seeing all those bombs go off at once?’
It was like waking up for breakfast in hell. It was like seeing lightning from inside a cloud. It was like a bonfire party squeezed into a tin can. It was cold-blooded murder from the safety of altitude. How could he explain such things to someone who’s age pigeon-holed everything as either good or bad, right or wrong?
‘It must have been very colourful.’
‘W-What?’ Colourful, Charles had called it, like a circus or a summer fair.
‘All those bombs going off. It must have looked very colourful. You know, yellow and red and orange!’ Charles added his own gaudy sound effects to mimic the imagined explosions. Malcolm visibly jumped and for the first time Irene noticed his discomfort. ‘Berlin, I bet that was bombed a hell of a lot!’ Charles almost shouted.
‘Language, young man!’ admonished Irene. ‘Now stop it and leave poor Uncle Malcolm alone.’
‘No, no; it’s all right,’ Malcolm interjected. But it was too late. He felt that the boy was accusing him of something; as if he knew more than he was saying and somehow wanted to taunt Malcolm with his secret knowledge. ‘You’re right, Charles: Berlin was a major target.’
‘Where else?’ Yes, the boy was taunting him. His face seemed bloated, inflated as Charles leaned enthusiastically across the table. His eyes beamed like searchlights and soon all Malcolm could see was the child’s face filling up the whole room. When? Where? How often? How many?
‘Munich, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Stuttgart.’ Surely the boy did not need to know every city Malcolm had helped destroy.
‘But where else, Uncle Malcolm? We do geography at school. Where? Where?’ the child’s looming face snarled in the narrow space between them. The sound of his own blood droned in Malcolm’s ears like a Rolls Royce engine.
Panic swept down his spine as nausea effervesced upward in a devastating pincer movement.
‘I really don’t think…’ began Irene.
‘Hamburg, Hanover, Frankfurt.’
Dresden. Remember? You burned Dresden! his mind yelled. You burned (children) Dresden!
The chair on which he sat started to spin, as did the grotesquely swollen face of Irene’s nephew. From some far off place he heard Irene’s voice calling his name repeatedly; and then he was falling. He fell through crisp dark air from the underbelly of a bomber and headed to earth with a cargo of bombs. The air around his metal confederates began to scream as their velocity increased, and Malcolm screamed too. Below him the burning city jumped up to meet him like a faithful dog; and oh, yes it was colourful, just like Charles had said. As the burning intensified he saw faces swelling towards him, each one howling in terror, so that the night became one endlessly appalling scream.
When his body hit the ground it exploded, its severed limbs decapitating two women, scything another in half. His body smashed through the doors of an air raid shelter and massacred those trembling within. And his head, catapulted back skyward, fell to earth once more, straight towards a familiar object that seemed so incongruously placed that he was unable to name it until his head was nearly upon it: a pram - and not an abandoned one.
‘Malcolm? Malcolm? Can you hear me?’ Irene asked, with increasing anxiety.
He spluttered like a man pulled from a burning house as consciousness found him again. Young Charles’ face was nowhere to be seen but his frightened voice could be heard asking what was the matter with Uncle Malcolm and was it his fault.
‘I’m all right, really,’ he mumbled, thinking of his vivid dream and then burying his face in his hands as he recalled the details. ‘I must be going down with something.’
Charles would not be interrogating him anymore, at least. He would never have to tell him about Dresden and how he burned children in their beds that night. But later Irene’s concern prompted a different round of questions which Malcolm avoided with a complaint of a headache. With that excuse, he knew, Malcolm had slammed a door shut in her face that he would never let open again. Maybe that was why she could never conceive? Because there was always something he held back from her.
The rain on the library skylight had stopped, but there would be no sunshine today. He sighed and looked over at the wall clock. Eleven-twenty: nearly time to head back. Three boys stood locked in a conspiracy of whispers. A library assistant eyed them fleetingly but admonished the two four-year-olds instead. One of the boys said something and his mates sniggered in unison. That was when Malcolm realised they were whispering about him. Perhaps they had noticed his vacant staring and found it uproariously funny. Malcolm considered leaving immediately, but then resolved to stay put.
These were the people he had killed for, risked his own life, his sanity for; this was what it was all about. He had orphaned German children, incinerated their grandparents, slaughtered mums and dads so that young people like this could laugh and snigger at him, vandalise phone boxes, piss in the underpass and defraud the benefits system. Thanks to him today’s youth could profit from supermarket lager, illicit drugs, gap years, the morning after pill and the rave scene. And he didn’t have a problem with any of it, because it meant that however vacuous and morally bankrupt the world was, it was at least free.
He tried to distract himself by taking a last look around his beloved library. How many hours had he spent here reading the newspapers and magazines, or looking at the monthly art exhibitions on the balcony upstairs? Children talked loudly over picture books, while a queue of adults clutched unread novels like priceless heirlooms. The librarian stamped their return dates like a border guard stamping passports; the smiling patrons her refugees from boredom.
For an environment supposed to be silent, it was surprising how many noises filled the air: books popping closed, throats clearing, whispered enquiries, creaking stairs; and above it all the incessant chuckling of the three boys and that droning sound emanating from the ceiling.
At first Malcolm assumed it was an airliner passing by overhead, but as he listened the sound intensified and became not a drone but a shrill whistling sound directly above his head. He looked up at the skylight just as the sky darkened with the promise of more rain. The whistling was louder than anything else in the library but no one seemed to have noticed. Malcolm looked around at a scene of collective apathy and indifference. The three boys were now staring openly at him and nudging each other. But not once did they look upward.
The whistling sound was now a scream, as something heavy and unstoppable hurtled down towards the library building. Malcolm stood on uncertain limbs, his face aghast at what was about to happen. How could this be? Why was there no siren, no evacuation procedure, no bolt for the exits? The scream of the falling bomb filled every corner. Malcolm started to speak, but realised it would be impossible to make anyone hear. Instead, he thought of the fire alarm and stumbled towards the nearest break glass panel.
‘Oh, no…’ sighed a librarian at the sound of the fire alarm.
Malcolm stood panting as everyone looked his way. Someone was speaking to him, but he could only see their mouth moving aggressively as the screech of the bomb dominated the sound-scape. The three boys were now bent double with hysterics. Malcolm turned and ran.
Outside the rain spat at him. Malcolm made his way to the opposite side of the road to catch the bus back home. His heart galloped inside his chest as he stood under the bus stand. This kind of excitement was not good for a man his age. His doctor had cautioned him over his blood pressure and the need for medication if it got any worse.
Malcolm was beginning to feel calmer until he saw the three boys from the library heading his way. He looked anxiously for his bus. It sat idling at the next stop. ‘Oh, come on,’ he cursed under his breath, but the boys were already crossing the road.
He tried to ignore them, turning his back, but he could still hear their muttering and guffawing, and imagined what they must be saying about him.
The journey back to Hitchcock Road was tortuous. He kept his eyes closed and tried to focus on what he had planned next.
The front room at Number 33 would be well filled with gas by now. Irene would still be sleeping, he hoped; drowsy but not dead. For this was not the gas of yesteryear, the gas you inhaled in the oven when all else seemed lost. This was not the discharge from a car’s exhaust or the stuff everyone feared the Germans would drop on London in 1940. No, this gas would not easily asphyxiate like its close cousins; but that did not mean it could not kill. But for that to happen it would need Malcolm’s deliberate intervention, not merely his contrived carelessness.
All the while the tittering and whispered comments buzzed in his ears from the seats behind him. The bus stopped half way down his street and for the final time, Malcolm Zimmerman, inadequate husband and war criminal, got down and walked in the direction of home.
He had to cross the road, which mercifully was not busy. But when he looked back he saw that the three boys were still in pursuit. ‘Here, mate,’ said a voice at his back, close and goading. ‘Hang on a minute.’
Malcolm felt anger well up inside him. How dare these yobs interfere with his plans on this crucial day? His mouth was dry while his eyes welled with tears.
‘Hey, old man; stop, will you,’ the voice continued, and he felt a strong hand grab his forearm.
‘Perhaps he’s deaf, too,’ he heard a different voice