Darkness Visible Read Free Page A

ringing, perhaps unnecessarily.
    It was the dimmest of the firemen who expressed the general feeling.
    “Poor little bugger.”
    All at once they were talking to each other enthusiastically about how incredible it was, a kid walking out of the fire like that, stark naked, burnt but going on, steadily making his way towards a glimpse of safety—
    “Plucky little bugger! Didn’t lose his head.”
    “They do wonders now. Look at them pilots. Getting faces as good as new they say.”
    “He might be a bit shrivelled like, down the left side.”
    “Thank Christ my kids are out of it. And the missus.”
    The bookseller was saying nothing and seemed to be staring at nothing. There was a memory flickering on the edge of his mind and he could not get it further in where it could be examined; and he was also remembering the moment when the child had appeared, seeming to his weak sight to be perhaps not entirely there—to be in a state of, as it were, indecision as to whether he was a human shape or merely a bit of flickering brightness. Was it the Apocalypse? Nothing could be more apocalyptic than a world so ferociously consumed. But he could not quite remember. Then he was deflected by the sounds of the musician being sick.
    The captain had turned back to the fire. He looked down a street that in the event had proved neither as hot as they supposed nor as dangerous. He jerked his attention away from it and back to the machine.
    “Well. What are we waiting for? They’ll want to tow us if we can be towed. Mason, try the steering and see if you can free it. Wells, come out of that trance! Start tracing the brake lines—quickly now and cheerfully!”
    Under the machine, Wells swore horribly and profoundly.
    “Now then Wells, you’re paid to get your hands dirty.”
    “The oil went straight into me fucking mouth!”
    A burst of sniggering—
    “Teach you to keep your mouth shut!”
    “What’s it taste like, Wellsy?”
    “Can’t be worse’n the canteen!”
    “All right lads, turn it up. We don’t want the breakdowns to do our work for us do we?”
    The captain turned back to the fire. He looked at the new crater half-way down the road. He saw quite clearly in a kind of interior geometry of this and this and that and that how things had been and how they might have been and where he would have been running if he had set off at the very first moment he had realized the child was there and needed help. He would have run straight into the space where now there was nothing but a hole. He would have run into the explosion and he would have disappeared.
    There was the clatter of a part falling under the machine and another burst of cursing from Wells. The captain hardly heard it. The skin had seemed to freeze on his body. He shut his eyes and for some sort of time saw that he was dead or felt that he was dead; and then that he was alive, only the screen that conceals the workings of things had shuddered and moved. Then his eyes were open again and the night was as normal as that kind of night could ever be, and he knew what the frost was on his skin and he thought to himself with the cunning immediacy that was part of his nature that it just didn’t do to examine such things too closely and anyway the little chap would have suffered just as much and anyway—
    He turned back to his own smashed machine and saw that the tow was coming. He came, silent and filled in an extraordinary way with grief, not for the maimed child but for himself, a maimed creature whose mind had touched for once on the nature of things. His chin was quivering again.
     
    The child was called number seven. After the kind of holding operations that had to be performed while he recovered from shock, number seven was the first present he got from the world outside him. There was some small doubt as to whether his silence was organic or not. He could hear, even with the ghastly fragment of ear on his left side, and the swelling round his eyes soon subsided