“Very nasty business, sir,” said the barman. “The enemy within.”
“It’s deuced frustrating,” the airman declared, looking at his hands.” Just sitting here. Not being able to fight back. I’d just like to get one of the bogeys in my sights.”
“Not a man from the Last War on the General Staff,” blustered the Blimp. “All babies and boyos, with their computer planes and ballistic what-have-you. Don’t know the words to “God Save the King” and jitterbug to Yank bands on their leave…”
“As a society turns in on its insides,” said the Boffin, “loses forward momentum in nostalgia, the patterns of time and space itself may bend and bow, and even break. Nobody seems to notice…”
“Bloody Yanks. Bet they come in when it’s all over, grinning and dispensing chocolate and nylons like bloody manna from Heaven. Heaven, Arizona.”
“We continually try to rethink, to reimagine, the past. It’s possible that we actually unpick our destinies, change the situation. Look at all the books: Fatherland, When Adolf Came, SS/GB, The Man in the High Castle, The Sound of His Horn. We can wish it otherwise, and otherwise it could very well become…”
Frankham looked at his empty glass.
“Another drinkie, sir?” asked the barman.
Frankham ordered one and sprung for another for the airman. He was out of coupons but they knew him at the Troy. The barman could get anything, rationed or not, if slipped a little folded green.
“Think it’ll ever end?” the airman asked. “The War?”
“What War?” Frankham asked, missing something.
The airman didn’t answer, just drank. The Troy shuddered, framed pictures of Churchill and the Princesses rattling on the walls. A distant thunder shook the windows. A blind rolled up with a snap, and a voice from below shouted: “Put that light out.”
To judge from the streaks of angry red in the three o’clock skies, fires had spread. Narrow winding Hanway Street was unaffected by the actual bombardment, but the air was tangy with traces of smoke, the gutters heavy with the run-off from nearby fire-hoses.
Frankham and the airman, whose name was Somerton, had left the Boffin and the Blimp to their fractured conversation in the Club and ventured out in search of a livelier place. Somerton suggested a dancehall Frankham had already written up and written off. Since he was in a ginnily generous mood, he acceded. Who knows, the hole might be looking up. Everything comes around again eventually.
In the sky, dark shapes wheeled and swooped. Somerton looked up, almost with longing. There was a distorted burst of fire and a patter of spent shell-cases sounded a dozen yards away. After a fire-burst, something with a comet-tail of flame plunged downwards.
“Score one for some lucky blighter,” Somerton said.
Oxford Street was still barred to vehicle traffic, but gangs of soot-faced rubble-shifters were swarming over an extensive spill of debris. The fires were dying down and workmen were rooting through for hapless bods who might be trapped. A few disgraceful souls were getting in a spot of Christmas looting, pulling prizes—video recorders, television sets, gramophones—out of the wreckage. Most wore gas masks and were fast on their feet, no matter how weighted-down they were.
The plane, with swastika markings, had come down in the fountain at the base of Centerpoint. Its bent black fuselage was propped in the steaming shallow waters, hot chunks of wing-metal spread down into Charing Cross Road.
“A bogey,” spat Somerton. “Messerschmitt.”
Frankham’s head was hurting. Behind his skull, things were shifting. He needed more gins. Or fewer.
A souvenir stall opposite Centerpoint was squashed flat by a sheared-off aeroplane wheel. Union Jack bunting was turned to muddied scraps, and Cellophane-wrapped ARP helmets and beefeater models congealed into crinkling pools of melted plastic. A pair of Japanese tourists—enemy Axis aliens—snapped photographs of the stall from every angle, and were apprehended by a couple of constables. Frankham supposed they would be shot as spies.
Somerton wanted a look at the smashed plane. It was some new design, incorporating aerodynamic advances the Air Ministry was not yet aware of. In the empty cockpit, a bank of computer consoles shorted and sparked. The pilot must have hit the silk and come down somewhere nearby.
From the direction of Holborn came the sharp crack of gunfire. Rifle shots. Then, a burst of machine gun. Men in uniform trousers and braces broke away from the rescue gangs and seized weapons from a jeep stalled by Claude Gill’s.
Somerton crouched down, hauling Frankham out of the line of fire. At a run, Storm troopers charged down New Oxford Street and were greeted by accurate fire. Pinned down between the Tommies entrenched in the Virgin Megastore and an armed policeman who had been hiding in the entrance to Forbidden Planet, the Nazis were cut up properly. They hooted and heiled as bullets hit home.
The air was thick with flying lead. Frankham felt a stab in his upper arm and a hot damp seeping inside his jacket sleeve.
“Rats,” he said, “I’ve been shot.”
“So you have,” Somerton commented.
It was over swiftly. When the last goose-stepping goon was halted, knocked to his knees by a head-shot, some of the civvies gave out a cheer. In the open air, it sounded like the farting response in “Der Fuhrer’s Face.” Only the enemy seemed to have sustained casualties.
Frankham tried to get up and became awkwardly aware of the numbness in his upper chest.
“After you, Claude,” he said to Somerton, waving at the airman to stand.
“No,” said Somerton, helping Frankham up, “after you, Cecil.”
A Red Cross nurse came over and had a look at him. Her hair was pinned up under her cap. Frankham took a deep breath and it didn’t hurt too much. The nurse poked a finger into the blackened dotlike hole in his gabardine, and felt through his jacket and shirt.
“Just a graze, sweetheart,” he said.
“Keep smiling through,” she told him, and left. He glimpsed, in a shop window, a row of civilian casualties by Top Man, all with neatly-bloodied bandages around their heads.
“Proper little angel,” Somerton commented.
“Sometimes, I think it’s harder on the women,” Frankham said. “Yet they complain so little.”
Enough rubble had been shifted to let tanks into Oxford Street. Three of them had been held in reserve near Marble Arch and now they rumbled placidly toward the downed Messerschmitt. Frankham and Somerton gave the Victory-V sign as they passed, and a tank officer, bundled up in thick jumpers, returned the gesture.
“Makes a feller proud,” Somerton said. “To see everyone doing their bit.”
He woke up with a fearful gin head in some chippie’s single bed. He remembered a name—Dottie—and the dancehall, and vaguely supposed he was as far out as Camden or Islington. His arm was stiff and cold, and there was a shifting and uncomfortable girl next to him, face smeared with last night’s makeup.
He didn’t know what had happened to Somerton or to the girl—Hettie?—he had been dancing with.
Frankham rolled off the bed and hauled himself upright. Dottie—or was this Hettie?—was instantly relieved and filled out the space under the sheet, settling in for more sleep.
He dressed one-handed and managed everything but his cufflinks. The hole in his arm was a scabby red mark. He guessed there was still a lump of bullet inside him.
Outside, he didn’t recognize the street. Half the buildings in the immediate area had been bombed out, either last night or within the last month. One completely demolished site was flooded, a small reservoir in the city. The neat piles of fallen masonry were mainly bleached white as bones.