Taken Away (26 page)

‘Fran?' I call.

At the sound of my voice, the passing men turn their indistinct faces towards me. I gasp as their eyes find me. Their attention is a physical blow. It shocks me. My arms rise up; my legs splay. I can feel my feet leave the ground as I am lifted into the trembling air. What is happening?

I am turned to face forward, and I am gently set back down on the ground. There is the sensation that this is the right way to face – the
only
way. As one, the men turn from me and continue on. The feeling of discomfort leaves me, and I sense once again the sweet insistence of that pull around my heart. It is calling me onwards. I begin to walk. My mind fills with happiness, and my moment of fear melts away. My thoughts drift to Fran and the trip we might take to the harbour. The mackerel may be in, and we could take our rods . . .

Someone calls my name. The voice is far away and frightened, and I am almost certain that it is Francis. I stop, and, in stopping, I fill with anxiety; I should keep going. Men continue to pass me by, and even the ones coming up from behind me seem further away than before.

I am being left behind.

The tug on my heart grows ever more insistent, and I fight to resist it. I only want a moment to listen for that voice. But the need to move forward is relentless, and I feel as though my insides are being pulled slowly through a painless hole in my throat. I groan with the effort of just standing still and listening.

The voice comes again: clear and certain and far away. Francis shouting, ‘LORRY!' I am positive now that it is him. My lost brother. My twin. I spin without a second thought and begin to run back for him. I yell for him at the top of my lungs.

‘FRANCIS!'

And I am torn asunder. I feel it, quite distinctly. I am torn in two, from top to bottom. That tug against my heart, the painless, invisible cord trying to pull me forward, rips something from me like the shirt being torn from my back, and I scream as part of me is left behind. A great flat wall of weight falls onto me and I am slapped down into the earth.

I've been hit
, I think in panic.
A shell just hit me.

The ground splits open, and I am plummeting through the solid earth. I'm slapped up and shoved down and cast from side to side in darkness. A nauseating pain consumes me. I want to breathe and I want to vomit, but I can do neither in this endless rush through the churning earth.

It ends in an abrupt
bang
of silence, and I am spewed up into the fog. All around me, men are running and silently screaming under the constant flash of lightning and a heavy storm of shells. Their running figures smear their way through the air, horrified mouths and eyes nothing but blurred smudges on their indistinct faces. All is grey, dirty, and soundless. I am violently pushed one way then carelessly swatted back, the very air itself buffeting me. I stagger about without respite, my arms wrapped around the pain in my heart. There is no noise – only the sensation of noise, and it makes my ears ring. I am torturously close to the edge of hearing, but actual sound eludes me.

A young man runs right through me, pulling a portion of me with him like a trail of filthy smoke. My mouth opens to scream noiselessly at the horror of it; then I snap back together with a sickening
twang
. I wrap my arms tighter around my chest and grit my teeth at the disgusting sensation.

I glare after the man who has done this to me, and I realise that he is the only distinct person in this shifting fog. I stumble after him, latching onto his sharp figure in the mist. He has fallen to his knees beside the wavering outline of another man and seems to be trying to pull him to his feet. I squint hard, trying to get a better focus. Pain sears my head, but details spring temporarily to life. I see the duckboards beneath the two men, the rain that pelts them, the vast rushing pandemonium of war that streams by.

It is Shamie. The man who ran me through is Shamie, and he is trying to pull poor Jolly to his feet. Jolly is screaming and crying. He is lying half on, half off the slippery duckboards, his arms sunk to the shoulder in the liquid mud. He flails against Shamie's touch and continues to grope about in the treacherous slurry.

The pain becomes intolerable, and I have to press my knuckles to my temples and squeeze my eyes shut for a moment. When I am finally able to look again, everything is back to shadows and the dirty half-suggestions of shadows, except for Shamie, who stands out clear and true as a photograph in the murk.

Shamie gets his shadow-companion to stand and turns towards me, his friend's arm slung across his shoulder. He looks straight at me, and the sight of his determined face is a punch to the belly. Shamie is looking right through me, as if I no longer exist. Then he bolts, dragging his companion with him, and I stumble after, following him blindly through the shifting grey.

‘
Shamie!
' I scream. ‘
Shamie!
'

I stagger only steps behind, but Shamie doesn't see me. So I stumble on, as I will continue to do forever, for an eternity, keeping Shamie in my sight, hoping for a glimpse of Fran, and I realise with despair that this is hell. This is hell, and I have purposely thrown myself from the very arms of heaven.

I WOKE WITH A
bump, as though I'd fallen from a great height, and my first thought was,
Oh no. I'm awake and I have no pills left!
Then I realised that my arms were empty, and Dom's cold weight was gone from me. I began to grope around for him in panic, thinking he'd slipped to the floor.

I called for him, but instead of shouting, ‘DOM!' as I had intended, I found myself yelling, ‘SH AMIE !' My voice was hoarse, a hoarse man's voice, and I realised that I was groping about not on the floorboards of our bedroom but in a bed of dry, yellow clay. It crumbled beneath my fingers as I scrabbled about, and I called again, ‘SH AMIE ! SH AMIE !' as if I'd been calling that name forever and couldn't find a way to stop.

A cautious voice said, ‘I'm here,' and someone put their hand on my shoulder.

I leapt away, pressing my back to the wall of the trench, and gaped up into Shamie's young face. I knew him and I didn't know him, all at once. My head spun with the contradiction.

He stared at me, this young version of James Hueston, looking me up and down. He seemed as disconcerted as I was. ‘Laurence?' he asked uncertainly.

I swallowed, afraid to look down at myself for fear of what I might see. Shamie was dressed in a grubby soldier's uniform. His nails were filthy, and his hair stuck up like a dirty blond hedgehog. He had a scruffy boy's beard on his cheeks, and his pale-blue eyes were round and frightened.

‘Laurence,' he whispered, ‘why am I here? What did you bring me back here for?'

His tone of voice told me that
here
was not a place he had ever wanted to be again. He seemed to feel betrayed that I would bring him back.

I shook my head. ‘I'm not Laurence, Mr Hueston. Don't you know me?'

The words sounded odd, coming as they did in that raspy man's voice, but I knew who I was – and I knew what was going on, too. This was another dream. Somewhere in Skerries, old James Hueston was fast asleep and dreaming in his bed. Just like I was fast asleep and dreaming on the floor of our room, my brother's body cradled in my arms. ‘We're sharing a dream, Mr Hueston.'

Shamie's expression changed: all his wounded disappointment left him, and his mouth dropped open a little in wonder. ‘Are you . . . ?' he stammered. ‘Patrick? Is that you, boy?'

I nodded dumbly, and we blinked at each other for a minute. Then James Hueston laughed and scratched his scrubby beard, perplexed. ‘Now what in God's name is this all about?' he muttered. He got to his feet and looked around, his face hardening. ‘And why, of all places, are we here?'

‘Mr Hueston . . . ' I began, and he glanced down at me, a spark of amusement showing through his confusion.

‘Now that's just too peculiar,' he said. ‘You calling me
mister
in that voice . . . with that face. I can't cope with that, at all. Call me James.'

‘Dom is dead, Mr Hueston. He died.'

His smile melted. He opened his mouth to speak, and I quickly put my hand up, as if to shield my eyes from his sympathy. ‘Don't!' I said, staring straight ahead, my hand blocking him from view. ‘If you look at me like that I.. . .I won't be able to keep going.'

There was a small moment of stillness; then he stuck his hand down into my line of vision. He was offering to help me stand. I glanced at him as he pulled me to my feet, and his face was carefully neutral.

‘I'm sorry, son,' he said softly. I nodded and avoided his eyes, looking around me for the first time. He stood quietly, taking his lead from me.

We were in a long, deep trench cut into the earth, and I recognised it instantly. ‘This is Black Paddy's Trench,' I said in my strange new voice. ‘This is where Lorry died – where he was sucked into the mud.'

James nodded mutely, and his eyes wandered up the clay walls to a thin ribbon of sky.

I looked down the endless, unpopulated length of the duckboards, first one way, then the other. ‘It's very different to how I dreamt it.'

He nodded again. It
was
very different. It was silent, for one thing. No breath of wind stirred; not a fly buzzed. And it was dry, so dry that the mud had baked beyond hard and was now soft and crumbling beneath our feet. Everything was yellow, or tinged yellow: the clay; the strange cloudless sky; the bleached wood of the duckboards and the ladders. Even the leaning sign that still faintly read ‘Black Paddy Rules' had a yellow cast beneath the beating sun. There was no sign of human life. All the equipment and paraphernalia of war was gone, except for the unusual piles of rope that stood in silent coils all over the duckboards and hung in motionless loops and swags from every convenient outcrop.

‘Nan sent me here,' I said. ‘She said Lorry wanted us to come here. There must be something . . . '

Without thinking too much about it, I leapt from the boards and scrambled up the nearest ladder, causing an avalanche of mud-dust and rubble as I went. I pulled myself over the top and stood up into open, breathless air, scanning the horizon. ‘It's all empty,' I said, my voice flattened under the weight of the dead air. ‘There's nothing to see for miles.'

Everything felt so real. The taste of the yellow mud-dust on my lips, the feel of the crumbling clay beneath my boots, the hot air in my nostrils; it all felt absolutely real, but far, far away. And I realised that Dom was an ache in my chest that had been with me for years. It was as though I'd buried him long ago. Mourned him and missed him and buried him. He was nothing but a tragic, manageable memory. I didn't like that – it was all wrong – but it was better than the crippling terror of before. At least like this, I could function. Like this, I could get things done.

Shamie stood in the trench shielding his eyes and looking up at me. I offered him my hand, but he seemed reluctant to climb up. ‘I never want to go over the top again, son.'

I understood. I remembered everything now, and after those dreams – that terrible rain of fire and mud, Lorry's awful death – I absolutely understood. But we couldn't just stay here. ‘Nan says Francis is stuck, Mr Hueston.'

His face kind of froze, and he waited for me to clarify.

‘Inside Dom's body,' I said. James's eyelids fluttered at that, and he lifted a hand as if to push the thought away. ‘Nan says that he can still hear and feel, and everything. But he's stuck. Nan says . . . ' The full horror of it struck me. ‘Nan says they'll bury him like that. They'll put him in a coffin and bury him. I'm not going to let that happen, Mr Hueston.'

I turned and looked around, slowly scanning the horizon. The barren landscape shimmered under the blank sky. ‘But what are we meant to do?' I whispered.

‘Lorry must have brought us here for a reason,' said James, squinting up at me.

I knew without discussing it that he was right; Lorry
had
brought us here. He had been bringing us here all along, trying to tell us something or show us something. ‘But this is different,' I whispered.

‘I hate to dream about here,' muttered James, down in the depths of the pit. ‘Why would he do this to me? Make me dream this again and again? It's like he's tormenting me. I can't stand it.'

I shook my head. ‘But this is different, isn't it, Mr Hueston? It's not . . . ' I turned again, dust rising from my boots. The landscape was a painful shimmer all around us, the trench a silent, listening presence running in a straight line all the way to either horizon. I spun in a slow circle, taking it all in. ‘This isn't a memory,' I said.

James Hueston stopped glancing fretfully about him and stared up at me, his pale-blue eyes startled in his grubby young face. ‘This is more like a place,' he said.

We met each other's eyes, and I knew he was right. Lorry had brought us to a
place
: constructed it from his past, given it form and substance by his will, donated us bodies made from his memories. I lifted my hand and stared at it – it was not my hand. It was
not my hand
. I was suddenly terrified. Where was my real body? Had Lorry cast me out from it, in the same way Fran had Dom?