Not Alone, page 26
‘I don’t know if I can help you, I—’
‘Of course, a fucking English girl.’ He rolls his eyes, chuckling.
‘Easy, Bill,’ the other guy says, ‘she seems spooked, probably one of the hiders.’ He smiles at me without blinking, sharp blue eyes with heavy lids and grey messy brows.
‘Come on, girl,’ Bill says again. ‘You know, if we make it right for them, it won’t have been an end, not really, and we won’t have to worry about dying ourselves – nothing’s so bleak if we know things continue? That we haven’t been wiped off the face of the Earth and obliterated?’
‘Always trying to outrun death.’ The other guy smiles, like he’s well used to Bill’s philosophies. ‘Bill here was always colour-blind too, poor cunt can’t see yellow or red – world’s all grey to him now!’
‘At least it allows me to see how shit it is!’ Bill grunts. ‘Simplified, even the leaves look the same shapes to me, same fucking species – I turned up to the protests Before, I know diversity was what made so much life possible. Now we’ve got to save it from the brink. It’s going to take a long time for the world to recover, so we have to work hard to grasp a life for our children, our community, for the future.’ He wheezes, trying to catch his breath. ‘And they can thrive, you need more than food and water and solid innovation to really survive, people need community and culture too—’
‘Sorry, I can’t help,’ I say more firmly, glancing sideways at the Cruiser, trying to catch sight of Harry.
‘We should be helping each other, not keeping things for ourselves – what good is that? The kids are the future! We fucked it up for them already, but we have to leave them something.’ His misty eyes narrow as they scan my face, drifting down the rest of my body. ‘You especially should be nurturing this future community.’
My boots crunch on a loose cobble – the top of Harry’s head is visible in the passenger seat. Bill grabs hold of my arms from behind, fingers digging into me.
‘Please, don’t just run.’ His hot sour breath is on my neck, his warm solid chest pressing into my back. ‘My wife didn’t make it, but she helped the first month – she would have dug in still if her lungs hadn’t been so burned and she got to live. What’s your name?’
As I hesitate, he thrusts his arms around me instead – one around my stomach, the other around my neck. Tight. He’s heavier than me. Stronger.
‘I’m not going to apologize for not being her!’ I find myself shouting, a sudden rush of hot anger making the words spill out. The other guy is peering in the back of the Cruiser. Harry’s little head is moving between the front seats. ‘I didn’t get to decide who lived!’
Bill’s body stiffens and the other guy’s head whips back to me.
‘You can now!’ Bill says. ‘Is your life worth more than my kid’s future? Thomas, that’s his name. And there’s more, there’s a group of twenty of us now, five children. So far. Don’t you see? It’s not really the plastic we have to worry about – we have to live with it, maybe one day more and more of it will be buried, only dangerous if it’s disturbed – the climate crisis was always the bigger bugger and it’s still coming, we have to at least make sure they can survive!’
I don’t answer.
‘Let’s just see what you’ve got, what supplies. You hiders are selfish little snowflakes, as if some horror has been landed on you and only you. Wake up, bitch.’
Bill’s arms still pin me to him as the other guy feels down the outside of my pocket. He finds the key, starts inserting his fingers to retrieve it. Grinning at me. ‘Why are women always so hysterical?’
The pressure of his warm hand against my thigh sends another hot wave through me. My T-shirt has come untucked, my stomach exposed to the cool air and Bill’s hairy forearm. I can feel his fingers on my bare hip. I can smell his sweat and the scent of woodsmoke and something metallic on his clothes. The Fear pumps up through me – thick and paralysing. I’m holding my breath. I can’t see Harry anymore.
The other guy grins, unlocking the boot, pulling out our things: boxes of roots and jars. Andy’s rifle.
‘You’ve been able to forage,’ Bill grunts.
‘There’s still food out there,’ I find myself saying, trying to sound calmer, more placating, ‘you just need to know how to forage, where to look, how to grow things . . .’
‘Nothing looks like it does in the books. We’re just relying on propagating veggies, keeping a few animals. You could help us.’ His deep voice is right at my ear.
I open my mouth, but the words get stuck in my throat. His rounded gut moves against my back as he breathes, his heat and sweat all around me, my leg still tingling from the unpleasant retrieval of the key. Muscles all squeezing tight.
Everything feels bleary. I’m shrinking into make-believe. I’m not here. Sinking into a dark hole, away from fingers and pressure and sweat.
The hooter blares from inside the Cruiser, ripping me back to the cobbled street, eyes clear. Bill flinches, his grip slackening. The other man is making for the driver’s door, Harry’s desperate little fingers trying to push down the lock.
I throw myself into a twist, my forehead catching Bill’s chin. Yanking myself back the opposite way, I find enough movement to jab my elbow into his ribs. He grunts.
There it is! Adders cheers in my head.
Once more and Bill is wheezing. The arm around my middle disappears, my face squashed against his shoulder with the arm he still has around my neck. Harry is being yanked out into the street like a ragdoll – both men cheering as if he is a trophy to bring home.
‘One more for our future!’
I’m not conscious of reaching for Dad’s knife from my belt but suddenly the cool blade is in my hand, and my arm jerks almost of its own accord. Hard. Pain shoots up my wrist as blade connects with flesh and scrapes into bone. Bill howls, folding forwards. And I run. Towards the driver’s door. Towards Harry.
32
The other man turns and pulls away just as I slash upwards, so the knife bites across his shoulder instead of the hand that grips Harry. But it’s enough for him to let go, to stagger back a few steps. I bundle Harry up into the Cruiser and throw myself in on top of him, slamming the door against the hands still trying to stop us leaving. I don’t care that they crunch; I slam until the door shuts and I can force the lock down.
‘The other key!’ I croak, groping with my free hand for the one I lost in Hitchin.
‘Mummy!’ Harry cries, pulling something shiny from between my seat and the gearstick.
I grab the silver key, plant it into the ignition. I hear more of our stuff being dragged out behind us as I try the key once, twice, jars smashing, the water filtering barrel bouncing on the cobbles. Third time lucky.
‘Bitch!’
Punch it.
The Cruiser screeches forwards, the boot door bouncing up and down behind us. The cloth bag is still tangled round my shoulder, wedging me forwards in the seat.
Harry is crying, gasping.
My right arm is covered in sticky too-dark red, the bloody knife in my footwell.
Disappearing in the rear-view mirror, Bill is on his back, the other guy stumbling on the cobbles, loading the rifle. Bitch. The word cements in my head with the crack of the rifle firing. The bullet slams into a back passenger window as we lurch round benches and lamp posts on the pedestrianized street. Snatching a glance in the side mirror, I see the glass whiten and splinter – resisting and catching it.
He bends to reload. I watch to see if Bill gets up.
I am a bitch. Another crack. Another punch to the back of the Cruiser, making me more grateful than ever for Jack’s protective choice of car.
Harry squirms out from beside me and scrambles over the gearstick to the passenger seat. The Cruiser is wild, tugging against me, the ripped tyre finally blown out and flapping and slapping as it spins. We swerve, crunching along walls, the wheel rim rumbling. Another crack and the exhaust bangs, red sparks in the rear-view. Harry’s terrified face catches my eye.
Energy bubbles up through me, making me suddenly laugh, even though the horror of my knife slicing into another person’s chest is replaying in my head.
Concentrate, Katie.
‘You did great,’ I say to Harry, squeezing the dimpled leather of the steering wheel, trying to force it straight.
‘Did they bite you?’ Harry whispers, clinging to his seat. ‘They were bad men.’
I want to agree with him as I glance in the rear-view at our empty boot. As we career through the streets, banging and rattling. As I feel the unpleasant fizz still in my skin from hands and arms and gut pressed against my body.
Yet it’s not my blood. And I felt Bill’s determination; he had his own hope to make things right.
It takes a few turns after leaving the high street, as I ease off the speed and untangle myself from the cloth bag, for me to understand: Bill won’t be getting back up. The bubbling-giggling feeling goes cold.
I can’t help wondering about Bill’s glasshouse community as Harry examines his new boots, lovingly stroking the bright laces. And about how skinny and small Harry is compared to those children playing hopscotch, how he could have been one of them.
I shake my head. It doesn’t matter. Too late now. And everything but Jack is low-hanging, but less sweet, fruit.
My hands are clenched around the steering wheel.
We need to get out of here. Make it to the dense, dizzyingly bright yellow trees at the edge of the loch. There’s probably enough food in my pack for today. We might make it to Arisaig on the fuel we have, if the engine holds out – it’s still grumbling, shooting bad fuel straight down the exhaust to pop and bang. All we have to do is reach Jack.
Bitch. My thoughts feel jumbled, but I know it used to matter to me, Before. Fixing the world, leaving it better, being helpful.
Squinting through the shattered windscreen, the blood drying and itchy up my trembling arm, I smudge away tears. I wonder if one of the children playing was Bill’s Thomas.
‘What is it?’ Harry turns, frowning out through the bouncing boot door.
‘It’s only . . . thirty-five miles west . . .’ I gasp out the words with each breath, guilty for feeling like getting to Jack will make it all feel less wrong, ‘. . . to Arisaig . . . to where . . . Daddy . . . said he’d be.’
‘Is that far?’
Breathe. Push the word out: ‘No.’ And yet the past five years all pile up in my head, heavy: yes. And I’m suddenly sinking, exhausted. Everything I might say crowds my mind, and what Jack might think, if and when he looks at Harry.
Blackness edges my vision. I try to suck in the fresh salty air whirling in from the back of the car.
We reach the trees and the lochside road and I press my foot down harder again, as if my speed right now – as if every moment – after all this time, matters.
Loch, trees and rocky heathland rocket past in a blur of black and yellow, the Cruiser bouncing and pulling in all directions, wheels clicking, groaning and slapping, the road disappearing beneath loch water.
As we near the end of the black water of the second loch, the Cruiser judders through the floodwater. Spray hits the windows. Harry flinches.
The diesel engine sputters, making me press ever harder on the accelerator. Yet we keep slowing down.
The hum of the engine suddenly cuts out and the drag of the water pulls us short, leaving us in silence.
I sit tight, still gripping the wheel. Just waterlogged trees and loch on one side, sheer cliff on the other.
Harry is holding his breath. ‘Mummy?’
Water ripples just below the windows. I try the ignition, over and over. Nothing.
Harry leans away from his window, scrunching his eyes shut, and even to me the ripples could be something looming towards us under the dark surface.
The Cruiser soon feels cold and I find myself smoothing the steering wheel, tapping the gearstick, breathing in the scent of the old seats.
Harry watches, his expression sad. ‘Is it too tired?’ he whispers in the silence, running a finger over the four-wheel-drive button.
I nod, cleaning the dried blood off myself, and reaching for my backpack hung on the back of my seat. Everything’s gone from the boot – food, water, clothes – except the groundsheet, laden with glass shards, and I lash that back to the outside of my pack.
‘Put them on.’ I nod at the new boots that look closest to his size and hand him the all-in-one from the outdoor gear sack, as I lace up my own new boots, their gleaming waterproofing and Gore-Tex label reassuring with all that water outside.
‘They’re too hard! And I told you this is too swishy, I don’t like it.’ Harry still has a wild look in his eyes, glancing at the still-bloody knife in my footwell.
‘You’ll get used to them.’ I wipe the blade and put it away on my belt, before pulling his legs and arms into the suit, lacing the boots and pressing the toes. ‘Plenty of room.’ I thread his pack onto his back.
He sits motionless as I wind my window down. The air meter shows green, though it’s breezy, and I glimpse overcast sky above the trees and rock.
‘I know you still feel sick, and what happened back there was . . . scary. But the Cruiser’s stuck; we have to go this last bit on foot.’ I study the Scottish OS spread out still on the dash. The dark green line of the Fort William to Arisaig road is only the length of my hand; we must have already travelled a good portion of it. We’ve gambled this far; if we can just make it to Jack . . .
‘We might be there in a few hours.’ I feel a surge of that energy that keeps eclipsing the horror behind us.
‘Will Daddy have a warm fire like we did in the flat? Like Andy and Sue?’
‘Yes, probably.’
Harry sighs heavily, frowning at me and up at the steep rock, squinting. ‘What if the mountain falls on me?’
‘You’ll be fine . . . and don’t forget the mandarins I promised.’
He sits a little straighter. ‘But isn’t it bad water?’
‘I’ll carry you through the worst bit.’
Unhappy in his gear, he is stiff and unhelpful as I struggle to pull the mittens attached to his sleeves over his hands ‘for not-touching’. Eventually I agree he can hold his mask for now, but only until I say he must put it on.
He’s still craning to scrutinize the rock as I get out first, getting instantly drenched up to my knees. With my backpack on my front, I help him out onto my back, his little feet hitching to avoid the water. Staggering forwards, the ever-present prickling ache in my chest is soon a sore breathlessness. My new boots pinch and rub, cold seeping in at the ankles.
The inundated road bends round the cliff, and as soon as there’s a bit of exposed yellowed grassy slope, I head up as far as I can to get away from the water, before having to set Harry and the bag down. The hillside spreads out around us to the west, low mountains to the east, that breeze picking up.
‘It’s wet!’ Harry stands with his feet close together, teeth chattering, looking very pale.
I nod. I can’t speak yet, still gasping and wheezing.
Grey droplets land on my coat sleeves.
‘Where’s your mask?’ I cry.
Harry flinches, hands at his ears as if feeling for it, and I rifle through his pack and mine. Looking back at the glimpse of the Cruiser between cliff and trees, I see the loch water has risen fast with the tide, now splashing in through the opened window.
‘You had it in your hands!’ I scan the water, as if I might be able to spot and retrieve it, but I know it’s gone.
Dread clogs my throat. The sky is thick with grey, the haze blurring the furthest slopes.
Yet in the distance, down towards the faint blur of the sea and across the folds of rich orange-brown hillside to the west, there’s a promising cluster of white specks. Arisaig is the only village in this direction – those may be the outermost cottages.
I don’t wait for my breathing to calm. I tie my adult-sized mask tight around Harry’s little face and strip out of my T-shirt to fold and wind the thin woven fabric around my face in as many layers as possible. We start scrambling upslope over the tufts and spongy mounds.
The rain plinks down on our hoods and shoulders in sharp heavy droplets. I keep plunging knee-deep into blood-hued cushions of wet moss and peat, and just catching Harry before he stumbles.
We have to rest further up when I can’t gasp another wheezy breath in, pins and needles starting to numb my hands and feet. Harry slumps to his knees in the damp grass, retching as I croak in breaths. Breeze spirals round us, ruffling our hair as I pull his hood up again and lash it tight, grey rain dripping from our coats.
‘Is the wind angry, Mummy?’ Harry’s mask-muffled voice is snatched away.
I twist the ring on my finger in frantic circles, slack dead bodies whirring in my head.
We just have to reach one of those cottages. Jack is not far now.
More clouds roll in, turning the grass and moss grey and billowing, and the afternoon dim and shadowy. The air is cold and damp, sharp and stinging inside my chest as we move again. The small cubes of those cottages in the distance fade into the grey downfall, but I try to stare exactly at the spot, so I won’t lose it.
33
I’m trudging through the gloom, sploshing across rushes and peatbog, knees juddering, threatening to give way. My pack is heavier than ever. And I’m dragging Harry, holding a blanket over us to keep the rain from his face.
I stumble and land on my hands and knees in something wet and cold. I’ve lost my gloves. Rain pummels me – cold hard loaded rain. My lungs are hot, the irritation that has felt like sandpaper scraping open and shut since that night in Sheffield now feels like a ball of thorny bramble sat inside my chest, growing bigger and sharper as I inhale. I shouldn’t get cold and wet. Or what good am I to Harry?
