2
They came to the wire. It stretched and weaved away to right and left. Reinforced mesh, with razor coils on top.
Fran stood there on the footpath, staring blankly through the fence. There was an empty road beyond it; then a vast expanse of grass. In the hazy middle distance, a scattering of buildings basked – smooth-backed, like concrete whales.
Her fingers closed on Lyn’s: so tightly that she feared they might do damage. But the gesture was convulsive, and she couldn’t let them go. They’d linked hands coming up the hill from Heyford – Fran had wavered to a standstill when she saw the water-tower. It rose above the skyline like a scaffold.
‘Come on, now,’ Lyn had whispered. ‘You can do it.’
If she felt her knuckles popping now, her quiet voice didn’t show it. ‘Are those the hangars, then … ?’
Fran nodded once, like someone in a trance. The last time she’d been up here, the day had been as bright and hot as this one; but lamps had still been burning on those buildings – shimmering like day-stars through the haze. The quick reaction flight was lurking there: bombed-up, and ready to go.
Today, the lights were off again; the hangars seemed abandoned. An eerie silence hung across the base.
‘Ugly-looking things …’ Lyn murmured.
‘They called them TAB-Vees,’ Fran said; the term came back to her from nowhere. ‘Theatre Airbase Vulnerability Shelters.’ She nodded to herself; then pinched a smile. ‘I used to know all the jargon, you know. Proper little trainspotter, I was.’
‘But nothing’s in them now?’
Fran shook her head. ‘They’ve gone. They’ve all flown home …’ The hush was huge: unnatural. Her inner ear recalled that disembodied rumbling in the air, when the hangars had been open, the aircraft on the prowl. Turning, she studied the empty sky – half-expecting to see a light in the distance: a bright, approaching star. A roaring bomber coming in to land.
A cloud obscured the sun. Its shadow slid across them, the green fields greying out – and she found herself right back where she had started.
It had been an overcast day, that Saturday in autumn ’88. She could almost smell the damp October air; the thinning veil of mist along the fence-line. The bitter tang of jet-fuel as the planes came screaming in.
She watched them land, like hungry iron hawks. The camouflaged ones were bombers, she was told: F-IIIs that could carry nuclear loads. They were followed down by others, grey as ghosts. Those were the Ravens, someone said: the radar-jamming planes.
Ravens. It had struck her, though she couldn’t quite say why; the weirdness of the choice of name, perhaps. Sinister, portentous – but a raven’s coat was black. These grey things came like spirits: like pallid spectres of their former selves …
Her fingers loosened; Lyn’s hand slipped away. And Lyn could only hover, like an anxious hanger-on. Excluded by the memories of things she hadn’t shared.
‘What are you seeing, Fran … ?’ she almost whispered.
But Fran didn’t answer; her mind was too full of restless ghosts.
Of Ravens.
3
It had still been Freshers’ Week when Paul had knocked on her door; she hadn’t even got her posters up. The societies were recruiting fit to bust, of course; she’d seen the cross on his lapel, and guessed what he was selling.
‘Would I be right in thinking you’re a Christian?’ he’d said, after a brief, polite preamble.
‘Well …’ Fran said, and felt a bit evasive. It was true she’d shopped around at the Freshers’ Fair. The Student Christian Movement had intrigued her; she rather liked their radical approach. But the college branch of Greenpeace was the only one she’d joined. She classed herself as C of E, but hadn’t been to church for quite a while. A charismatic-slanted group at school had sucked her in, bolstering her final year with happy-clappy pap; but in pulling up her roots to come here, she’d set herself adrift on that score too. Simplicity had brought no satisfaction: If God gave me brains, why won’t you let me use them? Right now, she wasn’t sure what she believed.
And now this pleasant second-year was trying to tempt her back. Whichever group he spoke for, they were doubtless keen on choruses and earnest Bible study. She shifted with discomfort at the thought.
‘I’m still deciding at the moment,’ she said carefully.
Paul gestured, smiling. ‘Fair enough. But me and some friends are going on a sort of religious outing on Saturday, and I wondered if you’d maybe like to come … ?’
Fran hesitated. ‘Going where?’
‘To Upper Heyford airbase,’ Paul said softly. ‘A place that needs to hear the Word of Life.’
Now that, she’d told him afterwards, was what I call a religious outing.
The base had been the scene of a national demo; the Christian groups had gathered at Gate 8. Walking down the track towards it, the sight of those sombre, vaulted hangars so close to the fence had given her a chill. A brooding sense of threat hung all about them. Paul told her that the bombs were stored elsewhere, but it felt like one was ticking in each building.
The service, in their shadow, was more stirring than she’d dreamed. She’d listened to the speakers, and joined in with the songs; shared the Peace with total strangers; hugged Paul tight. As people breached the wire and got arrested, she’d clung to the fence and shouted her support.
It was a rainbow congregation, lively and colourful; but most of all she remembered the Dominicans, in their solemn cloaks, and their banner behind them: a black dog running, with a firebrand in its jaws.
Paul had led her on down the perimeter path; taught her the difference between Blazer patrol trucks and Hummvee armoured cars (while one of the latter paced them, like a hunchbacked iron toad). An impromptu Mass was being held near the Peace Camp. Paul, being a Methodist, hung back – but Fran went and knelt at the roadside, to take a torn-off piece of Tesco’s Sliced, and sip from the chipped cup of wine. And all the time, beyond the fence, the planes were prowling past, their tailfin beacons pulsing bloody red.
They’d hung around in the waning afternoon, until the people who’d been arrested were finally released. Then one of the Oxford groups invited them back for a social at someone’s house. It lasted late into the evening, and she’d loved it: food and drink and dry good humour, ending up with some decidedly secular songs. She sang along delightedly with those; but the melody that stayed in her buzzing head was one she’d heard at Heyford’s iron gates. The people who stumbled in darkness, their eyes have seen the light…
4
And those who sit in the deepest pit: on them has the day dawned bright.
She ran the lines through her mind again – worrying each word like a Rosary bead; but the gloom was deep and glutinous inside her. There was just that pale, thin gleam on the horizon.
‘How do you
