Vail

by Trevor Hoyle

  We pulled off the main road and were thrown about quite a bit as the transporter jolted along a narrow rutted lane. Sparse black branches went by as we wound deeper and deeper into the countryside. From the odour of putrefaction I judged that quite a few of my companions had died in the night. Come to that, I wasn’t feeling too clever myself.

  We passed through some kind of chain-link fence dotted along the top with what I took to be festive balls of cotton wool but were in fact white ceramic insulators. The transporter stopped and I could hear men’s voices. They sounded tired. Somebody cracked a joke but no one laughed.

  It worried me that they might decide to glance over the side of the skip, – I had a brother-in-law who was a driver and I knew that they usually checked their loads after a long trip. There was nowhere to hide, and my difference, as an adult and whole person, would be spotted immediately. I could only pray that they didn’t think it worthwhile checking a load of slops, added to which the smell was enough to deter anyone and would in itself be adequate confirmation that the cargo was still, in a manner of speaking, in one piece.

  Having nothing better to do I let my head rest on something soft and looked at the sky. It was an unbroken blanket of grey, grim and wintry-looking, piles of dirty clouds tumbling along under a steady biting wind.

  After a while the blunt rounded top of a dark-green storage silo caught my eye. It had one of those circular stairways going round and round the structure up to a gantry. On the silo itself were painted the faded yellow letters UCP in an ornate and old-fashioned script.

  A secret base for the Under-Cover Police outside the wire? A detention camp where they interrogated dissidents and political undesirables? An elimination centre, – part of the U.M.P.S. Programme I had heard people talk about but had never been sure actually existed?

  This speculation, somewhat futile and unproductive lacking further information, was terminated as with a great coughing roar the transporter’s engine started up again. The skip swayed to and fro as we moved off, breaking the scum and sending a warm watery brownish wave lapping over my head. The taste on my lips was vile: I preferred bollock-freezing milk to this any day.

  In a couple of minutes the vehicle stopped, there was a crunching of gears, a billowing of blue diesel fumes, and we reversed into a vast shed or warehouse with a corrugated asbestos roof high above. Chains rattled and the engine changed pitch to a shrill whine as the hydraulics took the strain, lifting the skip between the davits and lowering it to the ground. Doors slammed, the transporter moved off, we were left alone in silence.

  Wading and treading through the mire, pushing lumps aside, I pulled myself over the side and dropped, dripping-wet, to the floor. At once I felt the cold strike through me and my teeth started chattering.

  There appeared to be machinery in the darker recesses of the building. I could see metal ducting and pipes, levers and gauges and large dials with red needles. Evidently a processing plant of some description.

  I also noticed that the skip was resting on a series of metal rollers, the type of conveyance system used in engineering works to move heavy loads about.

  Even then it didn’t dawn on me what all this paraphernalia was for; and I don’t think it was stupidity on my part so much as plain ignorance. I was still trying to figure out what possible use the Under-Cover Police could have for a couple of tons of mushy DIs rapidly going off.

  The plant must have been automated or at least operated by remote-control because there was no one about when the machinery started up and the skip began to move. It trundled along the rollers for about fifteen yards and was brought to a halt by a pair of buffers. The whole apparatus then tilted and the contents spilled into a concrete pit which extended deep below ground level. As they slopped over the rim I heard weak snatches of dreadful melody … thank you for the world so sweet… thank you for the birds that sing… as they slid down and were swallowed up in final darkness.

  From beneath my feet came muffled churning and gurgling sounds. The floor trembled. Lights lit up on the gauges. Needles quivered and swung round the dials. Whatever the process was, it had started.

  In another part of the building, beyond the panel of controls with the levers and winking lights, I found out what it was.

  Bales of compressed glutinous cattle cake came tumbling down a metal chute onto a conveyor belt which carried them to a bay where they were picked up and stacked ten high by a mechanical grab. Stupid of me not to have realised before, – but the plain fact was that I had become accustomed to the new meaning of the acronym ‘UCP’ and all but forgotten the old one. I should have known that beyond the wire ordinary people were still eating tripe and pigs’ trotters.

  It had been a miserable, gloomy, depressing day to begin with, and this being the 22nd December, the shortest day of the year, it was very nearly dark by three o’clock in the afternoon when I set off across the bare fields. Behind me the red light on top of the silo glowed like a ruby.

  I felt almost happy, I think. At least I was outside the wire and I was free. I could return to the north and settle back into some sort of normality. If I grew a beard people might not even recognise me. Most likely I would sink back into my old drinking habits, hanging round my old haunts, fraternising with my old cronies. There didn’t seem a lot else to do.

  If I kept heading east, I thought, trudging across the fields in the darkness, I should strike the A1 in about an hour, just south of Grantham.

  * Hastily amended in later editions to HARRODS’ SPIRIT AT NO. 10.