I turned to her.
‘Job? Maggie, I don’t think you understand. I’m not staying here. I can’t stay here, and boat or no boat I’m leaving, even if it means wading out to sea.’
She fixed me with a look of bland amusement, before finally turning to Richard.
‘Come and see me when you’re done,’ she said.
When she was gone, Richard turned to me. ‘It’s good to see you up, Beth. I was worried about—’
‘Josh said you’d been in the radio room.’
‘That’s right,’ he said, a little cowed by my interruption.
‘Is that what you do around here? Is that your job?’
‘Amongst other things. But it’s mostly Bryce that does it. Beth, don’t think for a second that we haven’t been trying to get off this place ever since we arrived. We know what happened to your kids, we all saw it, but the fact is we’re trapped here. I wish it wasn’t the case, but it is.’
I got up from the table. I was getting used to a new way of moving, avoiding certain positions in which the pain was worse. I walked to the door where Richard leaned.
‘Is Bryce at the radio now?’
‘Yes, it’s in a room near the old munitions store.’
‘Take me to him. Take me to him now.’
Chapter 11
The munitions store was high in the Rock near the southern summit where the barracks had once been. Richard led me up some winding stone stairs dotted with roughly cut windows that offered views across the empty sea. The sky and water were reflections of each other. Above us was a colourless grey, but black and bouldering clouds gathered over the Atlas Mountains on the African coast. A storm was coming.
We reached a short corridor, whitewashed and brightly lit from windows with real glass. At the end of it was an archway sealed by a dark oak door – the munitions store, I presumed, and halfway along was another smaller door at which Richard stopped. He gripped the handle.
‘Is this it?’ I asked.
‘Yes. But listen, about Bryce …’
‘Richard, I don’t have time for this.’
‘I know, it’s just … look, he’s changed. A bit.’
‘What do you mean changed?’
‘He … well, he’s met someone. Here. Just to prepare you.’
‘Right, whatever.’
I pushed past him and opened the door. Inside was a wide room with oak beams and long windows that flooded the chalk-white walls with light. In one corner was an iron bed neatly made with pressed sheets, and in the other was an ornate antique desk upon which sat a complicated-looking radio set. Standing in the middle of the room was a large and rather beautiful black-haired woman in a red skirt and white blouse, who was sweeping the sanded wooden floor. Behind the radio sat Bryce.
At least, it was someone who looked a bit like Bryce. He looked up as I entered and raised both eyebrows.
‘Beth, you’re awake. How are you, darlin’?’
I paused.
‘Fine,’ I said, taking in his face, which I had never seen and was, to my surprise, a lean egg-shape. His beard had been trimmed to a respectable half-inch fuzz of black, and his hair was slick and swept back into a – I had to look twice to be sure – topknot. Perched on his nose was a pair of half-moon spectacles. ‘How are you?’
He beamed. ‘Wonderful. Just wonderful. Come in, come in, please. You too, Richard.’
I caught Richard’s eye as he shut the door behind him.
‘I tried to warn you,’ he muttered.
‘What’s that smell?’ I whispered.
‘I think it’s a joss stick.’
Bryce got up and marched around the desk. ‘This –’ he held out a hand to the raven-haired woman with the broom ‘– is Carmela.’
The woman smiled at his approach, her caramel skin flushed with a kind of hungry pride. She was the same height as him, and therefore not dwarfed by his presence like most others. He put his arm around her waist and kissed her cheek. She bowed her head in my direction.
‘Hola.’
‘Hello,’ I replied, looking between the two of them. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
Bryce sighed.
‘Carmela only speaks a little English,’ he said, ‘and I speak even less Spanish. But that doesn’t matter, does it, my little wood pigeon. We talk to each other in other ways.’
‘Mi guapo,’ she said, stroking his cheek. ‘Mi hombre.’
Bryce gazed into her deep brown eyes.
‘Amazing thing, love, isn’t it? No need for words. No need for conversation. We communicate just by looking at each other, knew it from the moment I opened my eyes in that bed and saw her looking down at me.’ He turned to me. ‘Carmela was working in the hospital when we washed ashore here. Nursed me back to health, didn’t you, pigeon?’
Moments passed as they looked at one other. Richard cleared his throat awkwardly.
‘Bryce,’ I said.
‘Aha?’ he said, turning. His eyes were glazed like a drunk’s.
‘My children. I need to find them.’
His face fell and he released Carmela’s waist.
‘I’m sorry, Beth. What am I thinking? Talking about my happiness when you’re …’ He turned to Carmela, speaking slowly, ‘Carmela, this is the one I was telling you about. From the boat.’
Carmela watched his lips, then threw a hand to her mouth and turned to me.
‘Tus niños? Oh! Pobre mujer.’ She ran to me and pulled me into a fierce embrace. ‘Pobre, pobre mujer!’
‘OK,’ I said, eyes bulging. ‘OK.’
She pulled away. Bryce approached.
‘Beth, I’ve been on that radio every day and night for the past six weeks trying to contact them. I try every channel, up and down, I say the name of the boat, your name, the names of the children, where we are and what happened, but –’ he shook his head ‘– there’s nobody there, Beth. The airwaves are dead. Nobody’s responding.’
‘Nada,’ said Carmela, fiddling with her sharp-nailed fingers and searching the ground. ‘Nadie nos escucha … estamos solos. Estamos solos!’ She stamped her foot.
‘It’s true,’ said Richard. ‘I’ve been trying too, it’s like … everyone’s just packed up and left.’
I looked at the radio.
‘Does it even work?’
‘Aye,’ said Bryce, ‘it works all right. There’s a fifty-foot antenna on top of this roof, and I know for sure it’s transmitting because we can talk to people on our own radios down there on the ground.’
‘So we know it can reach at least as far as … what, the harbour?’
‘Aye,’ Bryce nodded, ‘at least.’
I walked to the ancient desk and placed a hand on the warm, chrome radio casing.
‘I want you to send a message, Bryce.’
‘Darling, I told you, I’ve been sending messages every day. Nobody’s—’
‘To him, Bryce. I want you to send a message to him.’
Bryce walked to my side.
‘I could try,’ he said, rubbing his beard. He smelled of citrus and coconut. ‘But Ed would already have picked up all my other calls if he’d been listening. And I don’t even know if that boat had a working radio.’
‘I don’t mean Ed.’
‘Who, then?’
‘Tony Staines. I want you to tell him I’m coming down to the harbour.’
‘Absolutely not.’ Maggie dismissed me with a wave of her hand. ‘No way.’
We were back in her open-walled office. It was early afternoon and the rain had grown heavy. Thunder growled in the distance. Richard, Bryce and Carmela stood behind me, and Dani was at her mother’s side, arms folded.
‘I have no choice,’ I said. ‘I need to get off this island if I’m going to get my children, and the only way I’m going to be able to do that is if I have a boat.’
‘And you think that bastard down there is just going to let you have one?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he’ll give me safe passage to somewhere that will
.’
‘Safe passage?’ Maggie laughed. ‘You really don’t know who you’re dealing with, child.’
I took a step towards her. She was taller than me but not by much, and I glared up at her. ‘You listen to me. I’m not your child and I never asked to be on this Rock. My children are on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and I’ve already been here too long. I won’t spend any more precious time waiting while some ridiculous argument I have no part in plays out. I’m going down there, and I’m going to talk to him like a human being, and I’m going to ask him for his help. Do you understand me?’
She glared back at me. I caught something in her daughter’s expression behind; a shiver of admiration soured with envy.
‘I understand you,’ said Maggie, slowly and deliberately. ‘I understand you very well, and I’m sure I would want to do the same in your position. It’s you who doesn’t understand. You could spend a hundred years trying to talk to that man like a human being, but he still wouldn’t listen. He’d just wait patiently, looking back at you with that crocodile’s smile, and then he’d just take whatever it was he wanted from you.’ Her eyes wandered my face and she lifted a lock of my hair. ‘You’re a very pretty woman, so I have a feeling I know what that might be.’
I brushed her hand away.
‘I don’t care what he wants. He can have it if it means I get a boat.’
‘And what then? You think you can just sail off into the ocean? Have you ever even sailed a boat before?’
‘It can’t be that hard, and anything’s better than sitting here while my –’ I gulped and shut my eyes ‘– while my children are over there. Please, let Bryce send the message, and for God’s sake let me go.’
A moment’s silence passed. Then Richard spoke.
‘If you’re going, then I’m going too.’
‘Aye,’ said Bryce, stepping forward. ‘Me too.’
‘That would only make it more dangerous,’ said Maggie. ‘With two bodyguards, you wouldn’t even make it down to the town.’
I turned to them.
‘She’s right,’ I said. ‘Richard, you’re a tall man, and Bryce, even with –’ I waved a hand ‘– whatever this is, you still look like Lemmy and Hagrid’s love child. No offence.’
‘None taken.’
‘It has to be me on my own.’
Maggie’s eyes hadn’t left me.
‘You are a brave woman,’ she said at last. ‘And it makes me furious that you need the help of a cruel man. But I cannot let you go, it’s too dangerous.’
‘It’s not your choice!’
‘It is my choice. This Rock is under my care. Besides, you’re not the first to go blundering down there trying to find another way out of this situation.’
‘What do you mean?’
Maggie scowled.
‘Ernest,’ said Dani. ‘He was one of the refugees who came in from Spain; a doctor. He worked in the hospital, and he didn’t agree with my mother’s … approach to the situation.’
‘Approach?’ said Maggie, affronted. ‘The only approach I’ve ever taken is to care for the people of this Rock in the only way I know how.’
Dani sneered. ‘You mean by waiting for that bastard to attack us every two days?’
Maggie sighed and shook her head at the ceiling. ‘By holding him back until that cruise ship runs out of supplies or he gets bored. There’s no way he can beat our defences. He’ll tire eventually.’
‘Ernest didn’t think so.’
‘No,’ said Maggie, pacing, ‘he didn’t, and he went bouldering in there against my wishes, in the dead of night, to broker a “peace deal” with that maniac. You can guess how that went down. Staines launched another attack the very next day, and we haven’t seen Ernest since.’ She turned to me. ‘If you go down to that harbour asking for help then it will only provoke another attack. I won’t risk it.’
Dani gave a sullen pout. ‘You won’t risk anything. You never have.’
‘Child,’ said Maggie, bitterly, ‘you have no idea what it’s like to have something in your care. It’s not that easy to take risks when lives depend on you.’ She touched a finger to her daughter’s hair. ‘Or even just one.’
Dani brushed off her mother’s hand and went to the window, where she glared out at the sullen afternoon.
‘What about Staines?’ I said to Maggie. ‘Surely he must have taken casualties too?’
‘That’s part of the problem, no? We have no idea how many men are down there, or what ammunition they have. We’ve never been able to get close enough to look.’
Dani pushed away from the window and paced the floor, smacking a palm with her fist. ‘If we launched a proper attack on the harbour rather than messing about in no-man’s land, do some real damage …’
Maggie rolled her eyes. ‘You know that’s not possible when we don’t know what’s down there. His entire set-up is completely invisible to us. Even from up here we can’t see how things fit together. It would be like walking into a minefield.’
‘We have to try, Mother, we can’t just sit here.’
‘We wait, regroup, plan a proper attack on Eurotowers.’
‘What about our supplies? How much time do we have? Three weeks? Less?’
‘We’ll ration them. We just need to sit tight.’
‘What we need is to grow a set of tits.’
‘And you need to watch your language, young lady.’
I limped to the missing wall, crutch squeaking, and pulled back a vine. The afternoon was growing dark and the clouds seemed to twitch with lightning, like a boxer’s muscles before a fight. An orange glow rose from the harbour water behind the cruise ship. I thought I could hear music.
‘You need to know what’s down there,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ said Maggie. ‘And we don’t. So that’s that.’
Dani joined me at the window. ‘We would if you told us.’
Maggie threw up her arms. ‘And what’s she going to do, shout back up the Rock? Take a walkie-talkie in with her?’
I looked at Dani. She smiled. ‘Not a walkie-talkie.’
‘A wire?’
Dani turned from the wall of shelves. We were deep in the Rock now, far beneath the scrubbed, bright warmth and dope-shop aroma of Bryce’s radio room. Down here was dark wet stone and cold musk. It was a store room of some kind, three walls of shelves piled high with boxes of nuts, bolts, cables and spare parts.
‘No,’ she replied, holding up a small silver disc no bigger than the button on a blouse. ‘There are no wires, see? It’s a wireless microphone transmitter.’
Richard took the disc and held it to the light of the bulb hanging from the ceiling.
‘This is not a good idea,’ he said, inspecting it like a jeweller with a counterfeit diamond.
‘Though it pains me to say it, I agree with Dick,’ said Bryce, hanging by the door with Carmela. The pair of them had been inseparable since I’d met them in the radio room, with some part of their bodies always touching. If a hand left a shoulder, another would reach for a hip, or a knee would search for a companion. I felt a sudden fierce envy at how easy it was for them to touch each other. Only inches separated them from the one they loved – my children, whose touch and smell I was already missing like a limb, were an ocean away from me.
I took the disc from Richard.
‘How does it work?’
‘USB-charged,’ Dani said. ‘You squeeze it to activate, after that it’ll run for about three hours before it dies. It’ll pick up any conversation in a twenty-metre area and transmit it up to one kilometre. I’ll be down in the town receiving it with this.’
She held up a battered smartphone attached to a small white box with an aerial.
‘What do I do with it?’ I asked.
‘Drop it somewhere busy, anywhere there’s conversation like a canteen or a mess hall.’
Richard shook his head. ‘No. No, no, no, this is not a good idea.’ He turned to Maggie. ‘What good will it do you anyway?�
�
‘We can use it to trace Beth’s location and pick up any information about their set-up down there.’
‘What if they find it on you?’ said Richard, turning to me.
I shrugged. ‘Then I’m in trouble.’
Bryce stroked his freshly manicured beard, shaking his head.
‘No, I don’t like this. Ed wouldn’t like this.’
‘Well, Ed’s not here, is he?’ I snapped. ‘Just like he’s never here, and never was. This is my choice and it’s the only way, so you can either help me or get out of my way. Now, will somebody tell me how to get down from this fucking Rock.’
Chapter 12
Bryce said his goodbyes and, still stroking his beard as if a cat was dangling from his chin, he disappeared with Carmela up to the radio room in an attempt to warn Tony of my impending visit. Maggie and Dani led me from the storeroom down some deep tunnels. My crutch technique was improving and I swung my leg for momentum in a bid to keep up with their swift strides. The ape looked back at me, claws clasped together and a wary, judgemental glint in his eye.
Richard and Josh followed. Richard muttered something to his son in a tone set somewhere between encouragement and frustration.
I tried to concentrate, to plan what words I would say to this supposedly dangerous stranger I was about to confront, and imagine what kind of journey awaited me if I was successful. But I couldn’t think of anything for long. Only them. Only moving forward. I would swim that sea if I had to.
Eventually we emerged from a small opening in the Rock. We were not yet at ground level, and a rough track led down into the northern section of what had been the town. The now vertical rain carved grooves in the dirt.
Maggie handed me her torch and pointed down the track.
‘Take Main Street until you reach the wall, then follow it until you come out at the car park.’
Main Street, the wall, the car park – they were all just dark clusters of rubble.
‘Where am I heading?’
‘That tall building. It’s an old block of flats called Eurotowers. It’s one of their lookouts, so it’s where they’ll first see you. Take these.’
The End of the World Survivors Club Page 9