The Armed Man

London was ash grey.

London was always ash grey; the dust never settled.
The HMRA were going to get me killed one day. I knew that much. With Jude gone they didn’t have a clue. I’ll tell you the truth, because if there isn’t truth, then what is the point of this book? There are only two things that exist in the world: fact and opinion. I’ll try to be the former.

Don’t blame me if I can’t.

To tell you the truth, I was getting bored of wandering around like we were making a difference and setting things on fire. I was tired of those mad, undercover dashes. I once even seriously considered burning my blue armband symbolically- and I would have done too, if they wouldn’t have killed me for it. Always on the lookout for rebels. Always on the lookout for revenge. It’s all they knew. I’m reluctant to blame them. These are dark times, and there’s no denying. It’s all too easy to lose your way.

I think I’d lost mine. I don’t think that I was even a Royalist. They were so forceful, the HMRA. I hadn’t asked to join them. They’d picked me up, one day, two of them. Decent ones, who only answered to their ‘codenames’.

The leader of the Royalist movement was called Charles, but no-one remembered much of him. I think you know why. His wife was called Victoria, but I hadn’t thought they’d all adopted monikers like that. These two were called Eadred and Ethelred. Two kings I’d never heard of. It turns out that the more powerful you get, the more well known your monarch becomes. Anyway, they took me back and fed me, which I was glad of. They introduced me to Jude, who we all knew as Edward at the time, after the boy king. Whoever had named him evidently thought that their sense of humour was better than it actually was. But Jude was decent enough. He looked after me.

I stopped. This had been a street, once. It was all rubble and broken glass now. No-one had meant for it to be so destructive. I think we all just lost control. It was the last thing we did as a nation.

They didn’t allow him a firing squad. They hanged him like a traitor.

There was a lot of glass around. It covered the road like dust. The only splash, the only vague splash of colour I’d seen all day was an old sign from the Underground, mangled with the rubble. It was easy to see why; one side of a shop had been blown completely outwards. One of the larger shards was glittering forlornly by my left foot, looking cold and lonely. Shivering, and trying not to expose too much of the back of my neck, I drew my coat over my hand and picked it up. My reflection caught in it for a moment. A boy looked back.
The starvation had made my eyes so big.

Trembling, I reached up and touched a cheekbone. It stuck out further than a cheekbone
should. I know I need to eat, I know I do, but there’s only one thing in plentiful supply at the moment, and I’m not eating that.

The glass was cold.

I pressed my cheek again, harder. Something cracked.

“Benedict?”

Gore Crow.

I turned around.

Edmund was half frozen in the act of climbing over a bit of wall, trying to balance. He was looking at me with a strange mixture of caution and polite interest. He’d noticed I’d gone. I felt a tiny rush of affection, under the annoyance that he’d come looking for me. He had a houseful of soldiers to look after. Why me?

“Where are you going?”

I was running away, really. I told you that I wasn’t brave. I couldn’t tell him that, of course, so I stared at him pathetically. It was a good day for a walk. The sky was so black that you couldn’t see anything.

“Nowhere” I said, but my voice cracked. I tried again. “Nowhere. I got bored of being inside.”

“You know it’s safer inside.”

Aesthetically, he was quite like Jude, you know. You had to get quite close to see that he wasn’t quite as tall, and his wavy hair didn’t have quite the same wild quality that Jude’s sometimes took on. Edmund was far too young. When Jude had died, he’d taken the reins and tried to steer us as best as he could. At twenty one he had none of his predecessor’s skill, oratory or charm. He didn’t have Jude’s organisation or pure bloody gall. He didn’t have the makings of a good leader, but, my God, did he try. He’d learnt all our birth names by heart.

“Come back with me, Benedict.” He held his right hand out, wobbling slightly on his bit of wall. He looked so endearingly pathetic that I just had to follow him.

“You’re not wearing your armband.” He said in a low voice as soon as I drew level with him. He sounded almost hurt.

Us Royalists like to keep in touch with each other. There were so many different chapters and groups and organisations that we all lost track. About eighteen months ago, Jude came falling through the door of our then safe house with a box that could easily have fitted my fourteen year old too-skinny self into it. There were hundreds of them in there, all royal blue. The leaders had a tiny, golden crown embroidered onto theirs. Edmund wore Jude’s now.

“Drawing attention to myself is probably not the wisest thing to do any more, Edmund.” I
looked at my feet as I negotiated the wreckage of a breeze block. “You saw what happened
last time.”

“But it wasn’t his fault.” Edmund said quietly. Everything about Edmund was quiet.

I looked at him and I really, really didn’t want him to cry. Edmund always looked so fragile, so on the brink of tears I felt my heart swoop when I looked at him. I can’t look at somebody cry without welling up. It’s because I’m weak. Edmund made me sad.

“Don’t cry.” I whispered.

We passed some graffiti. There’s graffiti everywhere now, on every square inch of anything that stands still long enough, but this was about ten feet tall. I tried to ignore it. Edmund looked on at the words ‘JUDE MCCULLOCK IS A LIAR’ wordlessly.

I’m not even going to attempt to count how many times I’d seen that sentence, or sentences like it, in my life. There were far too many. But every time I felt like the tiniest knife was being twisted in my gut. You probably know the feeling, when you hear a rumour about a friend or a brother. I felt offended for Jude. Edmund almost cried.

“I always wonder how they get up there.” I said feebly, just wanting his voice not to crack. I want to get him home. I want to get him home in one piece.

There was a silence that I wanted to end. I was so cold. I felt my hand starting to shiver slightly and clenched it into a fist, all the while looking at Edmund looking at the wall. After a few more terrible, dead moments and a whispered “They could at least have spelt his name right.”, he turned and walked away, more subdued, faster than usual. I almost stumbled to keep up with him.

Jude was quite a figurehead in his time, you see. He was only four years older than Edmund, and maybe it’s that he’d grown up in Northern Ireland, but he supported the cause so viciously it scared me at times. For every friend he made, he had twice as many enemies.
I suppose that’s bravery for you.

Edmund’s first action had been to move us out of our old hideout. It was becoming one of those secrets that everyone knew, and it would only get worse without Jude. I’m not pretending it wasn’t nice sometimes; getting letters through the door telling you how well you were doing. Don’t you dare give up. Fight, fight with us tooth and nail, don’t you dare give up. You can win this. That’s one of the reasons we stayed so long. It took a letterbomb taking off
William’s hands to finally persuade us to get out of there.

The new place was nicer, if less connotive. I touched the walls and cried when we left. Some old Georgian terrace, still almost all furnished. We found a bust of Lenin in one of the rooms, so Edward and I put a hat on it and hung it out a window for a joke. Someone had stolen it by the morning.

I looked sideways up at Edmund as he walked. There was the same age difference between him and I as there was between he and Jude.. He looked older than I remember, but maybe that was just the dust. And that the light in his eyes had gone out with the Beacon. I half considered asking him something.

You see, I never found out how my parents died. I assume that they are dead, because no-one’s seen hide nor hair of them for years. They haven’t tried to find me at all. My dad wasn’t a soldier- it was a young man’s war- but he was linked to the Royals. He liked them. He didn’t want them to go. I suppose that would make anyone else want to join them and their cause in the strangest sort of vengeance. Not me. You’re forgetting that I’m a coward. I want to run away and hide. I know how brutal these Gore Crows are.

“I’ve heard they’ve moved up from Gore Crows now.” I told Edmund to see if his face would change. “Someone said they’ve got entire bomb squads”.

“They’re the only ones still fighting this war.” He said in a dry, quiet voice. “The rest of us gave up a long time ago”.

The Beacon had a strange effect on Edmund. While it had only filled Jude with more anger than ever before (and believe me, he was pretty angry from the start), it had made Edmund more miserable. It meant that they were really gone.

The Beacon had gone under many names, and almost all of them included the word ‘Royal’ somewhere in the title. The Royalist Beacon, The Beacon of Royalist Defiance, Royalist Hope, Royalist Loyalty. It had burnt behind the palace gates for the best part of eighteen months, lit by the Prince himself as a rallying point. As long as it burnt, they said, we’d be together. As long as it burnt, we’d be united.

The night it went out, graffiti appeared across the front of the palace. Huge, twenty feet high, spider black letters. No one person could have done that. All the minor scribbles that the more daring artists had done before the barricade went up, and ‘THE KING IS DEAD’ shone out from where the Beacon had done. They’d armed the gate since then. Mercenaries. They shot anything that came within thirty feet.

It broke Edmund’s heart.

We were about to turn the corner into the road we were now living and he stopped. It was so sudden that it looked like someone had stopped him mid movement. I stared at him dumbly for a moment, before he looked up and his eyes met mine with the air of a man who had a lot to say, but wasn’t quite sure how to say it. I felt the air go cold. And in a voice that sounded like it took a lot of courage to muster, he said- “We’re discharging.”

Something felt very wrong.

He closed his eyes, looking devastated, gathered up the pieces and tried again. “We’re discharging, Benedict.” He looked so pained. “You, Michael. Jude’s gone, and we’re all going to end up like him sooner or later. Sooner. You can’t not have noticed that they’re getting more violent”.

“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to keep the nervous caution that was creeping up on me out of my voice. “What do you mean ‘discharging?”

I knew perfectly well, of course. I just wanted him to say it was all a dream.

“You’re sixteen, Benedict. Some are younger than that. I’ve decided-” He broke off, leant against the wall and closed his eyes. After a huge deep breath, he whispered “I’ve decided to let you go.”

“I won’t be sixteen forever.” I tested. “I’m seventeen in six months.”

I felt despair. I felt like something had been pulled out from underneath me with such savage force that I was wobbling and nobody would catch me when I fell. I never believed them. I’d never thought it was for the best, but I’d cried with them and fought with them and stayed by their side.

Oh God.

“I can’t lead this, Benedict.” Edmund sounded desperate. He just wanted to justify himself. He just wanted me not to hate him. “I can’t. Sooner or later, I’m going to get you all killed. And I don’t want you to be there when I do”.

“You’re-” I started, but he cut me off instantly.

“Don’t try and tell me that I’m wrong. This month alone, three people have died under my command. That’s two more than under Jude’s entire reign.”

He hesitated. The words ‘two more than necessary’ floated unspoken between us, like butterflies.

I knew I couldn’t deny this. Two days ago, two of our men had been blown up by a mine that they’d left in the middle of the road. Tommy. Kess. Three days into Edmund’s command, his own sister, Elizabeth had gone missing. They found her a week later, face up in the Thames.

Oh, he was right. They were the only ones till fighting this war.

I looked awkwardly down at the ground to the left of his foot, wishing there was something that I could say.

“I don’t want you to do anything. When we get back, I want you to go upstairs and pack your clothes and any weapons you might have. that you might have. Go to the armoury. As soon as you think you can leave without being seen, I want you to get the hell out of there. Don’t say anything to me, don’t talk to anyone. Just leave.”

My mouth was dry.

“When did you come up with this?” I asked him, finally. It came out so cracked I didn’t think it was my voice.

He sighed. “Last night. Last night when I should have been listening to Thomas snoring. We’re in way over our heads here, Benedict.”

“Where can I go?” I asked him weakly. I wanted to find a flaw. I wanted him to say I could stay with him forever. That’s all I ever wanted.

“I daresay you’ll find somewhere. I’ve heard the war orphanages aren’t too bad. You could find a job somewhere. Become an apprentice.”

We both knew that there were no apprenticeships going now.

“Look,” he started, “I’ve already sent the Powell brothers off. They’ll be well away by now. Michael’s leaving tonight, but I wouldn’t go with him. It’s best if we stagger it, it’ll look less suspicious.”

“You haven’t told anyone else about this, have you?”

He looked up at me with eyes that could have broken your heart. “No. But they’ll guess. Rats
always leave a sinking ship. Not that I’m calling you a rat.” He added hurriedly. “You’ve been one of our most valuable assets, Benedict. God knows we’ve all benefitted from you at least once.”

I smiled at him, more touched than I could ever let on, clapped my hand to his shoulder and gently pushed him onwards towards the house.

That’s how I ended up, nine hours later with nothing but a blanket, a pistol and the clothes on my back in a petrified heap at the bottom of the stairs, listening in a terrified way for footsteps. I couldn’t see very well in the dark. My head also hurt quite a lot. I half wondered- if I wasn’t caught and skinned alive first, that is- if I should sneak into the kitchen and pick up some plasters and paracetamol, but in the end I decided that it wouldn’t be fair. There was little enough for them already.

We slept, Ripley, Jonners and I, in one of the old parlour rooms. It was small, high ceilinged and hung with paintings that look alive in the half dark. In the corner nearest the only window facing out onto the street, there’s a chess table. It’s old, well made. The top lifts off on hinges and the pieces are stored inside, only there’s far fewer now than there were once upon a time. I had some nice memories of that table. When they were asleep, Jonners and Ripley, I shuffled over and looked at it in the half light. It glinted.

Some pieces were on the table, some were on the floor. Ripley and I had abandoned a game halfway through when we’d realised that neither of us were actually very good, and then I’d banged into it a few days ago. I teased a bishop with my toe. It rolled back to me.

I knelt down and picked it up. Perhaps it was because it was there, perhaps because it had banged against my foot so softly, perhaps I just wanted to take a some of barracks with me. It was white. I held it between my finger and my thumb, feeling its weight and pressures against my hand. I slipped it into my pocket then, and I was feeling it there now. I looked back at Ripley and Jonners, and I couldn’t stop thinking I’m going to regret this moment.

I wanted to say goodbye to all of them. I had a horrible, uncomfortable feeling that none of this would last much longer. I hoped with everything I had that Edmund was wrong. He’d been wrong before. It was only out of loyalty to him (and the fact that my knee hurt like buggery and I didn’t want to face those damn stairs in the dark ever again) that I didn’t just give up there and then and go back to bed. But he’d never have forgiven me.

When I finally got outside, the temperature there took my breath away. It was half past one, and only half the streetlights were working. Some weren’t even doing that, just blinking in a forlorn way and looking sorry for themselves. I was only in a cotton shirt.

Drawing my shoulders around me for what little warmth it could give, I looked back one last time at the place I’d called home for the past month. The people in it that I’d called family. I don’t know if it’s all still there now, you’d have to check. But if you do, say hello from me.

Twenty one of us left barracks that week. Some cried, some touched the walls. Only one looked back.

I had no idea where to go. I didn’t know London well. I knew that if I turned left enough times, I’d come to some sort of station, but I dread to think of who I’d find there. I walked on into the cold. I felt oddly awake, for someone that had been worrying about what on earth I was going to do since half four that afternoon. I was still no closer to answering that question. I kept seeing mercenaries, Gore Crows in the shadows. The road where Jude had found me was just ahead, but I had no idea what lay beyond it. I decided it was probably best I didn’t know. The other road took me back, the one to the right took me down to God knows where. For such a big city, I didn’t know London could be so limited. I chose the right, but eventually the cold got the better of me. I collapsed in the doorway of an old newsagent. The lights were long since out.

And that was my home for three days. Just that doorway with a blanket over it. Before long, I took to eating leaves. It was better than what everyone else was eating, anyway. It was so cold. The tiling was cold. The street floor was cold. The window was so cold I could have sworn that my cheek froze to it one night. The overhang was such an awkward size that when it rained, only half of me got wet. This, I could put up with, just about. As long as it didn’t freeze overnight, it was just about bearable. The worst part, the worst part by far of living on the street, was what you saw.

Whenever Crommies passed, I turned my face away and pretended to be asleep, praying to God that they didn’t recognise me. I must have looked like easy meat to them. One came so close once, at the very end of my stay there, that I could feel his breath in my hair. I was amazed that he couldn’t hear my heartbeat, because to me it felt to me that it would give out at any moment, it was beating so fast.

“He looks ill.” One of them said, one that wasn’t so close. “Do you think he’s still alive?”

“He’s breathing.”

“Shouldn’t we try and help him?”

My heart, that had been going so quickly not a moment before, stopped at that. I knew all too well exactly what would happen if you were picked up by an army. The prospect of raising a gun to Edmund’s head was just too horrible.

“And what could we do?” The one by my ear said. I tried so hard to fight off a shiver that I
felt growing in the middle of my spine. “Feed him? Clothe him?”

“Do you reckon he has parents?”

“Oh yes, of course he does. He’s only starving out in the street because he likes it.”
I could hear the more compassionate of the three draw an exasperated breath.

“He needs his parents.” The other one continued. “None of us are exactly in a position to be that to him at the moment. No-one is.”

“So, what? We just leave him?”

“It’s all we can do.” The too-close one said. “He doesn’t look like he’s going to last much longer, anyway.”

I felt slightly indignant at that.

“No. Hang on, wait-what are you doing?” The one I’d grown to like the most during this merry little conversation (that is to say, the one that didn’t want to leave me freezing or predicted my imminent death) exploded suddenly, sounding both desperate and urgent in equal measures. I understood why all too soon.

“But don’t you think it’s best for him?” The one with the gun to my head asked, softly. I could feel it cold above my left ear. “He wouldn’t be the first.”

“Mate, no. I don’t like this.”

“He’s just a child.”

The gunman hesitated. He was so close that I could almost hear him thinking.

“He’ll be dead within the week anyway.” He said finally, grudgingly, but did take it away. If I could have breathed a sigh of relief, I would have. The cold ring where it had rested still remained. I felt so ill.

Their jackboots departed. I felt weak with relief. So like crying.

In front of me, I heard something stir. The only innocent thing it could be was a bird, and it was heavier than that. I felt my blood go completely cold.

Daring, I opened one eye as narrowly as I could. It was human. God, it was human. A torso. I shut it again, and screwed it shut this time.

Nothing happened.

I dared another look. Whatever it was had gone now, it must have. Unless-

No.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see an elbow.

Whoever it was was crouching on their haunches, looking at me. I didn’t need eyes to see that. I closed mine as fast as I could and hoped against hope and holy that it would go away. If I ignored it for long enough, it would go away.

When, after five minutes, everything was still silent, I started a debate with myself. If the coin I was mentally tossing came up heads, I would open my eyes and look them in the face. If it came up tails, I’d stay like this for another five minutes and hope that they went away again. Again. It came up heads.

Best out of three.

Tails. Yes.
Heads. Heads again. But it wasn’t really fair, was it? Mental coin-tossing? I mean, it was probably being influenced by my subconscious mind or something. It wasn’t very fair. Maybe I should just stay like this. Whoever this is must be very patient.

They were, as well. In five minutes, they hadn’t so much as twitched. I could beat them at this. I’ve been waiting all my life. I can be silent for days. With a bit of luck, I’d fall asleep, and then they’d have to go.

Unless that’s what they were waiting for.

I almost jumped and died of shock when the tiny voice that I thought I’d shut out a long time ago suddenly piped up, ‘Hang on.’ It started wisely. ‘If they were going to harm you, they’d have done it by now. You’re not exactly looking at your most formidable, are you?’
‘You’re a sixteen year old orphan. You’re homeless. The only people that know and care about you are tightening the nooses around their necks with every breath they take. Name one way that this situation could get any worse’
‘Open your eyes’

And then, in what was probably the bravest thing that I’d done to date, I did.

I found myself staring straight into the face of a street urchin.

“Hello!” said the urchin brightly. “I’m an urchin!”

I looked at him incredulously, drew a deep breath and promptly fainted.