The Bunker Diary

by Kevin Brooks

  It’s pathetic really.

  I had a long chat with Russell this evening. I didn’t mention the incident when he went a bit funny, but I think he knows about it. He looked a bit embarrassed, like a drunk who knows he’s done something stupid but can’t remember what it was. Anyway, Russell told me all this stuff about when he was a kid, about his parents and school and what is was like growing up black and gay. He made it sound funny, but I think he had a pretty tough time. He got beaten up quite a lot.

  When the kids at boarding school first started picking on me, I thought it had something to do with Dad being rich, that the other kids were just jealous, but I soon realized they had nothing to be jealous about. Their parents were all rolling in money too, huge amounts of money, and at least half of them had real celebrities for parents. Real A-list celebrities. Lords and ladies, minor royals, MPs, rock stars, film stars, that kind of thing. Compared to their parents, my dad was nothing. And then I started thinking that maybe that was why they picked on me. Because I was common, working class. I had no breeding. Or maybe they didn’t like my long hair? The way I speak?

  Or maybe they just didn’t like me?

  That’s possible, isn’t it? Maybe I’m not very nice? I mean, you can’t tell, can you? You can’t tell if you’re nice or not. You think you are, but everyone thinks they’re nice. Everyone thinks they’re all right.

  Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. They picked on me, it doesn’t matter why. They just did.

  Russell asked me what I’m going to do when I get out of here, if I’m going back home to Dad.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Probably. The street’s all right for a while, but in the end it’s no better than anywhere else. Same crappy people, same crappy life. Same old shit. At least Dad doesn’t steal my stuff.’

  ‘Do you miss him?’ Russell said.

  ‘I don’t know him enough to miss him.’

  Russell looked at me.

  I sighed. ‘Yeah, I miss him.’

  Dad tried to find me when I first ran away. He had all these posters printed up, you know, the usual MISSING PERSON kind of thing, with my name and photograph and everything. He had them stuck up all over the place. I saw quite a few around London, in railway and underground stations mostly, but Dad didn’t actually know where I was, so he had the posters put up all over the country. I found out about it from this girl I met who’d come down from Northampton. Sophie. I met her one day hanging around outside McDonald’s at Liverpool Street. She was dressed in a threadbare skirt, thin black tights, and bright-red monkey boots. She was kind of nice. Anyway, we got talking and she said she recognized me from posters she’d seen in Northampton.

  After that I cut my hair short and dyed it blond.

  Dad hired a private detective too. A dirty little man in a cheap suit. He started sniffing around, asking questions, showing people my photograph, but he didn’t last long. Pretty Bob tracked him down and beat him up. I don’t think he did it for my sake, he just likes beating people up.

  See?

  Same crappy people …

  I’ve had enough of this.

  Sunday, 4 March

  Haven’t managed to write for a while. Can’t think of anything to say. I’m hungry, it’s cold, I’m bored, scared, fed up.

  The same old stuff.

  God, I’m so fed up.

  It gets to the point when you can’t do anything. You can’t think any more. You can’t remember anything. You don’t feel anything. You can’t even get angry any more. You just lie on your bed all day staring into space. Then the lights go out and you stare at the darkness.

  The lights come on.

  The empty lift comes down.

  The day passes.

  The empty lift goes up.

  The lights go off.

  I try to keep thinking, but the more I concentrate, the more confusing it gets. What am I doing? Thinking. Thinking? What’s that? Thinking? How does that work?

  I think about that and my head starts spinning.

  It gets worse.

  I imagine myself as being nothing more than sixteen years of bone, skin, muscle, brain, blood, meat, and jelly. I imagine symbols inside my head. Electric things. Circuits. Tubes. Spatial patterns frozen in time. Tiny things. Bits of stuff. Short jaggedy strings. Carbon. Components.

  Stuff.

  I think about it.

  I think about what that stuff can do.

  It can move me. It can walk. It can breathe. It grows. It can see. It can hear, feel, smell, taste. It can like and hate. It can want. It needs. It can fear. It can speak. It can laugh. It can sleep. It can play. It can wonder. It can tell lies. It can remember. It can live with doubts and uncertainties. It can sing, la la. It can dance. It can dream. It bleeds. It coughs. It blinks. It shivers and sweats. It can live without love.

  It’s complicated.

  It can:

  Analyse.

  Coordinate.

  Destroy.

  Dream.

  Secrete.

  Control.

  Generate.

  Degenerate.

  Synthesize.

  Emote.

  Regulate.

  Calculate.

  Imagine.

  It can run.

  Play.

  Jump.

  Judge.

  It can catch a ball.

  And dance.

  And fight.

  And cry.

  It can know at night that the morning will come.

  It can spit.

  Recognize.

  Ride a bike.

  It can kill.

  Whistle.

  Ask.

  And forget.

  It can hope.

  And hurt.

  It can come to know that there’s nothing to know.

  And it can, and it will, close my eyes.

  Tuesday, 6 March

  I’m feeling better now. We’ve still got no food, and it’s still very cold, but I seem to have found some energy from somewhere, and I’ve managed to shake off the worst of the gloom.

  I don’t feel quite so desperate any more.

  I’m not sure what happened to me over the last few days. I lost myself, I think. I sank down into a hole for a while.

  They’re tricky things, holes. You don’t know you’re in one until you get out.

  This morning I killed and ate a couple of cockroaches. Big ones. They were in the kitchen, behind the burned-out cooker. I was just poking around down there, having a look. You never know what you’re going to find down the back of a cooker, do you? The cockroaches were on the wall. I grabbed them fast, squished them up, stuck the goo in a cup, mixed in a bit of cooking oil, and swallowed the lot.

  It tasted foul.

  Later. 11.57 p.m. to be precise.

  We’ve got a new clock.

  A few hours ago the knock-out gas came on. I was in my room, sitting on the bed trying to get some knots out of my hair. I heard the hissing, looked up, and then I smelled the chemicals. I got up and started wrapping a sheet round my head, but it was too late. My eyes started streaming, the stuff got into my lungs, and that was that.

  When I woke up I went out and checked on the others. They were all up and about, apart from Bird, who was lying on his bed gasping like a stranded fish. I haven’t seen him for a while and I didn’t realize how bad he’s got. He looks terrible. His skin’s all streaked and discoloured, his head’s swollen, his neck’s as stiff as a board, and his eyes are bulging like mad. It was a really shocking sight. Too much to cope with.

  I left his room and went to join the others.

  We had a good look round to see if He
’d come down and done anything while we were all knocked out, but the only thing we could find was the clock. A brand-new clock.

  Exactly the same as the old clock.

  Just for a moment I had an irresistible urge to smash it.

  That was about it.

  We all hung around for a bit, trying to think of something to say, but no one could think of anything. New clock? Big deal. You can’t eat it, can you? After a while the silence got too much and everyone started drifting back to their rooms.

  I followed Russell and caught up with him at his door.

  ‘Can I have a word with you?’ I said.

  He looked at me with distant eyes.

  ‘About Bird,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bird. I think he’s really ill.’

  Russell just nodded.

  I said, ‘Have you seen him recently?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bird.’

  Russell blinked. ‘I’m sorry, I’m very tired. Can we talk about this some other time?’

  ‘But I think he’s –’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do about it. He’s dying. We’re all dying. You might as well get used to it.’

  Then he turned and shut the door on me.

  It’s five minutes before lights-out. I wonder if they’re going to be five long minutes or five short minutes. I wonder how He adjusts the time. Does He do it manually? Is it automated? Computerized? Has He got the clock linked up to some kind of time-adjusting mechanism, something He downloaded from the Internet or bought at one of those gadget places in Tottenham Court Road?

  And another thing I wonder.

  I wonder if He read my notebook when He came down here.

  Did you?

  Hey, Mister, did you read this when you came down here? Did you take a peek at my innermost thoughts? Did you? No, I don’t think you did. In fact, I know you didn’t. You see, I’m pretty sneaky. I can tell if this notebook’s been moved. I can tell if it’s even been touched. You want to know how? Well, tough, I’m not telling you.

  Mind you, I don’t need to be that sneaky when it comes to you. I would have known anyway. If you’d touched this notebook I would have smelled it a mile away. The pages would have reeked of shit.

  Thursday, 8 March

  A word about Jenny.

  We spend a lot of time together. Even in the bad times – when I’m feeling down, or she’s feeling sick, or the other way round – we spend hours together every day. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we don’t. It doesn’t matter. Just being together is enough. I tell her stories, make up jokes. We play word games. Russell joins in sometimes, when he’s not too tired. Fred occasionally. But mostly it’s just me and Jenny. If I’m not in the mood for stories or jokes she just babbles on about her friends, or her family, or what she thinks about things – pop groups, TV, dogs, clothes. I don’t have to do anything. I just listen. Nod my head. Say uh-huh now and then. Or not. It doesn’t matter.

  It’s good.

  It keeps us both going.

  Me more than her, probably.

  She’s coping pretty well. She looks a mess – skinny, dirty, tired – but then we all look a mess. The difference with Jenny is her eyes. Even when they’re runny, her eyes are clear. Alive. As bright as the day she arrived. The rest of us have dead eyes.

  Earlier this evening she told me that Anja has some food.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Cornflakes. I saw them in her room.’

  ‘What were you doing in her room?’

  Jenny looked a little embarrassed. ‘I wanted to ask her about something.’

  ‘What?’

  She blushed. ‘Nothing … just a girl thing.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  She smiled awkwardly. ‘I knocked on her door and went in. I didn’t mean to be rude. I thought I’d heard her say, “Come in.” But I don’t think she did because when I went in she was putting a packet of cornflakes under her bed. I saw her, Linus. She shouted at me. Told me to get out.’

  ‘Cornflakes?’

  She nodded. ‘I saw them.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I saw them.’

  I suppose she must have had them stored away since before the food ran out. So while the rest of us have been starving to death she’s been munching away on cornflakes.

  ‘Stay here,’ I told Jenny.

  I went out into the corridor, stomped across to Anja’s room and barged in without knocking. She was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, dressed only in her underwear. White lace, all grubby and stained.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘What the fuck –?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  I went over to her bed and looked underneath it. There was nothing there. I went over to the bedside cabinet and opened the door. Meanwhile Anja had got to her feet and was screaming at me.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get away from that. How dare you come in here without … hey!’

  Inside the cabinet, as well as the cornflakes, there was a thick crust of mouldy bread, half a bar of chocolate, and a slab of dried-up cheese.

  ‘Now, hold on a minute,’ Anja spluttered. ‘Listen, I can explain …’

  I swept the food into my arms, kicked the cabinet shut, and walked out.

  Anja called after me, ‘I hope you puke on it, you self-righteous little bastard.’

  I gave most of the food to Jenny. The rest of it I divided up and shared out between the four of us. Russell was asleep, so I left his share on the bedside cabinet. Bird didn’t want his, but I left it for him anyway. Fred just looked at the handful of manky old food and asked me where I’d got it from. I told him I’d found it down the back of the cooker. He didn’t believe me, but he was too hungry to bother with the truth. He took the food and wolfed it all down in one go.

  Friday, 9 March

  First the good news.

  There was a massive chunk of cooked meat in the lift this morning. A joint of roast beef on a silver platter. It looked beautiful. Thick, solid, juicy, succulent …

  The smell of it was intoxicating.

  And the bad news?

  There were two sheets of paper pinned to the meat with skewers.

  One of them was a grubby little note that we wrote about a month ago. Do you remember that secret meeting I told you about? The one with Russell and Fred? The one I wouldn’t tell you about? Well, the reason I didn’t want to tell you about it then was that I was worried The Man Upstairs might find out about it. But it doesn’t matter now. Because He did find about it.

  We wrote the note after Russell had told us everything he knew about the bunker. When Fred had first suggested his message-down-the-lavatory idea, Jenny had been right to say that it was pointless sending a message if we didn’t know where we were. But a bit later on, when I mentioned the idea to Russell, he pointed out that although we didn’t know exactly where we were, we did have some information that was worth passing on.

  We knew that we were probably somewhere in Essex.

  We knew that we were still alive, and that as long as the police knew we were alive, they’d probably carry on looking for us.

  And we knew that we were in an old nuclear bunker.

  ‘There aren’t that many of them around,’ Russell said. ‘And I know someone at Cambridge, a physicist called Dr Lausche, who did some research on post-war nuclear facilities a few years ago. If I write out everything I know about this place, and we include an instruction with our note to pass these details on to Dr Lausche, it’s possible that he might be able to work out where we are.’

  So we’d written a note. Names
, descriptions, best guesses … as much information as we could think of. And we’d carefully wrapped the note in several layers of black polythene torn from a bin liner, and we’d tied the bundle with brightly coloured plastic strips ripped from food packaging. And then we’d flushed the package down the lavatory.

  That was almost four weeks ago.

  And now here it was. Returned to sender. Skewered to a piece of meat.

  I think we all knew from the beginning that the chances of the note actually reaching anyone were virtually non-existent, and ever since we flushed it away I’ve been doing my best not to think about it, but I suppose in the back of my mind I’ve been clinging to the hope that someone would find it. So when I saw the note this morning, and when I realized what it meant, it hit me like a cold hard slap in the face.

  If anything though, the other sheet of paper pinned to the meat was even worse. A printed note, it simply said:

  lISTEN – mY WORD:

  hE WHO KILLS aNOTHER SHALL BE fREe

  We all looked at it for a long time. Ten words. Nine puzzled eyes. (Bird was still in his room.)

  ‘Well?’ I said eventually.

  ‘Well what?’ Fred answered.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Who cares?’ He pulled out one of the skewers, speared it into the joint of beef, and dug out a big chunk of meat.

  ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘It might be drugged –’

  ‘I don’t care.’ He stuffed the meat in his mouth and started chewing. ‘I rahvver vee foison v’n ’ungry.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said he’d rather be poisoned than hungry,’ Jenny said.

  We watched him eat. Chomping, chewing, swallowing …

  We looked at the meat. Mouth-watering, thick and juicy …

  We looked at the note.

  lISTEN – mY WORD:

  hE WHO KILLS aNOTHER SHALL BE fREe

  The meat won.

  We went at it like hyenas, ripping out dirty great pieces with our bare hands and stuffing ourselves stupid.

  Afterwards, when our bellies were full (and Russell and Jenny had been sick), we considered the note again.