When the RAF asked Ray his reasons for wanting to join up, he said he liked the uniform and had no objection to travelling, the latter being an understatement. They sent him to the island of Zanzibar, thirty miles or so off the coast of Tanganyika in East Africa. A greater contrast with east Manchester must have been hard to imagine. The family declared him heartless and cruel, swanning off to a tropical island when he should have been mourning his wife and looking after his kid. Their hypocrisy galvanised him and he brought his departure date forward. He needed to put some distance between himself and his family in order to mourn. Five thousand miles wasn’t bad going.
Ray wasn’t surprised when Billy Dunstan invited the two girls to join them on a flight around the island. Joan and Frankie were English nurses working in a clinic in Zanzibar Town. Dunstan and one of his fellow officers, Flight Lieutenant Campbell, had met the pair one evening on the terrace of the Africa House Hotel where all the island’s expats went to enjoy a drink and to watch the sun go down in the Indian Ocean.
On the agreed afternoon, the nurses were brought to the base at Bwejuu by an RAF auxiliary. Ray looked up from polishing his boots and saw all the men stop what they were doing as the women entered the compound. Henshaw stepped forward with a confident smirk, wiping his hands on an oily rag. The other men watched, with the exception of Flynn, whose uniform still bore one or two of the more obstinate traces of the engineers’ ritual humiliation of him on the beach. The airman coloured up and looked away.
Dunstan appeared and made a swift assessment of the situation.
‘Henshaw,’ he said, ‘shouldn’t you be driving the supply truck up to Uroa? You’ll have it dark, lad. Take Flynn with you.’
Flight Lieutenant Campbell had been called away to deal with a discipline problem on Pemba Island, Dunstan explained to the two women. Because of the nurses’ schedule, there wouldn’t be another opportunity for a fortnight and Dunstan didn’t want them to go away disappointed. Ray watched him stride out across the landing strip to the Hercules, his white silk scarf, an affectation only he had the dashing glamour to carry off, and then possibly only in Ray’s opinion, flapping in the constant onshore breeze. Joan trotted behind him. Frankie stopped to fiddle with her heel and while doing so looked back at the men watching from the paved area outside the low huts. Ray, who was among those men, was struck for the first time by her resemblance to Victoria. When she smiled, it seemed directed straight at him. A nudge in the ribs from Henshaw confirmed this.
‘Didn’t you receive an order?’ muttered Ray.
‘Yes, Corporal,’ Henshaw replied sarcastically.
Ray looked away from Henshaw towards Flynn, who had also been watching the exchange of looks between Ray and Frankie with, it seemed to Ray, a look of hurt in his blue eyes.
‘Corporal Cross,’ came a cry from the airstrip. ‘Get your flying jacket.’
‘Now it’s your turn to be ordered about,’ said Henshaw. ‘Lucky bastard.’
As Ray left to join Dunstan and the two girls, he passed close to Flynn.
‘You’ll get your chance, son,’ he said quietly.
As they taxied to the beginning of the landing strip, Ray looked out of the cockpit to see the fair head of Flynn bobbing into the supply truck alongside Henshaw.
‘Hold tight, ladies,’ shouted Dunstan over the noise of the four engines as the plane started to rumble down the runway.
It takes a while to set up a protected route through the house for the wheelbarrow, but once I have, I make a start on removing the rockery. I soon realise it’s a bigger job than I had thought it would be. The rockery is about fifteen feet wide and climbs to three feet above the level of the lawn. There are rocks, obviously, and a lot of impacted soil, but that doesn’t go very deep, because a few inches below the surface the landfill starts: roof tiles, half-bricks, lengths of flex, old light fittings, bits of hard moulded red plastic and some unidentified cottony material that for some reason I find slightly sinister. The penny-pinching approach to upkeep of the former owners of the house has left me a wide range of problems to deal with, of which this is only the latest to emerge.
I kick down on the spade and receive a bone-jarring shock to hip and shoulder. Further, more careful shovelling reveals the ghostly white outline of an old Belfast sink. Inside the bowl is a collection of ash and burnt matter. I turn this over with the spade, but it’s impossible to tell what it once was. I wonder if I should have bought a decorator’s mask.
I work on, filling the wheelbarrow, pushing it through the house, emptying it into the skip. I keep promising myself a break — after the next barrowful, once I’ve emptied five barrow-loads — but don’t take one. Every time I unearth another section of the ivy’s extensive root system, I down tools and try to tug it out. The results are mixed and I keep falling over on my backside. Every time this happens I get straight up and carry on, aware of pain radiating out from a small angry red knot of muscle, as I picture it, in the small of my back. Then one time I don’t get up, but allow myself to rest for a moment, sitting in the mud. The root I’ve been trying to free has snapped, leaving me holding a six-inch stub. In the hole I’ve dug to gain access to the root is a white name tag from some plant bought at a garden centre. I feel a sense of futility settle on the scene, born partly of my insignificant progress and partly of an odd, almost malevolent stillness in the early afternoon air. There’s a strange compressed quality to the light with a wall of slate-grey cloud building steadily in the west. The sun disappears behind the cloud. The sound of children’s laughter, of which I have hardly been aware, fades out and ceases altogether as the light changes. The colours become muted. Lewis’ face briefly enters my mind as I reach for the white tag in the hole. I see his face screw up as he laughs his spluttering laugh and turns away, then turns back, the laugh dissipating, to meet your gaze, almost challenging you to look away. At which moment, I suddenly realise, there’s always a strange look in his eyes. Either sadness, or an emptiness of some kind. An odd ambivalence, as if his emotions could suddenly swing dramatically in any direction. The laugh itself carries a suggestion of hysteria.
I pick up the tag. It names a plant that presumably once grew in the rockery: Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’. I allow myself a brief smirk at that. ‘Hardy perennial’ it says. It would have to be very hardy indeed to survive any length of time in this toxic dump. In the rockery since I’ve been living here, there’s been no sign of what the tag describes as the ‘flame-red flowers and sword-like foliage’ of the Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’. There’s been very little, in fact, apart from rosebay willow herb and various other weeds. I wonder how far back in time the name tag goes. I presume the previous owners put the rockery in. The previous owners — who increased the price of the house substantially after a figure had been agreed — I do not feel well disposed towards. The overgrown ivy, and the landfill rockery, don’t help.
The quality of the silence starts to alter. The sky — and somehow the silence itself — becomes darker, even more ominous and unsettling, until it becomes clear that what I can hear isn’t silence at all but the drone of an approaching plane. As I look up, it lurches over the roof of the house dragging an overwhelming downdraught of noise, in the same way that a thick black cloud might trail skirts of heavy rain. Despite the subdued light, I can see the aircraft’s lower parts, its undercarriage and the curved plates of its tubular fuselage, in the sort of shimmering, hallucinatory detail you see in certain surrealist paintings. I see individual rivets glowing like white-hot pinheads. As the bass roar of the engines causes my breastbone to vibrate, I think of the neckline of the dress Carol wore at the barbecue, which in turn prompts a memory of the dashboard of a car. Numbers, needles and dials picked out in glowing jazz-club blues and traffic-light reds.