Broken

I woke as the bombs dropped. The bed shook. Glass took to the air. The curtain pole dislodged, dropped the scarlet curtains like a matador taunting a bull. Sleep well and truly blown clear of my mind, muscle memory had my hand reach for the other side of the bed, only to be met with disappointment and a heavy heart as fingertip exploration registered nothing but cold, empty sheets. He wasn’t here. I knew that.

The wind stole in through the empty windowpanes and the hairs on my arms rose to salute its deathly chill. Pulling myself from the relative comfort of the covers was a trial, but one that had to be faced. There was breakfast to make and work to be done. Life goes on. As I shuffled into warm slippers and shrugged into a dressing gown, my thoughts slipped towards the dark place which questioned why, wondered whose war I was caught between. But that was quickly pushed away. Once power was back, the TV would no doubt reveal all… well, the most patriotic version of the truth, at least. For the moment my greatest concern was hunting down a milk bottle that hadn’t surrendered to violent force. I never could stomach dry cereal. My breakfast bowl was only slightly cracked, the cutlery still slumbered in ordered rows in its draw, untouched. I lifted a chair back on its feet, brushed dust off the tabletop and took my place. As I munched, I read the newspaper from yesterday, a morning ritual, although today the old issue’s lack of immediacy was more conspicuous than usual. No mention of war, not even the smallest of political slights. Instead, the front pages concerned with the success of a national tennis hero, the back with the whereabouts of a missing cat. There would be fresh “Missing” pages today, no doubt.

I dropped the dirty bowl into the sink without a thought for the crack, which took the hit and split the ceramic clean in two. The sound made me pause. My first impulse to throw it out was disregarded, my stomach churning on glimpsing the two halves. I left it behind in the sink as I threw on clothes and grabbed my bag, perched on the bottom step to tie the rough laces on my leather boots. The rubble behind the door offered more resistance to my exit that usual. I met the postman on the front path, his hat a little askew, a smear of soot across his cheek, but otherwise the same smiley, ruddy-faced man I had come to know well. He proffered my letters in response to pleasantries, and walked on to the next house, whistling a ditty out of tune. Well behind schedule, I ran for my bus, noting the lack of houses on the parallel row. The bus pulled up as I arrived. I should have missed it. Settled into a seat at the back, I shuffled almost unconsciously through my post, intermittently gazing out of the window, at the busy normalcy of Tuesday morning commuters. Nothing but unpaid bills.

The bus coughed me up in a cloud of acrid fumes, choking passers-by in the busy city centre street. People wandered by as if unaware of the hair matted to their heads by clotting blood. Injuries from flying debris. A man suffered alone, slumped in a doorway and nursing a bullet wound, spattered blood staining the wall behind him as his head bowed forward, unmoving. Another nameless civilian casualty to add to the toll on the ten o’clock news.

Automatic doors buzzed open, pockmarked but still functional, admitted me into the cool, air-conditioned building. The bloodstains on the carpet led me to her office, the well-manicured secretary waving me in.

“Doctor Herman’s waiting for you.”

Dream the Future

Teenage revellers gyrated off-tempo under unforgiving UV light, animated by the irregular beat synthesised by a cocktail of legal highs, cut with a strong helping of MDMA. The romanticised drugs of the past, ecstasy, opiates, had fallen by the wayside, cut too well, more talcum powder than high, the new generation of “clued-up” kids too ping-smart to be cheated out of chemical paradise. And they wanted it cheap. Body mods were still expensive these days, or the popular ones, at least. Fingertips fitted with chemical sensors sent drug breakdowns and calorie counts to microchips fused into skull bone. Displayed feeds across a high-tech retina replacement, the information travelling along microscopic optic fibre masquerading as neural pathway. Uninterrupted by social notification bubbles, pre-programmed software tinted teen vision green or red in line with the desirability of chemical breakdowns, ending in a swallowed bomb, or a dead dealer.

Tommo cursed Rezik’s name as he pelted flat out down forgotten back-streets, through the gaping maws of dead buildings, bomb craters, still smoking stacks of rejected human flesh. The enhanced cries of his already pinging assailant echoed in the empty streets like the bark of a vicious dog. Warm blood dripped from a gash across Tommo’s pounding head, a killing blow interrupted by a clumsy tween high for a hookup. He jumped a battered garden fence and for a brief moment forgot Rezik to berate himself, feet pounding across rough concrete and barren dirt. He’d known this would happen. The new mod updates released last week had updated scanners to catch sugar levels in chem soups, revealing the trick behind the deals Rezik’s guys had been offering pingers for the past month. And, as always, it was Tommo that inevitably took the hit.

Diary of a War Hero

England 1939:

I ‘member, the radio declared war in the morning. In the afternoon I went to see a guy about some smokes. All I’d ever heard from the fellas that had made it back from the last one was that the market for smokes was big over there, once things got going. I’d thought it was smart. I packed my haul up safe in a case, I gave ma a kiss on her cheek, and I signed up.

France 1940:

France was a pile of shite, no matter how you dressed it. We should have known, one look at the frozen faces of our pas, the empty space our lads should have filled, they said it all. What were we expecting, really? That eleven years would have turned graves to paradise? Sure, the ditches had been filled, grass had grown, wire had rusted to nothin’, but the tears remained. Wouldn’t have to dig far to find the bloodstains from the last war. I dunno what the hell the props guys were spouting back home, to get ‘em signing up for this, not with the state we were sending their brothers back in, but the steady stream kept coming. Every day a new face to pretend you didn’t see. It was easier that way. Kept your thoughts down on your boots and your mess and kept right on marching, one foot before the other, ’til it was time to stop. The mud sucked at your boots as the trigger sapped your soul, yet still you marched. Fought. Died. And marched again. An endless haze of brown, and grey, and red.

Until we couldn’t march anymore. Bloody Jerrys broke through Belgium, slipped the French bastards and came right for us. Caught us with our pants around our ankles, so to speak. There we were, marching on one minute, all soldier-like, an’ the next we’re burning our own tanks, trucks, food, shooting horses, fleeing like rats before the flood. It was messy. Real messy. Later, they’d try an’ call me a war hero when I lay in the dirt like a worm. Did you know there was a medal for that? Honoured for letting others die in my place. I asked them to. And they, brave boys, went willingly.

“Operation Dynamo”:

Here we gallant survivors were, cowering in marshland like rats, while they, the martyrs, stood tall and defiant, marching at the enemy. We were not brave men. Not as we brought hell to the town we cowered beneath, waiting restlessly for our turn to bail, to get the hell out of this blasted pit of a country. Laid in whatever dank cellar we had stumbled upon in the ringing haze, eyes screwed tight shut. With every rumbling impact, every shake of the walls, the opera of death played out across my lids, the face of a child blown in, the polished fingers of a woman in flight, a blue-eyed man-boy drowning in a soup of mud and blood. Opening ‘em did no good either, they were always there, one endless, accusing stare. Whose war was this, really? Not theirs, surely. What on earth had they done to deserve this? I lay in my makeshift cot, unable to find sleep to the lullaby offered by the orchestra of war, and turned that final battered pack of smokes in trembling hands. It was ironic, here I was, unable to bear parting with them, unable to bear smoking ‘em. Unable to do anything with em really, useless bastards, ‘cept stare at them laying there, nine pretty white coffins in two neat rows, mindlessly playing my grime-caked nails across their pearly tops, trying and failing to catch a breath.

Fat lot of good those smokes did me, fed to the sea. If only fish smoked.

_____________

‘So long as the English tongue survives, the word Dunkirk will be spoken with reverence. In that harbour, such a hell on earth as never blazed before, at the end of a lost battle, the rags and blemishes that had hidden the soul of democracy fell away. There, beaten but unconquered, in shining splendour, she faced the enemy, this shining thing in the souls of free men, which Hitler cannot command. It is in the great tradition of democracy. It is a future. It is victory.’

New York Times, 1 June 1940

The Artist’s Lament

An endless stretch of grey. 

Deep, dark, dirt. 

Sucking mud. Clutches at a man’s boots,

And won’t let go. Tries to save him, to stop the endless forward push, 

To the inevitable ruddy report before all goes black. 

In the grey wasteland silence hangs, a silver thread grasping at the dark,

At the quiet cold, while the whistles and the bombs

Dominate the day. 

The uniforms on both sides a wash of grey.

What was brown faded.

Coated in harsh, cloying mud, dries pale. Cracks, 

Like their officers’ reserve. 

Running, running, running, running, 

Running until they fall.

Through pitted earth, over tangled limbs; ally, enemy, human.

Rolling tide of red, red the earth neglects to swallow, 

Bloated by the bloody blood-feast, 

Can not defeat the greyness of it all.

The hopeless, pitiless, soulless shades,

Of cold, cold grey.