The Dynamite Room Read online

  “Don’t look,” Heiden said. “Come on, we need to get the water and leave.”

  “No,” she said. She wiped at her eyes. “No, I want to go back. I want to go now. What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Has someone shot him? Did someone shoot him?”

  He bent down beside the body and carefully turned it over. He studied it for a moment, then stood up again. “He’s had his throat cut,” he told her. “Come on now, we need to get the water.”

  But she was already pushing her way through the ferns and running, stumbling, back towards Greyfriars.

  He called out as he chased after her, suddenly, surprisingly, using her name. “Lydia!” he yelled. “Lydia, stop!” But Lydia would not.

  She watched him sitting at the window, peering through the slit in the blackout fabric with pistol in hand. He’d been there for half an hour already and he hadn’t moved, not even to stretch a muscle or relieve some cramp. He wasn’t human. He was something else, made by German scientists. He looked like flesh and blood, she thought, but inside he was mechanical. He’d said himself that he could shoot a moving target at fifty yards. He probably had X-ray vision.

  He’d easily caught up with her in the wood, abandoning the buckets as he ran after her so that now they too were lost.

  “Now do you see why you mustn’t leave the house?” he had said. “They are all around us. We have to be more careful.”

  And, indeed, he had even thought he’d seen a figure—a man in uniform, he had said—disappearing around the side of Greyfriars as they had returned through the wood to the house and were almost setting out across the lawn. He had made her wait, hidden way back in the trees, whilst he had gone to investigate, but after several minutes he had come back saying that it was nothing. And she wondered whether he was telling the truth, or whether there really had been someone snooping about, a German or a Brit.

  Sitting in the dark again, she felt as if she’d been thrown back into her cage. She had cried herself out so that now her stomach hurt, all the muscles in her aching as if every organ was clenched and clasped tight. She kept seeing the dead body and those blackened fingertips. So Heiden had been right—there were men stalking through the trees; men with guns and knives who slit people’s throats, men perhaps even coming right up to the house, up to the door and trying the handle, trying to see if anyone was there.

  She now knew what Mr. Morton meant when he had said Britain was under siege. All the thrill and adventure of war that she’d dreamed of had emptied away. It was terrifying and lonely, and she wanted it to stop.

  The leather squeaked as she hauled herself up in the chair again, but still he didn’t turn from the window. Now that she knew that they had no water and no hope of getting any soon, she was desperately thirsty. Every time she tried to swallow her throat seemed to stick together as if she was drying up inside. Something else had been playing on her mind too since they’d got back.

  “You said my name,” she told him. “When you ran after me. I heard you.”

  He stayed quite rigid, staring through the slit at the window.

  “I heard you,” she blurted. “You shouted at me to stop. You shouted, ‘Lydia.’ How did you know that’s my name?”

  “You must have told me,” he said.

  “I didn’t.” She was quite sure.

  But he still didn’t move. She could feel the heat of the leather seat melting into her, her skin sticking to it.

  “Perhaps I read it somewhere,” he said without turning.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. It was on the story, the one I gave back to you, that I found. It had your name on it.”

  She quietly slid it out from under her cardigan, turning the little homemade book over in her hands, but it was just as she suspected: her name was not on it anywhere.

  For most of the time they sat in silence, one of them occasionally feeding the fire with the last bits of twig and stick they could find about the floor or moving to the window to watch the snow hurl itself against the pane.

  Once, coming out of a dream, he had woken to find Bürckel sleeping wrapped around him, his arm around Heiden’s waist and head nuzzled into him. He didn’t move the boy away. Instead, in the darkness, there was some comfort in his warmth, in the smell of the boy’s hair pushed up against his face, and his soft hushing breath blowing against his neck. When he looked out across the room he saw the whites of Pendell’s eyes, watching.

  Who will you go home to? Pendell asked. When all of this is over.

  Me?

  Yes. Do you have a wife? A young lady? Children?

  Heiden didn’t answer.

  I have a family. I have a wife and two children. My son thinks this war is an adventure, Pendell said. Is that what this is? This generation’s great adventure? Everybody wants to be a bloody hero. But heroes don’t often come home, do they? They disappear. They leave a hole. When my daughter knows I’m coming home she sits on the stairs and waits for me. She’s almost twelve years old and yet she still sits and waits. I think about her all the time, her sitting there on the stairs.

  Why are you telling me this? said Heiden. Do you think I care? You know, my comrade wanted to kill you.

  Pendell nodded.

  But I stopped him.

  Yes. I know.

  He’ll keep trying, Heiden said. He’ll keep saying that we should shoot you. And I will have to keep stopping him. Every time I will have to stop him—do you understand?—until one of us wears the other down.

  I’m not asking to be saved or spared, said the man. I’m just telling you that I have someone waiting for me and that at some stage—God willing—I would like to see them again. Is that too much to ask?

  That will be down to God, said Heiden, if it’s “God willing.”

  He wished now that there had been more conversation in that dynamite room; it might have whiled away the hours faster, kept their minds off the cold and hunger. Instead, it was mostly silence as they sat facing each other, their backs against the walls. He never had been able to bear the silence. He needed to fill it with rhythms, tapping them out with his fingers.

  The man Pendell intrigued him. He seemed to have no fear of Heiden’s stare, or of the pistol that was trained on him. Heiden had studied the way he sat: one leg up, an arm draped over its knee, gently rubbing circles around the tip of his thumb with his finger, and head slightly tilted as if considering Heiden but only ever with the very vaguest interest. Heiden amused himself mimicking the man’s moves: the way he sucked his bottom lip in and softly chewed on it, the gentle cough he would occasionally make deep in his throat, or the way he drew his finger along his top lip as if it were a new discovery, the chapped and peeling skin. It was a game that Heiden had played as a child, secretly mimicking strangers and playing copycat. Finger and thumb rub together. Head tilts, a gentle cough; the very vaguest hint of interest.

  His mouth still tasted sweet. He and the girl, Lydia, had cracked open a Kilner jar of preserved pears and had shared the juice, just like they’d shared the tinned peach juice in the dynamite room in Norway; but now in the house, and without water, he was thirsty again. He could hear her skulking around the rooms upstairs. He couldn’t think what to tell her about the body—an unfortunate discovery. Nor had he told her what he’d seen in the distance, through his binoculars across the marshes—lines of tents along the shore and people running. He would of course have to go back for water, but he couldn’t risk it, not yet. If they were coming, let them come. Let them put a bullet through him. He needed to be watchful. He needed to wait for Diederich.

  In the attic she stood on her tiptoes and peered through the window. Small, white clouds languished in the sky, their shadows drifting slowly over the cornfields. Looking out across the empty fields reminded her of the nature studies classes they had in Wales—Miss Mountford taking them out over the fields, where they’d sit on sacks of straw and learn about photosynthesis and pol
lination and the different types of cloud. Sometimes they went high up into the hills.

  It’s not like Suffolk, is it, one of them had said.

  No, it’s not, said Miss Mountford. But it’s jolly nice, isn’t it? Look at all the colors.

  Lydia had never noticed them before, all the tones of the Welsh stone, purples and blues and greens and grays, the shadows of the clouds passing over them like great flotillas of ships.

  The soldier appeared from her father’s work shed with a wrench in his hand. She had watched him earlier standing at the edge of the garden peeing into the hydrangeas. There wasn’t any water to flush the toilet, and even the stench of her own pee still in the toilet bowl made her stomach turn.

  From the tiny attic window the only sign of life was the scarecrow at Heathcote Farm, dressed as Mr. Hitler with a sagging sandbag for his head and a trench coat full of holes and nesting mice.

  She lowered herself from the window. She could hear him banging around in the kitchen, the clank of him hitting pipes. All that was left in the house to drink now was her father’s home brew, and not even her father had been keen on that. Heiden would fix it, he had told her—she didn’t need to worry—but downstairs she could still hear him banging.

  The man Harris woke up coughing. Bürckel offered him his canteen and the Englishman took a sip and handed it back. He had been deteriorating for some hours now, drifting in and out of consciousness and then jerking awake. On more than one occasion when Heiden had been bent over him, the man had grabbed at his arm, saying, George, George—

  I’m not George, Heiden said, pulling his hand free, and then the man called Pendell had gone to him and had given him some water or held his hand or simply said, Yes. Yes, I’m here.

  He watched Gruber in the snow as he stripped the clothes from the dead boy. He struggled with the body’s dead weight, hauling it about as if it were a sack of corn, unbuttoning the shirt and dragging it off the shoulders and down over the arms, then unbuckling the belt, dragging the trousers off as well as the body lay on its back. He even took the socks and underwear, stripping the body completely clean. Then he gathered the clothes up in his arms and, with the boy’s boots swinging at his side, he trudged back up to the store, leaving the body sprawled out at an awkward angle, porcelain white in the snow. And Heiden had done nothing.

  It was easy to hate people in war, far easier than loving. He found it easy to hate Gruber, for example, for thinking Heiden a coward for not shooting the English officers or throwing them out in the snow; or for wasting matches, sitting beneath the window, striking them against the floor, and then blowing them out and flicking them across the room so that they bounced off Pendell’s coat or caused sparks in the corner where there was still dynamite dust on the floor.

  We’ve another box, he said when Heiden wanted to know what he was doing.

  We don’t know how long we’re going to be here.

  Not much longer, I hope. These Tommy sailors are boring the hell out of me.

  Even the way he called Heiden “Lance Corporal” had a tinge of sarcastic resentment. He seemed intent on making everything difficult, challenging everything Heiden said so that they ended up bickering like children, chipping away at each other.

  The man called Harris sat half-twisted against the wall as if he wanted to become part of it, the mortar to become his flesh, his face whitening, his bones turning to stone, his skin turning to dust. Pendell was silent at the window, sucking at one of the spent matches Gruber had tossed at him. He stood quite firm, legs spaced and solid, his arms folded and mittened hands pressed into his armpits, as if he were waiting for nothing more than for the storm to stop before he went on his way.

  There was little left in the store to burn and all of them were starting to freeze. Heiden had been out in the storm with Bürckel, but the firewood they had brought in had been too sodden to do anything but smoke. He sent Bürckel out again anyway.

  I’ll freeze out there.

  You’ll freeze in here, said Heiden.

  Yes, stop being such a baby, said Gruber.

  Outside the store it had grown dark again. The storm blew and blasted against the walls, whistling in through a hole in the roof. Gruber bent over his boot, trying to work out how best to position a flattened piece of matchbox and keep it in place so that it covered the split in the boot’s sole. He fumbled irritably with it. He had tried the dead boy’s boots on for size, but they had been too small and were split even worse than his.

  Eventually Bürckel came back in shivering. He tossed an armful of frosted sticks on the floor and, without saying anything, went into the annex room and took his turn to sleep.

  Let’s make bets as to which one of us gets pneumonia first, said Gruber. My bet’s on him. If we’re reduced to eating each other he’ll barely be a meal.

  Heiden ignored him. He shut his eyes to it all and leaned against the cold wall, holding Eva’s letters in his hand. I miss you. I love you. I think about you every night. Perhaps if he could imagine her still being in Berlin she would still be there. Perhaps she was still waiting for him—sitting on the bench of the hospital garden, waiting for him to come down the drive and take her home. Or maybe it was her and not the two nurses that he remembered passing through the double doors of the institute, Eva turning to look back at him, Eva raising her hand in a half wave, before she goes through and the doors slip silently shut behind her. I miss you. I love you. I—

  The boot hit him in the chest. For God’s sake, stop it! That infernal tapping!

  He looked at Gruber, tossed the boot back, and went to the window where Pendell was still sucking the match and staring out into the dark. For a time they both stood there, watching, two faces in the glass. Then Pendell pulled the match from his mouth.

  Can I borrow your knife?

  Heiden glanced at him and laughed. You want my knife?

  Yes. Don’t you trust me?

  Heiden laughed again, nervously this time, then looked at the man more closely, trying to see something in those calm eyes. Then he took his knife from his belt, unsheathed it, and laid it on the ledge. Pendell picked it up and turned it in his hands, running his finger along the flat of the blade and studying the tip; then, taking hold of the head of the match, he made three precise incisions in it and handed the knife back.

  Is that it? said Heiden.

  He watched as the man slowly prized open the slits he’d made in the matchstick, shaping it into something new. Then Pendell glanced at him and smiled. What were you expecting? A blade in the ribs perhaps?

  She could hear the man moving about downstairs—an animal with a wound where someone had already tried to hunt him down. She wondered if she could love him, if everyone else was dead and she had no choice. She would have to learn to cook, and they would tend to the vegetable patch and put the garden in order. New chickens. A new Jeremiah. Maybe even a new name for the house—The Lair. War, if it lasted long enough, would eventually turn her into a woman. And he would make her love him as if it were a spell.

  She sat in Alfie’s bedroom and waited but Alfie didn’t come. She had seen something all those months ago as he stood in the arms of the tree in his cricket whites: he had looked like an angel. She knew that he would protect her. And so, here in his room, she waited, slowly turning the button on her cardigan round and around, and shutting her eyes so perhaps he might appear. But there was no sign of him. She looked everywhere for a feather, a clue that he had been there, that he would come back—along the windowsill, under the bed, behind the backs of the books on the shelf—but there was nothing there.

  She sat on his bed, her hand gently smoothing down the blanket where he used to lie. She thought she had heard his voice, just once, that morning. Lydia, it said.

  She closed her eyes and saw him in the garden with Eddie bowling a few overs. The twack of their grandfather’s cricket bat. The ball wedging itself into a tree. Eddie running with him across the lawn on his shoulders, and them falling and laughing and tusslin
g on the lawn until Alfie was sprawled on top of him, pinning Eddie’s arms down and shouting, Submit, submit! Then she was struck with a memory, quite clear and sudden now in her head, of Eddie straining his head up and kissing her brother, there—quite purposefully—on the lips. And Alfie had let him: a kiss that had lasted no more than a moment, and yet, in that moment, before he turned his head and caught her eye, Alfie seemed to forget entirely where he was or that Lydia was even there.

  Can I tell you something? A secret.

  The whisper was there in his ear; a sudden draft of sound, Bürckel’s soft voice. Around them the others slept. The room was dark but for the faint glow of the fire and its occasional flitter of sparks, a fragment of explosive dust in the air suddenly igniting.

  Bürckel pulled himself closer until he was pressed against Heiden, his warm breath against the side of Heiden’s face.

  I’ve been thinking about it ever since we got here. I can’t get it out of my mind. You promise not to tell Gruber. You mustn’t tell him.

  Tell him what? said Heiden.

  The boy was paler than usual, his eyes wide and wet.

  What happened was my fault. I’m sure. I’m going mad with it, thinking about it. I’m quite sure it was me. I’m going to hell, aren’t I?

  What are you talking about?

  The shooting. In the clearing. It was me that started it, me that started firing first. It was my fault.

  Are you sure? said Heiden.

  No. I mean, I don’t know, said Bürckel. I think it might have been. It was. I mean, it must have been.

  Why must it?

  Because I was so scared. I was terrified.