Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [87]
“Goz, Goz. Orright. But look, it’s not really gonna happen, is it? It’s too . . .”
“You not been watching the box? Reading the papers?”
“Yeah, but . . .”
Goz opened the tap behind him and drowned the cigarette end and flicked it backward over the wall into the butcher’s yard that bordered the school.
“Listen,” Goz said, “and no offense, comrade, but I know for a fact that the be-all and end-all of existence for you is getting your end away with the lovely doe-eyed Miss Mortimer. Fair enough. But I’ve got plans, comrade. I’ve got ideas about what I want to do with my life. And it dunt include getting fried alive because some pillock wants missiles on Cuba and some other pillock don’t. And you know what? It seriously cheeses me off when some bloke called Wankstaff stands there and tells me that all I have to do is lie down and pull my jacket over my head and then carry on as normal. ’Cos we are gone, comrade, when the Bomb goes off. Gone.”
Tash Harmsworth appeared around the far end of the urinals and said, “Ah. My Fool and my Bastard. I was wondering where you were.”
(Harmsworth was not being gratuitously offensive. Goz was reading the part of Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester.)
“Sir,” Goz said, straightening up but keeping his eyes on the stained concrete floor.
Tash pushed his vampire robe aside and took a metal cigarette case out of his pocket. He lit an untipped Capstan with a gold Dunhill lighter.
“The rest of the cast is disturbed by your absence. Cordelia is particularly distressed; it’s her big scene this morning.”
“Sorry, sir,” Clem said.
“I’m sure you are. I assume you had something of significance to discuss?”
“Only the end of the world, sir,” Goz said.
“Ah,” Tash said. “That. And here was I thinking you’d merely sloped off for a smoke. May I inquire as to what conclusions you have come to, regarding the Apocalypse? Ackroyd?”
“We’re against it, sir.”
“Are you, indeed? I shall write notes to President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev immediately. I’m sure that when they learn that two scholars as eminent as yourselves disapprove of their actions, they will come promptly to their senses.”
Tash took a deep pull on his Capstan, studying the bitterness on Goz’s unresponsive face.
“Nothing to say, Gosling?”
“No, sir.”
“Very well.” Tash tossed his half-smoked cigarette into the urinal. “Shall we go, then? Because ‘at my back I hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.’ Who wrote that, Ackroyd?”
“Don’t know, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“Andrew Marvell,” Goz muttered as if he didn’t want to but couldn’t help it.
“Correct, Gosling. Give that man a cigar. ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ You’ve not read it, Ackroyd?”
“No, sir.”
“You should. A rare example of a poem with a practical purpose. Even you, Ackroyd, might find it handy one of these days.”
The boys followed him out of the bogs.
“Essentially,” Tash said as if resuming an interrupted lecture, “each of us is a single consciousness. Therefore, when we die, all else dies. The light goes out, and all is darkness. Some find that concept bleak. I find it comforting.”
Goz said, “What about envying the people that go on living, sir?”
“I bloody well don’t,” Tash said.
ON WEDNESDAY, October 24, the Americans made their first low-level reconnaissance flights over Cuba. Six U.S. Navy Crusader jets took off from Key West, Florida, and headed south, flying so low that they wet their bellies with sea spray. Having slipped under Cuban radar defenses, they climbed and started taking photographs. Their pictures would show, in clear detail, the construction in progress of a nuclear warhead storage bunker near San Cristóbal. Close by stood lines of fuel tankers, warhead transporters, and tents for MRBMs.
That morning’s ExComm meeting began,