Hiroshima Joe (53 page)

No one said anything.

It was followed by a cloud bellying outwards and upwards over the distant city. There was a silence lowered upon them. Sandingham became acutely aware that there were no birds singing or insects chirruping. The bullock, he saw, was standing as still and firm as a statue. It was as if someone had stopped the projector running the film of life on to the screen of the world – just for a few frames. There was then a rumble that quickly swelled to a thunderous bang.

The film recommenced. The bullock jerked into action. The birds sung again.

The driver started up the lorry and crashed the gears. The guards were shouting to him, gesticulating wildly through the rear window of the cab and through the doors. He did not reverse and drive back towards the camp but on towards the timber yard, the horn blaring to clear the way through the cyclists and walkers.

The gates to the yard were open, swinging wide on the hinges. The driver slewed the truck through them and skidded to a halt. The guards bullied and chivvied the prisoners off the rear bed of the truck and herded them into the woodpile bunker. With them all in there, they pulled the door to and wedged it firmly shut with a heavy log. The prisoners heard the truck drive off. Still nobody spoke. They could hear nothing from outside.

‘They’ve gone. Buggered off,’ someone said incredulously.

‘Let’s get the door down.’

They shoved and heaved but the log held firm in the earth.

‘Roof. Have a go at the roof.’

The bunker was not well constructed, depending for its security upon the weight of timber on and around it. It was, furthermore, never intended to be a prison. Without too much difficulty they managed to ease aside some of the logs and Sandingham, being thinner than most, was hoisted up and started to weave his way through the mesh of trunks resting on the bunker. In ten minutes he was out.

Gathering his breath, he shouted down through the wood pile, ‘I made it. I’ll get the door.’

It was then that he looked up.

Over the city was a cloud, thousands of feet hight, as it seemed to him. It was shaped like an umbrella toadstool. It was black and deep purple and grey all at once. At its base was a thick layer of smoke, turning in and in and in upon itself like dough being kneaded.

‘Christ!’ he muttered involuntarily.

The log was no problem. He tugged it aside and all the prisoners crawled or crouched out into the sunlight.

‘Look at that!’

They gathered in the yard and gazed up at the cloud. Even now it was growing taller as they watched.

‘That was some kinda raid!’ exclaimed Toni.

He studied the face of his scratched and battered watch in a perplexed manner.

‘What’s up, Yank?’

‘I don’ get it. It’s only twenty to nine.’

‘So?’

‘You see a raid like that come together in under twenty minutes…?’

They scattered about the timber yard, searching for the workers or the guards. There was no one there, not even the
hancho.
There were no weapons, either. In the office, they found some clothes and shared them out.

Sandingham was excited and afraid and exhilarated. It was like being a child let loose in an adult world from which all the adults and their constraints had been miraculously, irrevocably removed. Yet he was simultaneously terribly afraid for Mishima.

The two dozen or so of them met in front of the office.

‘What the hell do we do now?’ puzzled ‘Harris’ Tweed, confused by the possibility of freedom.

‘Get back to camp or stay here. One or the other. What we can’t do is piss off as we like.’

‘Why the hell not?’ asked Mick Harwood in his Liverpudlian accent.

‘You heard His Majesty the Nip Emperor free you? You see US Marines chargin’ over th’ hill? Ain’t no cavalry in this man’s war. For Chrissake, think, you guys!’

‘Toni’s right. If we run loose, we’ll be judged escapers and shot by the Kempetai. If we get seen at large in the countryside we’ll be done for. If that is a flattening of Hiroshima by a raid, and the Japs want scapegoats to punish, we’ll be the best they could have.’

They sat in hasty council and took a quick show of hands. The majority was for getting back to the camp where there would be guards to protect them against the local population. The calculated risk of making their way through the farmland was accepted as inevitable. It was deemed better than remaining in the timber yard for a lynch-mob.

‘How far is it back?’

‘I reckon it’s five, six – mebbe seven miles.’

‘If we go on the road…’

One person ran to the gate and cast his eyes up and down the road. There were few people in sight.

‘Not many about now.’

‘Where they all gone?’

‘See here. I reckon we could cut across country. The camp is over there…’ The prisoner from the gate returned and pointed with a six-inch nail he had picked up as the only weapon he could find. ‘… And if we marched as fast as hell we could do it in less than two hours. There’s no steep hills or anything.’

To assist with their journey, they put on all the Japanese clothing they could find in the office. As they dressed, Sandingham realised that the clothes were the property of the Japanese workers. It confirmed that they had been there that morning, but had left in a hurry before the prisoners’ arrival.

He lifted Mishima’s jacket off its hook. As he did so, through a window, he caught a glimpse of a bicycle haphazardly leaning on a wall.

In one pocket of Mishima’s jacket, he found some currency notes, some coins and a small rice cake wrapped in a cotton napkin. In the other was a small wallet-like folder. Inside were identity papers of some sort, two letters and a photo – it was of the three of them: Mishima, Noriko and their son, Katsuo.

Pushing his arms through the sleeves, he pulled on the jacket. It was a good fit, although it would not have been had he not lost so much weight. The sleeves were much too short. To disguise his head, he put on one of the peaked caps that were regulation issue to workers and soldiers alike.

The others had assembled in the yard.

‘Are we ready? We don’t go as a column. That’d be too obvious. Split into two and threes. But walk in sight of another group. If you get stopped, keep going. If you see one group being done over, join forces. Okay? Let’s go!’

In their worry, no one noticed Sandingham holding back.

When they had gone, he ran behind the office to where he had seen the bicycle. He mounted it and pedalled out of the gateway. In the distance, on his left, he could see the groups making their way along the road; the leading pair were striking off along the banks between the rice fields. To the right, ahead of him as he shifted his weight and turned the handlebars, was Hiroshima. Above it the cloud now looked less like a toadstool and more like a tall-bodied oak tree with a fearsome, awful canopy thousands of feet high.

*   *   *

The bicycle was old and heavy and his legs were not strong enough to propel it forward at any speed. At first he had wobbled: it was six years since he had last ridden a bike. This one was plainly a poor man’s model, for it lacked gearing and there was a metal-framed shelf behind the saddle for the carriage of packages and boxes.

The road wound through paddyfields and vegetable farms, many of them partially harvested. The few hamlets he pedalled through contained knots of people talking excitedly to each other. Everyone was facing the city.

The nearer he came to the city limits the more people he found to be travelling with him. Some were on cycles, some on foot, a few in cars or on lorries. As he came alongside the railway line to Kure the road took a bend. Here he decided to stop, to regain his breath. He squeezed on the brake levers and halted by the kerb under the shade of a tree that grew over a stone wall.

From around the corner he could hear a mysterious sound. More accurately, it was a great number of disparate sounds melding together to make one orchestration, much as many notes join in unison to make a complex chord. He tried, leaning over the handlebars, to recognise any one of the noises but he was unable to do so, for whatever they were they registered in his brain as unlikely to unite. They did not fit into a pattern – much as a cawing crow would not be expected to join in harmony with a harpsichord.

His breath regained, Sandingham shifted the pedals and took the pressure of the chain. He rode away from the kerb and around the corner.

Ahead of him on the road, half a mile away, there was what appeared to be a tide coming in his direction. As he pedalled on and approached it, he saw it was a multitude of people. Behind them was the smoke of what Sandingham took to be the burning city.

When he caught sight of them he assumed the crowd he was riding up to was made of refugees from the air raid. He had seen Chinese in droves leaving a district under fire in Hong Kong. As he got closer, he saw that he was only partly right.

Within easy sight of them, he stopped again. He could not quite believe what he witnessed in front of him.

The crowd was silent except for the shuffling of their feet and the creaking of the axles on their handcarts. A few moaned but none spoke. Many of them were injured. Cuts about the face and hands had bled into streaks upon their clothing. Some limped, while others were riding on the handcarts, sitting on an assortment of mundane household belongings. As they passed by, he saw that they were all stunned, bemused even. Refugees were usually more alert than this, eager in their escape. These people were strangely apathetic.

He was about to set off the way they had come when an elderly man in a dirtied
ukata
– a light indoor kimono used by Japanese much as Europeans might use a cotton dressing-gown – touched his arm. Sandingham looked down at the man’s hand. It was badly grazed as if he had rubbed it along a rough surface. Straw-coloured plasma was weeping from the wound.

The man said nothing but looked Sandingham straight in the face, then shifted his eyes to the bicycle. He pleaded through the telepathy that pain brings to the injured. Without a thought Sandingham lifted his leg over the saddle and relinquished his machine. The old man said nothing at all; he did not even smile his thanks. He steered the bicycle through the crowd and, propping it by a pedal to the opposite kerb, helped a middle-aged woman on to the saddle, precariously balancing a child on the crossbar between her arms.

Sandingham watched them rejoin the crowd.

Walking was easier for him than cycling. His legs, after initially feeling weakened as he dismounted, set back into the stride to which they were accustomed.

It was not long before he reached the outer limits of the blast damage. House walls were askew, trees leafless: windows were blown out and fences down. Debris littered the road.

The more he walked, the worse the damage became.

All the while, from the city, there rose the vast pall of smoke and dust. It was so wide and huge now that it entirely cut off the sun. The head of the tree-cloud over-toppled him and was widening its branches.

Sounds increased. From the city came the noise of human turmoil, of burning, of disintegration and the musical tinkling of metal bending or breaking, glass shattering. In the firestorm were the popping detonations of houses igniting in an instant and exploding. It was the symphony of destruction.

He walked with his head lowered, his brain struggling to recall the instructions from Mishima on reaching his Japanese friend’s home. If he looked up, what he spied wiped his thoughts clean with horror.

Around him, few buildings stood. They were heaps of wood and tiles, cloth and glass and metal. Some smouldered. Brick or stone edifices were cracked and leaning. Everything had collapsed. The narrower sidestreets between the houses were filled with rubble. Further on, the sides of buildings were burned as if scorched. Telegraph and power poles were charred down one side. Flimsy upright objects, like some of the street lamp-posts, were bent over. The air was filled with the acrid stink of the ruination of war.

Everywhere, there were the people. Or what was left of the people.

*   *   *

To one side of the street was a shambles of wooden planks, beams and plates. Shattered roof tiles underfoot hurt his soles through his
tabi.
Woven into the fabric of the wreck of the building were bicycle frames, wheels, chains, mudguards – a carton of saddles lay strewn on the pavement like an obscene dried fruit. Opposite was a stone building: most of it had collapsed but enough had survived to assure Sandingham that it was a temple. The smoke rising gently from the ruins was scented with incense.

‘Eighteen doors down on the left,’ Sandingham uttered.

He shut his mouth up promptly. To speak in English was to commit suicide. He tugged the peak of his cap down further and stepped over a tangle of power cables and began to clamber over the first hillock of rubble that had been the cycle-repair shop.

It was impossible counting off the houses: they were all so utterly destroyed that there was no way to discern one from the next. He tried to guess how wide each property might be and then assess how far down the street he had gone; but there was little to guide him.

He kept his face lowered, studying where next to step or balance. Often he stumbled or slipped over splintered wood, torn cloth and more tiles. Pieces of furniture stuck out from the wreckage like decorations in a macabre sculpture.

When he had gone what he estimated to be one hundred yards, he sat on the protruding end of a cupboard and shouted.

‘Mishima? Mishima? Mishima-san?’

He scanned the destruction around him, oblivious to everything but a sign of his friend.

‘Mishima-san … wa doko desu ka?’

Nothing moved except a hot wind. The only sound was the wind in the crannies and around the tangled wires of the ruins, and the murmur of the fire raging in the centre of the city.

Smoke drifted towards him. It choked and confused him, cut into his lungs and made his eyes and nose run. It was pungent and foul.

He clambered further over the ruins, keeping to the street. Another fifty yards and again he halted, precariously standing upon the ridge of a roof that had slid sideways into the street.