Assurances Read online

too solid too easily broken

  passed over passed through)

  There’s always The World Service: its reedy whine picked up on longwave. No order not to listen. Not that such an order could be enforced. There’s comfort in the normalness of afternoon plays, of forecasts, bulletins.

  (high and the world has faded

  into greyness into neutral density

  its colours sun-bleached flattened out

  where nothing moves and there’s no longer

  anywhere good to come down)

  Not that a final report before the silence would help matters much. Having heard the capital’s blitzed, your hometown gone, the fields and woods you used to walk, the families you had no way to warn. Nothing much else to be done beyond that. Not much point at all.

  She’s sitting alone in the strip-lit glare

  of her kitchen when the news breaks

  interrupting morning prayers.

  And the warning is given,

  those few minutes granted

  in which there is no action left to take,

  only a moment, enough, to contemplate.

  So she leaves the coffee cooling,

  the half-buttered toast to go soft,

  and steps outside to welcome in the dawn.

  (What curious hand wound up those bits

  of sun and stone and sea, all packed in

  tight and centrepunched, a single dot

  held in a press of nothingness?)

  And the doorway yields like paper, having gained

  fresh insubstantiality. A silence folded, pushed aside,

  admitting her into the garden, to the uncut length

  of the lawn and on, beneath the sky in its uniform blue

  from which the last of the starlight still shows through.

  (And at that grand release when all was flung out

  spinning wildly, and the planetary pieces pulled together,

  and one thing led to another, who then watched them settle

  into automatic motion, into perpetuity?)

  Her barefoot prints bend back the grass,

  the weight of one thing pressing down

  to overwhelm another

  and yet leaving it unharmed,

  the fine green blades re-woken by

  their springiness, unsticking themselves

  from themselves, as from

  the burdens placed upon them.

  (Who rolled those planets over, examining each in turn

  and with the perfect place selected then injected this

  and sparked off that, promoting further change?

  who moulded self-sufficiency?

  who shaped the first of many replicates?)

  She lingers in the moonlit shade of convenient trees.

  Their purity of airs. Her slow deep breathing. Waiting

  while the birds start up their noise, their dark cacophony.

  (And under all heavenly spirals

  and over all earthly fixations

  at the tip of every motion gone before

  and at the root of all directions yet to be,

  did all the universe conspire to manufacture me?)

  Now here the everything-she-is stands ready

  for this culmination to the scheme so long ago

  set on its course, for all the quicknesses in her

  to be wrenched out, to leave her egg-blown.

  (Is this shell, this dusty husk, what we’ve been dreaming of?)

  And when the sudden sun on the horizon flashes

  over hills, its wake of wind to sweep away the trees,

  to open wide the doors, to silence every mouth, to whirl

  right through her and keep on, she’s nothing more

  than grateful — that it asked so little in the end.

  And somewhere reasonably distant lies the command centre. Bunkered into borderlands in hollowed foreign soils. Hidden by a coverlet of green to feed a scattering of cattle. Far away from anywhere, but close enough to hear the goings on, and always listening.

  (cow bells intermittently chime

  in the cloudy mountain heights

  a thump of hooves comes soft

  through thick stone ceilings

  is mixed with the tapping of keys

  a shuffle of papers under dim electric light

  the stammered telegraphic beep of code)

  They keep abreast of the news: the local upheavals, the national slumps. The grit in the ointment of peaceful protesting; the speck of mould that turns the whole batch sour. Carnival flotillas of military might. Political gamings, playgroundings. Of one distraction leading to another.

  (the stockman is calling up the slope

  he is rattling feed in a bucket

  and deep under earth the sound

  of ungulates lumbering downhill

  comes rolling and booming

  but gentled like distant explosions

  like the start of the end of the world)

  And when that balloon’s puffed up too much. And when at last it bursts. They’re ready with their many monitorings. Aware which launch-sites have been used by the arc of each missile inbound.

  (beasts clamour at the troughs

  they bellow mournfully

  vying for better position

  a brief yet frantic moaning

  before there is silence

  echoing eerily downwards

  sudden and prolonged)

  Not that four minutes allows them the means to do much. A cry of evacuation would be empty of any such hope. Go where? under what? for how long? All they have left is to order the counter attack.

  Unlike earthborne vehicles of expensive pedigree

  Vulcans can’t stay covered up in gloom-aired garages

  and only taken for a spin on sunny afternoons.

  They’re made to exist at maximum performance.

  The heat of their flight to expand them, pushing

  their patchwork plate together, a perfect seal,

  becoming one seamless surface round which

  the windpress passes by unhindered, unheeded.

  When back on the ground they drip oil.

  Each part of them cools

  contracts and separates.

  Natural gaps become evident.

  Sharp-edged valleys in the metalwork.

  Countersunk screws turn bothersome

  through itchy prominence.

  And so they sit in patient discomfort,

  sagging their unbuoyed bulk

  onto spindly wheels.

  Here their dedicated ground-crews fuss.

  As cleaner wrasse are permitted to scour

  the skin of predatory fish,

  picking parasites from gills,

  dipping in and out of open jaws

  to descale furred-up teeth;

  likewise the men mop dribbly chins,

  touch up the paintwork with artisan brushes,

  buff the cockpit glass till it

  is scratchless, till it mirrors emptiness.

  Even a build-up of insects

  mashed and hardened round the air-intakes

  might alter the windflow,

  might impede the perfection of flight, and so

  having softened and soaped off the carapace crust

  every curve is towel-dried and re-waxed.

  And when with expert ear someone

  detects a fine alien hum and gazing

  spots the black enemy sky-speck circling

  under cover of the blinding sun:

  then like ants with their nest upset

  who shift the exposed larvae deep under earth

  so the gleams of the grounded planes,

  the blank-faced bombs poised on their padded racks,

  all are hastily expertly ushered indoors.

  A slick operation in clearing the field

  though not quite as quick as they’re able:

  allowing their pristine machines to be duly admired,

  the bombs to be cou
nted before they are tucked

  out of sight; before the sky-speck, satisfied,

  casually exits the air-space.

  We have to switch radio frequencies on the hour. It avoids unwanted detection. It’s easy to do. Pre-written into charts. Presented in a handy pocket book. Though the waves themselves can’t be hidden. Are open to anyone.

  (… I discovered a pair of otters by the river

  saw them splashing in the late evening light

  their holt a hollowed trunk of hunched-up oak

  I took my torch the next day got in close

  found they’d delved the earth yet deeper

  so many tunnels rootways hidey-holes …)

  And out there, somewhere, are folk with ham-radio sets. Amateurs hooking into whatever tatty threads of signal they can find. Some only broadcast. Others are two-way. Rambling on about anything over unseen distances. They don’t mind whom they talk to, or who listens.

  (… can get lonely but when we’re talking when I

  your voice and it’s just a voice I don’t I’m not

  pretending we could ever even if we it’s much too far

  though sometimes I’ll pretend anywhere but here

  it’s fine it’s really fine and I’ve my responsibilities

  and it’s they do depend upon me but still I think

  often and then back to how I when I was alone …)

  So, and it does happen sometimes, when switching channels, when that hour approaches, if you turn the dial slowly, half a minute in advance, you may hit upon those snatches of chatter, fragments of far away lives.

  (… it’s become my obsession I’m out there at dawn

  before work and again when I come home late

  I find a spot on the bank downriver and wait

  mostly see nothing just river a few dragonflies

  a dipper half floating half skittering over wet stones

  but I crouch very still in the long reed grass

  I’ve nowhere else to go I can stay there for hours

  till it’s dark I don’t mind and yet sometimes …)

  But you never get to listen in for long. You can’t risk missing the hourly orders that may or may not be patched through. Not on the pretext of eavesdropping, over such ground-level utterances.

  (… not only your voice how you what is it you say

  I have to be cautious makes me very yes a sort

  a tremble like me when you think it’s how I you

  it could be we could be and I know I feel this is

  because in person of all those other matters maybe

  we would never we probably wouldn’t have then

  but even there is this now we are like this now …)

  Besides which there’s the need to keep an ear out for enemy spoofing. Phoney accents slyly offering fake commands: to give it all up: to go on home: to believe that all is well.

  (… the setting sun was wavering and runny like egg yolk

  slumping splitting sliding back and down behind the hills

  its last light filtered green through a veil of beech leaves

  and the river itself was a beefy brown a constant rippling

  those darker patches swapping with the pale reflected blues

  and I was sitting staring very still I barely even breathed …)

  Such enemy interceptions happen infrequently. Almost not at all. Never while our team has been on shift. Though that’s no reason not to expect that they might. You have to be alert to all these possibilities.

  (… lose connection how could I find you if you go

  how will and where it’s troubling then I would also

  gone unfair to say that I know because you might never

  please don’t it’s only it should when you’re not there I’m

  emptied I’ve no care it is and all the world and I

  acting my part each day of course I’ll do my best

  to think of in hope of and if then someday you …)

  It’s not about the enemy knowing when to tune in. It’d be in the avoidance of any overlap. To be hoodwinked into hearing only them. Hard to pull off, but the enemy’s wily. They’ll try any trick that they can, if so they can.

  (… and realised all that riversound the sucking the splashes

  the constant soft ripple even the shifting reflection itself was

  an otter I was staring straight at it don’t know for how long

  it was playing or washing or doing whatever it is otters do

  can’t have known me there or if it did it didn’t show it …)

  At least the amateurs are safe enough. Safe in not talking directly to us. Speaking blind over moorland over mountain over sea. Of course they don’t know that we’re listening. Don’t know we’re here at all.

  Three sets of code-breaking equipment: receiving

  their ciphers simultaneously. Each one running as fast

  as the next. Still their answers come out a fraction apart.

  The order is different each time.

  Three sets with identical problems to solve.

  Whether it’s a go-code or a routine. Their matched

  mechanical brains spinning out ultimata. Yet here

  one answer differs from the other two.

  They confer. The pair in agreement strongly believe

  the smallness of chance in them both being wrong

  in precisely the same way proves they must be right.

  They feel this logic is impeccable.

  The one considers its own variation as similarly correct.

  It won’t be ignored. Strength of convictions combined

  should not be allowed to counter that of the individual.

  A truth cannot be arrived at through numbers alone.

  All three agree that, in this singular instance, likelihood

  must give way to perception. What was deemed improbable

  is pronounced irrelevant. The possibility of any one moment

  being only as real as the chosen expectations of another.

  All three agree that in such a state of uncertainty

  the safest solution is not to act at all, or else

  to find a better way in which to run the tests,

  the system having in some manner already failed.

  A conclusion: reached. The go-code: not passed on.

  And not a second wasted, where from without

  all that’s witnessed is the apparently synchronous blink

  of three small amber lights, three clicks, three sudden silences.

  The military state-of-mind is one of familiarity. All the daily duties the repetitions the regular false alerts, it’s all part of desensitisation. An aircraft isn’t sixty tonnes of metal kept afloat on nothingness. It doesn’t fly. Can’t possibly stay up. It’s merely a means of conveyance. As easy as riding a pushbike and never concerning yourself over how it maintains its relative perpendicularity. As easy as jogging without ever musing upon which muscles are needed for your legs to keep constantly moving.

  (My bulk is advantageous,

  when they set me going I cannot

  be stopped. I must be borne

  that I may then be born again,

  O my creator)

  Think too hard and the legs will flounder, crumple, fold, the bike will list and topple, the plane will drop out of the sky, or else, long before that, it will flop lumpily down the runway, managing no more than a few fat little leaps.

  (I will not drag on updraughts.

  With my nose I split the air

  and sew it up behind me

  seamlessly. I tidy as I go,

  O my creator)

  And all those bombs will be once again lifted and loaded and locked into place. Mind you they’re only bombs by name, by dint of reputation. Aren’t so peculiar or so cumbersome once you’ve hoisted them into position a hundred times over.

  (I am a lozenge. I will soothe.

  I am the cupboard medicine

  kept in its handy pack
aging,

  at need to be so easily pressed out,

  O my creator)

  A ridiculous hugeness. A blunt metal smoothness. Modern sculptures, solid right the way through. That sharp knuckle-tap that sounds them out hollow is deceptive, is illusory. The hard slap that sets their skin humming is only a quirk of design, an after-effect to make them appear more vibrant, more alive.

  (I am ripe. My juiciness

  is packed in tight, preserved,

  thick-skinned. I won’t go off till I

  am given to go off,

  O my creator)

  The military state-of-mind is one of alertness, nothing more than that. To be wound up tight one moment and then: just as tight the next. Like a dog whose ears stay pricked even while sleeping, who’ll leap right out of deep dreaming and into a volley of furious barks, and all at the muffled scuttle of a mouse skipping over bare beams in the attic, or else at the wind-blown rose bush as it taps its thorny fingers on the bathroom window-pane.

  (The earth is small, is soft

  beneath my single heavy step.

  Disorderly build-ups top the crust

  but I shall blow such meagre dust away,

  O my creator)

  Growling and barking yet backing away from the bite. That’s the aim. The undercurrent of desire. Merely to handle. Never to use. To go through all that choreography without once considering where the performance will lead; of just how long such parcels can stay lost within their delivery system; of what you become in being the dupe who jumps right to it, who steers, who pin-points, who drops.

  (I am anti-bacterial.

  A surface pure and bright

  shall be my legacy, shall gleam

  when I have made my sacrifice,

  O my creator)

  That’s where all those dummy runs come in. A sort of enforced thoughtlessness. So that when the order arrives you merely do. As you’ve done so many times before. You go through the moves you’ve perfected. Take pride in the accuracy of your air-drawn curves. You are yourself an instrument. Not by you: but through you. Not in you: but of you. And then, before you know it, it’s all done.

  His watch gains fifteen seconds in a day.

  It creeps through hours too eagerly,

  a lightness to its tip-toe stepping

  getting ahead of itself.

  At night he matches its motions to

  the pulse of an atomic clock

  where forward change is marked and set

  by nuclear decay,

  each measure to show how far we’ve come

  how far we’ve still to go.

  The clock has settled its actions to that of the earth,

  the earth to the universe, world to encompassing world.