A God in Ruins

  The bomber stream had long ago begun to disintegrate. The more experienced pilots had realized that rather than being the safest place to be, it had become the most dangerous. Teddy began to elbow his way out to the edge of it at the same time as he pushed higher. Keep a tight bomber stream. Always. His last command to his squadron. He hoped they weren’t blindly following his instructions. Teddy was working the sky as much as he could. F-Fox couldn’t quite make the height of the Lancasters but in the thin air and with good engines he got pretty close. Nonetheless they were spotted.

  “One coming in, skipper.”

  “OK, navigator.”

  “Nine hundred feet. Eight hundred,” the navigator counted off the distance of the approaching blip on his radar screen. “Seven hundred, six hundred.”

  “See anything yet, gunners?”

  “No, skipper,” from both.

  “Five hundred, four hundred.”

  “Got him, skipper,” from the mid-upper gunner. “Port upper quarter. Corkscrew port. Go, go, go.”

  “Up the revs, engineer.”

  “A hundred on, skip.”

  “Hang on, everybody,” Teddy said as he rammed the controls forward, rolling the aircraft and dropping the wing down to port. The G-force pinned him to his seat. They spun down, the altimeter unwinding until at the bottom of the dive he rolled the aircraft to starboard, pulled the ailerons back and they lumbered upwards again. He was trying to find cloud to hide in but the mid-upper was shouting, “Starboard upper quarter, corkscrew starboard, go, go, go!”

  Sometimes the amount of turbulence alone that was created was enough to put a fighter off, but not this one. As soon as they had climbed again, there was a shout from the rear-gunner, “Bandit at rear port, dive to port!”

  The gunners’ Brownings were drumming away and the aircraft filled with the stink of cordite. The sky around F-Fox was crowded with bullet and cannon tracer. Teddy threw the heavy aircraft around in the sky, dropping into a starboard dive and then heeling into a port curve, clawing his way back up the sky, trying to shake the fighter off their shoulder. He felt exhausted from the sheer physical effort needed to control the aircraft. Needs must, he heard his mother say. The gunners were out of ammunition but then the mid-upper reported, “Port bandit broken away, skipper,” and then, “Starboard bandit moved on too, skipper.” On to another poor sod, Teddy thought and said, “Well done, gunners.”

  Their luck finally ran out. They never reached the target. Teddy wasn’t sure they would ever have found it anyway. Many didn’t, he learned later.

  It happened very quickly. One minute they were in the dark void of the sky, no sign of the bomber stream any more, and the next they were coned and were being hit by flak—huge, hollow bangs as if the fuselage was being battered by a sledgehammer. They must have found the Ruhr’s defences. Dazzled and blinded by the searchlights, all Teddy could do was fling the aircraft into another dive. He could feel poor F-Fox protesting, he had already tested her beyond her limits and he was expecting her to break up any second. He suspected that he, too, had been tested beyond his limits but suddenly they were out of the awful light and back into the welcome dark.

  The port wing was on fire and they were rapidly losing height. Teddy knew instinctively that there was going to be no soft landing this time, no ditching, no WAAF guiding them into a friendly airfield. F-Fox was going to her death. He gave the order to abandon the aircraft.

  The navigator kicked off the escape hatch and he and the spark strapped a parachute on to the injured pilot and pushed him out. The spark followed quickly, then the navigator. The mid-upper climbed down from his turret and followed. The rear-gunner reported that his turret was shot up and he couldn’t get it to revolve. The bomb-aimer crawled up from the nose, fighting gravity, and went to see if he could help the rear-gunner manually release the turret.

  Flames had begun to lick the inside of the fuselage. They had come out of the dive but were still losing height. Teddy was expecting F-Fox to explode at any moment. There was no word from the bomb-aimer or the rear-gunner. Clifford and Charlie, their names suddenly came back to him.

  He was fighting F-Fox now, trying to keep her flying straight and level. Clifford appeared by his side and said the fire had prevented him from getting to the rear-gunner and Teddy told him to jump. He disappeared through the hatch.

  It was all a blur after that, there was a curtain of flames behind him, he could feel them beginning to scorch his seat. The intercom was no longer working but he carried on wrestling with F-Fox to give the rear-gunner a last-ditch chance to get out. The captain was always the last to leave.

  And then, when he thought he was resigned to death—quite accepting of it—the instinct for life kicked in and the jaws of death were forced open. He found himself tearing off the twin umbilicals of oxygen and intercom and flinging himself out of his seat and was more or less sucked from F-Fox’s belly through the escape hatch.

  The silence of the night sky was stunning after the noise inside the aircraft. He was alone, floating in the dark, the great peaceful dark. The moon was shining benignly on him. Below a river ran like silver, Germany laid out like a map in the moonlight, growing closer and closer as he drifted towards it like a feathery dandelion head.

  Above him the fiery form of F-Fox continued to glide on her downward path. Teddy wondered if the rear-gunner was still inside. He shouldn’t have abandoned him. The aircraft found the ground before Teddy did and he watched as it exploded in a glittering starburst of light. He would live, he realized. There would be an afterward after all. He gave thanks to whichever god had stepped in to save him.

  2012

  All the Way to Bright

  “… geofencing… we should want to do because… the new normal… client-agency relationship or on the other hand… as well as near-field communication…”

  The man who was speaking had a degree in jargon and a doctorate in nonsense. His words were floating in the air, language devoid of meaning, sucking out the oxygen, making Bertie feel mildly hypoxic. The man speaking, the Nonsense Man, as she thought of him, was called Angus and came “from Scottish stock”—hence the name—although his accent was pure English public school. “Harrow, actually,” and Bertie knew these things because she had been on a date with him, a date procured by that well-known pander, Match.com. Which was why she was now slouched at the back of the room, trying to look as if she wasn’t there.

  She had taken an almost instant dislike to him over a dinner at Nopi which, when the bill arrived, he had been more than happy to go Dutch on, thereby failing one of her first requirements of a suitor, which was to behave like a gentleman. She wanted doors opening, meals paid for, flowers. Billets-doux (lovely words, made her think of doves—bill and coo). She wanted to be courted. Gallantry. What a lovely word. Fat chance of any of that. She snorted to herself and the man seated next to her in the “industry seminar” gave her a nervous glance.

  “Bertie?” the Nonsense Man had said over dinner. “What kind of name is that?”

  “A very good one.” And after a long, rather tedious silence, “Roberta, after my grandmother.” Roberta was Bertie’s middle name, she wasn’t about to give Angus the Moon.

  Just the wrong side of sensible, she had gone home with him (classic mistake) to his flat in Battersea, a flat which was all shiny glass surfaces as if it had been designed in the future, and then she had proceeded to have rather disagreeable, drunken sex with him which, naturally, had led to self-loathing and a stealthy dawn exit, a walk of shame along the Thames, to ease her payne. She had been surprised at how many other people were out and about along the shoare of silver streaming Themmes, although Spenser’s nymphs, the Daughters of the Flood, were notable by their absence, unless they were a university team of grunting female rowers, hammering their way through the brown water as if they were being chased by a river monster. What kind of woman got up at six in the morning to row, Bertie wondered? A better woman than her, she supposed.

&nb
sp; Spenser handed over to Wordsworth who met her at Westminster Bridge, where, early on a morning late in May, London really was all bright and glittering in the smokeless air, if only for a little while.

  She was surprised, to put it mildly, when she looked over the bridge and saw a gilded, swan-necked barge being rowed towards her. As she watched the boat sweep smoothly beneath the bridge, Bertie wondered if perhaps she had time-travelled back to Tudor times.

  “Gloriana,” a voice said. She hadn’t noticed the man who had come to stand next to her. “It’s the Queen’s barge,” he said, “for the flotilla. Rehearsing, I expect.” Of course, she thought. The river pageant. London was en fête for the Diamond Jubilee. So many lovely words, Bertie thought—“gilded,” “jubilee,” “flotilla,” “diamond,” “pageant,” “Gloriana.” It was almost too much to bear.

  “I thought I’d stepped back in time for a moment,” she said.

  “Would you like to?” he asked, sounding like someone who was inviting her to enter a time machine that he had handily parked around the corner.

  “Well…” she said.

  … Transactional supply-based relationships and commoditization…”

  Bertie worked in an advertising agency and for reasons now already forgotten to her was in Belgravia, where Angus was facilitating a “Hackathon.” (Yes, really.)

  Angus’s father was a QC and his mother a hospital consultant, and the family—a brother and two sisters—had been brought up in Primrose Hill, where Angus had a “pretty normal childhood.” Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.

  He was in marketing, “an innovator,” which didn’t seem like a proper job to Bertie. “I’m in library services,” she said, because that was always a conversation killer.

  “On the website,” he puzzled, “it says you’re in ‘community education.’ ”

  “Same thing,” she said. “More or less.” She could never remember what her cover story was, she would have made a dreadful spy. “Community library,” she amended and his eyes duly glazed over at this information and he turned his attention to the twice-cooked baby chicken on his plate. Surely once was enough for the poor thing?

  “… bluejacking… roadblocking…”

  Angus was currently wearing a black T-shirt with a picture of Nipper, the HMV dog, on it. Beneath Nipper—and she really wished she didn’t know this—Angus’s chest was waxed. Nipper himself was beneath the Lloyd’s insurance building in Kingston-upon-Thames. Bertie hoped that she didn’t end up buried beneath a building. Or worse, excavated and put on show, like all those poor Egyptian mummies or the people from Pompeii, immortalized in their helpless death throes. Grandpa Ted wanted a woodland burial. (“An oak, if possible.”) “He’ll get what we give him,” Viola said. “It’s not as if he’s going to know, is it?” (But what if he did?) The fight over his corpse had already begun and he wasn’t even dead yet. Bertie loved her grandfather. Her grandfather loved Bertie. It was the simplest arrangement.

  “… standout talkability…”

  What on earth was she doing with her life? Could she just get up and leave?

  “… hot linking…”

  Viola was the last person she would ever tell about the men she dated. Bertie was thirty-seven—“and counting,” as Viola always reminded her in that giddy girls’-school manner she had sometimes. “Just jump right in! You don’t want to miss out on motherhood.” Bertie’s friends who were married with children—all her friends, in fact; Bertie had spent what seemed like nearly every weekend for the last five years at either weddings or christenings—all seemed in thrall to their children, each one a version of the Second Coming. None of these children seemed particularly attractive to Bertie and she worried that if she had a baby she wouldn’t like it. Viola came to mind. She hadn’t loved them, or it certainly hadn’t felt like it, and she definitely didn’t like them (although she seemed to like no one). “Liking doesn’t really come into it,” Grandpa Ted had told her when he was still capable of giving advice. “You’ll be besotted with your own.” Bertie wasn’t sure that she wanted to be besotted by anyone, particularly someone small and helpless.

  “Your grandmother was besotted with Viola,” her grandfather said. So, it just went to show, anything was possible.

  A long time ago now, before he left on his hegira, Sunny had got a girl pregnant. Viola had been aghast and then when the girl had a termination she was equally aghast. “No pleasing some people,” Sunny said.

  Viola had started sending Bertie links to donor websites—sperm supermarkets where you could simply pick a gene packet off the shelf—Scandinavian, 71 kilos, 6' 1", blond hair, blue/green eyes, teacher—and pop it in “Your Basket.” “Danish is best, apparently,” Viola advised.

  Of course, Viola was terrified that if she didn’t have grandchildren her genes would die and nothing of her would be left. She would cease to exist. Pouf! Viola was sixty now, always waiting for people to say, “Never!” Which they didn’t. “You may not think so now,” Viola said to her, “but when you get to fifty and turn around and find it’s too late for motherhood, you’ll be devastated.” Why did her mother always have to be so unnecessarily melodramatic? Because no one would listen if she wasn’t?

  Of course, no one was more surprised than Bertie when two years later she had twins (and, yes, besotted), after marrying a perfectly straightforward man, a doctor (yes, that man on Westminster Bridge), and becoming, well… happy. But that wasn’t now. Now was Angus pumping the air with evangelical fervour as if he were at a prayer meeting and exhorting them to consider “sellsumers.” Bertie tried to divert herself by thinking of rhymes for Nonsense Man (Japan, frying-pan, catamaran, watering-can), but in the end she had to pull out scraps from the ragbag of loveliness that she was forced to carry around these days to protect herself from the evil materialist universe. (Was advertising the right profession for her?)

  Where the bee sucks, there suck I

  She could just go. She had a meeting at two and it would take her for ever to cross London. The creatives were presenting ideas to the client for a new toothpaste. Surely there was enough toothpaste in the world already? Did people really need so much choice that they could never get to the end of choosing? As if the world needed more of anything. Yes, it was official—she was in the wrong profession. If Bertie was a god (a favourite fantasy), she would be manufacturing things there was a shortage of—bees, tigers, dormice—not flip-flops and phone covers and toothpaste. No, don’t go down that road, she thought, the creation fantasy was so vast and wide that she could be lost in it for ever.

  “… monetize… materialism…”

  the frost performs its secret ministry, unhelped by any wind

  “… always-on consumers…”

  whose woods these are I think I know

  “… staggered event-related…”

  loveliest of trees, the cherry now is hung with bloom along the bough

  “… outcome-specific media burst…”

  as kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame

  “Brand-relevant content… re-energize consumers’ perceptions of the…”

  On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble

  “… by doing that you can take it all the way to bright…”

  There’s a certain Slant of light

  “… Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detection…”

  What?

  Dear God. When did language and meaning divorce each other and decide to go their separate ways? Bertie’s ragbag of loveliness was almost depleted for the day and it wasn’t even lunchtime.

  O how full of briers is this working-day world!

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said when the nervous man sitting next to her twitched. “Did I say that out loud?”

  “Yes.”

  She stood up rather abruptly, and whispered “Sorry” to the twitchy man. “I have to go. I just remembered I left my real self on the Tube. She’ll be wondering what’s happened. She’s lost wit
hout me.”

  Angus caught sight of her and frowned as if he was trying to remember who she was. She gave him a little wave, waggling her fingers in a way which she hoped looked ironic, but it seemed to confuse him even more.

  On the Tube—on the Piccadilly line, although that was probably not relevant—there was no sign of her real self, but there was a copy of the Daily Mail that someone had left behind. It was folded open to a page with a headline that blared, “Could the universe collapse TODAY? Physicists claim that risk is ‘more likely than ever and may have already started.’ ” (How on earth would you tell?) It was a curious usage of the upper case. Bertie would have put the emphasis on “collapse.” It was how Viola spoke (“You’ll be DEVASTATED”).

  Rummaging around at the bottom of her ragbag for some crumb, Bertie couldn’t even find a bit of wild thyme blowing around in there.

  Are you watching the Thames Pageant with Grandpa Ted?”

  “Yes, I’m in his room,” her mother said.

  “It’s rubbish, isn’t it? And the poor Queen, she’s almost as old as Grandpa Ted and she’s having to suffer all this.”

  “She’ll catch her death in all that rain,” Viola said.

  Was that what happened, Bertie wondered? Did you have to catch your death, like a runaway horse, and it took some people, like Grandpa Ted, a long time to get hold of it but others managed to grab the reins straight away? Like the grandmother she had never known—nimble-footed Nancy, jumping on the back of death, a bold rider, so quickly that she must have taken everyone by surprise. Death itself, perhaps.

  “Anyway,” Bertie said, “can you put me on to Grandpa Ted?”

  “He won’t understand you.”

  “Just put me on anyway. Hello, Grandpa Ted. It’s Bertie here.”