‘If that will help you sleep at night.’
Beatrice shakes her head and flicks on the radio, probably in hopes that I’ll shut my mouth and give her face a chance to return to its natural colour.
The drive is short, and the fields of New York turn into the fields of another almost identical village until I have no idea what sort of distance we’ve travelled. Soon, the fields begin to evolve into a housing estate and the boundaries to the land go from being marked out byhedges and drystone walls, to eight-foot fences topped with barbed wire.
‘I might be a terrible farmer, but prison is surely a bit overkill,’ I say, half joking, half afraid. Beatrice looks at the fence, then back at me with another bemused shake of her head.
‘I can tell you’re a little brother.’ Her eyes are bright when she looks at me. This is the first time she’s referred in any way to Lizzie since I told her about her. I sink into the chair a little deeper.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I raise an amused eyebrow, curious to know her reasoning.
‘I can just imagine you annoying your sister all hours of the day with all your silly comments that shouldn’t be funny but are, stupidly so.’ Again, she shakes her head. ‘You have all of the persistence of a little brother too. As if you cannot rest until you drive someone stir-crazy.’
‘You’ve got one of your own?’
‘No. I’m an only child.’ A little sadness overcomes her face. ‘My best friend was just like you though.’
Beatrice seems to follow the barbed wire the whole way around the perimeter until she finds its ending and slips the truck through the open gates of ‘RAF Coningsby’. ‘You’ve brought me on a date to an Air Force base?’ I ask, perplexed.
Sitting up straighter in her seat, Beatrice flushes almost instantly. ‘See what I mean? Irritating on a monumental scale.’ She shakes her head with a roll of her eyes.
Rolling down her window fully, she is greeted by a stone-faced gentleman and his rifle mounted high in hisclutch. He doesn’t say anything, nor does his expression change, so Beatrice does the talking. ‘Hi, we’re here to see the Butcher. I’ve got him a new client.’
Beatrice sits back in her chair and allows the guard to take a long look at me. He assesses me then nods with as little movement as possible. ‘Go and fetch your passes.’
‘The Butcher?’ I say, a little nervously as Beatrice pulls into the layby beside us and turns off her engine. ‘Now I’m trying to be more open-minded about the countryside but I swear to God if this turns into someHills Have Eyesbullshit, or you take me into a military base to let them do alien experiments on me I will not be happy.’
‘God, do you ever stop talking?’ She laughs and clambers out of the truck. ‘Come on, you don’t want to keep the Butcher waiting …’ Beatrice lowers her chin and shoots me an unsettling stare. With a shiver, I do as I’m told, though I protest with each step towards the office.
With my photo taken and Beatrice’s pass already on file and printed out, we pass our security check and I trail behind her, still unsure as to what I’ve gotten myself into this time.
Walking through the dominion of RAF Coningsby is like stepping back in time. A once grand hall overlooks a decommissioned Spitfire that rusts on the green of the roundabout. With the absence of any other human life, the entire place feels abandoned, left unchanged from its 1940s prime, slowly decaying, fossilised at the peak of patriotism. The ropes of an old obstacle course flap in the breeze thirty feet from the ground. Brittle and frayed, they’re an accident waiting to happen when a few new recruits stumble home drunk, having left any common sense back on the sticky leather of the bar stools.
‘Ta-da!’ Beatrice’s voice startles me just as I begin to imagine phantom airmen lurking in the corners of hangars, or downed pilots haunting the officers’ mess. She points to an old pre-fab building tucked away in the midst of a copse of trees. Corrugated iron shrapnel litters the muddy plot it stands on; bits of old tank are dispersed in between wild flowers and weeds. If she were to tell me that she had brought me to a bomb site, I would believe her.
But it’s the striped pole that clings to the asbestos walls that gives away its actual occupation. The barber’s pole still stands proud by the door, polished and primed as though someone had fastened the king’s golden sceptre to the side of a skip. The metallic red signage has bubbled and corroded from the weather. It must have once read ‘Barber’s Shoppe’, but all that remains are a few rusted vowels that are losing the fight against acid rain.
‘The Butcher, is a…barber?’
Beatrice shoots me yet another perplexing smile that sends a shiver right through me before she tugs on the door and it swings open with the tinkle of an old bell. Ushering me inside, she whispers close to me, ‘Relax, you’ll be fine.’ Which makes me feel anything but ‘relaxed’.
I run a hand through my hair, feeling the way it tickles at the bottom of my neck, and sweeps rather close to my jugular. Against my better judgement, and in spite of all of my reservations telling me to run, I step inside and prepare myself to either leave missing an ear, or in a meaty pie.
Chapter 15
Beatrice
We all call him Bruce the Butcher. A short man whose belly, bloated with years of alcohol abuse, forms a perfectly smooth bump under his lino apron. His red-wine nose glows under the fluorescent lights. There’s a mad stare to his eyes. One of them, lazier than the other, always seems as though it’s somewhere else, looking off into a different place, towards a different story. The ghost of an old piercing lingers in the holes in his earlobes, reminiscent of his days as a rocker. His faded leather jacket hangs limply on the hat stand in the corner. Wiry hair, umber flecked with white, rests atop his head but leaves a small patch of freckled skin on show at his crown. If his own haircut tells you anything, it’s that he is the worst barber His Majesty’s Royal Air Force has ever seen.
An old friend of my dad’s and somewhat of a local legend, he has cut the hair of almost every man in a six-mile radius at some point, but it’s certainly not the quality of the style that keeps anyone coming back. Bruce is, how can I put it … aninterestingcharacter.
‘Is that our Beatrice Norton finally come for a chop?’ Bruce grasps one of my plaits in his freckled fist and rests his rusty scissors against it, abandoning the patron currently sat in his seat with half a head of hair.
‘Not this time, I’m afraid.’ I laugh and he releases me from his grip and drags me in for a hug filled with soft stomach and cigar smoke.
‘Your nan would never forgive me if I did, anyway.’ Bruce laughs a jolly laugh and pats me on the back. ‘How are you, babby?’
‘Always happy to see you.’ I grin and Bruce brushes me away in a bashful gesture.
