by Stuart Evers
Someone has died, she thinks. Someone has died suddenly. Perhaps it is her. Maybe she has become as wraith-like as Cathy, haunting the dark spaces, never to leave. She doesn’t know how that makes her feel.
2
It is a woman who calls; something Drummond did not expect. In the imagining, in the preparation, it was always a man. A pause after his message and then a gravelled good luck before ending the call. Import. Seriousness. An understanding of the weight and implication of his words. Instead, a woman, the breeze and speed of a secretary, emotionless and dutiful, another task ticked from a list. No pause; no good-luck coda. All the things to think, and this the first. Distracted as a condemned man eyeing the dandruff of his executioner. Should have been a man.
Drum’s hands shake, exaggerated the shake, welcoming-an-invisible-figure shake, both arms jolting up and down, in different rhythms, at different speeds. The things we say. I thought I’d have a heart attack. Thinking that now, thinking he’ll soon clutch at his chest, fall to the farmhouse flags, his last sight clumps of food unswept from under kitchen cabinets.
It has been a good life. Yes. A family safe. Money, tight, but always food on the table, a car to drive. Good kids, mostly. Gwen happy, provided for, loved. His days free from bodywork and production; up at the crack with the cows; at the end of day, watching the cattle into their sheds, dung and flies, the sense of a day’s work done. Nights watching the sun set over the fields, whisky in hand with Carter, reading books with Gwen in the sitting room. His back cracks and his joints ache, but it is a good life. Has been a good life, well lived.
It passes. The clutch at the heart releases, the hands and arms settle. Ashamed at the reaction. The adrenalin cooling. He washes his hands and face. Calm now. Trained and diligent now. To follow the drill by rote. Still, it should have been a man to call. A man to wish him good luck. He deserves that at least.
3
Over time, Gwen has got used to wearing earplugs; those she uses to deaden Drummond’s snores. They give routine, the plugs. Once the radio is switched off, the last page read, she puts them in and offers a kiss goodnight. They are punctuation; a provider of grammar. They say no more conversation; they say quiet; they say no chance of sex. A kiss without earplugs has potential. Not uncommon those kisses, and always successful.
Each morning he forgets about the earplugs, talks for a time before stroking her arm to wake her. A dance that. A quick foxtrot of pretending to be asleep before putting on dressing gown and slippers.
The way he strokes her arm now is different; insistent, running to rough. She looks up and there is sweat on his brow, the grey at his temples darker. She takes out the earplugs, and he is shaking his head. Somewhere she can hear the run of water.
‘We need to go,’ he says.
‘Where?’ she says, though his face and the sweat tell her exactly where.
‘Under,’ he says. ‘Just a drill, I expect.’
There have been many drills over the last year, but never at night. She sits up and touches his arm, the slight stammer to it. He smiles, the falsest smile she has seen on his face, one he does not believe himself.
‘Are you running a bath?’ she says.
He sits down next to her, eyes already cried, already wiped dry and glassily prepared.
‘You never know how long we’ll be down there. I’d like to go in clean.’
He takes her hand.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘The bath’s warm. Almost ready.’
In the dark he leads her to the bathroom. There are bubbles in the bath; the best towels folded on the toilet seat. Be calm. Just another drill. Never a bath on the drill though. Never like this. Go in clean.
She vomits into the lavatory pan, three quick expulsions. Nausea like the worst of the morning sickness, body fried with tremens, gooseflesh on her arms as she flushes the toilet.
Looking up from the pan, she sees the panic in him, the disappointment in himself. ‘Get in,’ he says.
The water is piping, her skin quickly red. He smooths a soaped-up sponge over her body. We go in clean. To have thought this for so long, the preparation and planning to think that. He pours water from a jug over her head. He massages shampoo into her crown. She closes her eyes and smells jojoba, tries to hold on to that smell, that smell and not scream.
‘It’s not a drill, is it?’ she says.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘But we’ll be okay. We’ll be safe.’
‘You talked to Carter?’ she says.
‘No,’ he says. ‘All communications are disconnected. We can’t call anyone. They can’t call us. But we’ll be fine.’
She thinks of Ray. Immediately, Ray. Not thought of for some time, and now urgently with her, combing his hair in the mirror.
Drum gets out of the bath, wipes steam from the mirror, picks up a can of shaving foam, fills the basin with water.
‘How can you be so calm?’ she says. ‘How can you just stand there and . . . . shave?’
He looks straight into the mirror, not at her. He dips the razor in the water, scrapes away a strip of white.
‘We need to be calm for the children,’ he says. ‘If we go crazy, so will they.’
She wishes he’d cut himself, for the blade to nick him, remind him he is blood and skin and bone. You think you’re prepared. You think you’ve thought it all through, practised it enough. But you can’t practise the real thing. There are baths in the real thing. There is shaving foam.
She gets out of the cooling water, presses herself against him. She shakes and he dries her, still foam-bearded, her shakes not stopping, the shakes shaking themselves.
‘Hush,’ he says. ‘You need to calm. You need to be calm for Annie and Nate.’
He goes back to his shave, the white and the dark in the water, the sound of razor on stubble. Calming the sound, calming as she dries.
‘Remember when they shared a bath?’ she says. ‘When they were young enough for that?’
He looks at her in the mirror, he smiles and his teeth look fang-yellow against the white.
‘Go get them and tell them it’s just a drill,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry. They know what to do.’
In her bedroom, she opens the wardrobe. A dress would be defiant. A long black chiffon number. A floaty gown in soft pink. A floor-length purple dress. All Daphne’s cast-offs. She shuts the door on them. Leaves them for the archivists, for the historians, for the archaeologists. Confuse them. Who could have lived in this simple cottage with such lavish garments? Let them wonder. Let them think. She puts on underwear, jeans, a jumper. She looks at herself in the mirror. The last time. This is who I am. About to disappear. Poof.
OPERATION MID-OFF
It begins with an accident, a computer malfunction. There have been several over the years, all of them intercepted at the last moment, the world none the wiser as to the proximity of Armageddon. On this occasion, the computer malfunction is not discovered until the Americans have already spotted the movement of missile sites. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, increased tensions have made such movements a catalyst for action. The Russians claim a malfunction, but the security council in the US believes this is a smokescreen for a pre-emptive strike. Between Washington and Moscow, the conversations are terse. The Soviets begin to wonder whether this is a work of espionage; the malfunction designed to allow the US to launch their own pre-emptive strike. The UK’s Regional Seats of Government are placed on the highest alert. Designated people of importance are contacted and told to make their way to the nearest safe facility, the first time this action has been implemented. The code name for the action is Operation Mid-Off. In the RSGs, we wait for further news and instructions.
Bryan Jerrick, My Cold Wars (Underworld Press, 2001)
5
It doesn’t feel like it is happening, more that it has already happened. The way they shoulder their Go bags, the quiet as they descend the stairs. The same as a regular drill, no different to any practice run, as ev
eryday as school and work. Happening, having happened: both the same.
They put on boots and walk to the Carter house, Drum unlocking the padlock on the storm hatch, letting his family crouch, descend first. The drills are principally about the normalization of process. The repetition dulling the senses, without that shrieking bedlam, blind panic. He follows them as he always does, into the creosote-and-sacking smell, the damp cold air.
They wait at the end of the cellar for him. He opens the door using the wheel at its centre, releasing the catch, pulling the door towards him. A corridor beyond, stone and steel and lead, lit by small spots in the roof, pricks of light leading to another battle-grey door.
He holds the door open, extends an arm in invitation, an invitation none of them takes. They stand in the cool, their breath visible. Gently Gwen ushers them into the corridor, holding one hand back for Drum to hold, which he takes, though he doesn’t want to. He knows if he doesn’t, the first few hours will be worse than the second time they rushed underground. Then the children looked not to him, but gravitated to her. They hid amongst Gwen’s petticoats as she asked them if they were hungry, if they’d like baked beans or spaghetti hoops. Neither of his children looked to him then.
Nate begins to turn the second door’s wheel. Not waiting for Drum, but turning it himself. The door opens before Drum can get there, behind it the decontamination chamber, strip lights reflecting off the chrome doors. The pipes and brickwork are painted the same shade of soothing green, nozzles are arranged in a regular pattern: one high, one at waist height, one for the ankles. Beyond the swing doors is a changing room, painted the same shade of soothing green, hooks on the walls, small wooden benches beneath. They take off their boots there, all of them, as they always do. Well drilled. Well trained. Then push through the doors into the living quarters.
In 1965, when Carter had eventually revealed it to him, the bunker project taking some three years to build and not an inconsiderable amount of his inheritance, the living area had appeared vast. If anything it now looks bigger. It still takes Drummond’s breath away; he feels genuinely winded whenever he sees it. A space for them to share, when the moment came. Enough room for both families, Drummond to lead them while Carter was at the Regional Seat of Government bunker. That the plan. Always the plan.
The large room is divided into specific spaces: the back wall dominated by a long refectory-style table; the right-hand wall home to a series of sky-blue easy chairs circled around a glass coffee table; the left wall a piano, and shelves filled with books, records and a radio set. The floor is black linoleum, the walls white, uplighters bracketed on them, brightly illuminating the space. There is a touch of the institutional, but it retains a simplistic comfort he admires.
‘Is anyone hungry?’ Drum says. ‘I could heat something up if anyone’s hungry.’
‘It’s the middle of the night,’ Anneka says. ‘How can you think of eating?’
Anneka sits on one of the easy chairs, tucks her legs underneath her the way she does when she sits on the sofa to watch television. So simple a motion: engrained and surprising. Drum doesn’t know where to put himself, where to stand or sit, but she has already decided, taken the space as her own. The fortitude of her. The strength of her. Does him proud.
‘On the bright side,’ Anneka says. ‘If it is the end of the world, at least I can’t fail my exams again.’
She laughs and it is flinty, her laughter directed squarely at her father. He smiles as the swing doors open: Daphne, Thomas, Natasha; behind them a thin tall man, suited in pinstripes, thick spectacles on a snub nose, chin weak as mild. Daphne walks towards them, drops her bag by the door, slackly embraces Gwen as though this a regular meeting. The two friends stay like that, holding each other, Daphne’s three companions standing by the settling door, two teenagers and a man in his fifties, blinking, their bags still in hand, looking at the congregation around the coffee table. Drum hopes the doors will open a last time, and Carter stride in, but they remain shut.
‘Come in, all of you,’ Drum says. ‘Come, sit. We were just about to make some tea.’
The two teenagers slope towards their contemporaries. Tom wearing a shirt open at the neck, slim-cut trousers, boat shoes, hair combed straight, the spit of his youthful father; Natasha wearing a similar outfit, a striped blouse and jeans, boat shoes. A holiday look. The way they dress when they pack the car to head to Spain.
The thin man strides towards Drum, takes his hand, it is a clammy handshake, confident in its pump.
‘You must be Moore,’ the thin man says to Drum. ‘Gault. Pleased to meet you.’
‘And you, Mr Gault.’
‘Could you show me to my berth?’ Gault says. ‘I’d like to change, if I may.’
‘But of course,’ Drum says, ‘it’s just through here.’
He thinks of Carter’s face, serious in the darkness, looking out over the fields. He wonders how Carter is coping. What he’s seeing on the telex machine. Drum walks Gault to his berth and opens the door: a small double bed, a nightstand, a chest of drawers.
‘Well,’ Gault says. ‘Seems I dropped lucky. You should see the shelter I was supposed to be billeted at. Double bunks. Four to a room. This is like the Savoy in comparison.’
Gault takes off his jacket; Drum thinks he’s about to hand it to him to hang on the back of the door, but he folds it on the bed.
‘What’s the latest, Mr Gault?’ Drum says.
‘You know as much I do, I expect,’ Gault says, unbuttoning his shirt. ‘As I understand it, the Americans are being painted into a corner. All I know is that it’s not looking hopeful.’
Drum looks at the thin man, the way he removes his vest, opens his case and takes out a fresh one, then a linen shirt. A man on a weekend away, unfazed and judging the accommodation.
‘We’ll be fine here,’ Gault says. ‘A few months at worst. Probably won’t even get that far. But with people like you, your family and so on, it’ll be the making of us. I believe that. I really do. A chance to start again. To begin again. A friend of mine always says that from the ashes came the phoenix, and from our ashes, we shall build a utopia. I believe him when he says that. Whatever the sacrifice, whatever the hardship, when we look back, we’ll see this was needed. We’ll see the privations were, in the end, worth the toil.’
It has the air of a speech oft-performed; the soft chin and watery eyes, the buttoning of the shirt, easing its passage. A man like that, saying those things, yes; succour there. Hope there. Belief there.
‘But I’m sure it won’t come to that,’ Gault says. ‘Though we must be prepared if it does.’
‘I’ll leave you to change, Mr Gault,’ he says. ‘How do you take your tea?’
‘With lemon,’ he said.
‘I don’t think we have any lemons,’ Drum says. Gault clicks his teeth.
‘If not I’ll take a small amount of milk, and a half-spoon of sugar.’
Drum closes the door on Gault. He passes the room he and Gwen will share, the children’s rooms with their single beds. He stands at the doorjamb, looking into the galley kitchen, Daphne and Gwen busying themselves with the tea, silent and looking through cupboards, checking stocks of tea and sugar.
‘Do we have any lemons?’ he says. ‘Gault likes his tea with lemon.’
The two women turn, pause their movements at the same time.
‘Well you tell Mr Gault,’ Daphne says, ‘that when we were preparing for the end of the world, we forgot to put fucking lemons on the list.’
6
Her mother and Daphne put down their tea; the radio now on, low hiss, an orange dial, the needle over to the very right of the band. All the stations to its left, playing Top Forty, playing opera, doling out the news, forecasting the weather, all oblivious. Already knowing this not a drill. Gault not a man for drills. This the real thing.
How many underground, Anneka wonders, how many like her, sitting with family, friends, colleagues, strangers. How many thinking suicide, planning
pacts, unable to face the survival. She could blow her brains out. Overdose on pills. It’s an option, holocaust or no. When the lack of sleep got out of hand, she thought about it often.
In the bath, her father’s razor in the medicine cabinet, the easiest way out. Slash down not across. Where did she read that? The ease of it; of walking out into traffic; motorcycles, strangely, the most provoking, the meagreness of them compared to cars, but the impact just as total. Electric pylons from the school information films, throw something over them. Wasn’t there something about shoelaces, a kid in flared trousers looping them over the pylon and catching flame? Always her father’s voice though, always the soothing voice, sometimes the shouting voice, but mostly the soothing voice: my love, my girl, be safe, that’s all.
Gault enters the living quarters. He looks strange in the linen shirt, the fawn slacks. He is trying too hard, he is too casual: she can already only imagine him in pinstripes, a suit like the father from Mary Poppins. The kind of man she’s seen arriving at the Carter house, greeted by Uncle Jim, backslaps and bottles of wine in hand, ushered into the big house through the front door she and her family never use.
‘Here you are, Mr Gault,’ her father says, handing the man a cup and saucer. ‘No lemon, I’m afraid.’
Gault sits down at twelve o’clock in the circle of chairs. He sets down his cup.
‘Thank you,’ Gault says. ‘Thank you for accommodating me. I know this is a difficult time, but if we all pull together, I’m sure we’ll all get through this.’
He picks up his cup, stirs his tea, looks blinking round at them all. Anneka wonders if anyone else is thinking they’d kill and eat him first.