The Road Between Us (7 page)

He carries on down an alley that brings him out on to a wide boulevard. More columns of men are arriving, weary from marching. Down the road the hulks of abandoned trucks, Bren-carriers and staff cars can be seen. Some are on their sides and men are trying to keep in step as they negotiate them, like water flowing around a boulder in a stream. Fires mark the treeline. The crackle of sporadic gunfire and mortars can be heard in the distance. And the skirl of bagpipes. Bagpipes? Here? Yes, the sound is unmistakable and dreamlike.

Some of the marching soldiers are too exhausted to notice him walking the opposite way, but others follow him with curious eyes, their heads turning like a wave. Their fatigue is palpable. There are abandoned greatcoats littering the road and a couple of times Charles trips up on them, seeing them too late. As he continues against the flow, he thinks of his reason for being here, for not getting back in the rowing boat, and a cold charge of fear runs through him. He reminds himself again of his purpose: he is here in this foreign land to find his friend. Wearing the clothes of a fisherman he will probably be ignored by the advancing German troops. He will sleep in barns. Steal food. Survive.

Before he sees the Stuka he hears its scream as it goes into a nosedive. The two files of soldiers scatter like a parting of the sea, taking cover where they can: on roadside verges, in shop doorways.
A 25-pounder field gun and limber being towed by a Quad takes a direct hit. A soldier who had been standing near it has been almost sliced in half by shrapnel and, as he lies on the ground, he tries to put his own entrails back into his stomach. Charles hears high-pitched screaming and turns to see a child running across the road with half her clothes missing. Her hair is alight. He takes his duffel coat off and, running after the child, wraps it around her to douse the flames. When he looks under the coat he sees the child’s skin has fallen away, and she is dead.

The groans of the wounded can be heard for a moment before another explosion leaves Charles briefly blinded by plaster dust. Someone is shouting for a stretcher-bearer. He turns and sees a French soldier lying on the ground drumming his heels. His jaw is missing. Charles is distracted by the sensation of rock fragments stinging the back of his neck. As he brushes them away with jittery hands, he hears bullets silence a whinnying horse.

A soldier now staggers into his path rubbing his belly and looking confused as his hand comes away wet with blood. He takes his helmet off and doesn’t seem to realize that his ear and a flap of skin from his neck are still attached to it. When a medic arrives dragging a stretcher, he gently persuades the man to lie down on it. Charles gets hold of the other end. Suddenly he has no choice. He has to go back to the beach.

On the promenade, the choking dust and smoke is dispersed by a damp and salty breeze blowing in from the sea. He sees decking panels from bridging trucks are now being laid across the backs of the line of lorries, along with planks that have appeared from somewhere. These serve as a walkway along which soldiers can head to the launches. Charles and the medic break into a jog, their boots squishing in the wet sand. A riderless cavalry horse canters past. The boarding is disordered and noisy now. Nerves are frayed. The jostling soldiers, some holding their rifles above their heads to keep them dry, have grown impatient of waiting. Those who have now realized they won’t be rescued unless they reach the front barge past others who are standing still. German shells are reaching the
outskirts of the town. Two ME 109s are strafing the beach. In desperation some soldiers fire their rifles into the air where they have passed over. Charles hears someone shout: ‘Where’s the bastard RAF?’

Eric is running up the beach. ‘What the fuck are you playing at?’

Charles does not answer. He has no answer. Blood is roaring in his ears. The shifting sand at his feet seems nebulous and blurred, like cloud vapours. From somewhere on the beach comes the incongruous sound of a mouth organ.

‘Jesus!’ Eric’s voice brings him back to consciousness. He sees his friend examining the man on the stretcher. It is clear now that a section of his skull has been sheared off. ‘Dead,’ Eric pronounces. ‘Leave him here.’

Charles and the medic lower the stretcher and transfer the body on to the sand. The medic rolls up the stretcher and runs back to the town, knocking over a tripod of rifles as he passes it. Three soldiers are sitting waiting in the rowing boat. When they reach the tide line, Eric signals across to the queue of waiting troops. ‘We can take one more of the wounded.’

A man with a bloody bandage around his head pushes forward and strips off his webbing and bayonet.

German guns are now ranged on the beach, sending up irregular storms of sand and bodies as the barrage creeps from east to west.

As they row, a soldier appears alongside and they drag him on board. He lies down flat across the others, to keep the boat balanced. Charles sees another uniformed figure about seventy yards away, more boy than man, being held afloat in the inky water by his life jacket. He has had both his arms blown off at the elbow but is still alive. His screams seem to carry along the entire coast.

Before they can change course to attempt a rescue, the man’s life vest slips off and he is silenced as he disappears under the waves. There is another man bobbing nearer to them, coated in thick oil. His brains are hanging out. Mercifully, this one is already dead. Geysers of water rise turbulently in the air as shells fall nearby.
Everyone in the rowing boat is drenched as the water showers back down.

There are seventeen rescued soldiers now on
The Painted Lady
, shivering on the deck and in the cabin. Some of them must have fallen back in as they were scrambling on board: they are barely able to move because of the weight of their saturated uniforms.

While Eric tends to the wounded, Charles hands out blankets. Remembering his bottle of Irish he goes around giving each of them a tot. Their faces, staring out from under their helmets, look gaunt. Their skin is black from the oil and smoke, emphasizing the whiteness of their eyes. There are no smiles of relief, only blank expressions of resignation and exhaustion. Some strip off their wet clothes and wring them out.

A nautical mile out, the noise of battle subsides and they become more aware of the chug-chug of the motor. They look back to Bray-Dunes and see another destroyer has been hit amidships and is listing. As he considers this spectacle, Eric says to Charles: ‘Would you mind telling me what the bloody hell you thought you were doing back there?’

‘Attempting a rescue,’ Charles says, unable to disguise the defeat in his voice. He watches a parachute descending in the distance like a strange blossom. In another quarter of the sky he sees white figures of eight scratched like skate marks on ice, evidence of a recent dogfight. Then he hears a wailing siren and, in a moment of choking horror, turns to see a black, hump-winged Stuka coming towards them in a series of jinking dives.

PART TWO

I

London. Summer. Present day. Two and a half months after Edward’s release

EDWARD IS CLIMBING UP THE WALL OF THE CAVE, FINDING
footholds, breaking his nails on the rocks as he clings and inches higher and higher. He is near the entrance now. He can almost taste the daylight …

He opens his eyes and tries to establish where he is. The inner man has woken with a jolt. He stretches, testing the walls, nudging himself to consciousness. There is something touching his head, but what? The enveloping darkness makes it difficult to determine. He brushes it with the back of his hand. Apart from a slightly raised pattern, it has a flat surface. Wallpaper. It is the ceiling.

His eyes have adjusted to the gloom now and, when he looks down, he can see he is standing on a bedroom chest, the drawers of which have been pulled out to make a tier of steps. He has been sleep-climbing again. It is the third or fourth night he has awoken to find himself here.

He touches his brow and finds it mantled with sweat. The T-shirt he has slept in is damp, too. As lightly as he can, he lowers himself down. The digital clock on the bedside table reads 3.23. He turns on the light and, though it is only a forty-watt bulb, has to shield his eyes. He looks around. There are tones of grey in the bedroom,
but they do not run to the spectrum of colour. He is still inhabiting the shadow world between black and white.

Now he feels a floating sensation in his groin and belly, as if he is in a lift that has come to an abrupt stop. The room seems to be spinning slowly. Sitting on the bed, he tries to focus on a stationary object, a bowl on the dressing table. Why has he never noticed it before? A hand snakes out towards it. The bowl contains hairpins, a disposable contact lens in a blister pack, euro coins, earrings, an AA battery, mascara, tweezers, an Oyster card, a ski pass, a packet of Rennies, three rings.

The traces of Frejya.

He examines them with jittery fingers, as if each contains a part of her. And then his heart dilates. Curled up at the bottom of the bowl he sees a photograph: a scarf, a towel, some socks and a bra on top of the duvet, fashioned into the letters ‘LYA’. It is the ‘Love You Always’ sign he made for her on the day he left for Afghanistan. She must have photographed it. LYA. The last words she had said to him as he wound down the taxi window to wave goodbye. The shorthand that spoke the immeasurable words of their love.

His fingers loosen. The photo drops to the floor. He reaches out to steady himself and his hand falls on a brush. There are long, balled-up hairs caught on its teeth. Pale blonde. It must have been Frejya’s brush. These must be Frejya’s hairs. He tugs them out, holds them to his nose and, for the first time in years, thinks he can smell something. It is sweet and musty, the smell of flour. As he detects it, a faint blur of colour swims before his eyes like a shoal of tropical fish, and then is gone. He picks up a bottle of scent. Frejya’s scent. Again the brief suffusion before he returns to his world of black and white.

He closes his eyes and pictures her slow blink. Hears her loose laughter as he tips her on the bed and kisses her bare feet before tugging off her jeans. Feels the warmth of her soft belly against his.

Her absence is like a presence now, as tangible as an indentation, as if she has just risen from the bed and the sheets are still warm from where she had been lying. He walks over to the fitted
cupboard and, opening the door, contemplates the dresses queuing up on the rack. As he runs his hands along them, setting them in motion, he remembers Frejya trying them on, smoothing them out over her hips.

He pulls out a cocktail dress of oriental brocade. It looks grey, though he remembers it as red and gold. As he holds it to his nose there is a shimmer of colours, a brief sensation of softness in his hands and a prickly awareness of someone else in the room. He looks up.

Frejya is standing in the bedroom doorway in her dressing gown, watching him.

‘They told me you were dead,’ Edward says.

Hannah covers her mouth with her hand. Shakes her head slowly.

Edward holds up the dress and smiles. ‘Your clothes still smell of you.’

II

AS HE APPROACHES THE HOUSE, NIALL ACKNOWLEDGES WITH A HALF
-salute the lone photographer waiting under an umbrella across the street. When he reaches the doorstep, he pumps his own up and down a couple of times and pats his pockets for the housekeys. The lock turns with a familiar
clack-clack
and he stamps his shoes on the mat before bending down to scoop up the post scattered across it. He shivers as the prickles brush against the backs of his fingers. More familiarity.

‘Hello,’ he says at the foot of the stairs as he drops the free newspapers, fliers and magazines in a bin. The bills and letters addressed to Frejya he puts on the radiator cover. ‘Anyone home?’

The house smells of two-week-old flowers. It is gloomy, but no one has turned on the lights. He listens. Hearing Hannah playing an acoustic guitar upstairs, plucking the strings with her fingertips in the Spanish style, he remembers how alive it made him feel when he used to call round here and check on her after her mother died. She had turned the house into student digs, renting out bedrooms to two nineteen-year-olds on her foundation course. They seemed to spend all their time texting, experimenting with eyelash extensions and listening to hip-hop. There would be unwashed plates around the sink, labels on food in the fridge, the stale smell of marijuana in the air.

Niall hesitates before entering the sitting room. Edward will be in there, staring out of the window as usual. It will smell like an infirmary: overheated and chemical. But he hopes his old friend will be more communicative this time, hopes that the thin layer of ice in which he is encased will have thawed a little.

He skitters his fingernails against the door panel before entering. ‘Hello? Northy?’

Edward looks up, sees who it is and looks down again. He is wearing a tracksuit with a hood. His feet are bare. He hasn’t shaved.

‘Shall I put the kettle on?’

Edward forces a smile. ‘Just had one.’

‘There was a snapper outside,’ Niall says. ‘I’m assuming he’s a freelance because, as far as I know, all the editors on the nationals have agreed to call their boys off in return for …’

‘Don’t think the neighbours were too happy about them being camped out there.’

‘No.’

‘At least they’ve stopped shouting through the letterbox.’

Good, Niall thinks. He seems quite talkative today. ‘That must have been horrible. I’ve told the editors that all requests for interviews have to come through me from now on. Not sure how much good it will do though, to be honest. Your best bet might be to give one interview, and then the others will lose interest. Go for one of the broadsheets. I know the editor of the
Guardian
pretty well. You might need to pose for some snaps too.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

Niall looks at the ceiling as he hears Hannah turn up the volume on the music she has started listening to. Coldplay, if he is not mistaken. ‘I gather it’s not going that well with your therapist,’ he says. ‘Han says you won’t talk to him.’