The Orange Propeller

By Andrew McEwan

From the banks of the Tyne, via the Spanish Civil War, Malta and industrialised innards of Sicily's Mt. Etna, Swene's journey is possessed of unrelenting momentum. Fleeing a murder, he escapes his past but is inevitably drawn back, memory loss and identity crises seemingly in tandem with a future he struggles to comprehend, one governed by beautiful women and a watch with two faces that can literally turn back time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew McEwan
• Release date: Jun 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301729135

Andrew McEwan

Van driver from Newcastle. My work divides opinion. Look me up on Goodreads and Twitter. I welcome all reviews.

Book preview

The Orange Propeller

:being

the Adventures of Stalwart Soap and Swene McEwan 100 years apart

www.apefiction.co.uk

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Copyright 2013 Andrew McEwan

Smashwords Edition

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

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For the Bills

*Author’s Note*

Whilst not a sequel this book largely draws its characters, themes and ideas from Ocellus and might be described as volume II of what I am loosely titling The Great Geordie Novel.

Prologue

Eric the Red, lying in his own excrement, sliding from consciousness as his lungs filled with fluid, could not know that the bearded face staring down at him was not that of Thor, feared master of the netherworld, god of war and smiter of armies, but our own Joseph Wilson Swan, time-traveller, persistent note-taker and inventor of the light-bulb. The yonderscope glimmered behind him like some skeletal guardian, further addling the dying Bloodaxe, whose soul might be captured in a vial and preserved for eternity, Swan fancied, should he be of a mind, and possessed of the appropriate glassware. He smiled, the notion suggesting an improvement in his own electrical filament. Congratulating himself, he patted the near dead Viking on one bony shoulder and bade him farewell, ascended the temporal machine and disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

One

It was a mystery to his colleagues at The Advertiser how Stalwart Soap came to own a swivel chair. Not that the chair itself was of any great workmanship, but it did enable Soap to posture in a manner guaranteed to get up his fellow reporters’ noses. Stalwart seemed oblivious to the cause of their irritation, creaking and revolving with a pencil in his ear, on his face a near permanent grin. He was up to something, the entire office believed. He was always up to something.

Rolled up shirt sleeves and blackened fingers, scratched wooden desks, coloured glass and pipe smoke, oil lamps, alcohol, pen and ink, candles, tea urns, grimy windows and strange phallic mushrooms composed this newspaper world, the offices of which occupied a first floor that undulated by several inches overlooking Dean Street, much construction thereabouts, and the ship-laden river. The city hummed outside, throbbed with misdemeanours, scandal and artifice. All of them stories. Within, belching and farting were uppermost.

Stalwart removed the pencil from his ear and stabbed a pork pie.

He’d had a notion.

The working man, whether beating metal, hauling ropes or hewing coal, was someone he generally looked down upon. His father had been a captain in the navy, decorated at Malta and killed in action on the Black Sea - or so his mother told him, young Stalwart with his somewhat surprised features, face always slightly askew, having no memory of the man himself. The veracity of this information had though been called into doubt recently during his mother’s illness, her delirium and fever offering up other tales, these of night visitors and unimaginable ravishment at the hands of another captain entirely, one whose eyes ‘shone like gold’ and whose vessel was more at home amongst clouds. At first Stalwart had refused to believe any of it. His father was a war hero, an officer of His Majesty’s fleet. But he had to admit there was a certain intrigue he found fascinating in her tales of the ‘sky man’s’ abrupt and enthusiastic courting. That she recalled none of this confession, despite his subtle prompting, bounding from her bed not two days later with a zest not seen in a decade and a sudden desire for pickled onions, only served to reinforce the idea that his mother had lied to him all along and that his true father was in fact some fantastical being from another dimension. Which made him what? Interesting, thought Stalwart. More so than the common man at least.

That he was bored with the everyday chronicling of ponderous industry, the mundane reporting of terrible fires, lewd behaviour and foreign conflicts was not lost on the paper’s chief editor, Mr. Dewar, in whose office Stalwart found himself forthwith, palms clammy and eyes gleaming with what Dewar imagined an over-zealous nature but secretly hoped was something worse. Soap was an improbable as far as Dewar was concerned, one inherited yet impossible to cancel out. A dog you sent down sewers being another way to look at him, he supposed, feeling strangely generous as the young man hopped from foot to foot before him.

‘Yes?’

‘Sir. Sir, Mr. Dewar,’ said Soap, suddenly panicking. He’d forgotten why he was here. ‘I need,’ he mumbled, ‘to go under cover.’

‘Under where?’

‘Cover, sir. In order to root out an injustice.’

Dewar regarded him strangely. ‘Which is?’

Stalwart had no idea, his previous notion having deserted him this side of the chief editor’s door.

‘I have wind of a threat to our great metropolis,’ he lied.

The man behind the heavy wooden desk rolled his moustache side to side. ‘Which is?’

‘The orange propeller,’ Soap blurted, recalling his mother’s description of the sky vehicle his real and true father had travelled in.

Dewar stiffened in his chair. ‘Get out,’ he said slowly. Which Stalwart took to mean go ahead. Which was all he needed.

‘Thank-you, sir.’

The orange propeller. There, he’d said it, leaning back now in his swivel chair, peering at the tops of masts and the distant chimneys beyond, waiting for his brain to catch up as he twisted the pencil’s blunt end into his palm. It was as if a door had opened in his head, the possibilities lurking behind it manifold. How could he have been so blind? The truth, all truths, were there if only you knew where to look. He had simply to focus his thoughts on what lay hidden, what might be revealed by the kind of scrutiny born of a unique and individual mind. It was a whole new journalism. It was a whole new Soap.

Stalwart had never ventured much beyond the town walls. That they were decaying and under threat from a growing populace was clear. Blacksmith’s shops and cartwrights were as likely to occupy the once noble towers and the walls themselves were breached in numerous places, their stones transplanted into stable yards and chimney stacks. The Castle Keep was the gaol and everywhere once staunch fortifications sprang human leaks. Various petitions had been raised with a view to repair, to again consolidate the town within its stone nest, but the burgeoning 19th Century was just that, spilling wantonly in every direction, industry overtaking agriculture so that neighbouring valleys became overrun and choked. Orchards fell, smoke rose, and once pleasant vistas disappeared under the footprint of progress.

Stalwart Soap was young and idealistic. Whatever happy marriage of town and country he mourned had probably never been. Still, he craved order of a kind, clean streets and bright pennants, ruddy-cheeked farmers and merchants whose chests bulged as much with pride as gold.

Newcastle had been corrupted, he believed. Crime was out of hand. There was a boil to lance and Stalwart was a pin.

1819

Napoleon, begrudgingly admired by many in British society, was finished, holed up somewhere with disease for company. Years of war had left millions dead and yet the victors celebrated victory more from pride than relief, the great and the grand at least, enamoured and oiled, celebrated in iconography and displayed on walls, captured for history, sainted, medalled and daubed. Bonaparte’s army of conscripts had whittled itself down to splinters across greater Europe, crawling on its knees from Moscow and going up in flames at Waterloo. All was madness. It was no way to start a new century. But that had never stopped mankind before. Such thoughts though were for reactionaries, reformers whose agenda threatened the very substance of nationhood, of God and Empire, the latter at least much engorged now that France was broken and Spain crippled by events beyond her control. Pax Britannia reigned, its stranglehold a navy, and all was well with the world.

Stalwart’s loyalties were to England, but latterly the navy had slipped a notch or two. He lay awake at night imagining conversations with his parents, neither of whom could look him in the eye. He saw his mother wink conspiratorially, indicating the man next to her to be a fraud, but it was never clear exactly what she was trying to say. Perhaps he was mistaken to believe there was anything in her fevered ramblings. Only his keen investigative sense told him otherwise. He could smell the truth, could Stalwart. There was a bigger story. He just needed to identify the clues.

That foreign spies were abroad was well documented. Napoleon had a sophisticated network of such. They were behind every civil disobedience, he believed, hardened revolutionaries determined to topple government and monarchy alike. And unlike Bonaparte, they had not gone to ground.

Was the orange propeller, after all, a seditious blanket organisation intent on spreading mayhem? There seemed some merit in the idea, he thought, lying one hand about his balls. His cock filled the other, strangely flaccid. The reformists had their firebrands, one such being Thomas Jonathan Wooler, whose publication The Black Dwarf lampooned the establishment and undermined elected government. But whereas that scandalous pamphlet existed overtly and was circulated through the often ignorant hands of men whose grievances were localised, might not the orange propeller be an unseen and much larger threat? The nation was still vulnerable, Stalwart told himself, squeezing his manhood as it finally hardened. Yes.

Given which, on which side was his mother?

He sighed as his balls sagged and his cock deflated again.

The Orange Propeller. Myth, fantasy or reality? He smirked and pumped his fist at the prospect of going under cover.

Two

Two things close to Nancy’s heart were horses and women’s suffrage. Just back from the 1913 Derby where Emily Wilding Davison had thrown herself under Anmer, the King’s horse, she was feeling somewhat morose. Previously she had attended Emily’s funeral at Morpeth, her father’s birthplace, that as now days hence, but this was the first occasion she had travelled south to Epsom for the race itself. That she was suspicious of events as they unfolded was nothing new; time travel had a way of instilling the full spectrum of doubt, from disbelief to paranoia. It was however up to the individual where on that sliding scale they chose to place their faith. As far as Nancy Spain was concerned such discrimination was always an intuitive process, one she handled without thought. Only latterly that had started to change. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when. It was more a quiet realisation, a burgeoning of suspicion that had eventually overflowed the well. Thus her disquiet, her brooding that had left Jack isolated in real time, disgruntled, unemployed, yet - she told herself - safe.

Emily had not revealed her intentions despite Nancy’s best efforts. There were rumours of her stopping horses in a London park in the weeks leading up to the race. At least one eyewitness claimed her hat had blown off and she’d gone to fetch it. Nancy wasn’t convinced by either. Certainly Emily was a thinker, determined and brave, yet it did not follow that she might believe she could stop a horse at full tilt. Divert it perhaps, but what merit in that? As a publicity stunt it lacked imagination, especially given the danger involved, after all this was a woman who had concealed herself in the House of Commons on the eve of the 1911 census so that she might rightly put down the place, where no woman held a seat, as her address.

Thinking of that, as ever it was love Nancy felt.

Still, she was unwilling to admit a conspiracy. She felt the fact forcing itself upon her though, like a drunken suitor.

She was of course suspicious of men. And a growing number of time travellers, most of whom were boys. Boys up to no good. The few she had encountered seemed innocent enough, but then she hadn’t felt confident in approaching any directly, even if they had sought her out. She needed to admit a higher degree of fear to herself she supposed. Slide the needle on the doubt scale farther to the right than already she had. An uncomfortable thing, only necessary, as one volume had closed and another opened, this more dangerous and she, perhaps, less naive.

Plots there were afoot. Well, she had a few of her own.

She sought solace in anonymity, mingling with shopping crowds on Northumberland Street, a sale being a great place to lose oneself, in this instance Fenwick’s 1959. As ever, the ladies were a sight to behold. More than the usual scuffling in haberdashery caught her attention, however, as amongst the lace and twills was a face somewhat jaundiced and inhuman, respectable in a nondescript sort of way in skirt and cardigan, hair loosely wound and near flat shoes, the suspicion of slightly backwards knees obscured from most by hem length and thick stockings, but to Nancy’s trained eye a dead giveaway. That it was early afternoon astonished her. That this creature had an eye for a bargain shocked her more. It drew no undue attention to itself and seemed armed with purpose as well as cash, measuring material by the yard and methodically counting change. Nancy instinctively reached for a dirk, only found she was armed with little more than a pair of reading spectacles. The cunningly disguised monster collected its purchases and made for the lift with Nancy close behind.

It was only a few seconds between floors, time enough to dispatch the thing and make good her exit. But it seemed so at home she made no move. The creature avoided her gaze, yet at the same time exhibited no fear, suggesting in neither recognised her nor suspected itself to be in any danger. Nancy remained fascinated; so much so that she doubted her eyes. Clearly she was not mistaken. Still, here it was, a contextual aberration, a morbid being from the underworld shopping for clothes.

Convinced of both its supernatural nature and obliviousness to her presence she followed the creature down Northumberland Street. It walked with a slight rocking motion but was otherwise well concealed amongst the throng, people, cars and busses jostling for position, each fitting about the other in the barely conscious way city traffic flows. It turned on to Blackett Street and ambled towards the YMCA, veered left, pausing to cross the road, passed Grey’s monument and headed in the direction of the Central Arcade, Nancy hot on its tail.

The arcade was not looking its best, she thought, momentarily distracted.

Had she lost the thing?

A door swung. J.G. Window’s, music and its reproduction that shop’s stock and trade.

Smiling ridiculously, Nancy turned on her heel and went to fetch her horse.

Smoke and flames never did change, nor their fascination. Months removed but years later, she stood amongst onlookers as a great conflagration overwhelmed and undermined a warehouse adjacent to Manors station. The late night final edition of the Evening Chronicle would report £35,000 of stock on one floor alone, up in smoke washing machines and cookers, tyres in the basement the suspected cause, £11,000 of those fuelling, smoke visible for miles, all the usual headlines, the intense heat melting overhead trolley lines.

Nancy of course thought it a fine thing. A shut door. She fished a cigar from between her breasts and without the least irony requested of a policeman a light. Nervously, the young copper obliged. She blew smoke, gauged his embarrassment, and asked him the time.

‘Er, just gone three-fifteen, madam.’

She thanked him and meandered away.

1944

Premature blossom and peculiar cloud formations suggested to those of an inquiring mind that things were not as they should be, or indeed as they seemed. Mostly these minds remained anonymous, but a few poked their heads above the bunkers, and a few of these were on the banks of the Tyne at Blaydon, under the chain bridge where a stillness had turned the water to glass, a mirror surface reflecting the roadway above, the phenomenon, which included a frame of sky, existing solely beyond the sun’s reach, that is, in shade.

Jack imagined he might walk upon the swell but thought better of it, Nancy reminding him of the more mundane facts of gravity and tide.

Still, he stared.

It was she installed in the diving suit, the only one present who would fit in it, shrugs all round and not a little humour he suspected, quietly observing a much too old Sid Chaplin and another fellow whose moniker escaped him attach helmet and hose.

Chaplin waved him over, putting him in charge of the air supply, a crank handle like that of an old movie camera. The fact of it, him performing this basic task, rankled somewhat. Was that why he was here? But as Nancy disappeared into the river, her intrusion barely registering on the water’s dark surface, he straight away felt the immediacy of her dependence and uncomplainingly turned.

The water was black. Her senses blanked. There was only the cold and an infinity of dark space. She felt like she was adrift in the universe, untethered. Her feet struggled in the heavy boots and her limbs quickly became numb, as if detached from her body, her body then from her mind as she fiercely concentrated on the task, forcing herself to stay awake almost, not to succumb to the all-swallowing emptiness. Whatever it was in the water, its mass glassing the surface and frosting her spine, she was sure it was man made. From what she had gleaned from Chaplin the vessel had been tracked upriver having first crossed from the continent. Too small to be a U-boat, detectable by means no army, navy or air force could understand, it had stopped here under the chain bridge. Nancy sensed the fear emanating from the object. Not a normal sensation, a fear of a known or unknown threat. More the terror of a peculiar electrical force, one that fastened to her flesh and made diodes of her nerves. She focused on that, on the unusualness of it, as she slowly traversed the inky Tyne, her air supply trailing behind and her toes curling in the cramped suit. Where had they found it? She wondered belatedly, a diving rig clearly not fashioned for a man.

There was a clanking noise as of gears and the water shook. She reached out and felt bolt heads, rivets and metal. Air escaped from somewhere and the object vibrated. She backed off a yard, imagining what shape the submersible might be. She could hear static and realised there was a voice, Chaplin’s, in her headset. Before she could form a reply, not having understood the words, a second outrush of air cause the vessel to oscillate violently.

Streams of air escaped like missiles, one slamming into her chest. Nancy was lifted backwards by the impact and her fears seized her at that moment, crushing her mind within her skull within the brass helmet. She lost consciousness even as she clamped an unknown object to her, arms locking rigid about it, panic spilling to the surface as forces propellant and electrical acted at once, rattling the bridge overhead and causing the water to recede both up and downstream. The doughnut ring of the submarine was exposed briefly, as were two small bodies it had evacuated. A third was crushed in Nancy’s arms and a fourth, Jack later stated, had escaped like a rabbit over the far embankment, a small human supernaturally energised.

Silence ended and the river crashed back in. The men hauled Nancy ashore, fearful of her condition, but when they removed the helmet from the diving suit they were amazed to see her smiling.

Reverie encapsulated the scene for a moment. She breathed, lifted the small body up and gazed at it curiously before dropping the homunculus to one side, its face pulped and its once neat submariner’s uniform sodden and dripping.

‘Gentlemen,’ she said, pointing at the broiling river, ‘I give you one of Herr Hitler’s more improbable secret weapons.’

There was a thump and a vortex of water as the vessel imploded.

Three

If Britain were not an island separated from the rest of Europe by a narrow strip of sea, then its history, like that of the wider world, would be entirely different. Such was the geographical influence of water. No power on Earth was greater. The sea answered only to the moon. Newcastle’s southern border was the river Tyne, one it never crossed in person and whose farther shore was wedded to it via convenience, much as the British Isles to the continent. Scotland had washed down as far as here but not been inclined to venture farther. The kingdom of Northumbria, as its name suggested, had once straddled the Tyne, stretching to the Humber. But a kingdom moves like a cloud, with only its shadow touching the ground. And soon it too receded.