Fred went with his tray to Aaron and Alfred. ‘How is he, then?’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t dead.’
Parsons lay, mouth fallen open, soundless, eyes upwhite and seeing nothing. Fred used the force of both hands to close the mouth, then pressed on the eyelids to conceal the ghastly stare, and arrange arms across the chest. He was dead all right, but what could you do? We all had to die sometime. ‘I can put undertaker down on my list of trades now, and that’s for sure.’ He spread a blanket: ‘A man in his condition shouldn’t have been sent out. Anybody might have known he’d have had a heart attack.’
He didn’t care how many went, now that his father had gone. ‘Try telling it to that stuck-up swine. All I can say is: God preserve us from bloody heroes.’
‘I did. Parsons could have got out of it if he’d wanted, but he insisted on doing his turn. He must have known the score. Everybody I’ve ever known always knew that kind of score. Have another bacon sarnie?’
‘Thanks, I will. I thought I was about to cop it as well, a time or two. You won’t get the MBE I laughed to myself, but you might end up with the MCA pinned to your chest. That’s what they said my brother-in-law died of — massive cardiac arrest. But I’ve never worked so hard out there, and I hope I’ll never do anything like it again.’ He ran a hand over himself, as if hoping to find another coat to button up against the chill. ‘I might as well chuck some more wood on the fire.’ He reached out for a chair and, gripping top right and bottom left worked the legs loose till all the blood from his body seemed to be in his face. He riffled the ashes with a poker and threw the bits on. ‘We may be in out of the snow, but I’m still bloody freezing.’
‘Why don’t you take a hatchet and start on the beams?’ But Alfred didn’t hear, and Fred knew that you just couldn’t get into the haybox of some people, not even with sarcasm as blunt as a cold chisel.
Giving all her warmth to Garry had done him no good, and Jenny felt that she had no spark remaining, not even for herself. Lance’s face was coated with grime and grease, eyes deadened with fatigue, flopped hair adhering from sweat. She didn’t care to imagine what her own face looked like, on coming to the table, or think about what she had turned into since entering this house of death. She didn’t have a job any more, but what would it matter if none of them lived beyond the night? If they did she would go back south and stay at her parents’ till she found a job and a room of her own. They’d always told her that Raymond was no good, that she shouldn’t have married him, and as for going off to live in the north … she would put up with any taunts to live in a more civilized place. No, it wasn’t that, because wherever you were you couldn’t escape from yourself, always a real Piranesi prison if ever there was one.
Lance thought this is how a soldier feels, not knowing you’re going to be alive the next second, though not caring too much either because to do so would break you into a thousand bits even before a bomb or shell could do it. Still, it isn’t in the Falklands, and I’ve got this lovely woman holding my hands, though hell, I don’t know what to say to her except: ‘Love you, Jenny.’
Jenny was surprised by a smile that she felt improved her features. ‘I hope you’ll be all right out there.’
‘I don’t think about it,’ he said. ‘It’s in the bag, though the Chief’ll never say so. All the time I was digging I was thinking about us in bed together.’
His inexperience had been made up for by guidance and abandon, and his energy. ‘I’m glad. I was thinking of you.’
‘Even when you was holding Garry’s hand?’
‘It was a way of holding yours.’
‘He’s still asleep,’ Wayne said. ‘Fancy sleeping all through this. He don’t know how lucky he is. It’s not like him, though. That terrorist caught him a real packet. I hope he’s burning in hell.’
‘He’s dead,’ Lance said. ‘You can bet on it.’
She drank her tea, not wanting anybody dead, yet not able to care if they were. It was cold. So was Garry, dead and cold, but they would discover it when their work was done, or nobody would find anybody if they were unlucky.
Keith sat with Eileen, and she held his hand, nothing to say, she just didn’t want him to eat alone. Not even a dog should. Though he was in charge, and had done so much, he looked beaten, finish written on his face in streaks and wrinkles, lips more down than when they had been fighting their way through the snow to get here. His eyes were dark and fallen-in, his skin cracked and in places peeling into the grease. Maybe pain made him look at the end of his strength. Everybody else’s face was in a rotten state, masks breaking up, except when they smiled or said something. He squeezed her hand, but she held from telling that it hurt, and pressed back gently when his fit of whatever it was had passed.
After one of the last quarrels with Gwen, when everything had been said on both sides to cause the maximum hurt, he went out of their Chelsea bijou gem — as she scathingly called it: she had never stopped telling him how much she disliked it, in spite of the half-million it would fetch on the market, and not being by any means so bijou — and drove over the bridge along the Inner Ring Road, comforted by traffic lights opening onto green-go when a hundred yards away.
Lulled by the light traffic he lost himself somewhere in Lewisham, circling but glad to note that for a while Gwen hadn’t dominated his mind. Even realizing her absence only brought her back for a moment. He stopped by a pub to orientate himself with his atlas, to find a route out of town for the Kent coast, where he would go to a hotel and sleep the night in peace.
He wound the window down to let out cigar smoke, and heard singing from the pub. All windows were squares of light, and though the singing was hardly the King’s College choir, he stood on the pavement to listen. The music rose and fell in waves of boisterous noise, till after a few choruses he made out the words, and began to laugh. Ain’t it grand, to be bloody well dead! They struck him as well off-centre, for of course it could never be grand to be bloody well dead, though going by the sound of their happiness it might be exhilarating to say so.
Expecting to see harridans with false teeth and candyfloss hair he went inside to find a dozen girls, with punk or otherwise elegant hairdos, sitting at a long table with linked arms, swaying from left to right and singing at the height of their voices, all healthy, confident, with good teeth, nice individual clothes to each.
Men along the bar and a few older women looked as if such merriment wasn’t taking place and there was nothing between them and the wall but silence and empty tables. Keith mimed a clap of applause, and one of the girls waved, her smile a flower thrown for him alone, to wear till it faded from his lapel. Sipping brandy and smoking a cigar, he enjoyed the crude yet funnily inspiring songs, as if the girls had inexplicably taken to such old-time melodies for the verve and gusto of their music.
They cared for no one, young women who worked hard and had money to spend, not the sort who would tolerate the marital anguish he was locked into, though maybe they would have to later. When he got home he could answer Gwen’s taunts with such equanimity that they went to bed without further quarrelling.