Vail (25 page)

Rumblings of unrest and disgruntlement if not actual outrage were heard: whoever was responsible for staging this farce quite evidently couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery.

‘Therefore it is with great pride and pleasure' (visible signs and audible sighs of relief) ‘that I call upon Jack Vail to receive, on behalf of the entire production team, this award for
Bootstraps
, in recognition of outstanding contribution to the cultural lifeblood of this nation, –'

Vail buttons up his tuxedo, straightens his black tie, and starts forward.

‘– a heritage which has coursed through the veins of Englishmen and women since the time of Shakespeare and even before. While we possess such riches we shall want for nothing. Let the hordes of barbarians come: they cannot withstand a nation united in blood and tradition, a nation that has scorned the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and shrugged off the scourge of the swastika as even now it spits defiance at the godless philistines of the red star war machine.'

Having skirted the sticky brown pool, Vail has paused uncertainly with one foot on the bottom step. People in the crowd are urging and shooing him on, frantic to get the bloody thing over and done with, though still Vail hesitates, waiting to be given the signal to proceed.

‘It does the soul good to know that in these troubled times of ours, beset as we are by so many problems, there still beats in the heart of this great nation that indomitable spirit, –'

Vail cautiously slides his foot onto the next step but then pauses, suspended, halfway up and halfway down the short flight of steps. Voices urge him on. He receives a savage push in the small of the back, staggers forward, recovers, holds his ground.

‘– which over the centuries has kept us whole, pure and inviolate, indifferent to the fickle sway of opposing ideological tyrannies which afflict much of this planet. Thank God that in such an uncertain ever-changing world we remain steadfast and firm, rooted like an aged oak in the nourishing loam of our native land. Let them try and shift us if they can and if they dare; as a great man once said: ‘We will take some shifting!'.'

Unaware, too weary and despondent to entertain the faint hope that the speech has ended, the audience is silent in the vast shuffling bunker with its curved roof and walls pimpled with condensation. Someone hisses at Vail, who breaks from his paralysed trance and stumbles the last few steps onto the dais.

As the trophy, – a replica of a rebuilt and refurbished Harrods in
pristine bronze, – is presented to Vail, the deformed imbeciles break raggedly into the song of praise in honour of the PM, a moment for which they have waited with such patience and fortitude, their innocent little hearts overflowing with gratitude and joy, – gratitude and joy, it needs be said, they feel with total sincerity and yet haven't the slightest conception why they ought to feel these sentiments nor to whom they should be properly addressed.

No matter; it is enough for the television cameras that they are seen to express them.

Their song sounds to Vail like the wails and agonised bellows of a colony of sea-cows in labour. Added to the smell it is well-nigh intolerable, and there is a surreptitious yet steady stream of movement to the exits. Patriotism has its limits, Bomb or no Bomb.

Vail's party at the bar is flushed and all aglow with triumph and alcohol. Bryce Ransom's blue temples are throbbing fit to burst and Virgie Hance has five cigarettes going all at once, one for each orifice. Mrs Stretcher, one of Vail's keenest fans, is swollen with pride, bosom pounding madly and on the verge of orgasm, as if he were her own son.

In his pocket Ed Flesh fingers the touch-sensitive buttons on a slim stainless steel calculator, boosting percentages, carrying decimal points and adding noughts in a delirium of ecstasy, while Laine Vere Jumper is chin-wagging with an old chum from Balliol, the Honourable Guy Naecological, he hasn't clapped eyes on in a donkey's age.

Now with the moment to hand and destiny within his grasp Vail finds himself encumbered with the Harrods trophy, which is stupendously heavy, pulling his arms to the floor. The PM is smiling
into his face, one hand raised in acknowledgement of the ragged wailing song, the applause and cheers from the body of the hall.

From the corner of his eye he sees an aide slip a familiar pink and black capsule into the PM's hand, which undercover of that same hand smothering a cough vanishes in a trice and is washed down with a sip of mineral water.

Vail still hasn't solved the problem of what to do with the trophy, whose weight is tearing his arms from their sockets. In desperation he looks over his shoulder for assistance and a burly security man steps forward and relieves him of his burden.

Vail's arms are numb and his funnybones are tingling, but at least his hands are free. He flexes his fingers experimentally.

The bunker shudders, dust sifts through cracks in the ceiling, the lighting blinks, dims, fails, goes out.

Blackness.

Feet stamp and slither over the deformed imbeciles in the headlong rush. The owners of the feet have no idea where they're rushing to; after all this is supposed to be the safest spot within Greater London.

[Vail doesn't know, and is never to know, that the tremor felt in the bunker was caused by ten pounds of gelignite in the emergency generator room, placed there by Fully Olbin's terrorist cell, who have at last managed to do something right.]

At that moment he doesn't care, has other things on his mind, his hands closed and locked round a warm throat.

Vail increases the pressure voluptuously, thinking of Mira and Bev and all the others. It won't bring them back and it probably won't alter or improve matters one jot, but it feels so good. His anger (an emotion!) gives him hands of iron.

He increases the pressure further, hardly noticing the feeble flailing of limbs underneath him. He can feel the corded muscles and ligatures in the neck swelling and writhing under his hands like a bundle of live snakes.

Vail keeps on increasing the pressure, squeezing tighter and tighter until his fingers interlock round the back of the neck and his thumbs sink up to the second joint in the slack flesh of the throat.

Vail keeps up the pressure, not relenting, not relinquishing his iron grip on the pipeline, now constricted and closed shut, tight,
nary the eye of a needle's worth of squinting gap inside his crushing hands.

Years pass, decades, and his hold never breaks, never wearies. The limbs have ceased to flail, and Vail is kneeling on the chest of a dead lifeless weight, holding the throttled neck in both hands like a wrung chicken.

A pencil beam illuminates the black-lipped mask and staring bloodshot eyes in a coin of light and a voice murmurs in his ear: ‘That should be enough.'

‘Enough,' Vail replies

with a smile,

‘is never

enough.'

They have to break his grip.

In some respects it was similar to my sojourn in the United Dairies tanker except that I was crossing the wire in the opposite direction and the leaking liquidy cargo in which I wallowed up to my armpits consisted of embryonic humans heaped on top of one another in a squelchy mass: the victims of toxic poisoning and radioactive decay who had so recently wailed their cretinous dirge in the PM's honour being returned by military transport whence they came.

From the little I can remember all was darkness and confusion in the bunker, everyone running several different ways at once and slipping and sliding on the deformed imbeciles whose faint mewing cries of terror and muffled squeaks of pain were lost in the general mad scrambling panic.

I do know that I was roughly, – brutally you might say, – manhandled off the dais and tossed from hand to unseen hand like a rag doll. At the time I thought
This is it. This is where you get yours. It's the Tower for you m'lad
. Instead of which I was thrown headfirst into the type of large metal skip builders use to dispose of their rubbish and landed in a morass of small bodies with stubby extensors, some of which appeared to be lifeless although still warm and twitching.

The skip was then hoisted by hydraulic means between davits and locked fast and we set off, rocking and swaying, the contents sloshing to and fro, in the dead of night. Though it was cold, this being Decemberish, I was kept warm as toast by being immersed armpit-deep in the lumpy mire of human flesh and waste product.

It was a long journey. I dozed. The stars rocked overhead. One of the creatures nearby, whose rudimentary features I could just
discern, started to sing. Other voices joined in. It was the song they had been taught by an official from the Ministry of DIs, the last song, indeed the very last words, to be heard by the PM.

Thank you for the food we eat

Thank you for the world so sweet

Thank you for the birds that sing

Thank you God for everything.

Towards dawn we were a fair distance up the M1, near to Watford Gap I guessed. It had to be a guess because I couldn't see over the side of the skip.

I was still puzzling over my predicament and how it was, under the circumstances, I had come to be in it. Why was I here and not in police custody? The voice murmuring in my ear, the one that said ‘That should be enough,' hadn't belonged to Fully Olbin, Urban Brown or Tex Rivett; in fact, as I only now realised, it hadn't been an English voice at all, or Australian, but American, –

This was such an odd revelation that I mused over it until we came off the motorway at Leicester (it was now daylight and I could read the overhead signs) and were heading east on the A607. The PM was fervently, indeed passionately, pro-American, had even abdicated certain sovereign rights in order to appease them and curry political favour. I couldn't understand it. But then international diplomacy never has been my strong point.

We pulled off the main road and were thrown about quite a bit as the transporter jolted along a narrow rutted lane. Sparse black branches went by as we wound deeper and deeper into the countryside. From the odour of putrefaction I judged that quite a few of my companions had died in the night. Come to that, I wasn't feeling too clever myself.

We passed through some kind of chain-link fence dotted along the top with what I took to be festive balls of cotton wool but were in fact white ceramic insulators. The transporter stopped and I could hear men's voices. They sounded tired. Somebody cracked a joke but no one laughed.

It worried me that they might decide to glance over the side of the skip, – I had a brother-in-law who was a driver and I knew that
they usually checked their loads after a long trip. There was nowhere to hide, and my difference, as an adult and whole person, would be spotted immediately. I could only pray that they didn't think it worthwhile checking a load of slops, added to which the smell was enough to deter anyone and would in itself be adequate confirmation that the cargo was still, in a manner of speaking, in one piece.

Having nothing better to do I let my head rest on something soft and looked at the sky. It was an unbroken blanket of grey, grim and wintry-looking, piles of dirty clouds tumbling along under a steady biting wind.

After a while the blunt rounded top of a dark-green storage silo caught my eye. It had one of those circular stairways going round and round the structure up to a gantry. On the silo itself were painted the faded yellow letters UCP in an ornate and old-fashioned script.

A secret base for the Under-Cover Police outside the wire? A detention camp where they interrogated dissidents and political undesirables? An elimination centre, – part of the U.M.P.S. Programme I had heard people talk about but had never been sure actually existed?

This speculation, somewhat futile and unproductive lacking further information, was terminated as with a great coughing roar the transporter's engine started up again. The skip swayed to and fro as we moved off, breaking the scum and sending a warm watery brownish wave lapping over my head. The taste on my lips was vile: I preferred bollock-freezing milk to this any day.

In a couple of minutes the vehicle stopped, there was a crunching of gears, a billowing of blue diesel fumes, and we reversed into a vast shed or warehouse with a corrugated asbestos roof high above. Chains rattled and the engine changed pitch to a shrill whine as the hydraulics took the strain, lifting the skip between the davits and lowering it to the ground. Doors slammed, the transporter moved off, we were left alone in silence.

Wading and treading through the mire, pushing lumps aside, I pulled myself over the side and dropped, dripping-wet, to the
floor. At once I felt the cold strike through me and my teeth started chattering.

There appeared to be machinery in the darker recesses of the building. I could see metal ducting and pipes, levers and gauges and large dials with red needles. Evidently a processing plant of some description.

I also noticed that the skip was resting on a series of metal rollers, the type of conveyance system used in engineering works to move heavy loads about.

Even then it didn't dawn on me what all this paraphernalia was for; and I don't think it was stupidity on my part so much as plain ignorance. I was still trying to figure out what possible use the Under-Cover Police could have for a couple of tons of mushy DIs rapidly going off.

The plant must have been automated or at least operated by remote-control because there was no one about when the machinery started up and the skip began to move. It trundled along the rollers for about fifteen yards and was brought to a halt by a pair of buffers. The whole apparatus then tilted and the contents spilled into a concrete pit which extended deep below ground level. As they slopped over the rim I heard weak snatches of dreadful melody …
thank you for the world so sweet… thank you for the birds that sing
… as they slid down and were swallowed up in final darkness.

From beneath my feet came muffled churning and gurgling sounds. The floor trembled. Lights lit up on the gauges. Needles quivered and swung round the dials. Whatever the process was, it had started.