Thimblewinter (3 page)

The road-train guards set off in pursuit, but without much zeal. They soon faltered in the failing light and returned without the captives. So it was that I spent a sleepless night and decided to heed Mrs. Sharma from then on. The next day, truth to tell, the incident on the road was almost forgotten, because we came to the place they called The Services, where the road-train stopped and broke into its many parts. We were on the outskirts of the city and, though not safe, were safe enough to complete the last few miles alone, though sleep caught up with me for the last leg of the journey.

As we drove on down to the harbour, the sea came on me suddenly and, though I had read about it and seen pictures, I was little prepared for the otherness of it. It filled up the bay and beyond the horizon I could see faint smudges of dark colour, a band between sky and sea. I thought they were clouds at first, but the Constable told me it was Devon, which I admit that, at the time, I took to be the name of some strange, exotic place.

Like the gull birds I had seen earlier, the sails that filled the harbour put me in mind of white ghosts hovering on the surface of that water. As we drove on down the hill, the town was laid out in front of us like an illustration in a child’s picture book, but it was a strange sort of skeletal presence. Much of it was ruined, with the occasional finger of an old church spire or the shell of a tall office or apartment block pointing to the sky.

The place had contracted, shrunk in on itself, between new walls, new defences, it seemed. A hectic mixture of shelters and shanties had crowded the spaces between the older buildings in the centre of town and here it was all hustle and bustle, while outside the ramparts and barricades the quiet ruins were mostly silent and haunted by scavenging creatures.

The market place was by the dock-side, through another gate and a set of ramparts and out onto the pitted tarmac of some sort of former car park. Because to all intents and purposes we had come to trade, that was what we intended to do, so as not to cast suspicion on ourselves. There were always militia and watchmen around the place, and people saw spies and thieves everywhere, so we had to act as we were supposed to.

It had not always been like this, Cal had told me, but in the days of the first big cold, when the hunger and the fighting came, there had been so many people on the roads - refugees from the big cities which were emptying out - that those who could had dug their ditches and built their walls to keep what was theirs and keep the others out. There was so little to go around, Cal said, that there wasn’t enough for everyone; so those that had it, guarded it jealously.

The Constable had found us a pitch and paid the market tax, which was more of our goods gone. It seemed to me that we had little to spread out on the old tarpaulin we had brought, but as I looked around I could see that may of the pitches had much less. One old man sat not far from us with precious little in front of him; an old watch, a pair of shoes and some broken children’s toys. He looked as if he would sit there all day, silent and unmoved, but later the market watch-men chased him off for not paying the tax.

We had not had room for much, so we had brought dried meat and cheeses, dried fruit and some honey; though the latter was a luxury as bees were rare creatures nowadays even in our mountain. There was some barter, but much of the trade was done in the city tokens that were currency here; these were flattish discs of recycled metal, from old cans mostly dredged up from rubbish heaps, and stamped with a value and the town crest. Cal was loath to take these, but the Constable though it best and besides we could use them while we were in the place. We were to find out later that they were not always sound, but that was a lesson people like us would always have to learn in such a place.

That day to me was a cup full to the brim of new sights and sounds, so it passed quickly by. If the Constable had some plan it was not clear to me, though he left most of trade, the little of it there was, to Cal, as he moved about getting the lie of the land as he put it.

Mrs. Sharma stayed close to our pitch and told me stories of the markets and shops when she was a girl, the stalls set up in rows under one great roof, the supermarkets with their electric lights and rows and rows of shelves, all the fruits and vegetables from all over the world. Names of things I did not recognise and, indeed, at times I found it hard to believe that she wasn’t exaggerating. 

By late afternoon the sun, which had made the day so fine and warm and had taken my thoughts away from other things, was ranged low over the sea and I started to feel the cold. The Constable returned just then with a long face and Cal brewed tea up on the storm kettle, which was his pride and joy.

He meant to surprise and please the Constable with the twist of tea a sailor had traded for a piece of honey comb. It was all the way from India, the man had said, though I did not know and somehow doubted that he told the truth. It did go some way to lifting the Constable’s mood, the cup that cheers he called it, but his actual cup was an ancient thing of tin and chipped enamel.

He told us that we should be off the streets before dusk, as there was a curfew in the town. He had been told it was not safe after dark; though the militia enforced the curfew, there were too few of them to keep off the bandits and cut-throats and just plain desperate people who would rob you if you weren’t behind closed doors. The market inspector had told him of a place we could stay, where many traders and sailors spent their nights. It was a tall old building, once a big hotel, now a warren of filthy cribs run by the watch as a side line.

He was unsure of the place, he said, and when he had looked at it from the outside and stood awhile by its entrance, he had seen all manner of things going on. When he said this, he looked at Cal and Mrs. Sharma, but he did not explain further. There was also the matter of the Land Rover, he said. Though there was a guarded compound at the place, he was sure we would have to pay dearly for leaving it there and there was no guarantee it wouldn’t be rifled by the guards, who were questionable characters.

There were few people still around in the market and most of the traders were packing up their packs or their carts. As Cal drank his tea, he was keeping one eye on the pitch, but there was only one person looking; a girl with a scarf around her head and a man’s coat that swamped her. She had the darkest skin I had ever seen, not the coffee colour of Mrs. Sharma’s face, but a dark and satin shade.

The tea was a revelation to me, it tasted of the sun and warmed like it, and I could see that the others were transported by it too. The girl was glancing shyly at us and, as if on impulse, Cal offered her some. She was unsure at first, but then took the cup, and after her first taste she smiled. She must have heard our conversation because she asked:

“Are you looking for shelter?”

Necessity was her name and though it was a strange and unfamiliar name to me, she never told us why she was so called. She was from another place, a far away country, of that I was certain. That day she hinted at it and all but told us so. It was her face that I saw as I woke up the next morning, or at least the memory of it, as I struggled to shake off dreams in which I was pursued through the darkness by strange animal men with the voices of beasts. It was her face I saw as she beckoned me on towards the circle of light that spread from the lantern she held aloft. I knew in my pounding heart that I would be safe if I could only reach the circle.

It was that drumming of my heart that awoke me to a strange place, in fear at first, until I remembered where I was, in the bedroom of the house. Sun was slanting in through the low windows and from where I lay I could see the waters of the bay and the flat expanse of sand that the retreating tide had exposed, with its shoals of rubbish and debris. But for that, it would have been a beautiful scene, with the old lighthouse on the headland in the distance and some sails on the horizon. Mrs. Sharma had told me that we had such beautiful sunrises and sunsets because of all the dust and particles in the air from when the cities burnt, but I did not know if I fully believed her.

The bedroom was a place of luxury for me, though there were three beds squashed into such a small place. This did not matter as the beds had iron frames and down-filled covers and the room had a dressing table with a mirror and a big, wooden wardrobe. There were some buckets around, it was true, because the ceiling leaked and everything was cold and damp had marked the walls, but it still seemed like a palace to me.

The evening before, Necessity had guided us here. From the docklands we had taken the road which ran between the dunes and the town’s wall, this had then branched off into a street of high terraced houses, not that different from those that I was used to in the village, but much bigger.

Most of the houses seemed occupied, as were those in the nearby streets, though they were all outside the town perimeter. When the Constable asked Necessity about this, she replied that people were re-occupying these houses and there were road-blocks and watch posts further along the coast to give some sense of security.

Things were better than they had been for a long time in the town, she said, and people had started feeling safer under the Council’s protection. As if to make her point, she had flung out her arm out towards the far end of the bay where, in the twilight, we could see that a fire had been kindled in the ruins of the lighthouse, in order to guide ships safely in and also to say, insistently, we are here. We are still here.

The road had been pitted by frost and pot-holed by water, but Cal got the Land Rover safely down the street to the even taller house at the end that Necessity indicated. Beside the building was a fenced-off and over-grown yard, once the garden, and the woman skipped out of the front seat to open a pair of heavily padlocked, corrugated gates.

We could hear a dog barking, but it was quickly silenced. I looked around at the Constable and Cal and Mrs. Sharma, and it was only then I realised how anxious and afraid they were. I saw Cal reaching beneath his seat and guessed that he was checking for the sawn-off shotgun that he knew was there, as if it was a comfort to him. The Constable was still and stern, but his silence showed his concern. Mrs. Sharma, with me in the back of the vehicle, hugged me a little too close.

The gates opened and Cal drove in, eyes wide and alert. There was a man standing with Necessity, leashing a dog with a rope and tying the creature up to the rusted remains of a garden fence. He looked to be an old man, with longish grey hair and a beard, dressed in a wool jacket of some sort, a garment that had once, I’m sure, been smart and formal. His eyes, blue-green like the sea, were not unfriendly, but it seemed to me that he was trying to get the measure of us.

“Yogi’s harmless,” he said, referring I think to the dog, “all bark and little bite. Please come in when you’re ready, supper is waiting.”

She called him Richards and he called her Nes. Mrs. Sharma whispered to me later, that she thought they were an odd couple, but, then again, she said, circumstance had brought many such together. Supper was soup with some strange tasting flat-bread. Though there was some transaction regarding the costs of our bed and board, I was not aware of it happening and Richards seemed embarrassed by it and determined to treat us more like dinner guests than paying customers.

“Nes says that you are from up-country,” he said, when the table had been cleared and tea brewed. The Constable had produced a small bottle of home-made apple-brandy, a prized possession of his and brought out for the occasion, I suppose, of our safe arrival and continuing survival.

“I’d be interested to find out how things fare with you,” Richards went on, “I don’t meet many people from the valleys.”

So the Constable talked and occasionally Cal or Mrs. Sharma said a few words and Richards did something that seemed remarkable to me. He took down a ledger from a shelf and started to write, in pencil, making note of our people’s history. No-one else seemed to find this as strange as I did, nor did they question him. In fact the talking and the brandy seemed to relax them all and the kitchen fire warmed us. It was only later, when the talk dried up and Richards put the ledger carefully away and the pencil down, that the man started to speak:

“Thank you for that,” he said. “I try to keep a record of things; otherwise it’s all so easily forgotten. You are safe here, or,” he smiled as he said it, “relatively so. Your vehicle should also be quite secure in the yard. Yogi will warn us of any trouble.”

He went on, as if he now felt the need to talk, to tell his story:

“This is my house; I’ve stayed here throughout the troubles. I’ve had to barricade myself in a few times, but I’ve come through. Nes and I take care of each other. We’ve water; we collect rain-water, and that’s safe. Safer than the town river anyway, even with the acid and whatever other elements are floating in our atmosphere. I have some power, from solar panels, enough to burn the lights anyway. There’s ample wood for cooking and heating out on the beach, driftwood and debris. So we keep going here…”

But I couldn’t. As he was talking I felt my eyes flickering shut and later I remember Cal half-carrying me up the stairs, guided by Necessity, to the room I would share with Mrs. Sharma.

Now as my heart steadied and I remembered all of this, the bed and the room, which had seemed so strange a moment before, now became a warm, safe place that I did not wish to leave. I also recalled that I was hungry, though, and in the end this was what drove me out of the warmth of my bed and to the head of the dark, deep stair-well. There were voices and sounds from the house and from outside and I had a vague recollection of being told by the others what their plans for the day were. But this had somehow slipped my mind.

  As I climbed down the stairs on bare feet, there were two things that I couldn’t help. First, because of the size of the place, it high ceilings and its ornate, fading décor, I couldn’t help but move with reverential stealth, on tip-toe, down the corridors. Second, because of the curious wonder I felt, I couldn’t stop myself peering into doorways and around corners to see what they framed and led to.

On the first floor, where the stairs opened out and the corridor widened to almost a gallery, I peered around an open door and saw a large room, the width of the house, with tall windows - that, I was later told, were called bay windows – which looked out over the bay. The place was full of books and full of piles of every sort of thing you could imagine and there, sitting at a vast wooden desk, I could see Richards, or at least his back, with papers and books stacked up before him.

I thought he hadn’t heard me and was preparing to steal away, but he turned and looked straight at me and beckoned me to come forward into the room. I was convinced he would be angry with me, that he would shout at me as Aunt Rachel sometimes did, or even give me a talking to in that stern voice that Mrs. Sharma used. But, after all, he didn’t seem angry, but pleased.

“Come in, my dear,” he said.

He seemed glad of the company. I had never seen so many books before, not even in our school or in the room in the village hall that we called our library. He told me that, in the early days of the trouble, when people were leaving the cities and dying in droves from the flu and other diseases, he had collected books from abandoned houses, often the only things left by looters.

He’d also collected other things that were useless now, computers and televisions, mobile phones and CD players. No use to anyone now, but he kept them he said, as a material record. I said his house was like a museum and he laughed and agreed.

“At one time,” he said, “people talked of the end of history. And what they meant by that was that all human societies would end up on the same level, with the same wealth and values. But that was all an illusion and we lived on borrowed time and when, eventually, we’d used up that time and the earth called in the debt, people again talked of the end of history and by this they meant that the whole story of humanity, the whole human endeavour had ended. But we still, some of us at least, we still hang on; we make a fist of it. This is what these are about.”

He indicated his desk, the books and ledgers on it.

“And this is what I do. I keep a record and others I’m sure will keep a record, and then these new Dark Ages will no longer be so dark and, if we can survive and eventually thrive, people will know what happened and know that they need to take care in the future. Take care of the future, in fact.”

At the time, I didn’t really understand him, but over the years I have come back often to thinking of these things and, though I know deep in my heart that he was a dreamer, I think there was some truth in what he said and, as I till the soil and watch the animals, I hope there is someone out there keeping a record of our quiet days. Though I suspect that the calm and peace that we ordinary people crave, is of less interest to historians than to us who live it.

“Still,” he said, “I see that it is well past time for your breakfast, so let’s go down to the kitchen and see what Nes has for us.”

So he took my hand and led me down the stairs to the warm fug of the kitchen, where Nes was stirring a pot of porridge made from a sack of oats we had brought with us and some of our honey for sweetening it was on the table. And Mrs. Sharma was there, waiting for me.

Much later that night, as Nes took me up to my bedroom, we passed by Richard’s room again from where I heard strange noises, like the squawking of birds or some such small creature. Nes saw the surprise on my face and told me not to worry.

“He has an old wind-up radio,” she said. “He listens to it every night; scanning all the frequencies he can, hoping to hear something.”

I asked her if he had heard anything yet, but she shook her head.