The model village

The space between the two sets of watch towers was an uneven no-man’s Land of stubble grass swept every few minutes by powerful searchlights. In the towers guards crouched over machine guns, on one side the guns had been paid for by the Americans, on the other by the Chinese; in both cases cold eyes squinted tirelessly through cross-hairs watching for the slightest movement.

Two minutes of inky shadow followed each sweep of the searchlights, after crawling under the wire someone he had never met had dies to cut for his escape the agent followed the track of shadow, running frantically to cover ground during brief spells of darkness; hugging his form into some inadequate defile during an eternity of brutal brightness. All the time fear writhed and twisted inside him like a knot of snakes.

Darkness again; up, run; try to beat the coming of the light and if he failed and was caught by the searchlight’s pitiless monocular glare one more unknown death in an undeclared war. The agent got to his feet, he had timed his run wrongly by a micro-second, the searchlight swung frantically to try and catch his zigzag course, in the tower a voice shouted a hoarse word of command; gunfire rattled out into the night. In the tower on the other side of the boarder someone returned fire; as he ran it was impossible for the agent to distinguish between the hammering of the machine guns and that of his own heart.

*

Jamie knew that he shouldn’t be in the park, shouldn’t have crossed the road on his own even though it was mid afternoon and there was little traffic; shouldn’t in fact have left the garden at all. By the age of ten he had already learnt from experience that his would be a life defined by what other people told him he shouldn’t do.

He looked back at the semi-detached houses on the other side of the street; the bedroom curtains in number twenty six were still closed. Jamie felt relieved that it didn’t frame the anxious face of his mother, she was still ‘lying down’ and wouldn’t be worried by the endless dangers she though stalked her only child. He walked quickly through the gates of the park losing himself in the cave like shadow cast by two huge rhododendron bushes.

*

The big cat moved through the jungle with liquid grace, each of its hyper-tuned senses alive to the slightest change in its surroundings. As it moved the cat made almost no sound; the black ghost was walking abroad and soon it would feed.

The smallest of sounds, maybe the crack of a twig under an unwary foot caught its attention, the cat paused and narrowed its cruel almond shaped eyes, its prey was close at hand. The cat’s muscles tensed, its senses hummed with energy, a killing machine perfected by thousands of years of evolution was about to spring into action.

*

The game broke into fragments almost before it had begun just as it always did because Jamie only had himself to play with. He stepped out of the patch of weeds onto a football pitch that had been churned into a moonscape of dried mud between the two goals. It was only a football, a deflated one lying forgotten and useless in the grass; nobody could make a game out of that.

The cuffs of his jeans and the toes of his new trainers were covered with grass stains; Jamie looked down at them and thought about trouble. The sort of trouble of the sort that would involve his mother shouting and then hours where the house filled up with angry silence as they waited for his father to come home so the shouting could start again.

That was the second worst sort of trouble, the worst sort; the very worst sort was going to school. His mother didn’t want him to go to the school in the town, to any school in fact. It was too far away, the children were too rough, their parents worked in factories or didn’t work at all; anyway he was ‘delicate’ and the other boys would pick on him if he were exposed to their company. There had been more shouting about school, but there was no alternative, or no money anyway to send him to a better school; money, Jamie had learnt early on, was the name adults gave to trouble.

At this time of day the park was an empty expanse of grass and grey paths fringed by rustling trees and traffic noise. It was, he knew, forbidden territory and yet nothing about being there excited him. This, Jamie thought with a sudden flash of clarity, was what it must be like to be grown up, forever struggling to get somewhere only to feel disappointed by what you found when you got there.

Walking slowly he followed a path that ran around the far edge of the park and then climbed a flight of crumbling steps up to a raised area. Here two rusty wrought iron fountains poked up through the grass, their shape made them look just like…..

*

Radar had tracked the spacecraft to their landing site; nobody knew where they had come from, now the entire world looked on in fear and wonder as they sat on the stony ground humming with menacing strangeness.

“We’ve formed a cordon to hold back the press for now”, said the soldier, it was a cold day in November but he was sweating nervously.

“Good work soldier,” said Doctor Forbes, “Tell your men to hold their fire we don’t want to provoke whatever’s in there.”

“Do you think they’re hostile?”

“I sure as hell hope not.”

Dr Forbes stepped through the cordon and walked slowly towards the alien craft, even though its sheer surface showed no sign of any aperture he felt certain that his every move was being watched. Very slowly he raised his hands palm outwards to show that he was unarmed.

*

“Freak!”

The sudden shout accompanied by a hard push in the back made Jamie stumble forwards; as he did so he was, shamefully, aware of screaming like a girl. This more than the pain of landing on the ground or the laughter of the bigger boy who had pushed him as he rode past on a mountain bike made his eyes prickle with tears. The spacecraft had turned back into a stupid rusty fountain; a stupid fountain in a stupid park in a world full of stupid people.

Tasting salty, shaming tears with every step Jamie followed first one path and then another; walking aimlessly as he tried to tie himself in knots with his own footsteps on the way to nowhere much. No that wasn’t right; he was going somewhere, to the model village in the far corner of the park.

It was located next to a playground where little kids; littler than him anyway, messed about in the sand on sunny days. Today wasn’t sunny and the playground was empty, the only playing was being done by the wind as it listlessly moved the chains of the swings and shifted old chip papers about under the climbing frame.

The model village was screened off on two sides by neatly clipped privet hedges and on a third by a miniature earthwork covered over with turf. Jamie stood on top of this like a giant in the story book his mother used to read to him from before she started being so tired all the time, he felt a sudden rush of anger.

He hated the model village. The way it pretended to be alive and that being alive always meant that everything was ok. The vicar would always be standing by the church door welcoming his flock into a month of Sundays; the butcher stood in the doorway of his shop fat arms covered with dried blood folded over his belly and around the green with its stocks and duck pond there were cottages with thatched roofs and roses around the door where people who never shouted or stayed in bed crying all day lived.

*

Jamie hated all these things, but what he hated most, more than anything else, was THE FAMILY. The mother and father who stood by the green holding the hands of their only son and heir, he hated them more than all the other figures in the model village because only they had voices.

“The boy is growing up soft with you hovering over him all the time,” the father’s voice loud and angry.
“He isn’t like the other boys; he’s sensitive,” the mother, her voice was higher pitched and always sounded on the edge of tears.

“He needs to learn to stand on his own two feet.”

“He’s all I’ve got; you’ve no right to take him away from me.”

“The boy needs an education, he needs to grow up, do you want him to be a baby forever?”

“I don’t want him to be turned into someone like you; a monster!”

“Oh for god’s sake stop snivelling…”

The voices went round and round getting faster and angrier all the time like voices on an old fashioned tape recorder running too fast. At last all the words ran together into a loop of angry white noise.

*

The creature came at dawn, a mountain of scaly flesh with waterfalls cascading down its flanks as it climbed out of the river and opened its huge jaws in a bellow of rage. On the shore the soldiers waited, hold your fire men; let this thing get into range then; fire!

A sudden storm of fire and steel, the horrific mad symphony of tanks and howitzers and countless machine guns all firing at once, the sky turned red as fighter jets screamed in to pour napalm down on the creature. It had no effect, the creature swiped away at the jets and helicopter gun ships swarming around its head as if they were insects, the wall of firepower glanced off its immense flanks like wind off the side of a mountain.

On and on the creature came, pushing buildings over in its path, stamping others flat. As it crossed the river the creature swiped aside a suspension bridge tumbling cars filled with people trying to flee the city into the water.

The last radio message sent from the city was a voice raw with terror saying: “Nothing stops this thing; for gods sake tell Washington to launch….”, then there was only the angry buzz of static.

*

“Hate them!” “Hate them!” Hate them!”

Jamie stopped shouting suddenly and listened as the echo of his voice faded into nothing. He felt cold and shivery, like he had a fever that made his muscles tremble uncontrollably.

He looked around him; the model village was in ruins. The spire of the church had been pushed over and the roofs of the cottages around the green had been stamped in. Jamie looked down, even though he knew already what he would see; the family, father, mother and their son and heir had been ground into dust.

Jamie looked over to the far off ring of trees that screened the park from the road; the traffic noise seemed to have melded together into the purposeful drone of powerful engines attached to shining wings bringing the worst trouble of all inexorably closer.