Gerald Seymour: Holding the Zero

‘Did you like Peake?’ Willet asked softly.

‘Did I say I knew him? I didn’t hear myself say that.’

‘You knew him because you had met him, and you must have encouraged him.’

A cigarette end was discarded. The packet was retrieved from the pocket, another cigarette was lit. The packet was pitched expertly into a rubbish bin beside the bench.

George stood.

‘My advice, young man, learn to walk before you try to run.’

‘You encouraged him, and you may have helped to kill him.’

‘So nice to have met you, Carol. Something for you to remember, Ken. Policy is our god. If little people, silly people, stray off a safe path and into the territory of policy, they will be exploited. Policy is a long game. This game has only recently started – but if we already have a martyr and a myth, it has started promisingly. Good morning.’

When the dawn came, both men – too tired to dream – slept. Between them was the river and the wide stone on which the carcass of the boy lay.

Abruptly, suddenly, the dreamless sleep was finished.

Gus woke. He jerked up, blinked, and did not understand. He was wrapped in a grey-white shroud.

For a moment, no thought, he flailed at the sheet, beat at it because it seemed to suffocate him, and could not move it. His fists punched the sheet, were absorbed, and it pressed down on him.

He sagged back.

He wiped hard at his eyes. The sheet was pegged just below his feet and just beyond his head, and the memory of where he was, what he had done, filtered back to him.

The rain had stopped. There was a stillness. The cloud nestled over him, but the thunder had rolled on. The sleep had not rested him. Together with the understanding that the cloud over the valley covered him came the tiredness and the slow, aching pains and the hunger.

At that moment, because he had lost hold of the emotion, he could have gathered together his kit and the rifle, and used the cloud as protection to crawl away up the slope towards the hidden ridge. He could put it all behind him and start out on the journey to the frontier, to an airport or to a lorry park.

Gus thought he was blessed.

In the scramble of his thoughts, as the residue of sleep was pushed aside, he realized the value of the cloud that sat tightly on him. Faces and voices slipped across his mind, competing for attention. Each gave him an opportunity, and it was no longer possible for Gus Peake to gather together the kit and the rifle and climb to the top of the slope.

He murmured, ‘I am blessed because I am here and because you, sir, have followed me. There is no hate, no slogans of politics, there is no baggage of distrust. I don’t know what your shooting range is called, I don’t know where you go to pit yourself against opponents and elements. My range is Stickledown. It can be quite a pleasant place in summer – birds, flowers, good light – and it can be a hell of a place in winter, believe me, wind, rain and flat, dead emptiness all the way to the butts and the V-Bulls. Thank you for following me, because it’s like I’m on Stickledown and shooting for a silver spoon, and you’re on your range and shooting for whatever prize is important to you, and for both of us it is real. You could have walked away from me, I could have walked away from you, and both of us would have been left with dried-out lives. Do you understand me, sir, am I making sense? No-one else will understand me or understand you but, then, I don’t think either of us would ask them to. We are blessed, we can only use the blessing. I’d like to have met you, and talked with you, but…’

He could not hear the rambled words he murmured. It might have been the tiredness, the pain or the hunger, but he felt, to a slight degree, better and more settled for having talked. He thought those other voices – from the kitchen, the factory, on the Common, at the tent camp, in the office, on the bench – would have understood what he said, and why.

Blessed…

He shook himself, cleared the chaff from his mind. The talk was finished. He was blessed because he was given time by the density of the cloud hanging in the valley.

Where he lay there was sparse cover from stubby wind-broken bushes with the first buds of bilberry fruit and a rock that covered his shoulders and flattened lifeless bracken.

It was a useful place for a firing position. He felt a keening breath of wind on his face: he must use his time because soon the wind would carry away the cloud cover and he would be able to see what lay before him. He rummaged in the rucksack for rounds of his Green Spot ammunition, took two from the tissue paper in which they were individually wrapped to prevent scrape noise. The magazine was already loaded on the rifle, five bullets, and he did not believe he would have an opportunity to fire more than one. He polished the two rounds so that the Full Metal Jackets shone, would catch the light when the cloud was gone. He had no string, or bandages, so he unwound the towel from the barrel and working parts of the rifle, made slits in it with his penknife at the ends then tore off narrow strips of fraying cotton. He knotted them together. Because of the thinness of the strips, the cotton rope he made would not take a weight and would snap at a violent pull, but it would be of sufficient strength for his purpose. He would have liked it longer, but that was not possible. He tied one end of the slim rope to a shoulder-strap of the rucksack and tested the knot with a gentle jerk. The rucksack shivered with a slight movement.

He was satisfied. His hand dipped again into the rucksack and retrieved a khaki woollen ski hat, and used the penknife to snip off more stems of the bilberry bushes, weaving them between the stitching.

He placed the rucksack half behind the rock and masked it with bracken fronds. He laid the two rounds of Green Spot ammunition on top, and behind them he put a stone the size of his hand. Over the stone he placed the wool hat.

He crawled away, paying out the length of towel rope, burying its length under further pieces of bracken. He used the sideways crawl – which they had shown him on the common and called the ‘slug’ crawl – so that the trail was minimal. When he had paid out the towel rope he was some twenty feet away from the rucksack. He was on a flat ledge of broken-down bracken, without stones, rocks or bushes, without serious cover.

Gus could not tell how long he would have the protection of the cloud. He worked at controlled speed, but not in panic, to snatch at the bracken, tear it up and make a blanket of it over his boots, legs, body and head, and over the rifle, the sight and the barrel. Then he draped the hessian net over the brightness of the ’scope’s lens.

He settled, waited on the wind, and wondered what his opponent was doing.

Through patience, Major Karim Aziz had learnt to hold the present in perpetuity, at the expense of past and future. The patience was based, as if embedded in concrete, on certainty.

He had slept for three hours. He had woken and immediately felt alert and alive. His resting place, chosen in pitch darkness, was under a flat slab stone that jutted out over a small table of grass that in turn gave way to sheltered ochre bracken fronds. If he had thought of the past or the future, he would have walked down the slope, through the blanket of cloud, and climbed the far side to safety.

Patiently he had watched the wall of lightening grey mist that was around him until, imperceptibly, it began to fragment. He had confidence in himself, and in the man he thought of as a friend, and confidence in his dog.

The cloud had started to break above his eyeline.

First there were lighter points, then blue islands, then a first glimpse of the sun. The cloud served him well, satisfied him. It had blocked out the early-rising sun, which would have peeped over the ridge on the far side of the valley and beamed onto him. He would have been looking into the sun in the early morning and his side of the valley would have been illuminated. It would have been the point of maximum danger when the sun’s strength caught the colouring of his face, penetrating under the stone slab, nicking the lens of his ’scope. Later, when the cloud blanket was burned away and the sun was higher, the stone slab would throw down deep shadow over him and his rifle. Much later, towards the end of the day, the sun would be behind him and its power would fall on the far slope. Then it would search for the man, his friend… That was the present, and all else was forgotten.