The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley Page B

the rats on the floor and then his toy soldiers to face them. I took the rifle off my shoulder and positioned it through one of the gun slits, fitting my eye to the rubber cup at the end of the sight. It took time to get it right—for a few seconds there was only the magnification of my own eyelashes—but once I had the sea contained in the circle, it was brought to me sharp and silent.
    The horizon I had seen with the naked eye from the top of the dunes was dragged closer and replaced by another much further out. A boat with a white sail that had been too far away to see before tracked slowly from one edge of my vision to the other, rising and falling, outrun by the terns and gulls scudding over the waves. There was another world out there that no one else but I could see.
    I fancied myself as a naval captain on the lookout for U-boats, or a lone gunner charged with the defence of the coastline.
    Those sorts of games only ever seemed real at The Loney. London was hard to convert into the kinds of places the men in Commando seemed to find themselves.
    Although I had assassinated the park keeper—who morphed from one important Gestapo officer to another—several times from a hideout in the huge oak tree by the tennis courts and blown Mummer to pieces when she stepped on the land mine I’d buried in the vegetable patch, the parks, our garden, they were too prim and clean.
    The cemetery up in Golders Green with its flat, white graves that looked as though they had been levelled by a bomb blast made for a half-decent blitzed town, but the groundsman had a dog that was supposed to be rabid. And anyway I could only play there on Saturdays when the Jews weren’t allowed to do anything, even visit the dead.
    At The Loney, on the other hand, one could be at Sword Beach, Iwo Jima, Arnhem, El Alamein without much strain on the imagination. The pillbox was easily transformed into a cell in a German prisoner of war camp, which we’d fight our way out of with our bare hands, thwacking Achtunging! Nazis in freeze frames. Or it was a jungle hideout from which we watched a line of buck-toothed Japs come stalking through the marram and the sea holly and then we’d unzipper them with a burst of machine gun fire before they had time to draw breath. The Japs were cruel and devious but screeched like girls when they died. They were always weaker than the Krauts and the Krauts were always more arrogant than the Brits, who naturally won every time.
    ‘Here,’ I said and Hanny, half crouching, took over, adjusting his grip, squinting into the sight. I moved to the slit next to Hanny’s and watched the hordes of birds come in with the rushing tide, ransacking the foaming bore for the things dragged along in its thrust, or heading inland to the marshes with food for their young.
    A flock of gulls came to land, squabbling over some dead thing from which they tore bits of fur and skin, the craftier ones making off with larger portions—a cluster of innards, or bones still jointed in the middle.
    The sudden boom of the sea against the rocks close by scared them and they took off together, screeching and honking. All but one. A large gull thrashed about on the sand, trying to lift itself out of the incoming water. It beat one wing against the air, while the other stuck out from its body at an angle. It had been broken in the scrum.
    It cawed, nuzzled at its leg and then resumed its strange dance, hopping one, two, three steps, lifting off and tumbling back onto the sand.
    Hanny looked at me.
    ‘We’ll have to kill it,’ I said. ‘It’s cruel to leave it in pain.’
    Hanny frowned. He didn’t understand. I took the rifle off him and mimed stoving the bird in with the butt. He nodded and we climbed out of the pillbox and watched the seagull floundering on the sand. It stared back, wide eyed.
    ‘It’s the right thing to do,’ I said, and gave Hanny the rifle.
    He looked at me and smiled and then he turned his head sharply the other way,