went to and fro. Later the Mackellars appeared – they had been at the agricultural market in the town and had just come back in the trap.

Mackellar strode across the grass towards me, the whip from the trap in his hand. Someone had obviously told him that I was responsible for what had happened. At first, craggy-faced and trembling with anger under his flat cap, he just stood there in front of me where I sat on the step. I was about to say something when he lifted the whip and began swiping me with it, uttering curses as he did so. I cowered on the step, curling fetally under the rain of stinging blows.

Eventually – and it seemed like an awfully long time – a pair of policemen pulled him off me.

I wiped blood off my face and sat back on the step, caught in a terrible immobility of misery and pain. I was almost grateful for the pain, not feeling sufficiently self-lacerated for what had happened. Just a terrible numbness and dizziness: oh yes, a vicious return of that.

The ambulance took Ryman's body. His glasses fell off as
they loaded him onto it. With tears running down my bleeding face, unable to watch any more, I stood up and went into the cot-house. I washed my face and staunched some of the bleeding with a towel. I looked awful.

Questions surged into my mind … What had all this been
for
? I must, I thought, send a telegram to Gill at once. But what could I possibly say to her? The prospect of facing Sir Peter also terrified me. Had I got what he wanted? If so it was at a great cost. As I was standing in front of the mirror, a policeman appeared, telling me I had to go with him to Dunoon.

From that moment a stream of further misery flowed. First of all I had to face Mrs Mackellar, who was waiting outside the door. Her wild white hair more awry than ever, and her ragged red coat flaring out behind her like the tail of a banshee, she came up to me as I was being put into the police car. She was carrying her hazel herd-stick and I thought for a second she was about to continue the work her husband had started, but all she did was lean her Gorgon-like face into the car window.

Nodding to herself more than me, she said, ‘I was right about you. Dangerous.' They were sentiments that I could only agree with.

I was then driven to Dunoon for questioning. I told the inspector who interrogated me that I was doing my duty in trying to down a German plane. It was four hours before I was released. Four hours being quizzed and signing statements. In the end my explanation that the whole thing had been an awful accident was accepted. On being released I was given instructions to report to Whybrow, of all people.

I did not care very much what that idiot thought, though I was worried about the extent to which he could colour Sir Peter's opinion. But Whybrow was not full of the malevolent satisfaction I was expecting. It was as if he was as shocked as I by what had happened.

He said in mild tones that I should go back to London immediately and see Sir Peter. ‘It seems to me,' he continued, ‘that you've behaved extremely irresponsibly. In this as in other matters. I shall be making a full report to the director.'

I went in search of Joan and Gwen, but on climbing to the makeshift studio in the observation tower I found it quite bare. The mattresses, the mirrors, the easel and other painting equipment – everything was gone. I climbed back down and went to the Waafs' quarters to ask.

A sullen looking girl with pins in her hair came to the door. She told me that Gwen and Joan had been transferred to another unit. Whybrow had kept his promise. That was why he had been so anodyne. He must have known I would come in search of them.

I returned in a box-like green bus to Kilmun to pack, in preparation for my journey south. As I walked up through the village for the last time, someone opened a window and shouted something down at me.

‘Murderer!' That was the word.

Dawn and the beginning of my long journey south for a reckoning with Sir Peter brought only more shame. As I was waiting for the ferry to Gourock, who should appear but Minister Grant, the cleric who had left Ryman's table in such a rage.

The bombast seemed to have gone out of him. ‘I did not rub along well with him myself, as you will be aware. But he was a popular figure here. Do you know, they used to call him the Prophet? So I am afraid there is a deal of animosity towards you. Really, it is a good thing you are leaving.'

I nodded distractedly, looking at the ferry as it drew close to the quay, propeller and exhausts churning up the water as the captain manoeuvred the vessel into position.

Grant told me that Ryman's body had been removed to a funeral parlour. ‘He left instructions in his will that he was to be cremated. A rationalist to the end.'

‘Mrs Ryman has been informed, then?'

‘So I understand.'

‘Will she be coming back?'

‘I don't know.' And then he gave me an imperious look, full of all the authority of the Kirk. ‘What I do know is that her husband is dead because of a schoolboy prank. Was that what you came here for?'

‘Of course not. I came to learn – to predict the weather.'

Now the old Grant came back, the Grant of the dinner table and the Old Testament. ‘You should read your Job, young man. “Great things doeth he, which we cannot comprehend. For he
saith to the snow, fall on the earth; likewise to the shower of rain … Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of him which is perfect in knowledge?”'

No.

I do not know them.

I cannot compute them.

Though I did not say that, simply nodding and turning away, towards the arriving MacBrayne, which was already rattling down its anchor.

Once across the water I caught the shuttle train from Gourock into the city. Light came down awkwardly through the hedges at the edge of the line.

At Fort Matilda children's heads popped up, calling out obscenities at the train as it passed.

At Greenock there were walls covered with red lichen.

At Port Glasgow there was a mill chimney.

Then came warehouses with broken windows and the cruel, careless Clyde, a depressing expanse of rippled mud now the tide was out, a lagoon of slime and seaweed which it now seemed that all the choir of heaven could not sing back to beauty. In fact, all it would take was water – rivulets of running water, pushing over the isobar-like lines of mud, cleansing, purging water, water running in from the sea.

Later – on the train south from Glasgow to London, my thoughts ebbing to and fro with the rocking of the carriage as the hours passed – the enormity of what I had done finally hit home. Someone had died. An
individual
had died. Wallace Ryman had died. The police might have let me off but there were still moral charges to answer, focused, even if only internally, on the degree of consequence and my intentions.

On consequence – well, it's impossible, isn't it? To chart it all, backwards and forwards through time and space, as one might a rainstorm. Yet I
was
foolish, I
should
have been more
careful, I
ought
to have given thought to what might transpire.

I pondered the different ways in which I might be able to explain it all to Sir Peter. Really, I should have been thinking about how I could explain it all to Gill. But it's a fact that the human mind tends to run away from its true responsibilities – always seeking an exit, always seeking a place to hide.

Examining my intentions, I found that I couldn't gauge them with any accuracy. I? My? Who was I kidding? My state of mind was so agitated I no longer knew what ‘I' was, what ‘I' meant.

I didn't know. I just didn't know. Even now I don't know who I am.

Feeling uncertain of myself like this, I heard the Prophet's voice in my head, extemporising on the nature of the eddy.
Difficult to define precisely: for a limited time it retains its identity,
while moving with the surrounding fluid – until it becomes
something else
. That is how I myself felt on that train – as if my very soul were being diluted by the surrounding fluid of life, that whirl of
kizunguzungu
which is ever with us.

Outside, in one of the speeding cities of the north of England, flames burned from two towers, the light of each cross-cutting the fading daylight between them. Munitions factories, in all likelihood. Very soon, on account of the blackout, the flames would be extinguished, for dusk was snatching away the last of day, taking a little piece of not just mine, but each man and woman's life as an extra tithe.

After an hour or two more we came to a creaking, juddering halt while another train passed. Now it was fully dark. The train vibrated, hummed. The other train's passengers sped by in their lighted boxes. The carriage gave a sideways shudder, as if someone had clouted it with a piece of track they had picked up from a siding. The engine changed its tune, and with a hiss of hydraulics and a screeching jolt the train resumed its motion.

As the journey continued, I came up with resolutions that now seem inadequate. All sorts of causes might drive one (this was the manner in which I considered the issue) to the corner of one's poor little acre, such a place as I'd found at Kilmun, launching into the path of that aircraft those balloons with their fatal tails. But the causes are more or less irrelevant. The real moral issue is how much one turns in the yoke. To what extent – irrespective of the historical goad – a particular course of action might authentically be claimed as one's own.

Yes (I told myself), surely the key now was being honest about why the action was made. Facing up to the fact that I had simply craved excitement, accepting that was why I'd set a trap for the plane like that. But I could hardly admit that to Sir Peter.

Stiff and bleary-eyed, I alighted at St Pancras no more assured of my personal coherence than of the shreds and patches of steam, the bits and pieces of smoke that surrounded me. I stood on the platform for a moment listening to echoing voices of the porters and guards. A brown paper bag was drifting around under the great glass arches. Watching it fall, I noticed a half-eaten, half-rotten apple lying on the ground nearby and was struck by the aspect of a mouth it presented. Staring at it, I realised my face was hurting from the gashes on it where Mackellar had whipped me; people had looked at my injuries curiously while I was on the train. Hoping they would heal at least partially by the time I had to see Sir Peter, I picked up my suitcase and walked.