by Adam Roberts
Opening the door set off an electronic chime: the first ten notes of ‘Yellow Submarine’ – it struck me then, a weirdly melancholy tune, trotting along and then diving down into the gloom. It suited the inside, though, which managed to be both very cheesily decorated and also extremely mournful-looking. Low-ceilinged, unmodernized, dusty.
There were more people inside than I had anticipated. Three were sat at tables staring at their drinks. Another man sat at the bar, nursing a tall glass filled with blue liquid like the sorts of things chemists used to stick in their front windows. Perhaps all four had crammed into the Prius outside; or perhaps they had walked; or perhaps they were always here, sipping beer in a Sartrean silence. They all looked at me when I entered, without the least positivity in their faces. Two Labradors were sprawled on the floor – both, I guessed, dumb beasts.
The barman was a very large man wearing a MANCHESTER CUNTED shirt. His head was pear-shaped and massive, his face a landslide of features. I ordered a pint and enquired after food, and he didn’t move from his stool, didn’t so much as reach for an empty glass. ‘No offence,’ he said. ‘But, from the look of yer.’
I handed over my chip. His eyebrows went up – as if I were trying to pay with dubloons, or an IOU signed by the devil. But he checked the credit. ‘This yours?’
‘Of course it is,’ I said.
‘Money in it’s not been touched for months and months.’ Pronounced mumfz.
‘Odd you should say that,’ I said. ‘Given that I take the money out every night and rub my cock with it.’
‘Unspent since April,’ he said doggedly. ‘What you been living on?’
‘Air,’ I said. ‘You going to pull me a fucking pint, or you want the Archbishop of Canterbury personally to stop by and vouch for me?’
At this point the man sitting at the bar, the one with the blue drink, chipped in. ‘We’d rather,’ he said, ‘cash.’
‘I didn’t realize I’d stepped into a pub conveniently located on the outskirts of the fucking eighteen nineties,’ I said. ‘What’s it to you? You work here?’
‘Just saying,’ the fellow wheezed, not meeting my eye. ‘Dollars for preference. Euros at a pinch.’
‘My coach and four is parked outside, I’ll just pop out, fetch my purse of golden guineas.’ I turned back to barman. ‘The chip’s kosher. Pour me the pint.’
All eyes were on me. Slowly, with a walrus grace, the barman slid from his stool and put a glass under the tap. The dogs laid their heads back on the floor. The people at the table went back to their mumbled conversation. Looking around I noticed for the first time a large grey parrot perched on a beam, over by the back door. I took this for a stuffed ornament; but when the beer was put in front of me the beast swivelled his head and scratched its talons on the wood.
‘Food?’ I asked.
‘Jesus Onion,’ said the barman. ‘Red Yseult.’
‘Crisps?’ I said, a little peevishly. I was starving, and there’s nothing much in crisps for the truly empty belly. ‘You got nothing more substantial?’
He gave this a think. ‘Porn cockatiel?’
‘You mean an actual prawn cocktail? Or you mean, flavoured crisps?’ A twitch of the head indicated that the latter, and I sighed. ‘Better than nothing I suppose,’ I said. ‘Three packs, please. Let us have one of each, why not, push the fucking boat out.’ Filling this order entailed the barman moving to the far end of the bar, which took a while. Whilst he was occupied I drank my pint, more or less in one go. It was the single most delicious thing I had tasted all year. Any words of mine that purported to do justice to the experience would be mere mendacity. It transcended words. My whole head lightened, de-leaded. My heart relaxed inside my chest. I had not realized how wound up and tense I was until I de-wound and untensed. The beer took the worst away from my hunger. I ate the crisps, and ordered a second drink. The barman scowled so hard it looked like the corners of his mouth had been pinned down to his chin with tent pegs, but he poured me another.
‘No offence,’ the man with the blue drink said. He still hadn’t touched his refreshment. ‘But you do look like a tramp.’
‘No offence,’ I said. ‘But you do look like you fuck goats.’ Somebody at the table sniggered at this, and suddenly the entire mood in the pub shifted about. Even the barman relaxed.
‘Don’t mean to be inhospital,’ said the blue-drink man. ‘Inhosbubble. Don’t mean to be—’ He sighed, gave up on the word and stared into space. Then, finally, for the first time since I’d come in, he took a slurp from his medicinal-looking drink. ‘Difficult days, these days.’
‘This your pub?’
‘Noddy Holder’s brother, lease,’ he said. ‘To speak of the woe that is in running a pub. Custom’s fallen off a cliff. No one has any money. Hardly anyone in the countryside even runs a car any more. Everyone’s moved. Reading, Bracknell, into London.’ He shook his head. ‘My investors are not happy.’
‘You have investors?’
‘Don’t mean to be in-ho-spit-able, brother,’ he said, finally getting it out. ‘Could use all the new custom we can get. Hey, maybe you’ll become a beloved regular! But chip money’s not the reliant thing it once was. The thing I don’t understand,’ he added, with a little spurt of energy, ‘is the economics of this plague.’
‘Plague?’
He looked at me. The barman looked at me. The three people at the table looked at me. I took another swig of beer. My gut, unused to such richness, was rumbling uncertainly.
‘You know about sclery,’ said the leaseholder. ‘You’re just pulling my leg.’
One old geezer spoke up from the group at the table: ‘My brother-in-law went up to Huddersfield for a job. Got there, laid-off, he slept rough for a month or so. He didn’t like it. Tried hitching back down here, the poe lice stuck him inside.’
‘Is that actual illegal now?’ enquired another of the fellows at the table. ‘Hitching?’
But the first man hadn’t finished story. ‘Ended up walking all the way back. Lost two stone, and got home smelling like a rat’s arse. Like a,’ he repeated, as if it were particularly important we grasp this crucial element in the narrative, ‘rat’s. Arse. He’s gone to Gdansk now.’
‘That Gene?’ asked another fellow.
‘Did you ever know O’Riordan?’ asked another. ‘Down Bagshot way?’
‘I know him.’
‘Died of the sclery. Last week it was. It was Jim told me.’
Everybody sucked their teeth at this news, and there was a moment of silence. I slurped my second pint glass and picked fussily at the last crumbs of crisp at the bottom of the packet, licking the tip of my finger to get the individual flakes to adhere. Fish food.
‘What I don’t understand,’ said the barman, deciding belatedly to contribute to the conversation, ‘is why everybody’s packing together. All packing into Bracknell like sardines in a …’ He stared into space, presumably trying to remember the name of that metal item inside which sardines proverbially congregate.
‘His missus went to Bracknell with a electric engineer,’ the blue-drink man told me, in a confidential tone. ‘He’s not happy about it.’
‘Packing themselves in,’ the barman continued. ‘Now, when there was a great plague of London that was because they were all packed in. Weren’t it? Tell me I’m wrong!’ He looked about, and repeated his request, sweetening the offer with an extra: ‘Tell me I’m wrong and I’ll fuck you in yer ear.’
Silence.
‘Bracknell’s bad, Reading’s crowdeder. But packin’ em in the ole days made the plague worse.’
Nobody was inclined to challenge his interpretation of the epidemiology of that particular historical calamity.
‘So tell the sense in packing yourselves into the cities? Infection spreads. That’s why they call it – well, why they. Well. Anyway. Infection spreads. When they stack apples, though, don’t they make sure they’re not all jostling in with one another? The countryside is all deserted now. I’d
rather be here. We’re further from the sclery out here, I reckon.’ He fell silent, musing on his own words.
‘Indulge me,’ I said. ‘I have been so far out of the loop lately, the loop is now a dot to me. What’s slary?’
‘Before they cut off the wifi,’ said one of the men at the table – and at this, everybody at the table groaned with miserable recognition.
‘They cut off your wifi?’
‘Not just ours,’ said the leaseholder. ‘There’s no internet access anywhere in the countryside now, pretty much. Been that way a month, or more. You are behind the times, my friend.’
‘Before they cut off the wifi,’ the guy at the table repeated, ‘I watched a documentary about it. Sclerotic charagmitis. Nasty way to go.’
‘Is it really a plague?’ I asked, wide-eyed. The beer was aiding my ingenuousness.
‘Spreads like flu,’ said the man at the table.
‘No, no, like AIDS,’ said another.
‘Flu. Yer mucus membranes all scar over. That’s the thing.’
‘I heard you’re OK until you cut yourself,’ said another. ‘Even if the virus’s in you. So long as you walk about cotton-wool-like, you’re good to go. But one little cut! Graze the knee, and the scarring sets in as a catastrophic, eh, domino thing. One cut to the finger and you can be turned into a scarred-up mummy-a-like in hours.’
‘Bollocks,’ said another.
‘The thing about AIDS,’ said the other, ‘is that they cured AIDS. They’ll cure the sclery, too.’
The others were not so sanguine. ‘It firulent,’ said one. ‘Real firulent. Mucus membranes are what they call the lining of your froat and sign-arses, and deeper and down into lungs. That’s what scars, all that. Not so much the outside skin.’
‘I helped wrap Maddie Elsever in plastic,’ the AIDS-optimist fellow said. ‘I saw her. She was all scrabbled on the outside, like stitching on a leather sofa.’
‘I’m not saying it can’t affect the outside,’ said the first fellow. ‘I’m saying that’s not what kills yer. What kills yer is the mucus membrane. Once yer lung-insides turn to denim, can’t breave no more. That’s your chips.’
‘I’m almost glad they cut the wifi,’ said the leaseholder, taking another modest sip from his big blue drink. ‘It was getting pretty miserable, watching the news. Same thing every bulletin: more deaths, more deaths. Authorities recommend this. Don’t touch granny if she’s stopped breathing. New theories about vectors of infection. Depressing.’
‘I can certainly see,’ I said, looking around at the dreary room, ‘that not having the telly on has brightened this place up no end.’
‘There’s never anything on,’ grumbled the barman. ‘I got it at home.’
‘How d’you manage that, Oscar?’ asked one of the men at the table.
‘I got,’ said Oscar mysteriously, ‘a pipe. But hardly watch it these days. ’Cept for boxettes.’
‘For what?’
‘I have a radio,’ one of the men put in, randomly.
‘Box,’ said the barman, pulling a biscuit from inside his jacket and placing it against his lower lip, ‘sets.’ He took a bite.
I had finished my second beer, and the crisps had made no appreciable dent on my weeks-deep hunger. ‘You have a biscuit,’ I pointed out to the barman.
He stared at me as if I had caught him strangling a puppy, mid-throttle. His eyes opened unnaturally wide.
‘You told me you only had crisps,’ I said accusingly. ‘Fucking prawny crisps! Now you’re eating a biscuit!’ You must remember I had imbibed no alcohol in months. My mood reflected the combination of intoxication and ravenousness.
The barman looked genuinely terrified. He turned his head slowly and looked – not at the leaseholder, propped at the bar feet from him, but at the parrot. Even in my beer-sozzled state I understood what the direction of that glance meant. Investors, indeed. I did not, at that time, understand the significance of the fact that the government had restricted wifi access to the countryside. Later – as I was to find out – they cut all wireless connectivity even in the towns, such that the internet shrank to a few hubs linked by actual wires sunk under the pavements. By then the whole world had changed. What I knew then was: I needed to get away.
‘They’re basically dog biscuits,’ said the leaseholder, gloomily. ‘You’re missing nowt.’
As I got up, one of the men at the table said in apparent non sequitur: ‘Wokingham’s a ghost town now.’
I visited the toilets. It felt strange to be standing at the grubby porcelain pod of a urinal, after months of pissing in the woods. I took a moment to avail myself of the sink: the plastic box on the wall deposited a semen-like squirt of white soap into my grubby, seamed palm. The water was cold as I rinsed hands and face, and then suddenly it was much too hot. There was no towel, and the hand-drier couldn’t be angled up, so I went into one of the cubicles and rubbed my beard with toilet paper to dry it.
Back in the bar I retrieved my chip, shouldered my pack and left without a word.
I walked back to the woods feeling faintly nauseous, and misliking the wooziness in my head. By the time I got back to my tent I was tired. I contemplated moving, but figured I could probably get away with a sleep first. The more I thought about it, the more exhausted I felt. So I crawled inside and fell coma-like into dreamland. Gigantic faceless men with the consistency of marshmallow stalking a dark purple landscape of castles and mountains – I don’t know. I don’t know.
I woke needing to piss, and it was dark. After relieving myself I went back to sleep. This was, looking back, a mistake; and I’m not sure why I made it. It’s not that I had any desire to get back to my dreams. They were not comfortable dreams.
I am lamed
I woke at dawn with a foul headache, made worse by the reflection that a mere two pints had left me hungover. You might think months of sleeping rough would harden a man, but in respect of my tolerance for alcohol it had done the opposite.
My hunger had an edge of ferocity of a kind I had not experienced in a long time. I pulled myself from the tent and hopped down into a dawn drizzle, cold and fine. I had taken a drink of water and pissed against the tree trunk before I noticed the deer.
There were three of them, with perhaps others in amongst the trees behind them – hard to say, in the dimness of the rainy air. They were stood in a line, and all looking straight at me. The difference between these beasts and the timidity of dumb animals could hardly be more pronounced.
For a moment I just stood. The drizzle was so fine it made no noise in falling; though the leaves above my head, red as Chelsea pensioner’s tunic, rustled and rustled. One of the deer had a growth of some kind on its back, bulging up through its fur. There was no growth: it was a cat. When it spoke I realized that it was Anne’s cat, Cincinnatus. Perhaps I was still dreaming.
‘They say you smell of soap,’ he told me. ‘Soap and beer.’
‘I can hardly hear you over the leaves’ shushing,’ I replied. It pulled on its whiskers, and then was still. I said: ‘The fuck you doing here, cat?’
‘Come closer if you want to hear better,’ the cat advised, sitting placidly on the shoulder of a deer.
‘I’m fine where I am,’ I said. I wasn’t dreaming.
‘Hard man to find,’ the cat observed conversationally.
I made an inward decision: not to be spooked; to ignore my headache; to get myself gone. ‘And yet you managed it,’ I observed. ‘Tell you what: let’s play again, and this time I’ll try and make it harder for you.’
Time to go, clearly. I didn’t much like packing away the tent wet, but couldn’t wait until things dried out. I turned my back on the deer, and starting unhooking the tie-lines from the tree bough. Something in me didn’t like not being able to keep them in sight. My heart hurried, jog-trotting with ungainly gait behind my ribs. Slow, I told myself. Calm. Calm.
‘You can’t keep running,’ said the cat. It said something else I didn’t catch, then: ‘We’re no
t your enemies, you know.’
‘Friends then?’ I said, looking back over my shoulder. ‘That’s good to hear. Be a pal, so, and fuck off.’
‘The world’s about to get a whole lot darker, Graham. You don’t mind if I call you Graham?’
‘Oh, Cincinnatus,’ I said, ‘you are a tease.’
‘Believe me, you need friends like us.’
I pulled my stuff from the tent and rolled it up, stuffing it heavy with water into my pack. My billycan was dirty, but I wasn’t about to wait. It went in the pack too. I coated up and pulled the drawstrings tight. Only then did I turn back to the deer. They hadn’t moved: an eerily still line of animals.
‘Deer don’t find the talking thing very easy,’ Cincinnatus said. ‘It’s their jaws. So I’m here.’
‘You all hooked up with one another, internetwise?’ I asked, wiping the drizzle from my face. ‘Only I heard a rumour that the government has cut the wifi.’
‘The government have limited the access,’ said the cat. ‘But it’s too little and it’s too late. Really, Graham. You should have gone to the Lamb when I first suggested it.’
‘Must be an old sheep by now, that lamb. Must be proper mutton by now.’ I was eyeing a path through the trees to my left. Should I run for it, or just walk confidently off? Come on, I told myself. They’re only deer: they’re not lions and tigers and boars. Then I thought to myself: Bears? Boars?
‘Still a lamb,’ said the cat. ‘You don’t understand how it works. For the Lamb cannot die, and the Lamb is continually being reborn as a lamb.’
‘Very pious I don’t doubt,’ I said. A thread of water was now linking the tip of my beard with the forest floor. I wiped my face with my hands a second time, and pulled my hood up. ‘I used to have a friend called Preacherman. He would have loved all this talk of the Lamb lying down.’
‘You could be there tomorrow, Graham. Day after at the latest. Harp and carp, Graham! Come along with us.’