Lessons, p.4
Lessons, page 4
It was not possible to buy a paper without seeing its headline. “Radiation cloud reaches Britain.” He had already heard in the murmur of his kitchen radio fragments of the explosion story. While he waited by the till for the flowers to be wrapped he wondered how it was possible to know something, if only in vaguest terms, and at the same time deny it, refuse it, steer round it, then experience the luxury of shock at the moment of revelation.
He reversed the pushchair out of the shop and continued towards his errands. The normality on the street had a sinister slow-motion look. He had thought he could burrow down but the world had come to find him. Not him. Lawrence. An industrial bird of prey, a pitiless eagle, in the service of the machinery of fate, come to snatch the child from the nest. The idiot parent, virtuous with the morning dishes in the sink, with a change of cot sheets, some tulips for the kitchen, had been looking the other way. Worse, was determined to look the other way. He thought he was immune because he always had been. He imagined it was his love that protected his child. But when a public emergency erupts it becomes an indifferent leveller. Children welcome. Roland had no special privileges. He was in there with the rest and would have to listen out for public announcements, the quarter-credible assurances of leaders who, by convention, talked down to the citizenry. What was good for a politician’s idea of the masses might not be good for any individual, especially for him. But he was the mass. He would be treated like the idiot he always was.
He stopped by a letter box. Its quaint red and royal insignia, George V, were already a memento of another time, of risible faith in continuity by way of posted messages. Roland stowed the flowers in a bag that hung from the pushchair handle and unfolded the paper to read the headline again. It was of the deadpan science-fiction kind, bland and apocalyptic. Of course. The cloud always knew where it was heading. To get here from Soviet Ukraine it would have crossed other countries that mattered less. This was a local affair. It appalled him how much of the story he already knew. A nuclear power station meltdown, explosion and fire in a faraway place called Chernobyl. An old aspect of normality, prison riots, still simmered further down the page. Below the newspaper Roland had a partial view of Lawrence’s fuzzy almost bald head swivelling as he tracked each passer-by. The headline was not as alarming as the line above it in smaller print. “Health officials insist there is no risk to public.” Exactly. The dam will hold. The disease will not spread. The president is not seriously ill. From democracies to dictatorships, calm above all.
His cynicism was good protection. It prompted him to take measures that would let him feel that he was not a faceless member of the mass. His child would survive. He was a knowledgeable man and knew what to do. The nearest pharmacy was less than a hundred yards away. At the prescription counter he queued for ten minutes. Lawrence was restless, squirming, arching his back against the buggy’s safety straps. As only the well-informed knew, potassium iodide protected the vulnerable thyroid against radiation. Children were at special risk. The pharmacist, a friendly lady, smiled and shrugged stoically as she might at a day of heavy rain. All sold out. As of last night.
“Everyone is going crazy for it, love.”
Two other pharmacies in the area told him the same, though in less friendly terms. One old fellow in a white coat was irritable: had he not seen the sign on the door? Further along the street Roland bought six one-and-a-half-litre bottles of water and a strong bag to carry them in. Reservoirs would be irradiated, tap water must be avoided. At a hardware shop he collected up packs of plastic dust sheets and rolls of sticky tape.
In the park, while Lawrence gripped in his fist a crushed portion of his second banana of the day and fell asleep, Roland scanned the pages and formed a mosaic of impressions. The invisible cloud was sixty miles away. British students arriving at Heathrow from Minsk were radiated to fifty times normal levels. Minsk was 200 miles from the accident. The Polish government was advising against drinking milk or eating dairy products. The radiation leak was first detected by the Swedes 700 miles away. Soviet authorities had passed on no advice about contaminated food or drink to their own people. It could never happen here. But it had already. A leak at Windscale had been kept secret. The Third Secretary at the Russian embassy in Stockholm had been dispatched to ask Swedish authorities how to deal with a graphite fire. The Swedes didn’t know and referred the Russians to the British. Nothing else was publicly known. France and Germany had said there can be no harm to the public. But don’t drink the milk.
In the centrefold a detailed cutaway drawing of the power station showed how it happened. He was impressed that a newspaper could know so much so soon. Elsewhere were warnings that experts had given long ago about this design of reactor. Bottom of the page, an overview of British power stations of roughly similar design. An editorial advised that it was time to shift to wind power. A columnist asked what happened to Gorbachev’s policy of openness. It was always a fraud. Someone wrote in the letters page that wherever there was nuclear power, East or West, there were official lies.
Across the broad asphalt path that cut through the park, on a bench like his, a woman was reading a more popular paper. Roland had a view of the headline. “Meltdown!” The entire story, the accumulated details, were beginning to nauseate him. Like eating too much cake. Radiation sickness. Two women, each pushing an old-fashioned well-sprung pram, walked past. He heard one of them use the word “emergency.” There was a general light-headed sensation that came from there being only one subject. The country stood together, united in anxiety. The sane impulse was to run. If he had the money he would rent a place somewhere safe. But where? Or buy a plane ticket to the States, to Pittsburgh where he had friends or to Kerala where he and Lawrence could live cheaply. How might that look to Detective Inspector Browne? What he needed, Roland thought, was a conversation with Daphne.
The weather report on the back page of his own paper predicted a north-easterly breeze. More of the cloud was on its way. His first duty was to hump the bag of bottled water home and start to seal the windows. He must continue to keep the world out. It was a twenty-minute walk. As Roland took the front door key from his pocket Lawrence woke. For no reason, in the way of all babies, he started to bawl. The trick was to pick him up as soon as possible. It was hot and clumsy work, unfastening the straps, lifting the screaming red-faced child, getting the pushchair, the water, the flowers, the dust sheets into the house. He was in, and saw it lying on the floor, writing side up, another card from Alissa, her fifth. More words this time. But he left it where it was and carried Lawrence and the shopping towards the kitchen.
2
He and his parents arrived in London from North Africa in the late summer of 1959. There was said to be a heatwave—a mere 89 degrees Fahrenheit and “sweltering,” a new word to Roland. He was disdainful, a proud native of a place where the light of mid-morning was a blinding white, where the heat struck your face as it bounced off the ground and the cicadas fell silent. He could have told his relatives. Instead, he told himself. Here, the streets near his half-sister Susan’s rooms in Richmond were orderly, with a look of permanence. Colossal paving stones and kerbs too heavy to lift or steal. Smooth black roads empty of dung and sand. No dogs, camels, donkeys, no shouting, no car horns pressed for half a minute on end, no handcarts piled high with melons, or dates still clinging to their palm branches or blocks of ice melting under sackcloth. No smell of food in the street, no hiss and clatter, no stench of burnt oil and rubber from the workshops under awnings where they pressed old tyres into new. No calls to prayer by muezzins from their high minarets. Here the surface of the clean road was slightly curved as though mostly buried out of sight was a fat black tube. To allow the rain to run off, his father explained, which made sense. Roland noted the heavy iron drains in the unlittered cobbled gutters. So much work to make a few yards of ordinary street, and no one noticed. When he tried to explain his black-tube idea to his mother, Rosalind, she didn’t understand. The Tube was a railway, she said. The underground part didn’t reach as far as Richmond. Along the visible portion of his black tube the traffic processed evenly, with no sense of striving. No one was trying to get ahead of everyone else.
In mid-afternoon of their first full day back “home” he went with his father, Captain Robert Baines, to the English shops. The light was golden treacly thick. The dominant colours were rich reds and greens—the famous buses and the startling postboxes over which rose tall horse chestnuts and plane trees and, lower down, hedges, lawns, verges, pavement crack weeds. Red and green, his mother said, should never be seen. These clashing colours were associated with anxiety, with a tensing in his shoulders that made him lean forward as they walked. The day after next he and his parents would travel seventy miles from London to inspect his new school. The term would not begin for several days. The other boys would not be there. He was glad, for the thought of them made his stomach contract. The word “boys,” boys en masse, conferred on them an authority, a thuggish power. When his father referred to them as “lads” they became taller in his thoughts, stringier, irresponsibly strong. In a town six miles from his school—his school—he and his parents would visit an outfitter to buy his uniform. That prospect too tightened his stomach. The school colours were yellow and blue. The list included a boilersuit, gumboots, two different kinds of tie, two different kinds of jacket. He had not told his parents that he didn’t know what to do with such clothes. He did not want to let anyone down. Who could tell him what a boilersuit was for, what gumboots were, what a blazer was, what “Harris tweed with leather patches” meant and when the right time was to put them on and take them off?
He had never worn a jacket. In Tripoli in winter, sometimes he wore a jumper knitted by his mother with a twisting cable pattern down the front. Two days before they caught the twin-propellor plane that brought them to London via Malta and Rome, his father had shown him how to knot a tie. In the sitting room he had proved to his parents several times over he could do it. It was not easy. Roland doubted that when he stood with other boys, tall lads, hundreds of them in a line, in front of gigantic mirrors like the ones he had seen in a picture of the Palace of Versailles, he would remember how to fix his tie. He would be alone, mocked and in trouble.
They were walking to buy his father’s cigarettes and to escape the two small rooms Susan lived in with her husband and baby daughter. Already his mother had packed away the camp beds and was vacuuming the dustless carpets. The little girl, with two molars coming through would not stop crying. It was only correct that “the men” should be out of the way. They walked side by side for fifteen minutes. It was where their street met the main road that the enormous horse chestnuts rose, forming an avenue towards the first of the shops. He was well used to high eucalyptus with their dusty dry rustling leaves and flaking barks, trees that seemed to live on the edge of death from thirst. He loved the high palms leaning into deep blue skies. But London’s trees were rich and grand like the Queen, as permanent as the postboxes. Here was a deeper anxiety. The lads, the boilersuit and the rest were as nothing. The individual leaves of the horse chestnuts, like the line of the Mediterranean horizon, like the writing on the blackboard in his Tripoli primary school, held a secret, one that he could barely tell himself. His vision was blurring. A year ago, he could see more clearly by screwing up his eyes. That no longer worked. There was something wrong with him and he could not bear to think about it, about where it was leading. Blindness. It was a sickness and a failure. He could not tell his parents because he dreaded their disappointment in him. Everyone could see clearly, and he could not. This was his shameful secret. He would take his condition away with him to boarding school and deal with it alone.
Every horse chestnut was a cliff of undifferentiated green. As they approached the first its leaves began to appear, each one an exuberant friendly five-eared spread. Stopping to look closely might have given his secret away. Examining leaves was not the sort of thing his father approved of.
When they reached a newsagent, the Captain bought, unasked, along with his cigarettes, a chocolate bar for his son. Years of being an infantryman in barracks in Fort George, Scotland before the war, low-paid and always hungry, had made Roland’s father appreciative of the treats he could bestow on his son. He was also stern, dangerous to disobey. It was a powerful mix. Roland feared and loved him. So did Roland’s mother.
Roland was still at an age when a mix of chocolate, toffee, sugary biscuit and crushed peanuts could dominate his senses and obliterate his surroundings. When he came to, they were entering another shop. Beer for the men, sherry for the women, lemonade for himself. Later that afternoon on television there would be football miraculously beamed from Ibrox Park, Glasgow. And tomorrow a variety show from the London Palladium. There was no television in Libya, not even talk of its absence. The wireless programmes from London broadcast to the forces families abroad faded and swelled among the hiss and whine of cosmic mayhem. For Roland and his parents television was not a novelty. It was a wonder. To watch it was to celebrate. There must be drinks.
Now father and son retraced their steps from the off-licence with their heavy loads in stout paper bags. When the avenue was still five minutes ahead, with the newsagent just behind, they heard a loud bang like the sharp crack of a rifle, like the .303 Roland had heard many times at the firing range out at Kilometre Eleven. What Roland saw as he turned remained with him for the rest of his life. At its end it would feature in the dying forms and whispers of his retreating consciousness. A man in white helmet, black jacket and blue trousers was flying in a low arc. Because he went head first it looked like a choice, a feat of daring and defiance. He landed on all fours and collapsed face down on the road as he slid along the asphalt with a rasping noise. On impact his helmet tumbled away from him. By a conservative estimate he travelled thirty feet, perhaps forty. Behind him was a small car with smashed-in front and shattered windscreen. The man had flown over its roof. The upended wreckage of a motorbike lay twisted in the gutter. In the car was a woman screaming.
The traffic stopped and stillness settled across the city. Roland ran across the road after his father. As a young soldier in the Highland Light Infantry, twenty-three-year-old Corporal Baines had been on the beach near Dunkirk and had seen much death and men split apart by bombs, still alive. He knew not to move the motorcyclist off the road. He put an ear to the man’s mouth to check his breathing and felt for his pulse in the blood-spiked hair at his temples. Roland watched closely. The Captain turned the man onto his side and parted his legs for stability. He took off his own jacket, folded it and tucked it under the man’s head. They went over to the car. By now, there was a crowd. Captain Baines was not alone—all the men, except the youngest, had been in the war and knew what to do, Roland thought. The car’s front doors were open and three men were leaning in. There was general agreement that the woman should not be moved. She was young, with blonde curly hair and a satin blouse with colourful polka dots streaked with her blood. There was a gash across the width of her forehead. She was no longer screaming but repeating, over and over, “I can’t see. I can’t see.” A man’s muffled voice came from within the car. “Don’t worry, pet. It’s the blood run into your eyes.” But still she kept on calling out. Roland turned away in a daze.
Next thing two ambulances were there. The woman, silent now, was sitting on the kerb with a blanket across her shoulders. An ambulanceman was turning a dressing around her head wound. The unconscious motorcyclist was on a stretcher by the ambulance. Its interior was creamy white, lit with yellow lamps. There were red blankets, two single beds and space in between, like a child’s bedroom. His father and two other men went forward to help with the stretcher but they were not needed. There was a murmur of sympathy in the crowd as the woman began to cry as she too was helped onto a stretcher. The blanket was tucked round her and they carried her into the other ambulance. All the while, Roland now saw, the blue lights on both had been flashing. Flashing heroically.
These several minutes were frightening. In his eleven years he had known nothing like them. They had a disjointed dreamlike quality. In memory they would blur, slip out of sequence. Perhaps they had run first to the car, then to the man on the ground because no one else was attending to him. There was a gap, like a sleep, during which the ambulances had arrived. Their sirens must have sounded and yet he didn’t hear them. A police car was there but he had not seen it arrive. Perhaps it was a woman in the crowd who had fainted and who was sitting on the kerb with the blanket. Perhaps the woman in the car remained in place as an ambulanceman staunched her bleeding. The yellow illumination inside the ambulance may have been reflected sunlight. Memory was not easily examined for greater detail like a horse chestnut leaf. The man shooting through the air—that was incontestable. So was the way he landed and surged forwards face down with the white helmet rolling away onto the grass verge. But what stayed with Roland and changed him was what happened when the rear doors were slammed shut and the ambulances pulled out into the stilled traffic. He began to cry. He moved away so that his father wouldn’t see. Roland was sorry for the man and the woman but that wasn’t it. His tears were for joy, for a sudden warmth of understanding that did not yet have these terms of definition: how loving and good people were, how kind the world was that had ambulances in it that came quickly out of nowhere whenever there was sorrow and pain. Always there, an entire system, just below the surface of everyday life, watchfully waiting, ready with all its knowledge and skill to come and help, embedded within a greater network of kindness he had yet to discover. It seemed to him then, as the ambulances receded with their distant sirens sounding, that everything worked, and was decent and caring and just. He hadn’t grasped that he was about to leave home forever, that for the next seven years, three-quarters of his life would be at school and that at home he would always be a visitor. And that after school came adulthood. But he sensed he was at the beginning of a new life and now he understood that the world was sympathetic and fair. It would embrace and contain him kindly, justly and nothing bad, really bad, could happen to him or to anyone, or not for long.
