Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

But then there’s something else — a prickle between the shoulder blades, like being watched, which makes her whip round and search the darkness. He stumbles on, but then notices she isn’t following.

“What?”

“Ssh.” She scans the scrubby trees, the hazy night.

“What’re you looking for?” He sways slightly, and rights himself. Even as she searches the darkness, she’s thinking, He is going to snore like a pig tonight. But then there’s another sound. So faint at first that it can’t really be heard.

“I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss—”

“Hush,” she says. “Shut up.”

A low thrum, which builds and grows, and becomes definite and insistent. And is unequivocal.

“Aeroplane.”

The noise is huge, it’s bursting.

“Christ—”

Moonlight kicks off Perspex and gleams on the grey blur of the blades. They duck down into the grass. Buffeted with gritty downdraught, crouched low, she can smell the earth, and her own body, and the booze off him, and the sweetness of the crushed grass, and the trail of exhaust coming down on them from a different world. Then the plane is past, and it roars away, and the noise diminishes.

They get back to their feet; she straightens out her skirt.

“Was that an Allied plane?”

“I think so,” he says.

By now the aeroplane is reduced to a thrum in the air and a dark blotch that shrinks against the stars.

“There must be a drop planned somewhere up the valley,” he says. He sounds almost sober now. Her throat constricts; she could cry. Really, if she just let herself, she could cry and cry and cry. Does he not see what a bloody slog all this has been? And now he’s going to throw it all up in the air again.

“For God’s sake, please,” she says. “Please. Just wait.”

She studies his face. The moonlight catching in his eyes. The starfished boy in tennis whites, the wounded man strapped down with hospital sheets. He was beautiful, he was brilliant, and he’d needed her. That’s what she’d thought. She had thought that it was love.

“Well,” she says. “That’s that, then.”

She wraps her arms around herself, turns away and stalks on. He follows. He could catch up with her in two paces if he wanted to. He could take her hand and slip her arm through his and, even now, he could comfort her. But what is there left to say? He is a disappointment to her; he’s a disappointment to himself. He just follows her on through the broken night.

—

He walks with Bonhomme silently, out along a back lane for a few twisting hairpinned miles; they slope off down a woodman’s track that takes them past piled logs and blasted clearings of sawn tree-stumps, mud and abandoned brushwood. They carry on until they’re deep into the woods, where the track ends dead. From here all he can see is an untrodden sweep of pine-needles and a maze of rusty trunks, and glancing back, there’s just the rutted gash that they’ve come along. On the left there is a coincidence of gaps between the branches and undergrowth, which might just be a path. At first the signs are equivocal — a bent-back twig here, a scuffed patch there — but as the ground rises the path becomes a worn line through fallen needles, and foot-polished patches on bare stone. As he heaves his way up the final rocky scramble, red stone catches the sun and glows like coals. The rock is skin-warm, crumbling, and as he climbs, it stains his hands red.

Bonhomme is bringing him to the maquis camp. It huddles on top of a bluff, deep amongst the trees. Faint smoke rises, but it is soon dissipated by the canopy. A lad nurses the fire, looks up warily; prone figures lie beneath a shelter of canvas and branches and do not move. Three bicycles lean together against a tree. The Boy Scouts, that’s what this is like. A summer camp set up in the woods.

Bonhomme nods to the kid at the fireside, who is smoky-faced and looks exhausted.

“We were on a job last night,” Bonhomme says. “The boys are tired.”

They head on, across the top of the bluff, which is a shallow cup scrubby and soft with fallen pine needles.

“If the Service de Travail Obligatoire doesn’t get the lads, they come to us; they can’t go home.”

He realizes he’s seen the kid before somewhere. Around the town, serving in one of the bars, perhaps. The farmer draws a scrubby bush aside. There’s a small, dry space behind, with crates stacked inside; he drags one out, cracks it open, lifts out a weapon.

“Ah yes, now,” Bonhomme says, “this is last night’s haul.”

He watches as deft hands twist the thing, click one part into another and offer the gun up to him.

“Here. Take it. It’s not loaded.”

It’s surprisingly light. He turns it round, looks at the gaping mouth where the magazine should go, at the grey barrel with its inner twist of mainspring; the stock is an empty metal frame. He tests the shift and clip of the safety catch. Even unloaded it’s an uneasy thing. It is cold, brutally simple.

“You have some experience of guns?”

“There was an Officer Training Corps at school, but I tended to stay away from all of that.”

“Shame. This is a Sten gun,” Bonhomme explains. “Ugly buggers, but they do their job. Except when they don’t. Sometimes they jam. Which is a fucking chore. Oh, and then there’s this…”

Bonhomme levers the lid off another box. A moment’s puzzlement in which it seems to be packed with fruit. Steely-green pineapples. The farmer lifts one, and it is a grenade, and he handles it as though it’s made of spun sugar.

“You pull the pin out,” he says. “You don’t hang around. You throw the thing. You have four seconds.”

He measures the time out, the beats of it in his head.

“Four seconds and no more, because then the other guy would have a chance to pick it up and lob it back at you. So — ” The farmer offers out the grenade; he looks at it. “Take.”

He lifts it in wary fingertips.

“Don’t worry,” the farmer says. “We’ve taken proper care of them; you can see they’re not degraded. They’re quite safe until you pull the pin.”

He looks at him in disbelief. “We’re going to throw it?”

“No. You’re going to throw it.”

“Isn’t that a waste?”

“The first time you do this, you don’t want it to matter too much.”

—

The firing range is off away from the camp and the store, down a separate gully leading off to the east, the steep sides acting as a natural buffer to noise. He sets the grenade down like an egg before attempting anything with the gun. Bonhomme demonstrates the shift and click that sets the Sten to semi-automatic. He takes the cold thing in his hands, and when he aims and squeezes the trigger a green glass bottle throws itself up into sudden fragments in the air. The noise is hard, the gun bucks in his grip and its heel knocks against his shoulder. It is nasty and efficient.

He hands the Sten back to Bonhomme. He looks down at the grenade, then crouches to lift it. He holds it like a cricket ball, just near his hip, his fingers curled around it.

The grenade is heavy.

After a moment, Bonhomme says, “You don’t have to do it, you know.”

He feels the hatched lines against his sweating palm, the coldness of the metal case. The thing is so self-contained; its hugeness presses out against itself. It’s as full of violence as an egg is full of egg.

“You don’t have to do any of this, you know.”

“One pulls the pin, and then, four seconds?”

“That’s right.”

“What — over there?” Towards a fall of scree from the cliff face, where a scrubby juniper twists out from between the stones.

“See that bush? Imagine it’s got a machine gun.”