by John Eider
‘I’d already decided, you see.’
I tried to move and rub my eyes.
‘The Captain thought that we could trust you, but he left it up to us. I made sure your mug only got one capsule.’ The voice was that of Mill, the group’s ‘Head Grower’.
‘You drugged us.’ My head was swimming.
‘He told me the drowsiness would pass. It’s mostly dehydration. Drink this.’ She handed me a glass of water.
‘Wareing.’
‘He’s out for the night, I’m afraid.’ This was Zak, the man with the gun, his voice now devoid of smugness. ‘We couldn’t take any chances with that one.’
‘Very disagreeable.’ This in turn was Jack Berne, their leader. ‘Bringing explosives to a place like this. It’s downright dangerous.’
‘In fact, I’d better go and check he’s all right,’ said Zak. ‘Sleeping like a baby last time I saw him. You coming, Jack?’
‘It’s okay,’ said Mill. ‘You can leave this one with me. Can’t they?’ she asked me directly.
I nodded my head.
‘I’ll radio if I need to.’ At this the two men left.
Oh my. The thoughts were flashing through my muddled head like lightning through cloud: they had radios, hence how they’d picked us up off the streets so neatly; the Captain had been here, and after having had time with Wareing’s papers in London; he’d already told me that he thought communes were the future; I guessed he’d even given them the knock out drops… It would take me a while to piece it all together; but all I could gather myself to ask just then was,
‘Mill – so Emily? Mildred?’
‘Millicent. I’m not posh, my parents had high hopes for me.’
I looked up at the stars through the high arced window – only they weren’t there. I’d been moved to what looked a smaller version of the operations room, an office full of charts and folders. It was dark outside the square window, I had lost a good few hours.
Once alone with me she spoke,
‘We thought you might have seen the aid sacks that the trucks left, with their army markings. They were still outside when Zak brought you here, we hadn’t had time to move them.’
I shook my head.
‘Well, you’d never have made it in the Royal Observer Corps.’
I remembered that name from somewhere recent: from the file, they were the people who had built and manned the bunkers. She had read it too and was playing with me, but I sensed no cruelty.
‘Can you stand?’ I tried, and she helped me. ‘Come and get your tea, then I’ll show you something.’
By the time we’d gotten to the part of the building cleared and made into a canteen I felt a great deal better. I had another glass of water, and she brought a cold plate covered from earlier,
‘Ham sandwiches, a rare treat. We have a local pork farmer, he’s won many awards. Not much each I’m afraid, but I kept you extra cheese and bread.
‘The Captain had seen your plans, you see,’ she explained as I ate. ‘He saw that we were your next target, and also what you were instructed to do. He couldn’t let you harm what we’d built here. He imagined that it must have been all a big mistake, that you hadn’t known of our existence when the mission was cooked up, and so you thought we were just another trashed building with a direct line to the War Rooms in the basement!’
I gave her a glare, my mouth too full to speak.
‘Sorry, are these your secrets I’m blurting out? I’ll say no more. Oh, and there’s coffee in the pot if you wanted it. It’s there for the night guards – we take shifts – I’ll let you fetch your own if you don’t trust me.’ But I did, and she fetched it.
I ought to add that we were speaking very quietly here; for over most of the floor of the gas-lit canteen, and along both edges of every moonlit corridor (I hadn’t even noticed them at first) were people in sleeping bags, their belongings held as pillows or tucked in with them.
‘They’ve been coming in from the fields while you’ve been… asleep,’ she explained as she led me through the building after eating.
‘They’re very possessive,’ I said, noting their closely-held backpacks and sports bags.
‘We have no thieving here, it brings instant expulsion. It’s just that many of them have come to us from rough places. It’s lawless out there, as you know, and so what we have in our hands is all many of us have to our names.’
I found it impossibly restful and calming, having these rows of sleepers lining our path as we went along; I only trying not to brush them as I passed to leave them murmuring in their dreams.
‘Some scream out in the night,’ she lamented. ‘They’ve been beaten, attacked. This is the first safe place they’ve had. Come this way.’
She led us as quietly as possible through a squeaky door and down the steps by the old reception, to a floor below where not even moonlight reached. ‘You have a torch?’ she asked, knowing full well that I did. I felt my belt and pockets, and found that I was again without a knife. I had the torch though, and lit our way downstairs and through more double doors.
‘I didn’t even know these rooms were down here before E-Day, until we took over the building.’
‘You worked here?’
‘I was a trainee in Sustainable Development. I was here late that evening when the lights went out, then the next day I came back and never left again. A few of us here were Council staff: Zak was something in Planning.’
‘A bit of a jump to security.’
‘This crisis brings out all sides of us: Jack was an auctioneer. He lost his whole family when looters burnt his house. Some of us have nothing but the commune to live for.’
‘Your family?’ I dared asking.
‘They’re miles away, impossible to contact from here.’ She spoke in the same tough, clipped way I had used when Wareing had asked me that question – it was the only way to broach the topic without risking breaking-down.
‘I’d moved for the job, you see,’ she continued. ‘I was living on my own, in a two-room flat the size of an orange box.’
‘No way to get word back?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t even know if…’
‘I know.’
‘Yours?’
‘The same.’
She took my hand as we walked the corridor. Though unfamiliar, it followed the pattern of those of the floors above.
We came to a door marked ‘Safe Room’, at which she produced a fat bunch of keys and undid two separate locks, while explaining,
‘The room hadn’t been used for years, not since they closed the old cash office. It’s all handled off site now – or was, by the end,’ she said catching herself. ‘It’s a shame, isn’t it, all the things we may never get working again. It’s just as well that it was out of use though, really – if any employee had got themselves stuck down here then they might never have been found.’
I shone the torch through the now-opened door to see a fairly modern space, with desk, chair and coin counting machine. Through another locked door we found the safe itself, four foot high and set into the building’s foundation.
‘There’s nothing in it – we checked,’ she chuckled. It would have been heavy enough to foil any burglar, and would probably have taken burning or drilling to get into.
There was still another door though, these thin rooms running back alongside the corridor we had just come down. This door looked less than the others in the torchlight, but as she withdrew the key and opened it, so it sounded heaviest of all: metallic and corroded, the kind of door I’d known before.
This final room of the three was a stark space, modern like the coin counting room, but with much of what would have filled it evidently removed, leaving just a comfy-looking chair, some empty filing racks, and all along one wall a row of plastic telephone sockets, every one currently unused.
‘So you see,’ she said, ‘that you have nothing to worry about. We’ve kept up to date, our operations are upstairs now, in a bright modern non-nuclear Emerge
ncy Planning department, busy with fire alarm tests and suspicious package policies; or at least it was until three months ago, and I firmly hope one day will be again. Light the locks for me?’
We went back out, securing each door in turn. The impression I was left with was that of a television documentary I had once seen: where a tiny robot drove through the tunnels of the Great Pyramids, sending camera footage back of walls not seen for centuries. As each door closed on my torchbeam, so I wondered how many years it would be before anyone saw these spaces again?
‘All of this lowest floor would have been the bunker, doors sealable from upstairs.’ Mill spoke as we came back along the silent corridor and up the black stairs. It was a relief when a shaft of moonlight caught us from the ground floor windows. Here it was that the sleepers began appearing on the mezzanine and ground floor landings – perhaps even those lost souls couldn’t bear the total darkness of below?
We walked back up through the building like church mice, watching our feet at every step, low murmurs and the rustle of sleeping bags the only signs that we weren’t alone. At the canteen we found a mixed pair of weary watchers drinking coffee, who exchanged an ‘All clear’ with Mill before resuming their posts. I sat down at the end of a long table, and she came to join me.
‘So, how did you end up here?’ I asked, suddenly self conscious in the large silent room. ‘Working at the Council, I mean.’
‘Oh, I blew in from here and there, just a sycamore seed on the wind.’
‘Well, you made it to Head Grower?’
‘That title’s just Jack being daft.’
‘But still.’
‘Pure luck, I assure you. I happen to have the skills this place needs right now.’
‘And they are?’
‘Okay, you want the personal history?’ From her expression I could see that she didn’t mind sharing. ‘At university, half-way through my first year of History, I realised I was more interested in crop rotation than the Repeal of the Corn Laws, so switched to Agricultural Management. After graduating, I spent a year on a farm, and then six months in Detroit…’
‘Detroit?’ I butted in. ‘But that’s an industrial city.’
‘Post-industrial,’ she corrected cryptically.’ The old motor plants are closed now, the inner suburbs overrun by wildlife. You ought to see it, you’d be amazed; and in the ruins on these vacant lots, that most people just speed past in the cars made elsewhere, are community farms. Can you imagine a town full of block after block of green leaves and bean-poles and tomato plants? What were once homes like those we grew up in are now in ruins, their gardens all wild bushes and five-foot high grass – there are houses with trees growing right up through them…’
Homes like those we grew up in… She’d said this as though we knew each other, and it fostered an intimacy in our talk. She continued,
‘World famous buildings are left deserted, the centre has been abandoned! I’d never seen such a wasteland; or at least not before E-Day. You see,’ she theorised, ‘America is always ahead of the rest of the world. They even had post-industrial decline before anybody else; though with E-Day we’ve ended up having it rather worse!
‘Anyway. Come on,’ she prompted, ‘I’ve got something else for you.’
We took our drinks to her office quarters where she surprised me by asking,
‘When did you last hear music? Records I mean, CDs?’
I didn’t know. ‘Calais?’ I offered without thinking. She had a camp bed set up and I fell back onto it.
‘Ah, you’ve been in France? Well then, this won’t mean as much to you, but stuck here you do so tire after a while of strident men around fires with acoustic guitars.’ She walked over to a small black box on top of a shoulder-high cabinet. ‘The batteries were a present from the Captain,’ she said as she switched it on.
I don’t know what I expected to hear from the box’s side speakers, but what came out was something like jazz, though not as I had ever heard it before (it admittedly not being my natural style of listening). The song started softly, the volume rising slowly; as like a lullaby, I felt it sending me off,
‘Close the blinds?’ I asked, as the first blue light of morning threatened to intrude on this sleep I now welcomed with open arms.
‘Nothing like it to get you in the mood, eh,’ she said, I not comprehending. ‘Look at you nodding off again, and after you were out cold all evening.’
Yet the knock-out drops hadn’t left me rested, indeed quite the opposite. She sat at the foot of the bed and shook me gently,
‘You’re not going to sleep on me, are you?’ she asked, before rising and walking back to the music player. There she joined in with the song, one she evidently knew and loved, the rhythm woozy and dreamlike,
‘I just want to be a woman…’ she sang along, her singing voice dusky enough, though not quite a match for the that of the song’s original singer, who was the very sound of tears falling on a microphone.
‘It’s all I want to be, is a woman…’
The whole effect was to send me further into a trance, Mill breaking from her rendition to say so gently, aware I was sleepy and not wanting to jolt me,
‘You know, music’s not the only thing I’ve missed these three months…’
But just then there was a knock on the door, Zak inviting himself in and speaking to Mill while looking at me,
‘The other one’s waking up, if you wanted to get in there before he’s conscious.’
Chapter 20 – Cast Out