Chris Cleave - Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“I raised a liar. Are you hurt anywhere else?”

Zachary looked up at him. “When we get back to London can we go to the school, please?”

“I’m not sure it’s the best thing.”

“Please?”

His father sighed. “ ‘Well how can I say no to you now?”

Zachary looked back to the window. He wore the gray knee shorts and the gray duffel coat in which he had been evacuated from London, and he had nothing with him but his gas mask in its box. Two things you could do with the gas mask: you could put it on so your breathing made a nice pop-pop, the valves clicking on the inhale and the exhale so your breathing had an off-beat. Or you could run a stick across the ribbing of the pipe that led from the filter to the mask, and the zip-zip reverberated through the rubber straps and sounded like a washboard.

“What can I do for you?” said his father. “Need more cream on those cuts?”

“I wish it could go back to before.”

His father smiled. “Before what? You start wishing it back, at your age, soon you’re back in diapers.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, but I’m serious too. Where are you going to take it back to? This life hasn’t worked out perfect, maybe I give you that, but it’s got you and me in it. I don’t see what you could change and still have us be. And I don’t see it can be bad so long as we’re here for each other.”

“You won’t let them split us up again?”

“I won’t.”

It was better, from there. Low hills whistled by, woodland verse and field chorus, the rails in rattling tempo. His father fell asleep. London came closer. The other passengers divided their time between staring at the Negroes and pretending they hadn’t been. When they weren’t looking, Zachary licked his fingertips and ate crumbs from the gaps between the seat cushions. The woman in the seat beside him was writing a letter, pressing on the cover of a book to do it. She paused to think, looking out of the window. Finally she fell asleep with the letter loose on her lap, and Zachary ate it. It was one page, written on one and a half sides, and the blue ink tasted of Simone’s note. When the woman woke she looked at her lap and then around the floor of the compartment. Then she looked at him.

“Have you seen a letter I was writing?”

“Why are you asking me?” said Zachary. “Why not ask one of the others?”

His lips and tongue were blue. The woman looked at him thoughtfully, then blinked and began writing all over again. At Reading, where she was alighting, she gave him a Mint Imperial.

At Marylebone the locomotive pulled up and vented steam as if the stuff had been hurting its belly. Zachary and his father stepped down from the carriage. On the station concourse the crowd seethed, harried here and there by its own urgent need. London absorbed them entirely.

Zachary leaned against an iron column. He was weak with hunger, though he wasn’t about to make his father feel worse by admitting it. The blood drained from his head and he had to wait until the color came back into the world and the ringing in his ears stopped. Dying might be like this, an infinite losing of balance, like looking at yourself in the mirror, only with time instead of light.

They left the station to walk home. There were no smoldering craters. He had been evacuated for nine months, and the Germans hadn’t attacked at all. It made no sense to him, but he didn’t even know how to begin asking his father why. It must be obvious. If there weren’t something wrong with him, he would be able to see some particular meaning in London’s undamaged streets and say: “Ah, so that’s why they had to send us away.”

His mind drifted again. If there were bomb craters, you could see whatever was underneath London. You could climb down into the holes and come back up with your pockets full of it. Fossils, gold, instructions.

“You really want to go straight to the school?” said his father. “You don’t want to get cleaned up first?”

“I want to go.”

“But why? Haven’t those people done enough to you?”

He didn’t know how to explain it, how he was so weary of never understanding, so worn down and sad from it, and how a part of him dared to hope that Miss North might know the trick of making him less stupid.

“I just want to see,” he said.

“All right. But if you get a hard time, I’ll get you out. From now on they don’t split us.”

They walked through Regent’s Park, past the boating lake where soldiers in khaki were rowing women in dresses. The men rowed badly, the women laughed and splashed water. Zachary’s father pulled him up with a hand on his shoulder. “You see them in their boats? You know what’s crazy?”

Zachary looked, wondering what his father might mean, but he could see nothing. He had to assign it to that great category of words and clocks, of mysteries. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know.”

His father laid a hand on the nape of his neck. “It’s the water. It’s only a foot deep. We could walk right across that lake if we wanted to. Take off our shoes and hang them round our necks.”

Zachary gave a small laugh, since this seemed to be what was wanted.

“But see,” said his father, “they don’t know they could just get out and walk. Like I didn’t know I could just come and fetch you home.”

“It’s fine,” said Zachary. “It’s not your fault.”

“It’s no one else’s. I’m happy for you, wanting that schooling. Maybe you won’t finish dumb like me.”

Zachary looked out over the little lake. “You’re not dumb,” he said. It looked deep.

He held his father’s hand and they took the canal towpath out of the park and on toward Hawley Street.

The heavy door of the school porch stood open. Singing came from inside. Zachary blinked. Had the rest of them come back? He wouldn’t be surprised by anything. It must have been written somewhere, and he had just sat there and blinked at it. He could hardly think at all, he was so hungry. He looked around at the orderly, clean street. He looked down at his ripped shorts and his muddy legs and shoes. He did not completely understand the trick that had been played on him, but he was ashamed.

Inside the school, they were singing “When a Knight Won His Spurs.” He hung on to the railings, feeling faint.

His father held him up. “Still want to go in?”

Zachary nodded. The corridor was dark. He looked through the doors of the first classrooms. They were empty and dark too. All the windows were boarded up. They followed the sounds of the voices along the corridor, past more empty classrooms.

No charger have I, and no sword by my side / Yet still to adventure and battle I ride . Somewhere, in the heart of the school, one class was singing. They found the classroom and stood outside. Zachary eased the door open and blinked in the sudden light.

Though back into storyland giants have fled… The singing tailed off as the children noticed Zachary standing there. There were only seven of them, not a whole class, and they were not all the same age. He recognized only two of them: most were not children he had been evacuated with. The older ones stopped singing first, and soon the little ones fell silent too. Last to stop was the teacher, who stood conducting the children with her back to the door. She carried on singing as she swept out the time in the air.

“… And the knights are no more and the dragons are … Oh, do come along, children, what on earth is the matter, why don’t you sing?”

She spun around and Zachary flinched. Then her face softened. She nodded to his father, took a step toward Zachary and folded him into her arms. He collapsed against her, too weak to talk.