War Children (5 page)

At Caffertys' Statia was welcomed. Simon Cafferty had bought three sacks of hen-meal only the week before.

‘I usually only buys the two,' he said, ‘but I got a good price on these, and I knew the extra one wouldn't go astray.'

He was glad to lend one to the Mulligans, and Statia had to assure him that one would be enough. Simon even loaded the sack in the cart for her while Statia was given tea and bread and butter and had a chat with his wife in
Caffertys
' kitchen.

‘I'll call up when I get the time,' Simon said to Statia when she was leaving, ‘and see if I can do anything for youse. And if there's anything in the meantime, youse have only to let me know.'

Then he leaned forward and, looking up into Statia's face, said in a lower voice: ‘There was an Auxie patrol out on the roads this morning. If you see them coming …'

‘I know, I know,' Statia said. ‘Me Mammy have me warned about them.'

‘And so she should,' Simon Cafferty said. ‘You wouldn't
be the first person they left dead on the roads behind them. They're worse nor the Tans, them fellows.' And he spat on the ground in disgust at the thought of the foreigners.

Statia set out on the road home, glad to have the
business
end of things over with. By the time she got back her brothers would have started mooching around the house, wondering when their tea would be ready.

‘Oh well,' she said to the ass, ‘we had a bit of a day out anyhow. And the best bit is to come.'

She'd decided from the first to save her visit to the river for the return journey. She'd been tempted, on the way, by the cool-looking water clucking over the smooth stones, but she'd known that the business of the corn would weigh on her mind. Now, with the sack safe in the bed of the cart, she could relax. It would give the ass a rest, too, before the long haul up the Drop. That would make it all the easier to persuade him up. As the summer sun beat down, Statia found herself nearly dozing on the cart. Once when she'd sat with her feet in the Rasheen – on a day much like this one, come to think of it – a trout had come and nibbled curiously at her toes. The river was sniving with them at this time of year. Maybe it would happen again today. Her brothers, if something like that happened, would have tried to catch the fish; but Statia wouldn't dream of doing that, even though she loved a bit of fried trout. She'd often watched the fish stirring dreamily in the Rasheen, darting along or staying still with just the odd flip of their tails.
She'd envied them sometimes, with all day to dream. She could dream for a while herself, now.

She was coming up to the hump-backed bridge again when, above the rushing noise of the water, she heard the sound of approaching motors. She looked up towards the lip of Mulligan's Drop. The cab of a lorry appeared over the brow of the hill. Then the rest of the lorry came into view, looming from a great cloud of dust. It was a police tender, the back full of Auxiliaries. There was a Lewis gun mounted on the top of the cab, and an Auxie stood behind it with the ribbons of his Glengarry cap fluttering.

The tender came down the slope towards her, followed by another. They were both full of armed men. Statia's heart dropped even quicker than the lorries coming down the hill. She felt a cold fear in her belly at the sight of the dark, dusty uniforms.
Don't look at them
, she told herself.
Get down off the cart this minute and don't even look at them
. But it was hard to tear her eyes away from the lorries. They bristled with gunbarrels, dark and dangerous. They were like big hunting animals completely out of place in this quiet countryside. And when Statia did finally look away, staring towards the river for some familiar, comforting sight, she was shocked to see there a man she didn't know. He was standing up over his knees in the waters of the Rasheen near the bridge, and he was waving at her
frantically
. Statia, taken by surprise, stared at him. She frowned. The man waved both arms at her, as though hooshing her
back the way she'd come. What was he at? She –

The whole world dissolved in a big bang and a flash like the end of time. Statia was sure that she screamed, but she could hear nothing. She was flung, stunned, from the cart. She lay on her back in the dust of the road, dazed and
blinking
. When she looked around she could see hardly
anything
. It was as though she was in the middle of a cloud.

I'm blinded!
she thought.
Blinded altogether!

But she wasn't blinded. She really was in a cloud. The cloud was made of dust, she realised, as it thinned and
settled
. Dust and smoke. She could see the donkey now, still between the shafts of the cart but lying stretched out on the road with his mild eyes closed and his great head between his outflung forelegs. His back legs had buckled under him, and his rump was in the air. He looked like he was bowing down to the sight before him. And when Statia looked, that sight was surely strange enough to bow down to. There was a shimmering twinkle of lights from the Auxie tenders, which had come to a halt ahead of her, across the bridge. And the bridge …

Statia shook her head to clear it. There was a ringing in her ears, but no other sound. She stared ahead. The bridge over the Rasheen … she squinted at it, unsure of what she was seeing. The bridge hadn't entirely disappeared, but a great ragged chunk of it was simply
gone
.

A mine,
she told herself.
They mined the bridge!

She said this to herself almost calmly, but she was more
dazed than calm. She couldn't quite believe that any of this was real. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly, and in complete silence. She remembered the man in the river. She turned her head to look to where she'd seen him. The man was still there, but there were two other men standing with him now. They climbed up on the bank and were scrambling onto the roadway ahead of her. They were carrying rifles. As Statia watched, they lay down flat in the roadbed, sheltered by the amputated stump of the hump-backed bridge, and started firing their rifles towards the Auxiliary tenders. One of them – the man who'd been waving at her – turned and waved again. There was no mistaking his message this time: he was
telling
her to go away.

All of this took place in a world that for Statia was
absolutely
silent except for the ringing in her ears. She could still see the tenders, trapped between the blown bridge and the steep hill behind them. The rear one was still on the slope. The twinkle of lights that she'd seen still went on, and she realised finally that the lights were gunflashes. As she watched, the Auxies abandoned their tenders. They jumped out and lay in the road. But some of them stayed in the tenders. Those would be the dead. Statia looked back up at Mulligan's Drop. From the top of it she saw more flashes coming from the hedges and bushes. And still all was silent.

Statia tried to guess how many Auxies had been in the
tenders, but she couldn't. That they were in a very bad
position
, whatever their numbers, even she could see that. The foremost tender was only a few yards from the wrecked bridge. Its cab was burnt out and smoking, caught full-on by the explosion of the mine. The windscreen was gone, and a dark, burnt, motionless figure slumped over what was left of the steering wheel. The Auxies on the road were exposed to a raking fire from the high ground above them, and when Statia looked she saw more gunflashes coming from this side of the river.

She was still sitting beside the cart. There wasn't a stir out of the ass: he was either insensible or dead. His fall had dragged the cartshafts down till their front ends were on the ground, so that the back of the cart itself stood raised to the sky. Statia put a hand out and rested it on the cart, to push herself up. Something smacked into the wood a couple of inches from her fingers. She stared, puzzled. It happened again, even closer to her hand this time. A big splinter of wood flew from the cart, raking the back of her hand in its passing. Blood welled in the long, shallow scrape. Suddenly understanding, Statia jerked her hand off the wood as though from a hot pan. Those were bullets that were hitting the cart. Statia scrambled round the back of the near wheel and into the shelter of the cart's raised body. She curled into a ball and closed her eyes and listened to the ringing in her ears, suddenly glad of her deafness.

She'd no idea, afterwards, of how long she lay there. It
felt like forever, but it could have been no more than a few minutes. Gradually her hearing came back. She heard the storm of gunfire and the cries of shot men. She heard curses roared. The sounds were all mixed up with the endless clucking sound of the river, that sound which had always seemed peaceful to her before. More explosions came – grenades or bombs, she guessed – and more screams. One scream in particular went on and on, like the sound of the river itself. It was an endless wail that spoke of an agony Statia didn't even want to think about. Anybody feeling such pain should be dead – they'd be better off dead. But the wail just went on, rising and falling, endlessly.

They were feared men, the Auxies, and hated – more feared and hated than the Tans in a way, precisely because they had the discipline the Tans lacked. There was more cold cruelty in their acts, and more thought. But now as she listened to their cries Statia heard only the sound of the pain, and she wanted it only to stop. She covered her ears with her hands and she lay there, shivering, wanting to scream herself.

Go away!
she thought.
Go away, all of you, this minute!

They didn't go away. The intensity of the gunfire, though, did begin to lessen. Statia started to believe that it might even end. She didn't care who won, so long as it all stopped. But then there was a new sound, a sound she didn't notice at first over the diminished shooting. It was the sound of another motor. Suddenly the firing grew to a
fresh crescendo. A machinegun opened up, and there were repeated volleys of rifle fire. Bullets smacked off the ground around the cart, and off the cart itself. Statia heard a strange, animal whimpering. It came from very close by. For a moment she thought that it must be the ass; but she'd noticed a pool of blood growing around the still figure of the poor brute between the shafts, and she knew that the ass was dead. She realised that the sound was coming from herself. She tried to stop it, but she couldn't. Her mouth had become like a stranger's, beyond her control.

Running footsteps approached. Statia saw several sets of flying feet go by. One set stumbled, and a man fell full length on the road with his face only a couple of feet from her own, staring at her from wide-open eyes. His mouth was open too. He had long yellow teeth, and several of them were missing. With his wide eyes and his open mouth, he seemed almost to be laughing. But there was no life in his eyes, and she realised he was dead. He wasn't an Auxie. His cap lay in the roadway, and the rifle that had dropped from his hand. Someone came and picked up the rifle, then ran on. The dead man lay grinning at Statia, like someone who'd been frozen in the act of playing ‘peep' with her.

Peep!
said the dead man's grin.
I sees you there.

Statia stared at the man's face for a very long moment, at the wide, staring eyes, dead and cold, like a fish staring back at her. Then she shrieked and scrabbled out from under the cart. She crouched there like an animal on the open road,
whimpering, then risked a look up towards the scene of the ambush.

At the brow of Mulligan's Drop she saw the cab of another Auxiliary tender. A Lewis gun on its roof was
sending
burst after burst of machinegun fire into the hedges lining the roadway down the Drop, and into the fields on either side. Lumps were flying off the hedges, and puffs of dirt spitting out of the ground. Dark-uniformed men were already in the fields, shouting and shooting. At the foot of the hill, the surviving Auxies from the first two tenders had regrouped. Some of them, she saw, were making for the river, to ford it. There was no sign of any answering gunfire. The attackers had cut and run: they'd been taken by surprise, and ambushed in their turn. A few of them lay dead or wounded in the field and on the road. She saw an Auxie with a pistol standing over one wounded man. As Statia watched, the Auxie reached out the pistol carefully and shot the man in the head.

Statia stared goggle-eyed at the scene across the bridge. The hedges were blackened and burning, the very road stained with blood and oil and black, twisted wreckage from the burning tenders. There were no birds singing now. She realised that the wailing man, whether ambusher or Auxie, had stopped his noise – dead now, no doubt, and probably glad of it. The ambush was over: her wish had come true.

Then a bullet tore a great gouge in the side of the cart
near her face. She saw it happen even before she heard the shot. When she looked she saw the Auxie who'd fired. He was standing in the middle of the river, in almost the same spot where she'd first seen the ambusher only a little while before. The Auxie was still pointing his rifle at her, and she saw several others raise their weapons too. This was not a wild shot, she realised: the man had quite deliberately fired at her. He had meant for her, Statia, to die.

They're going to kill me
, she thought.
They think I was in on it, and they're going to kill me
.

It was the last straw. Her brain froze. Her stomach clenched. Pure animal fear drove her scrambling across the road and over the ditch. None of the Auxies had reached this bank of the river yet. They were moving carefully, wary of ambushers who might still lie in wait. Statia didn't move warily at all. She fled pell mell over ditches and stiles, through stands of trees and thorny hedges, down narrow, twisting, half-overgrown lanes between fields. She had no plan beyond putting as much distance as possible between herself and the ambush scene, and even to say that she planned that was wrong: she fled as any other animal might, the last vestiges of her sense cracked by the thought that these frightening men meant to take her life.