The Bunker Diary

by Kevin Brooks

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ Fred asks me.

  I tell him about Russell’s brain tumour.

  ‘He knows I didn’t kill Anja,’ I explain. ‘He’s just got this mixed-up idea that if The Man Upstairs believes I killed her, He’ll let me go.’

  Fred nods. ‘I kind of guessed that.’

  I sigh.

  Bird makes a horrible rasping sound then, hawking up something from the back of his throat. Me and Fred both look at him. He stares straight ahead, his left eye twitching.

  ‘What the hell are we going to do with him?’ I ask Fred.

  Fred says nothing, just shakes his head.

  We couldn’t decide what to do with Bird. We secured him in his room, tying him to the bed, and then we just sat down and talked things over for hours and hours, trying to work out what to do. We didn’t know why Bird had killed Anja, or whether he’d known what he was doing or not, and – as Fred pointed out – we didn’t even know for sure that he had killed her.

  ‘We’re only guessing it was him,’ he said.

  ‘Who else could have done it?’

  ‘Russell.’

  I stared at Fred.

  He shrugged. ‘It’s possible, isn’t it? He’s not himself any more, he’s half-crazy … he could have done it.’

  ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘No way.’

  Fred shrugged again. ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘Yeah, I do.’

  Fred was right, of course. I didn’t know that Russell hadn’t killed Anja. I was 99% sure that he hadn’t, and I think Fred felt the same, but we couldn’t discount the possibility. So then we had to try to work out what to do about that as well.

  We didn’t get very far.

  How could we prove anything? How could we prove that Bird had done it, or that Russell had done it? And even if we could prove anything, what did we do then? Put the killer on trial? Punish him? Lock him up?

  He was already locked up. We all were.

  In the end, we got to the stage where we just couldn’t think about it any more. We were too tired, too confused to carry on. It was early evening by then, and we’d been talking all day. We decided to leave it for now, get some rest. Start again tomorrow.

  It happened in the early hours of the morning.

  I was asleep in my room with Jenny, Fred was outside in the corridor. Bird and Russell were both in their rooms. Bird was still tied up – his belt-bound hands secured to the bed by another belt – but we hadn’t done anything to restrain Russell. He was so weak now he could barely walk. I’d had to help him to the bathroom earlier on. He had no idea where he was or what he was doing. And besides, Fred was going to spend the night sitting in a chair at the kitchen-end of the corridor, so even if Russell did leave his room for any reason, Fred would see him. At least until the lights went out. And then he’d hear him.

  ‘And I’ve still got this,’ Fred said, grinning and clicking one of the cigarette lighters The Man had sent down to us a million years ago. ‘Don’t worry, Linus,’ he said, patting my shoulder. ‘Nothing’s going to happen. You and Jenny get some sleep and we’ll talk again in the morning.’

  I was confused when the sound of the lift woke me up. G-dung, g-dunk. It was dark, and it felt early. And that wasn’t right. The lift comes down at nine o’clock. The lights are always on at nine o’clock. The lift doesn’t come down when it’s dark.

  I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and listened.

  Whirr, clunk, click, nnnnnnnnn …

  It was definitely the lift.

  I wasn’t dreaming.

  Jenny was still asleep. I could hear her sleepy breathing. I got up quietly, tiptoed across the pitch-black room, and opened the door.

  ‘Fred?’ I whispered into the darkness.

  A light came on over by the lift, the flickering flame of Fred’s cigarette lighter. He was standing in front of the lift door, his head angled to one side, as if he was listening to something.

  The lift came to a halt – g-dung, g-dunk.

  The door didn’t open.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked Fred, crossing over to him.

  ‘Listen,’ he said.

  I listened. Silence.

  ‘It’s stopped now,’ Fred said.

  ‘What’s stopped?’

  ‘It sounded like a phone ringing.’

  ‘Where? In the lift?’

  He nodded. ‘I could have sworn –’

  A phone started ringing.

  ‘There it is!’ Fred said. ‘I knew I’d heard it.’

  It was an old-fashioned telephone ring – brrr, brrr … brrr, brrr. I stepped closer to the lift door and listened hard. There was no doubt it was coming from inside the lift.

  ‘What’s He doing?’ I said.

  Fred shook his head. ‘God knows.’

  The ringing stopped.

  Nothing happened for a moment.

  And then suddenly – mmm-kshhh-tkk – the door opened and the phone started ringing again. We could see it now. It was on the floor at the back of the lift. A cheap-looking mobile with a grubby white casing. The screen was flashing on and off with the ringtone.

  Brrr, brrr … brrr, brrr.

  Brrr, brrr … brrr, brrr.

  ‘What do we do?’ I said to Fred.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just leave it.’

  ‘But it might be –’

  ‘It won’t be anything, Linus. He’s playing games with us again. It’s just another –’

  All the lights came on then, a sudden flash of blinding white, and a second later we heard the scream. It came from behind us, from my room … from Jenny. I turned and ran.

  ‘JENNY!’ I yelled. ‘JENNY!’

  My door was half open. I barged through it and saw Bird bending over the bed, trying to get hold of Jenny. She was scrabbling away from him, swatting away his hands, her face shocked white and her eyes wide with fear. I threw myself at Bird, got hold of him round the neck and started pulling him away. He twisted round and clawed at me like a lunatic – hissing and growling, spitting, snarling – and then suddenly Fred was there, grabbing hold of Bird’s shoulders, swinging him round and hammering his massive head into his face. Once, crack. And again, crack.

  Bird went down without a sound.

  We still haven’t worked out exactly how it happened. We know that Bird gnawed his way through the belts at some point because we found the chewed remains of them in his room, but the rest of it we can only guess at. We think The Man Upstairs must have been watching Bird (infrared cameras?). He must have seen him chewing through the belts, waited until he was almost free, then distracted us with the phone in the lift so we didn’t see Bird sneaking out of his room. Of course, He couldn’t have known what Bird was going to do, but it was pretty obvious he was going to do something, and I guess that’s all that matters to Him. As long as He’s got something to watch He’s happy.

  God knows what Bird was actually doing.

  Was he after me?

  Did he know that Jenny was in my room?

  I don’t even want to think about it.

  Jenny’s just about OK now. She was badly shaken up for a while, but after I’d sat with her for an hour or so – telling her over and over again that there was nothing to worry about any more, that Bird was gone and she’d never see him again – she slowly began to come out of it.

  ‘Is he really gone?’ she asked quietly.

  I nodded.

  ‘Is he dead?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘Did Fred kill him?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to kill him, Linus.’

  ‘I know.
’

  ‘I thought I’d just knocked him out. It wasn’t till I’d dragged him out that I realized he was dead.’

  ‘You did what you had to do, Fred. He was probably just about dead anyway. Not that it matters. As long as Jenny’s all right, that’s all that counts.’

  I’m getting it all mixed up now. I can’t remember if I talked to Fred first and then talked to Jenny, or if it was the other way round. All I know for sure is that at some point I was sitting at the table with Fred, and Jenny was in my room, and I suddenly realized that while all this craziness had been going on we hadn’t seen or heard anything from Russell.

  ‘We’d better go and check on him,’ I said to Fred.

  I looked in on Jenny first. She was asleep – all curled up, nice and snug, sucking quietly on a finger. I closed the door and left her to it.

  Fred followed me down the corridor to Russell’s room.

  I knocked on the door.

  No answer.

  I knocked again.

  Still no answer.

  I looked at Fred.

  He shrugged.

  I opened the door, just an inch.

  ‘Russell?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Russell?’

  The silence was ominous.

  With a heavy heart, I pushed open the door and went inside. For a fraction of a second everything seemed normal – the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the bed – and then I saw him. He was lying on the bed wrapped in a reddened sheet.

  The sheet was wet.

  The red was blood.

  My legs were shaking as I went over for a closer look. I sank down on to the bed, numbed to the bone. A hollow sickness ached in my belly.

  You know what I thought then? I thought, This is it. This is what happens and what will happen. This is where you’re going, Linus. This – this silence, this stillness, this lack of feeling – this is where you’re going.

  When I looked into Russell’s lifeless face, a flood of wretchedness filled my heart. I’ve never had a feeling like it before. Words can’t describe it. Through cold tears I looked down at the empty socket where his glass eye should have been. Lying on the sheet beside his head was a splinter of coloured glass.

  It took me a moment to get it.

  Russell Lansing had popped out his glass eye, smashed it on the floor, and opened his wrists with a blue-and-white shard.

  It’s getting late now.

  I’ve talked with Jenny, told her about Russell. I didn’t tell her everything, but I didn’t lie. I told her that Russell had cancer.

  ‘A girl at school got cancer,’ she told me. ‘Carly Green. She died too. She got leukaemula from the power station.’

  ‘The nucular power station?’

  Jenny smiled.

  She’s not stupid.

  She asked me what’s going to happen to us.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.

  ‘Are we going to die too?’

  ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Not us.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Lots of reasons.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Weedy Power, for one.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Well, for a start, Fred’s invincible. Second, you’re too smart. And third, I’m too pretty.’

  She laughed. ‘You’re not pretty. Girls are pretty.’

  ‘Yeah? What am I then?’

  ‘Pretty ugly,’ she giggled.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Pretty whiffy too,’ she added.

  ‘And you’re not, I suppose?’

  Her face suddenly dropped.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘I didn’t mean –’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  She sniffed and wiped her nose. I felt bad then. Bad for the little things. It’s not the big stuff that really gets to you, it’s the little things. Things like cold bathrooms, dirty sheets, and little girls who have to put up with smelling bad.

  Jenny looked up at me. ‘What’s going to happen, Linus?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I lied. ‘We’re going to be all right.’

  I’ve got the others’ notebooks – Anja’s, Bird’s, Russell’s. I’ve been looking around their rooms too. I waited until Jenny was asleep and then I went nosing around. It was a bit spooky, and it didn’t make me feel too great, but then I didn’t feel too great anyway.

  Anja’s notebook is blank. Not a word. Nothing at all. It looks like it’s never been opened. I thought that was quite sad at first – having nothing to say, no one to talk to, no secrets, no desire to leave anything behind. But then it struck me that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. I mean, what’s so great about sharing your thoughts with someone who doesn’t exist? What good does it do? Where does it get you? Nowhere, as far as I can see. Nowhere useful anyway.

  Her room had a peculiar smell to it. It smelled exactly how you’d expect a dirty posh woman’s room to smell, a curious mixture of waste and wealth. A bit sweet and a bit sour. Like a dead flower. Or like a £50 note that’s been in a tramp’s pocket for a week. Not very nice, but not too bad either.

  I found some more food in there. There wasn’t much – a couple of crackers under the pillow, four rashers of cooked bacon hidden in the bible, a small furry lump of chocolate under the bed – but it’s enough to keep us going for a few more days. The thought of Anja hiding it away didn’t make me feel angry any more. It didn’t make me feel anything, to be honest.

  Bird’s room was neater than Anja’s. Not clean, but neat. Neat in a scary kind of way, as if he didn’t move around much when he was in there, just lay on his bed staring at the ceiling thinking scary thoughts. Although it was neater than Anja’s room, it smelled a lot worse. It smelled like fifty years of sweat and putrefaction. There were also one or two signs that Bird had lost it near the end. Urine stains on the wall, dried turds under the bed …

  I took his notebook and got out of there.

  The writing in his notebook is really hard to read, all cramped and scrawly, like he was drunk all the time. Apart from the records he kept of our meetings, it’s mostly filled with strange little undated notes, each one written on a separate page. I’m not sure what any of it means. For example:

  10.59

  a11.25

  13.00B

  a1306

  movement/time/wasted

  Philp Satar 99273

  7 down

  7 Marlett

  3

  firedefinelinesignwhine

  usleless

  law = devolution (weakness)

  law weakness

  weakness is gaurded by law

  152

  1142

  start with 1 61 67 8 47 end 34

  PICTURES?

  pci peice pice pice peice

  I left Russell’s room until last. I didn’t really want to go in there at all. He was dead, but his memory was alive, and I wanted to leave it at that. But something made me go in there. I don’t know what it was, some kind of ghoulish curiosity, I suppose. Something stronger than sentiment.

  The air smelled thick and coppery, almost salty, and there was a silence to the room that reminded me of the silence of a church. You know, like you’re not supposed to be there, like something’s watching you. I stood there for a while, just looking around, trying to breathe calmly. It wasn’t easy. There were tiny splinters of coloured glass scattered on the floor by the bed, shining dully in the light. They looked like blue-and-white needles. The bed was still bloody and there were ugly smears on the floor where we’d dragged the body out. There was other stuff in there, too … stuff I don’t want to talk about
. It was all too much. I got his notebook from the cabinet and took it back to my room.

  I’ve just finished reading it. Page after page of words and pictures and diagrams … there’s all kinds of stuff in there. Thoughts, letters, theories, equations, drawings, even poems. It’s incredible. Beautiful, dark, harrowing, complex, and indescribably sad.

  I’m not going to show you any of it.

  The last entry is addressed to me.

  Dear Linus, it begins.

  The rest is illegible, just a dying scrawl.

  I’m going to sleep.

  Sunday, 18 March

  It doesn’t take long to sink back into a routine. Whatever it takes, I suppose. You just take it, live it, hour after hour after hour.

  07.00: You wake up shivering. It’s impossibly cold. You can’t get up. There’s a nasty taste in your mouth and your tongue feels furry. You’ve got a throbbing headache and a stuffy nose. You’re tired. You’re not hungry, but you can’t stop thinking about food. Cheese, honey, hot meat, green vegetables swimming in gravy. You don’t even like vegetables. And fresh air too. You can’t stop thinking of fresh air. Wind, sky, open spaces. Gardens, fir trees, hedges …

  What do you do?

  I lie in bed thinking of other times.

  When I was a little kid. When Dad was home, telling me rhymes. I remember the one about budgies and crabs and grizzly bears, and the one with the buffaloes, and last night I finally remembered another one, a longer one. It was about a tortoise. I started thinking about it about three days ago, and last night I finally got it:

  A rich lady tortoise called Joyce

  was driving her shiny Rolls-Royce,

  when a boisterous young oyster

  made a noise like a rooster

  Joyce crashed her shiny Rolls-Royce.

  A kind little turtle called Myrtle

  ran up and said, ‘Oh! are you hurtle?’

  The tortoise replied, ‘I’m fine, thank you, Clyde,’

  and Myrtle said, ‘Oh, but I’m Myrtle.’

  You see, Joyce had a husband called Clyde