The Night the Lights Went Out

by John Eider

That night I was allowed to eat with the collective, my feet re-tied beneath the trestle table. The food was basic – a thick vegetable soup, and then a bowl of something like porridge sweetened with jam. Desert was brownies and flapjacks, flavoured with sprinkled sugar. Then after eating, before a special session of their ‘Organisational Council’ to discuss Hawker and the new threat of wild dogs, I was allowed to explain myself, to tell of what I’d seen and to make my pitch to stay.

  To begin with, I was treated worse than on my previous visit, with some part of me always bound, and an armed Zak not taking his eyes off me. I remembered my first time there fondly, that night I’d been allowed to roam the Council House with Mill; but then that night they’d known why we were there, had neutralised our threat, and had Wareing safely knocked out. This time even I couldn’t clearly say why I was back.

  ‘We’re very grateful for your raising the alarm.’ This was Jack Berne, after I’d told all of my adventures, ending with my sighting of the Hawker farm. By now only Organisational Council members were left at the dining tables. The commune chief continued,

  ‘I liked Grant Hawker, we’ll be glad of the chance to lay him properly to rest. So sad. But that doesn’t explain what you were doing there today. You knew what you were risking coming back?’

  All attention was on me, that of the three figures I knew and of six others still in their overalls. These I imagined were the gang leaders out in the fields.

  ‘Mr Berne, Council,’ I began. ‘I’ve seen many things these recent weeks, have covered a lot of ground. I hadn’t been back to Britain since the crisis, had only seen the news from Calais; but now I know how things have turned out. I suppose what I’m saying is that there aren’t many people left alive in some places, and not many ways left to live, and of those ways the best I’ve seen is what you have here.

  ‘Now, there’s a scientist, called Scanlon, he’s written on the crisis.’

  Mill answered, ‘Yes, the Captain brought me his latest paper.’

  ‘Then you’ll know that he too has a commune, and that the Government in Exile are listening to him.’ At this point I gave a theatrical downcast shake of the head before resuming. ‘You know, if things had been different then you’d have gotten on with Wareing: at another time and place he’d have loved all this.’ I gestured with my arms to encompass the enterprise around us. ‘He talked for hours about crop cycles, farming, food supply, the “Cycle of Sustainability”.’

  ‘That’s Scanlon’s phrase,’ she noted.

  ‘Exactly. Now it seems to me that what he’s talking about you’re already doing. But the system is shot to pieces, word of your existence hadn’t even reached the Major when he planned our mission. Do you think he’d have sent saboteurs to this place if he’d known it was under your good stewardship?’

  I looked at Berne, who not for the first time wore an expression of, Thanks for the compliment, but I’m not sure I’m going to like where this is heading. While for myself, admitting what Wareing and I had been and what we had been sent there to do felt cathartic; though it was nothing those around the table didn’t already know.

  I carried on, unsure of my direction,

  ‘I’ve seen vast acres of farmland that I don’t even know if anyone’s still looking after. But look at what you’ve achieved here, at how you’ve managed your land. I can’t even imagine the practicalities of getting a site like this off the ground; yet you did it without any help, no Government scheme.’

  ‘But we…’

  I was getting manic now, but I had to get this said,

  ‘What stopped you people from being savages?’ It wasn’t an exclusively rhetorical question, but still none answered. ‘Why aren’t you out there killing and fighting and starving? Some combination of intent and abilities came together here. Now, I’ve walked miles these past weeks, and bar a few shotgun farmsteads I’ve only seen one other try at this kind of life, and it failed. It was a house backing onto farmland, the fence taken down, people taking from the land sparingly, orderly – and the place was burnt out, by the mob or an accident with a gas fire, or… I don’t know. A chance at something like this,’ I making another expansive gesture to all around me, ‘snuffed out. But what else is there out there? I’ve seen roaming gangs like something out of Waiting For Godot, I’ve seen criminals keeping towns in fear…

  ‘What is it that we need in this new state of affairs? Wareing told me all about it, about how we relied on electricity of course, in the old days, and social order too; but that it’s the lack of food that’s killing us. Now, the power’s not coming back for many of us any time soon, and order comes at gunpoint these days it seems.’ (Believe it or not, I really didn’t say this to rile Zak.) ‘But look at how you work together, how you trust each other, how quick-eyed you are to any threat from outside. Now, being so busy here you might not have seen too much of how other towns have fared, haven’t witnessed the mania: but I can tell you, Mr Berne, you thanked me for the chance to bury Grant Hawker? I’ve seen streets where the dogs leave nothing but scattered bones.’

  This final image perhaps had Jack Berne answer hesitatingly,

  ‘Well, thank you, Private. I’m sure we all appreciate the compliment, and the update on the broader state of things. However, we’re early-rising people, and it’s after nine already, and I’m not sure that we’ve yet to broach the matter of your presence here.’

  For all my babbling, he was right. I tried to focus,

  ‘Mr Berne. So far I’ve been here twice, and under watch both times. You know me only as a troublemaker, as an agent of disruption…’

  ‘I don’t think we ever thought that of you.’

  ‘…but I don’t want that. I want you to know how much I love what you’re doing. I want a chance to do my bit, to contribute. Now, you might think this is me making some grand penance…’

  ‘I don’t think we…’

  ‘…but I don’t want it to be that either. I don’t want to be the focus of your attentions, to have to be watched and guarded over. I want to be forgotten, thrown in with the mass, left with the hardest work and sleeping in the corridor. I want to earn my supper.’

  With enough there to think on, I was thanked for my contribution by Jack Berne and excused from the table, for they still had the business of the Hawker farm to discuss. The others got up awhile to fetch drinks or stretch their legs, leaving only Mill, myself and my guard.

  ‘Can we have a minute, Zak?’ she asked him.

  ‘Okay, but I’m to stay in the room with you.’

  ‘Well, stay at that end, will you? I only want a few words.’

  ‘I’m sure the lady knows best.’

  She turned to me. We’d hardly looked at each other since that awful morning at the farm,

  ‘So, Wareing’s really?’ (I nodded) ‘What happened?’

  ‘He was shot by a scumbag with a machine gun.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ came the voice from the end of the table. I’d forgotten Zak was listening and of course perpetually armed.

  ‘Get over yourself,’ I spat. ‘My friend’s dead.’

  ‘Oh Zak, can’t you give us a bit of space?’ asked Mill again. ‘Go and get yourself a drink or something.’

  ‘Orders is orders,’ he said; before conceding, ‘Okay,’ and leaving us a precious minute out of earshot.

  She continued, ‘All of what you said just now, about our great achievement. You meant it?’

  ‘Every word.’

  ‘And you came all the way back here just to say that?’

  ‘Well… there was something else.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Do you remember the last time I was here, that song you played me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you play it for me again?’

  At last she broke into a smile, ‘I don’t know, I think your bodyguard over there might spoil the mood.’

  Zak returned from the water tank to hear the pair of us sniggering.

  I was escorted – pe
rhaps with some grim irony – to the same unused reception room as had been our prison on my previous stay. This time though I was left to sleep naturally, and with a pint glass of water that I had poured myself from the communal tank.

  Mill would later tell me that, vital though it was, there was little of the subsequent discussion on the management of Hawker’s land that moved very much further on from the earlier talk in the back of the four-by-four. She could though remember my speech, and wrote it down from memory that night; and it is that transcript I use here (though I could have used her cutting a little of the repetition).

  I had only wanted the chance to work and show willing; and in time I was offered it. After a day left alone to rest, I was unshackled and entrusted to the foreman of a group picking vegetables. The foreman was armed, ostensibly for his group’s protection; however, the presence of the pistol at his hip did seem to keep those itinerant labourers honest. It was explained to us each time we trudged out at dawn for another shift in the dew-damp soil, that anything ‘going hand to mouth’ was strictly outlawed, and than anyone still hungry after meals should request extra portions, not help themselves from the crop. That said, I saw more than one raw swede or carrot going straight under someone’s tunic. A code of silence between us workers meant than nobody ratted, though I took no such risk myself; for though I wasn’t sure if our foreman had been issued any special instruction with regard to me, I couldn’t believe he would be watching me any less eagerly than the others.

  From labouring I was moved some days to the ‘heavy crew’, as we were called: fixing fences, planting posts, and repairing houses in the town for members to live in as new arrivals drifted in all the time. This work was harder though freer, less rooted – to play on words – to one field all day long. We moved around in trucks, had longer breaks, and even got beer at the end of day before joining the rest for mealtime. Here I was trusted more, was one of the gang. I loved it, despite the back-breaking work.

  It was a warm autumn that year, the sun hot on our backs. As shop supplies of suncream dwindled, so new coverings were devised – canvas shawls tied at the neck, paired with large-rimmed beekeeper-style hats, or caps with cloth attached at the back in the manner of those worn by French Legionnaires. One day, walking home from field or fencepost as the afternoon turned golden, I caught sight of another gang coming back along the ridge of a field, the sun behind them and so casting them and their new dress in silhouette; and I realised that here were a new breed, people utterly alien to the old world: part medieval, part ‘post-industrial’, part something not even named yet. We were no longer who we had been, but now belonged to whatever this new era would be termed by historians in ages to come. The tired group traipsed past me, on to their dinners, with no deeper thought in their tired heads than whether it would be potato or turnip soup that night. My mind was playing tricks – I kept my theories to myself.

  We would eat our simple hearty meals; maybe stay then for meetings, or for card games played for meaningless coins, or for performances around the fire on guitar and violin. We would be turned in by ten, which seemed so much later than before with no lights around, bar those in the canteen and planning room and a few candles dotted about.

  It was on the third night, alone in my glass cell, only the stars to comfort me, that I began uncontrollably crying, tears soaking my air mattress and leaving a puddle forming along its seams. I thought of everything clearly at once, as bright as the blue sky that had shone down on me as I had laboured that day – the lad without a name on the path, his girl in Nottingham who’d never know; the fellow with his head sheared off by the ripped up copper roofing; the body of Marty, the news vendor in Calais; Wareing slumped, unmoving on the seafront; and finally and bizarrely, as powerfully as on the day it happened, the Doberman running at me and my knife down the alley to be gutted, his steaming corpse nearly on top of me before I could throw it off to be devoured by his gang. The memories did not belong together, yet there they were all at once and getting muddled up.

  The tears rolled and rolled, some channel opening that had not done so since childhood; and which has, whatever else I’ve seen, been sealed again since.

  Chapter 34 – Captain Linkater’s Visit