Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

Then the open road. At this time Clint Smoker weighed four and a half tons. He had a top speed of a hundred and sixty miles per hour. The great blare of his voice (audible for miles), the great blaze of his eyes, tunnelling through the late afternoon. Even his backside carbuncles were now eight inches square.

There was a little reception committee for him, of course, and Joseph Andrews hadn’t travelled alone. His people were unloading the Range Rover that Manfred had hired, and there were two other cars, blocking the road for now, outside the villa in rural Essex, near Gravesend, just where you come off the Bends.

‘A fine fucking welcome this is,’ he said. ‘A fine fucking homecoming.’

Joseph Andrews stood at the gate, half slumped over his Zimmer frame. His eyes were clenched shut and his lower teeth bared, after the long journey.

‘I come back to me own country,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘after twenty-five year. And what’s the first thing I see in me Evening Standard ? Plans for the uh, the fucking renounciation of the monarchy. I reckon they done it to spite me. Got half a mind to …’ His closed eyes saw a swimming-pool: a motion jigsaw of crimson blood.

‘That’s down to you, that is, Boss,’ said a passing figure. ‘Pressures on the Princess.’

‘… You’re due a chinning for that, you are, Manfred Curbishley. And when you least expect it and all. No Scotch for you tonight. Face like a fucking chicken tandoori as it is. Where’s Simon? Simon! Hadn’t you better be getting along, son? … Gaw, now who’s this doing his fucking nut.’

He thought it was an insect at first, and even reached feebly for his holster — which of course he would not be needing, in England, in February: a buzzing whine, with hysteria in it. Joseph Andrews raised his trembling head; but the eyes wouldn’t open.

‘Someone — someone go and …’

Brisk footsteps clicked past him. He heard the car change gear, down from third to second, then, with insane protest, from second to first; then a sterling cry of ‘Halt!’; then a boost, then an atrocious concussion, then a faint miaow in the air, then a sound that opened the eyes of Joseph Andrews. It was a sound he had heard once before, in Strangeways, when a prison guard threw himself naked from the tower into the courtyard. An explosion, then something like a flurry of rain.

He threw aside his Zimmer frame and stepped forward. And he thought he had never seen anyone walking towards him as fast as this — walking to the edge of the earth, and intending to get there.

Mal Bale was within (he had been there half the day: turn on the heat and otherwise), coming out of a light nap on the chair in the hall. He heard it. He looked into the kitchen and told Manfred and Rodney to stay inside.

You couldn’t see anything from the front path: just the lights of the cars and the garage lantern. Mal kept moving forward. And now other sounds, the squelch, the sob, the squelch, the sob.

There was a pink mist. And his own car, the elderly BM, was lavishly besplattered with flesh and plasma; on the bonnet was a brown brogue shoe with an ankle in it.

To the left, where the noises were coming from, you were blinded by the brights of the black jeep. Mal ducked out of the beam and edged round the garage doors.

Joseph Andrews lay dead on the road. Above him, his assailant, by now with painful weariness, delivered a few last blows with his tool — his spanner, his wrench. Then he threw it aside and seemed to be trying to weep. But he couldn’t weep; and Mal saw why.

‘Come on, son. You’ve done him now. It’s over. Easy. Easy … Christ: Clint mate … Up. Up you come. We’re going to help you now. We’re going to help you, help you.’

Mal Bale thought: So that was Jo’s last act on earth. With his prehensile right hand. The blinding of Clint Smoker.

Captain John Macmanaman : Come on back. Come on back! … Come on back to me. Level up the turn. No no no. Straighten out, straighten out.

System Aircraft Maintenance : Well I’m here, John, with my circular sliderule.

Macmanaman : Take me through it, Betty.

SAM : NEO will be twenty-one point three nine miles from you when it sheers. There’ll be fireworks and some heat and you’ll feel that instantly. We don’t think that’ll be important. But there’ll be downwinds, John.

Flight Engineer Hal Ward : Well that’s it.

SAM : I’m sorry. Now the heat’ll come at the speed of light. The wind will come at the speed of sound. So after the flash you’ll have one minute … nine seconds. Good luck. We’re all rooting for you. Really rooting for you.

Macmanaman : Thanks, honey.

First Officer Nick Chopko : And here we have our so-called runway, gentlemen. See it?

Macmanaman : Hal?

‘Three minutes,’ said the voice of Hal Ward, and nothing else. Reynolds knew that John Macmanaman had been in a crash before — as a young man, and as a passenger. He’d told her about it a couple of times. He said it was like a silent movie: no sound at all, and black-and-white. Even the gust of fire was silent and black-and-white. And the dying, those slipping away but also those actually in flames had the same expression. One of wonder.

She eased her neck, and searched for better thoughts … John said he suddenly became a hundred different me s. All around him were wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, children. And then, later, the question of survival. It was like winning a squalid lottery, he said … Oh I get it, she said to herself. After nearly half a century Royce dies and then, three days later, I die too. Moral: don’t marry at seventeen.

The passengers facing the prow were in the brace position, bent forward with their hands clasped over their heads. Reynolds, facing aft, sat normally, just hugging her neck, hugging her neck: Captain’s orders.

And she knew — stone knew — that if they got through this alive she was going to make him marry her.

There was a yellow flash and she felt sweat form on her upper lip.

Ward : How long?

Macmanaman : Sixteen seconds. And God, right now, it’s so still .

SAM : This isn’t my field, but if the wind comes down, it’s got to come back up, right? If you can just stay out there …

Macmanaman : Here it comes. Ride it. Ride it.

Ward : … Fucking Christ , the wing’s coming down!

Macmanaman : Wait!

Ward : We’re coming down on the wing!

Chopko : I love you, Amy!

There were rescue-and-emergency teams, at a distance, all along the cleared six miles of Interstate 95—just south of the city of Florence, Florence County, South Carolina.

This is what the people saw and this is what they heard.

They saw the crucifix of Flight 101 coming out of the early afternoon above the red plateau. At first in perfect silence — until they heard the mournful chord of the stricken machine. Then its drunken slides and drifts, and its final circling, chest up, arms outflung: counterclockwise. As it steadied, as it bore down, there came the heavy flash from above, and, within a second, the comet’s hair was a silver river from horizon to horizon …

The plane was perhaps five hundred feet from the ground when the downwind took it. It seemed to give a roar of pain and rage as it rocked and plunged. The left wing dropped and hit: a streak of sparks along the hard shoulder. Then the updraught: and Flight 101 violently levelled. One scorching ricochet, one hurt, wounded rearing-up with slats and panels flying off it, then touchdown, the resilient gathering of its rigidity, and on it powered beyond the cauldron of its wake.