At the Edge of the Game (27 page)

‘You can’t leave
town,’ the sergeant says. ‘Sorry.’

This does not go
down well. People are crammed into this stale and peeling Town Hall, sopping
wet, smelling of goat.

‘Waterford is
under the control of the military authority, mandated under the Emergency
Powers Act. Law and order have been maintained. Teams are working to restore
services. Others will arrive in this town soon. So there’s no need for you to
leave the town. You’re safe here. You have enough food, and you have power.’

‘What about the
IRA?’ someone shouts.

‘Destroyed.
There’s nothing to worry about.’

A car drives
past outside. The strangeness of this occurrence makes everyone’s head turn to
the door.

How sickly are
those hydrocarbon fumes, and how potent to our unaccustomed lungs, seeping into
blood-vessels, inflaming neuro-receptors.

‘Anyone who tries
to leave will find themselves arrested and locked up.’

As good a cue as
any for Heathshade to make his entrance, flanked by his fighting men. A clatter
of boots as he crosses the chamber. A flick of his head and his cronies fan
out, taking up positions around the side of the chamber.

 ‘Now,’says
Heathshade, ‘some of you may think that there’s no need to worry any more, that
everything’s going back to normal. You look at these soldiers, and think that
you’re safe. Yes? You're wrong. Who saved you from the IRA? I did. Who took
decisive action with the prisoners? I did. They would have been a constant
security threat, maybe even find some way to contact their pals elsewhere. None
of us wanted that, did we?’

I thought I was
supposed to have dreamt the executions? Helen looks like she knows what
Heathshade is talking about.

Heathshade
pauses for effect, which gives Warburton a chance to get a word in. ‘I speak
for the town, Mr Heathshade.’ Sort of true. ‘It's good that you're here. Since
security responsibilities will be taken over by the Army, we need you and your
men to hand over your weapons.’

Heathshade
laughs. ‘You're joking.’

‘Do it with good
grace,’ says the sergeant. ‘It isn't a request.’

‘Have you all
forgotten who saved you? You’d all be dead without me.’

‘We're haven't
forgotten,’ says Warburton. ‘We're very grateful. Now the guns must be put
away.’

‘Well I say the
fighting is not over, and they must not be put away.’

Arguments break out
at the back between Heathshade's men and members of the audience.

‘Hold onto those
rifles,’ Heathshade shouts out.

No good. The
guns are handed over.

‘You fucking
idiots!’

Warburton
reaches forward and takes hold of Heathshade’s rifle. Bad move. He's sent
flying, dashes his face against the wall.

‘You fucking
asked for that. To hell with the lot of you. See how you do without me.’

The chamber door
slams. He's gone.

‘Forget him,’
says the sergeant. ‘Let’s get back to the business at hand.’

Helen grabs my
arm. ‘Come on.’ She pulls me to the door, out to the rainy street.

Heathshade’s
standing at the bottom of the steps, rain-blotched overcoat spread over curved
shoulders. Two cars rush past, throwing up patterns of spray.

He sees us. ‘You
coming with me, then?’

Helen speaks
quickly. ‘Yes, we’re coming.’

‘Hey, hang on a
minute – ‘

‘Oh for God’s
sake, George, there’s no time.’

Heathshade
starts striding away. She drags me along after him.

A long sunbeam
like a searchlight in the dark cloud spans the grey slate roofs at the end of
New Street and the wooded hills beyond. Another landslump has just occurred. A
distant patch of forest slid and toppled, candlesticks on a bad magician’s
table. More of that dark, creeping soliflux.

The rain
ratchets up a few notches. Thunder clatters around the broad, flat valley.

We catch up with
him at the door of his apartment. He gives us a dose of mirthless laughter. ‘Tell
you what, George. You can earn your passage by giving me a hand. Helen, go and
get your gear together. You’ve got twenty minutes.’

Daisy Carruth
opens the front door. ‘You ready?’ he says.

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. We’ll be quick.’

He leads me up
the Main Street. At the supermarket that now serves as supply depot, two men
with machine guns are stationed. A baggage-laden car passes, beeps its horn and
is away, turning left at the end of the street.

Heathshade
marches up to the men, booted feet kicking up water off the ground.

‘Let us through,
lads.’

They are
troubled by the ambiguously directed gun barrel. He steps up to the door, tries
it. It’s locked. ‘Where’s the key?’

‘Have you got a
ration slip, sir?’

‘Ration slip!’ He
shoves past.

The men mind
their own business while we secure a trolleyful of food and enough petrol to
fill a tank. He has me wheel the trolley through the West Gate, round a couple
of corners to where a big bull-barred jeep is parked.

‘Load that stuff
in the back, and fuel her up.’ He’s had it all planned. But of course. He gets
in the driver’s seat, I in the passenger side, and we drive the wrong way
through the one-way West Gate.

Daisy and child
are waiting at the front door.

‘My lady will
want the front seat.’

I cede the territory,
go up to our apartment where Helen is zipping a stuffed suitcase.

‘It’s not
anything to do with not respecting you,’ she says, taking my hand. ‘We need
him. He’s the kind that survives. You…’

Yeah, tell me,
Helen. What am I?

‘Let’s just go
with him to Waterford, and then we can go our own way, never see him again. Okay?’

There’s no time
for anything except to pick up our stuff and go. We push our cases in behind
the passenger seats and strap ourselves in. He takes off down the Main Street.
Around the corner in New Street we encounter a sort of mini-traffic jam. Councillors
and the two soldiers stand there, looking out at us rather forlornly. People
seem to be stopping to gloat before taking their leave of the town. Heathshade
wants to do the same. He slows down and stops. But before any words of derision
can escape from his throat, an old man in a peak cap and wet overcoat steps out
from somewhere and thrusts his hand in the window.

‘God bless you,
Marcus Heathshade, for all you did for Carrick!’

‘Cheers, mate.’

Heatshade guns
it. The old man falls into a puddle.

We lurch onto
the empty main road, take the turn for Waterford, shoot under a railway bridge,
past abandoned commercial buildings. Then, at the edge of the town, a setback:
a dip in the road ahead is flooded. A couple of cars, inundated to
bonnet-height, sit dead in the silted current. Another has got through, is
ascending the slope at the other side.

The engine ticks
over, and rain hammers the roof.

‘I think - ‘
says Helen.

Too late. No way
is Heathshade going back into town. He powers the jeep into the flood. Oozing
water, dirty and cold, leaks through the door seals onto the floor. Daisy
Carruth clings to her whimpering child.

‘Keep her quiet.’

I grip the
handle of the door so tightly I might break my own fingers. The engine whines,
strains. In a second it will die, and so will we. We pass the stalled cars. Can’t
look at them lest there be drowning people inside. Mid-stream now. Water
surging, spraying. The jeep lurches, slips. Already I’m losing breath, lungs
filling, brain dying. The last seconds of life before -

We’re okay. Wheels
grip again, push forward, reach the shallows. What is this strange feeling? I’m
a hundred metres downstream, soul drifting away from body, losing physical
moorings, agony and bliss together. And yet, that’s not what happened. We
survived. Solid ground, clear of the current.

Helen’s falls
against me, cold, damp, shaking.

The jeep is also
shaking. Vertigo. Instability. Are we inside the event horizon after all,
sliding back into the black-hole? No, it’s not just us – it’s the earth itself.
There’s a new sound that goes through bones, sonic equivalent of deep
background radiation.

‘Look,’ says
Daisy, pointing.

Not a half-mile
distant, unstable banks are collapsing into the Suir. The river explodes at the
impact of each massive chunk. The effect is spreading upstream and downstream.
The forest too, brown and green under the heavy grey skies, is sliding. Not
just sections of it, but all of it. The whole hillface coming down, liquefied
after so much melted snow and so much rain. Back towards the town, in one
rotating motion, the rooftops of Carrickbeg disappear under mingled rock and
biomass, unstoppable megatons of sliding surface. Flattened and buried are the
sanctuaries of the Friary and St Molleran’s; dead surely are any who returned
to their homes. The leading edge of the cataclysm ploughs through the barrier
of concrete and masonry close by the quay, slams into the Old Bridge. Five and
a half centuries of history buried in a few moments as finally and forever it
succumbs to the forces of destruction. Alas too for the Castle, a structure
more ancient still. Its walls shall fall, its constituent blocks pile into the
Suir. Over decades and centuries to come, these shall to roll into the sea.

‘Serves ‘em
fucking right,’ Heathshade says.

We’re away,
engine revving, tyres dethreading on the asphalt. And now – crazily – the CD
player on. He turns it up loud, beats some metal rhythm on the steering wheel.

Behind us
thousands die. But they belong to a past already gone, no longer part of our
world. Best to look forward through the fogging windscreen, down the
centre-line of the long, straight road.

Sixteen miles to
Waterford.

Faintly, a new
fear leaks through to my conscious, but stupefaction is my saviour. We’ll be
there before my faculties have time to properly regroup.

She turns in
bed, pulling blankets around herself. I can’t lie down for fear I’ll wake her. What’s
that she’s whimpering? Don’t know, but I think the pain has seeped deeply
enough through to colour her dreams. I don’t know what to do to help, and
there’s nothing I can say. Nothing could pass my lips that would not be
dishonourably shallow, exhibit self-serving callowness. I don’t know how she
feels – that’s the truth of it. I’m like an active sensor probing with waves. I
detect something in outline, a target on scope, a looming shadow I don’t
properly perceive. A shape with no texture, a mass with no interior. Because
unlike her, I don’t have to believe my parents are dead. So it’s better when
she sleeps, except that the dawning anguish when her eyes open is all the more
terrible.

I seem to spend
most of my time these days looking out the window, hoping faintly that the
daylight spectrum will induce dreaminess, clad realness, slow down thought. The
morning wind blows a mist off the piled snow at the sides of empty Gracedieu
Road. Yesterday afternoon, from this perch, I watched the work gang go about
their poor-house task of clearing that snow. A fume-spewing plough laboured
slowly up the hill, and the workers, wrapped in fraying brown-grey layers,
gasping clouds of drifting white, trudged behind it, shovelling piles this way
and that with the perfunctory strokes of hungry men. The soldier overseer let
them rest just below this window, went around to each, lit their cigarettes. The
soldier called to our door and asked if the men could use the toilet. I was
about to let them in when Helen sat up in bed, bloodless white and
tear-streaked. The soldier saw her. He understood, led the men instead to the
door of the Smyths’ flat.

Today, more snow
is covering the stretch they cleared. The work will have to be done all over
again. Those lucky sods from yesterday are probably still asleep in their
warmish beds, or eating their hard-earned breakfast. Meanwhile, some other work
gang will be led out to slave away from the day. A few days from now it’ll be
me doing my ten-hour stint, my mandatory spell of drudgery, all in the name of
law and order and fairness. You earn your rations here. That’s the way it
works. Not that I’m complaining.

Time to head out
and get our three days’ ration. I close the front door quietly, so as not to
unsettle her. I call to the Smyths’ door. Mrs Smyth is expecting me. A decent woman
only too happy to check in on Helen while I’m out. ‘Leave her be as much as you
can.’ As if I know what I’m talking about.

The unsteady
stairs leads to a cold hallway, thence to the more intense cold of outside - a
cold that penetrates like gamma rays. Down the bleak hill I go, boots crunching
through the crusted surface. Round the corner on Merchant’s Quay I sense that
trouble is afoot. An APC rumbles behind me like a steam gun. Hairs on the back
of my neck prickle.

No, be sensible
- it’s what’s happening at the distribution centre that interests them. Never
seen so many there at the same time. Soldiers in riot gear pushing people
around, trying to get them to queue up properly.

People are
reaching the city from all directions. It seemed to be the return of the cold
that triggered it, made people give up on normality. Just get to a fastness of
some sort – that seems to have been the universal thought. We were among the
lucky ones, arriving during the warm spell, while there was still half a
welcome to be got here.

The first night
here was entrancing. A glittering quayside, an urban paradise lit by up by fire
and electric lights. Happy multitudes gathered around bonfires. The candles in
the windows of the distant buildings were like the thousand stars burning in
the sky. We saw and exulted at the dark shapes of heavy military vehicles
moving along the quay.

If a wall could
be put up around the city now, I think they’d do it. In fact, I’d help. Better
that than more ration reductions. Two hundred grams of cheese, a half litre of
milk and a small loaf of bread is not much to sustain two people for three
days.

It’s good to share
with the Smyths some evenings. Last time they got cabbage from somewhere, and
we’d been handed some black-spotted carrots with our regular food. These we
boiled. Combined with some sachet soup, they made a stew of sorts, and we had
this with the bread and cheese. The Smyth children became sleepy then and
settled on the floor by the fire under a mass of blankets. We listened to
distant, foreign radio voices, vague references to faraway upheaval – storms,
famine, violence.

The river froze
while still in flood, so that the ice begins in the middle of the road on the quay.
Out in the middle of the river, open water still flows. The two fronts of ice
are converging. Soon they’ll meet, and it will be possible to walk to the other
side of the Suir without recourse to the bridge. Don’t know why one would want
to though. There’s nothing over there. No food, no heat, no help, nothing.

In the window of
an estate agent’s office I can see Major Shelton’s desk. No one there. Looks
like the office has been abandoned, Shelton’s project shelved. He was sick of
the sight of me and Helen by the end. Each day – or several times a day in the
case of Helen – he would see one or both of us. He would give is that
Not
you again
look. Had he found any trace of Helen’s parents? No, he hadn’t.
If any information came to light, he’d contact us. ‘I haven’t forgotten. If I
see their names on the lists, I will tell you. I have your address.’

Then one day he
stood up when he saw us come in through the door. Helen saw the look on his
face, and immediately began to cry.

‘I’m sorry,’ he
said.

And he was
genuinely sorry too. I felt for him, this sad and spiritless man, who despite
the smart uniform was as lost, as bereft as the rest of us.

Her parents were
found in a basement room in a school, along with about two hundred others.
Their house on Casement Road had been empty and looted when we arrived there,
and there was nothing to indicate where they had gone. Seems that they went to
the school to see out the big storm. Their bodies had been preserved by the
cold.

They would have
been something of a burden to us had we found them alive.

There’s a soldier
with a loudhailer – a helmeted officer, middle-aged, tired-looking,
ill-tempered. He’s grabbing the tunics of his men, pushing them this way and
that, trying to get them organised. They’re less than enthusiastic. Hungry and
depressed, I would imagine, although their status brings privileges not given
to the common plebeians.

The officer’s
voice filters crackly through the speaker:

‘If you’re not
on the 8:30 list, leave the area now.’

They haven’t
even fed the 8:30ers yet? Not promising, it being 9:45 now, and me being on the
10:30 list.

‘Final warning –
‘

He means
business, this man. He raises his rifle with one hand so that the barrel points
to the roofs.

‘Those not on
the list, get out of the area.’

A line of
soldiers with riot shields and truncheons forms across the width of the street,
begins to advance so as to push the mob back. The mob does not like this one
bit. Curses and missiles fly. The hotheads advancing on the riot line are dealt
with efficiently. Whatever resinous substance the truncheons are made of is unyielding
yet resilient.

My strategy is
to skirt wide onto the river ice, make my way far back around the way I came,
well away from the major trouble area. Good thing too, because now the
situation’s gotten worse. Gunfire. Screams. People running. I duck around a
corner, peer back from cover to see some lunatics charge the soldiers again.
They’re cut down, just like that. Flat dead on the ground.

What’s to be
done, except to go home?

A filament of
rational brain wonders at its own existence as I pass the dead hulk of a red
commercial van.

There’s an empty
dustbin lying on its side in the hardened snow. I wrench it free and fling it
at our front door. It bounces away, leaving a raw dent.

Stumbling inside
now, falling into a dreadful heap at the bottom of the stairs. Images flash
through my head, impossibly detailed. Where does a brain get all the processing
power to achieve this infinite clarity?

The journey here
in the cramped car. That man with the weird accent on the radio. Sounded like
English was his first language, but whatever the hell he was talking about, we
couldn’t follow. He spoke of ‘Japhethy’. Member states would have to coalesce
to endure. ‘Let this finally and forever prove the separateness of God and
Nature.’ He sang a hymn-like tune.

‘It’s a wind-up,’
Heathshade said.

A wind-up? Who’d
be bothered? That was even more ludicrous than the notion that it was in some
way real.

In the village
of Fiddown and again in Mooncoin there was evidence of murder. Fires burned
across the wide Suir, like someone had soaked the forest in petrol and put a
torch to it. Fire set against mud, smoke set against a wet, green sky.

Back towards
Carrick, dendrons of lightning like devils dancing over the ruined town.

To the north, a
cylindrical structure high, high up caught the friendly daylight of other time
zones.

And then… the
blessed relief of reaching Waterford safely.

They made us get
out of the car at the railway station. We never saw it again. They took away
Heathshade’s gun too.

Where have
you come from?

Carrick-on-Suir.

Why didn’t
you stay there?

It’s been
destroyed. (They react to this with dubiety.)

Many more
coming behind you?

Don’t know.

We can’t take
you all, you know.

(Only way to
react to this is to shrug.)

All right,
cross the bridge, make a left, follow the signs.

And so we did,
and with remarkable efficiency Helen and I were assigned our flat in this
building, and a new ration card.

Bad luck:
Heathshade was put in the flat upstairs.

Those were the
good old days, when that short-lived spurt of regeneration stimulated feelings
of optimism. They had a local radio service up and running for a few days. That’s
been stopped again now, replaced by beeping static, long-lost shipping signals
from the early 20
^th
Century, bent back to earth somehow.

Still we tune in
every day, hoping to hear something.

Gradually I have
become aware that I am not alone in this unpleasant hallway. I blink my wet
eyes clear to see Heathshade’s standing a few steps above, looking down upon me
with not the merest hint of empathy.

I relate to him
what I witnessed on the quay. He nods with satisfaction.

‘I predicted
that.’

Not to me, you
didn’t.

‘It was only a
matter of when. Good to have expected it, eh? Got some preparation in. That’s
the last you’ll see of rations round here. I tell you, George, I ain’t just
guessing either. Found a handy piece of equipment up in the flat. A police
scanner.’

‘What good is
that?’

‘What do you
think? It picks up their radio chatter. I know what they’re at. I know what a
fucking shambles they are. Follow me.’

We climb to the
top floor, to his flat. Daisy Carruth and her daughter are there, sitting near
the fire, covered by a duvet. The place smells of rubbish.

He opens a
kitchen cabinet. It’s full of food. Cans and packets enough to last weeks.

‘Where did you
get all that?’

‘Let’s do a
deal. Help me out, and I’ll cut you in.’

Mindful as ever
that he’s pulling a fast one, I hesitate. He shuts the cabinet doors.

‘Of course, if
you reckon the soldier boys are going to keep feeding you, that’s fair enough
too.’

‘I’ll help you.’

‘Good. And maybe
that fella who lives across the hall from you. Maybe see if he’s up for a
nixer.’

He hands me a
tin of sliced pears.

‘Gesture of good
will.’

I take the
cursed thing and leave.

Helen’s still
asleep in the silent flat. She’s managed to sleep through all the strife
outside. Wish I had. On the locker beside the bed I put the pears.

I move the fire
guard from the hearth and place some bits of plank on the diminishing smoky
flame. Sporadic engine noise and shouting carry in wisps over the rooftops. The
morning progresses, and the heaviness of post-shock sinks my decreasingly
animate bones into the old armchair. Even my face feels dragged down.

The child comes
into this, then. This is really the way it’s going to be. Fathered and mothered
by bodies no longer completely alive, already preparing to be two of the
freeze-dried corpses that will litter this wasteland when it’s all over.

Dark, low clouds
tumbling out of the north. Heavy, dirty cold rain. Splashing into the new
flood.

Yesterday
afternoon the river delivered a coup de grace nobody had been expecting. Of all
things, another flood. This time, spreading downstream over the already frozen
main body of the river. Caused, I am sure, by the bursting banks of the
landslip-blocked upriver, the draining of the temporary lake formed over
Carrick’s remnants.