Contents
Cover
Also By Melvin Burgess
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Acknowledgements
Other books by Melvin Burgess
An Angel for May
The Baby and Fly Pie
Bloodsong
Bloodtide
Burning Issy
The Cry of the Wolf
Doing It
Junk
Lady: My Life as a Bitch
The Lost Witch
Nicholas Dane
Sara’s Face
First published in 2021 by
Andersen Press Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
Vijverlaan 48, 3062 HL Rotterdam, Nederland
www.andersenpress.co.uk
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
The right of Melvin Burgess to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Copyright © Melvin Burgess, 2021
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
ISBN 978 1 83913 050 2
Ruled Britannia
This book is part of a triptych of novels; three separate stories all taking place in the same imagined world. One Drop, by Pete Kalu, The Second Coming, by Tariq Mehmood, as well as my own book, Three Bullets, all take place in the UK as it might be in the near future.
Thanks to Pete and Tariq not just in terms of world building but with conversations about race, politics, gender and life in general, not to mention all the hard work that went into writing notes for one another. You guys opened a lot of doors for me – I’ve not had so much fun writing a book for years.
You can find out more about the Triptych on our Facebook page,
https://www.facebook.com/RuledBritannia/ Or at www.ruledbritannia.net
For my Anita,
who made Lockdown such a pleasure
1
My name is Martina. You won’t like me, not many people do. Back then I lived in south Manchester with my little brother Rowan, an odious brat; my mum, a nutjob; and my friend Maude, who I used to hate but, well, she didn’t turn out as bad as she might have done, put it like that. She kind of owed me, which helped. If it wasn’t for me, she’d have been dead meat by then, no question.
Not so long before, I had loads of friends – well, people I knew, anyway. Not all of them were exactly friends. Now I just had Maude. She used to go to the same school as me, back in the day. We never hung out. She was way over my head. She was two years older than me and she was everything I’m not. She was hot. I’m not hot. Mind you, she didn’t stay so hot, not without the hot short skirts and the hot tight jeans and the hot make-up. She still had the nice bum and boobs but if you dropped her back in a half decent school, she would truly not be lead bitch. She still got loads of boys but all you needed round there to get any number of boys was a pair of legs you could still open and that was as good as hot.
She was smart as well, which I never was – I mean, good-at-lessons smart. Good at sport and that. Oh, and a bitch. Did I mention that? A bully. You know the sort. She wouldn’t even talk to me because I wasn’t cool enough. She was in a group of girls who somehow found out that I was wearing a thong one day and pulled my skirt up over my head so that everyone could see my spotty bottom. That was nice.
Then her house got bombed, and her mum and dad both got killed, and her brother, who she adored, pulled her out of the rubble, put her on a mattress on the side of the road and ran away to who-knows-where.
Maude’s brother did the sensible thing. If my mum had been as dead as hers, I’d have gone, too. I’d’ve gone before you could lick the fat off your fingers. I was furious when my dad dragged her home on that mattress to live with us. I never saw a lot of my dad because he was always away doing important war stuff. So then what? He finally gets home after being away for months, and the first thing he does is adopt the monster bitch girl from school who spent three months calling me Cheesewire. And then he goes away again! How’s that for fair, eh, Dad?
‘I don’t care how horrible she was, she has nothing now,’ he said. Then he left us again to get on with his war work.
See? Mum needed him. I needed him. We needed him. And instead of helping us, he spent all his time helping everyone else. Then he brings in cheesewire girl and leaves us on our own to look after her!
Unbelievable.
I remember standing in the doorway of her room, looking at her lying there, all bruised and ugly. One side of her face was out like a melon, she had a bloodstained bandage around her head. She’d been bleeding from her ear.
‘Not so hot now, are you?’ I said.
I said it quite loud. Loud enough for her to hear if she was awake – if she could still hear – but not loud enough for Mum to hear downstairs. She opened her eyes, looked at me, turned over and lay still.
Serves you right, I thought. But I felt bad.
She woke up a few days later and I still don’t know if she heard me that day. But I really hope not because we became mates. She spent a week eating all the Pot Noodles I’d got from when they bombed the Co-op, then one day she lifted her head and looked at me across the table.
‘Did you get them?’ she asked. ‘The noodles?’
I nodded. She nodded.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m really, really sorry, Marti.’ I suppose she was talking about the thong and stuff. ‘I’ll come out with you tomorrow and help.’
And she did. And – she was OK, Maude. She stuck to her word, for you or against you, which I liked. She had principles, which I kind of admired because I don’t have any myself.
‘A person who stands for nothing will fall for anything,’ she kept telling me. Which was really annoying because I lent her that book, and also because she’s the one who fell for people’s bullshit every time. All you had to do was agree with her and she’d follow you anywhere. I called her Rubblehead because I think all that rubble sitting on her head for a day must have knocked some generosity of spirit into her.
‘You were such a bitch before. That bomb was a blessing,’ I told her. And she laughed, but actually it’s true. See? Even bombs can be a blessing.
That was a joke. Right?
2
So I woke up and it was pitch black, and I couldn’t see a thing and there was a great bellowing and roaring all around.
I thought, This is it. There was a big crash and a bang that knocked the breath out of me. There were bombs going off all around. It was pitch black but then there was this blinding white flash for a moment, and everything looked normal. The room, everything. I was still in bed. The walls, still there. I saw it all in a fraction of a second. The door. The glass was stil
l in the windows, but this weird blanket of dust was creeping in at the edges.
My mum was always nagging us to sleep down in the basement with her and Rowan, but I had my reasons for staying on the first floor. There’s lots of ways to die when your house gets hit. You can get burned to death. You can have a lump of masonry fall on your head. You can choke on smoke or get thrown up into the air and come down on the heap of rubble that was once your bedroom. Or, you can get buried under the wreckage with slow internal bleeding that hurts like hell, with not enough air to breathe and tonnes of bricks pressing down on top of you, hoping someone will come along and dig you out but knowing that they probably won’t. I’d put some thought into this and that last one was my least favourite way of dying. Which is why I always slept on the first floor. The attic – even a little bomb is going to come through the roof and get you. Ground floor, if the house falls down – you’re dead.
Technically the basement was the safest place, but that basement was so cold and damp. The gas went last year and we only got electric for a few hours here and there.
I got this horrendous vertigo, like I was falling, but I was still in the room lying on my bed. Then, a big bump. The glass shattered in the windows. The incendiaries were flashing – one, two, three, four, like that – and I could see Maude sitting up in bed with her hair in little curls sticking up. She turned to look at me in strobe and I remember it so well, her with her blonde hair all sticking up with all that gel she used, like some crazy doll. I just had time to notice that there was something funny about the ceiling when the room began to fill up with dust. Thicker and thicker. Suddenly we were both choking and we knew we had to get out quick.
I jumped up and my head hit the roof. The room had shrunk! I was like, WTF? but there was no time to think. There was another flash and you could see how the dust was swirling around by the broken windows. I bent down under my bed to drag out my backpack, but the space under the bed had shrunk just like the room had and it was jammed tight.
‘Marti!’ Maude shrieked, because I wasn’t getting out fast enough. You could hear the whole house groaning. But no way, no way was my beloved backpack staying behind because then I might just as well be dead. So I was up on my feet and heaving and tugging at it, screaming, ‘Maude, Maude!’ as loud as I could for her to help me, and we were both coughing and hacking and choking. But then there was another flash and that damn ceiling was even lower, like it was some kind of monster psycho ceiling coming to get me, with cracks all over it and its insides spilling out through them, so I had to leave the backpack after all and make a dash for the window. There was both of us scrambling out, getting cut on the jags of broken glass still in the window. I cut myself badly, actually, on the arm and on my thigh. It was the dead of night. So dark. There was another flash – thank God! You have no idea how dark it gets when there’s no electricity. But that dust – you couldn’t even breathe. Claustrophobia? Tell me about it.
We got out onto the flat bit on top of the bay window and scuttled to the edge and then paused. It was a big drop from up there. Bombs were still going off nearby and we were still getting flashes of lights from incendiaries – but Lo! The whole house had shrunk. Instead of a view across to the stumps of the university buildings on the other side of Platt Fields, we were halfway to the ground.
What must have happened, we worked out later, is bombs must have gone off on each side of the house. The blast punched in the ground-floor walls so the house folded up under us like a pack of cards, and the attic floor above us, which was a rubbish floor that a cheap builder put in for Mum and Dad when I was just a wean, came down inside our room more or less in one piece, which is why the ceiling was so close.
We were both hanging on for dear life because it was a long way down from there normally, but when the next burst of incendiaries went off, you could see that actually, now it was just a short drop down. So we just stepped down from the top of the bay window, which should have been three metres off the ground, straight into the front garden.
We stood there a moment coughing, like, Really? Is that it? We couldn’t believe we were out, just like that. We walked together across the road like a couple of old folk going for a stroll and looked back to where the house was, which was like a ghost house, in complete and utter darkness, except for the flashes, which were getting duller now as the incendiaries marched past us. The whole thing was totally surreal.
‘So I was right about sleeping up there,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Maude. ‘Unbelievable. I mean, it looks like that was the only floor that was...’
I knew what she was about to say. The first floor was the only one you stood a decent chance of coming out of alive. But then we both looked at each other, because in our relief at being alive, we forgot...
Maude said ‘—Mum.’
She’d started to call my mum just Mum, which annoyed me because she was my mum, not hers. But I didn’t pick her up on it because – yeah, Mum! She was under all that rubble.
‘Rowan,’ she said.
‘My backpack,’ I said, and we both ran back to the house just in time to see it go up. There was no warning – no missile or whistle or anything. It just went boom. We both flew up in the air in the blast. I didn’t actually see it because I was going backwards at the time. Then I was rolling around on my back with bits of brick and smoking sparks falling around me, trying to get my breath and work out how many ribs I’d broken. None actually, thanks for asking. By the time I got to sit up, everything was in darkness again and you could just hear this rumbling, crashing, rolling kind of noise, which I think must have been the house falling down. Jesus. Later, I always thought of that as the sound of my mum dying.
We ran up to it, but bits of house were still falling off and it was too dangerous. It was dark, there was fire inside the house but you couldn’t see much. You could hear stuff hitting the ground around you. It was hard to breathe. It started raining. I remember being surprised at how cold the rain was. Quite icy on the skin. It’s funny what stays in your head. We stood at the front where her bedroom used to be, shouting, ‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’ at the top of our voices at the heaps of bricks, but no one answered. The bombs were still marching about but further away now.
People came out with torches and shovels and stuff to help. Once the dust began to clear – the rain helped – you could see the house was just a pile of rubble and tangled beams and windows and cables and pipes and bits of fire and things. Our things. We pulled away at it all night, and it was the hardest and most horrible work anyone ever did. We didn’t get any sleep, obvs. When the morning came and we could see, the devastation was so bad, you just knew you were wasting your time. Some of the neighbours drifted off, but we didn’t stop. We took breaks from the digging at Thomas’s house across the road, sipping hot tea and eating chickpeas with the other casualties. Veronica from next door had lost her house too. It actually looked as if it had fallen sideways onto ours, which irritated me. I mean – it just made things worse, you know?
She bandaged up my thigh for me. No one cried. What can you do? You just sit there and think to yourself that one day, maybe soon, you’re going to cry your eyes out about this. But not now.
3
Mum and my brother Rowan had been sleeping in the basement which had the two side walls fall in on it and the ceiling, our floor, came down on top of that. So they were dead, weren’t they? Flat as cereal packets. Even so, I dug for two days to get down to them, then at the end of the second day, when we reached ground zero – Mum zero, let’s face it – that’s when I got the willies and Maude and some of the neighbours made me go and wait across the road while they cleared off the final layers. It took them a few hours until Maude came to find me and gave me a little nod, and I didn’t follow her when she went back. I didn’t want to see it, thanks.
I cried then. Then, I cried. She’d been a crap mum for the last couple of years, but that was just because she couldn’t cope with the war and the bo
mbs and the people dying so she got into all this weird secrecy and hiding and conspiracy theories. But before that, she’d been a good mum. And even if she hadn’t been, she was still my mum, the only mum I’d ever had or could have, and you have to love your mum, don’t you? – the woman who gave birth to you and loved you no matter what.
We buried her a couple of days later in the Central Cemetery. I’m mostly glad I never got to see her dead, because who knows what she was like underneath all that rubble? In another way, though, it does my head in because I keep getting these fantasies, like the one where she’s just popped out to see someone so she wasn’t even in when the house got hit, or perhaps she was having a secret affair with someone, but she got stuck and only came back after we left, and now she’s looking everywhere for us and can’t find us. Whereas, if I’d seen her, in whatever mess she was in, then I’d know for sure she was dead, right here in my heart, and that she is never going to come back.
But whatever my heart thought and hoped, my brain knew. My mum was dead and I was an orphan, free to realise my dream of running away from this benighted s***hole and make my home somewhere decent, somewhere with shops and beauty spas and schools and hospitals that don’t get bombed. The good things in life. I remembered them and I wanted them back. Hot chocolate and tea. Nice meals every day, cake, going to the cinema, make-up, eating out, pizza, burgers, frothy coffee. Wine. Vodka. Sex. Drugs. All of it.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, What a monster! Her mum’s just been squashed flat like a beetle and here she is celebrating her freedom. But don’t get me wrong – I loved my mum. Not my brother Rowan, though. I didn’t love him, that’s true, so in that respect I am a monster. But my mum, yeah. Every time I think about her, even now, it hurts like a punch to the stomach. She was such a stubborn bitch! And a stupid cow, as I often had to remind her. I didn’t like her much, but I loved her and I wept my little heart out, all on my own, sitting on the loo in Thomas’s basement, until someone knocked on the door and said they needed a poo, so I wiped my eyes on some toilet paper and got on with life.
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