Thimblewinter (7 page)

There was a wind now, thankfully blowing the rain away, but the breakers were being stirred up and were washing almost up to the walk-way, throwing salt spray over our already sodden capes. I was not minded to talk, let alone ask more questions, I was just conscious of the fact that we were exposed like two ants walking across a rock on a sunny day.

So I was paying little attention to the supposed dangers that Nes had hinted at, until when we were slowly and carefully rounding one of the big tower turbines - the walkway in front of it having all but collapsed - and she suddenly pulled me into the shelter of a doorway. Down below, against the metal skeleton of the tower’s base, a small boat was tied up and some men in waterproof gear were unloading bales of some sort. I saw very little because Nes pulled me on quickly, but I did hear the sound of a woman’s sobbing coming from one of the tower rooms. This made me pause, my mouth framing a question which Nes waved away. Her face said it all; there was nothing we could do about it, we had to concentrate on saving ourselves.

That was all that happened to us on the barrage, but it was enough. When we got to the other side of the river, we saw no people, but there like some giant, extinct creature stood the remains of a big ship, its belly split open, its body rusting and falling back into the sands. There were eyes watching us from this hulk, we both could feel them, so we moved on faster, wondering what sort of creatures would dwell there.

At the compound the guards recognised Nes and we were admitted. The trade had been done and Cal, the Constable and Mrs. Sharma were drinking tea with Mr. Ali and some other, older looking men, when we were brought into their presence.

It was late afternoon by the time the Land Rover got back to Richard’s street. Cal was weaving his way around the debris and pot-holes at the end of the road, while Nes beside him strained her eyes into the already fading light, trying to see the way ahead. There were dark figures outside the house, motionless, like so many statues. Cal braked the Land Rover, but kept the engine running. Nes jumped from the seat and ran up the road, ignoring Cal’s shouts urging her to be careful. Cal slid from behind the wheel and followed her, leaving Mrs. Sharma to take the wheel and the Constable on guard. I was supposed to stay too, but I slipped out of the door before Mrs. Sharma could stop me and took after Cal.

As I got closer I could see that the figures standing around outside the house were neighbours, people from the street and close around, as near to a community as it got in this place. I could see that the corrugated iron of the gate had been forced open and just inside lay the bloodied corpse of the dog Yogi. Cal had stepped through the front door after Nes and I followed, though some of the women there tried to dissuade me.

“It’s no sight for you love,” one of them, cowled in a head scarf, said.

There were many sights I’d seen though, things perhaps it would have been better for me if I hadn’t, but they had not prepared me for what I saw then. There were other people in the house and some of them looked leery or shame-faced. I had the impression that not all of the neighbours were here to help, some were in the process of scavenging whatever items of value Richards had.

He was in his room, amongst his books and his other relics. No-one had taken any of the books, I noticed. They had tried to make him comfortable, propped him up on some pillows on the couch, which was now sodden with his blood. His head was battered and someone had tried to bandage it, but the major wound was at his abdomen, covered with a pad now.

“Nes, love,” a man who was holding Richards’ hand said, “we thought they’d taken you too. The bastards broke in and, when he tried to stop them, they beat him up. And when that didn’t put him down, they shot him in the guts.”

A woman, who seemed to have some medical knowledge, as she was administering to the wounds, stood back for a moment and shook her head at Nes. We all understood her meaning. Cal stepped back too, as if he feared he was intruding on this intimate scene of death. Nes stood over Richards and took the hand that the neighbour relinquished. Richards seemed to be slipping in and out of consciousness, but then he woke to a sudden lucidity and noticed Nes. He smiled at her. She almost lost her composure, almost cried. Her voice betrayed her.

“You old fool,” she said. “You could have just let them in. Told them where I was.” Saved your life, was what she thought, but she didn’t give voice to it.

He shook his head:

“Couldn’t do it…. Ever…” he managed to say. Then he looked around him at the gathered people. He looked straight at me, tried to smile, and then I realised that my face was wet. I was crying and that noise in my ears of someone sniffing and trying not to sob was me.

“It’s alright,” he said to me. He seemed to want to say more, but it pained him too much.

“Tell everyone to go,” he said to Nes, his voice almost breaking, “and the girl shouldn’t see this.” He nodded in my direction.

The other people filed out and Cal came and touched my shoulder. Mute, I followed him to the door, looking back once to see Nes, her head bowed, and Richards striving to keep himself awake and alive for a few more moments.

We waited at the Land Rover for Nes. It hadn't taken long; she came out of the dim end of the afternoon, a wild silhouette against the dying sun, which had deigned finally to shine on this forlorn day. She had a rucksack and another bag, which she chucked into the back of the vehicle and then climbed in beside me. Cal and the Constable looked at each other, unsure what to do, but she just said:

“Get us out of here.”

So Cal started the old vehicle up and we began our journey home.

It wasn’t as easy to get it done, as to say it. No-one travelled at night in those times and it was hard to get through the militia check-points at that time of day without answering many questions. But Cal and the Constable had acquired some knowledge of the militia’s habits and knew that the gate that led out towards the fishing village was only manned in a desultory way by some elderly watchmen. There was little opportunity to skim off unofficial taxes from the traffic on this particular road, as it was mostly Council transport; the only traders who came and went by this route were farmers and though food was always a welcome addition to any militia man’s diet, richer pickings were to be had at other gates.

The gate was open when we got there, some farm wagons were on their way home and the watch-men had just waved them through. Cal took the opportunity to over-take one of them and drive through in the wake of another. One of the watch-men shouted and waved a gun in our direction, but they showed little zeal in pursuing us.

There was a problem involved in leaving the city by this route. The roads that would take us to The Services were more circuitous and less safe than the way we had originally come into the city. In the fading light the Constable would have to navigate from the old city map that Richard’s had given him and the land was much changed since any map had been last printed.

As dusk came on, the countryside was like I imagine the face of the moon to be. A landscape of pitted craters, mountainous shapes looming at intervals and deep, uneven gullies and canyons. Cal managed to keep to a track of sorts, which threaded its way through it all.

“God knows what this once was,” Mrs. Sharma said. “How you can imagine it from what’s left?”

It really seemed a wasteland. We had turned north off the coast road and were trying to cut north-east toward The Services and the main road it stood upon, but this moonscape seemed to go on and on, confusing and bemusing us.

Eventually we were out of it, into a region of stunted trees and poisonous looking shrubs, but this did not put an end to our troubles. The track was sometimes now so choked with brush and dead wood that we had to pile out of the Land Rover and clear a way ahead. We did this warily, fearing attack from the remittance men that Owen had talked of, or some other deadlier creature. At one stop, we narrowly managed to scramble back into the car before a pack of wild dogs erupted from the undergrowth. A few shots would have probably cleared them, but Cal and the Constable didn’t want to attract any unwelcome attention by using firearms and ammunition, as always, was too precious to waste.

We found ourselves following the ghost of a track across a wide dry meadow, which gave on to a stream. To our right, I could see the ghosts of trees in the valley’s shadow and to the left the sun still lighting up the ribbon of water. As we drove on the stream wound away from us, opening up a flat plain between the track and its course. Soon we could see a light flaring up, growing into a bonfire near the edge of the water as we got closer. Around the fire figures were dancing and as we neared we saw that they were naked and painted, some daubed with some luminous white pigment, which gave them the look of so many skeletons.

“What the …?” The Constable asked, but didn’t finish his question. Nes was reaching for her weapon and Mrs. Sharma looked bemused. I had started to laugh, but from the others’ faces, I could see that this could be serious so I stopped myself.

Cal drove on; after all there was little else he could do, the alternative was turning back and that had little attraction. As we came up level with the fire, some of the figures peeled off and ran towards us. Nes started to roll down the window, her shotgun ready, but the Constable motioned to her, waving caution with his hand, and she slid the weapon out of view.

The beings that came into the halo of light from our headlights were human, men with beards and long matted dreadlocks, naked except for their paint, brandishing sticks and staffs. Everyone in the Land Rover collectively held their breath, but though the men surged forward they stopped at the edge of the track and howled and screamed and waved their weapons at us. There was the sound of rain, or so I thought, hitting the windows and Mrs. Sharma gasped.

“My God, they’re peeing on us!”

And that was all that happened, they let us pass and soon we had turned onto the main road, the once mighty highway, now scarred and crumbling, but still better than most of the tracks and roads we had travelled on and, in a short while, we had gained the haven of The Services. We were waved through the gates of the place with no trouble, just some more weary travellers keen to get off the road before full dark.

The Services were outside the remit of the town and it’s Council; in essence the place was a private enterprise, which offered protection and victuals for anyone on the roads for the necessary fee. They weren’t always such beacons of calm and peace as they were made out to be, but they served in their fashion.

I was surprised at the number and variety of people who had come before us and by the various forms of transport that had brought them. A road train had come in from the north and there were people amongst the merchants and travellers it had brought, who had the look of refugees. They seemed to smell of fear and sudden flight, bearing their possessions with them heaped onto carts or other vehicles, elderly people too old for such travel sitting precariously atop the loads.

There were others, too, who did not have the expected look of regular voyagers. A group of holy women, nuns going into the west, camped in austere fashion, all eating from identical plastic bowls some sort of gruel or porridge. The Constable, ever curious, had asked them where they were bound. He told us later that they appeared to be on a pilgrimage to a holy place of theirs; St. Mark’s it was called and was far in the west. He said that they seemed glaringly innocent to all the dangers that might face them and he doubted that they would ever arrive.

There were also a group of men in colourful turbans in two white vans. They were traders Cal said, Sikhs. They often travelled the roads these days, from one to another of their own communities, like nomads, trading and transporting goods along the vestiges of the great highways.

There were also some soldiers, the first we had seen in years.

“Real army they are,” said Cal, “not militia or mercenaries”.

Cal gleaned that they were from London, or what was left of it, the areas that hadn’t been overwhelmed when the Thames barrier was breached in the great storms of the fifties. There was still some sort of government in London and they still had all the airs and graces to think they were running the country, though there was little enough left to run, and not much that wanted to be run by others. They were on their way west, too, to some vestigial garrison guarding the western seaboard. He couldn’t find out why, but he guessed that they were conveying dispatches of some sort.

I knew that there was supposed to be some sort of government in Cardiff too, but nobody seemed to know what had happened to it nor had heard much of it, or Cardiff, lately. The soldiers were a surly-looking, malnourished bunch, with two beat up trucks and a motley array of equipment. They did not inspire confidence or raise our spirits.

“They’re just glorified London militia,” Cal said, “though they’ve got some fancy regimental name.”

The officer in charge, Cal said, looked like a proper soldier though, a professional Cal called him, and the Constable talked with him later, seeing if he could arrange for the nuns to travel with them part of the way. The result of this conversation was unclear, though the Constable, as ever, remained hopeful.

“He seemed a man of honour,” was all he said, though I was unsure what he meant by this.

But I saw little of this and found most of it out later. I spent the evening sitting with Nes, in the light of the fire Cal made, away from the big, communal fires, where people visited and talked and swapped news of the country.

The flames lit the planes of her face, as she sat unmoving, the shadows and the light tracing patterns on her mute and silent features. She sat as if in some kind of trance and I was loath to leave her. After a spell, I chanced to take her hand, finding it cold and lifeless at first, but later, much later, feeling a welcome pressure and warmth.