by Alex Marwood
I was so frightened when they brought me from Wales to the Halfway House – across a river so wide that the far shore was lost in mist, over a bridge where juggernauts roared like dragons on a six-lane road – that I hid my face in the hood of my top and didn’t look up until my police driver assured me we had arrived.
It’s 129 miles from Weston-super-Mare, on the Bristol Channel, to Hounslow, on the outskirts of London. I am, at least, prepared this time. But my case worker’s little car feels like a rabbit overtaken by stampeding horses as we race up slopes towards the horizon. Great tracts of green land, majestic trees, briefly glimpsed houses lost among them, and, in the far distance, the sea. Then a river, then cranes and ships and buildings so large that, even in the distance, I can see that their cavernous interiors would swallow Plas Golau whole. Strange names on signs. Ancient, I know, but a different order of ancient from the jumbles of consonants where I grew up. Portishead. Avonmouth. Bristol. A tangle of roads so fast and so convoluted it makes me nauseous with terror. But Janet switches through the maze of lanes with ease. More signs: London 110, Newbury 65, Finbrough 71, Reading 78. My skin prickles when I see the sign for Finbrough. I glance at the speedometer. She is sticking to a lawful seventy-two, which has already started to feel normal to me, until I try to focus on a detail at the side of the road only to see it shoot past in a blur of speed. In an hour, we will pass the place where I was born. If she stopped the car now, I could walk there in three days. From my new home, it would only take a day and a half. But maybe I’ll take the bus. They taught me how to take a bus in Weston, as part of my life-skills training, along with buying things in shops and registering with a doctor and how to use a money card and how to look things up on the internet at the library. I like buses. Janet, the case worker, says that where I’m going there’s an underground railway that goes all the way into the centre of London. The very thought makes me cold.
‘It’s a start,’ says Janet. ‘That’s the thing. Nobody’s saying you have to stay in Hounslow for the rest of your life. But it’s as good a place as any to find your feet. Not too busy, not too rough, but handy for London, when you’ve got your nerve up. You’ve actually fallen on your feet, when you think of the places you could have been housed. The hard-to-let lottery can be very unforgiving.’
I can’t imagine I shall ever want to go into London. It’s dangerous in so many ways. As it is, if a nuclear bomb drops on Westminster, Hounslow will be flattened. I will most likely die in a collapsing building rather than a firestorm, and if I survive there will be no avoiding the fallout.
We turn off the motorway, turn left at a roundabout and then left at another. Street after street of square, squat houses, yellow bricks, car parks, a couple of gloomy towers. People live in those, Janet says. They’re a bit of an eyesore, all that concrete. Building was like that in the 1970s. But they’re not bad inside, and the new cladding has made quite a difference, and the views are great. I squeeze my eyelids together to help me focus and see that all the way up there in the sky there are washing lines, shirts and trousers and bedclothes, drooping forlornly against the grey sky. I wonder what it would be like to be in one of those if it caught on fire.
It takes ten minutes to reach our destination from the motorway. ‘Write it down, Romy,’ says Janet. ‘Here: use a page out of my notebook. Keep it in your bra till you’re sure you remember the address.’ And I suppress a smile, because, rather than a bra, I have my breasts strapped down with a bandage from the chemist’s shop, to stop their burgeoning growth showing. There’s no room for anything in there.
‘136b Bath Road, Hounslow. That’s your home. It’s near the station. You can ask people where that is, if you get lost. You won’t need to tell people your actual address. Best not to.’
I stare and stare, try to memorise some landmarks, but everything looks like everything else. Roads, houses, yellow bricks, red bricks, cul-de-sacs, street signs. Just a blur of sameness. And then a huge aeroplane passes over us, so close that my hands fly to my head because I think we are about to die.
‘Oh, yes,’ says Janet, ‘it’s on the flight path for Heathrow. That’s one of the reasons there are flats available around here. Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it.’
Easy for you to say.
Looking out at the wide street, I feel as though the Apocalypse has already been and gone. It’s lined with shops, but half of them have boards across their windows. And not new boards, as though they’re expecting a riot, but old boards, boards that are rotting at the edges, boards that have had posters stuck on, layer after layer, peeled off again, re-pasted. Hounslow West Underground station looms out of the dusk.
‘I know,’ Janet breaks into my thoughts. ‘It does look a bit run-down. You’ll be surprised, though. There’s most things you need, at least for now.’
Mainly, I can see a giant car park.
She pulls up in front of a launderette and a grubby little shop that calls itself Bath Road Foods and Off-Sales, a hundred yards down from the station. ‘Here we are,’ she says.
There’s a blank door to the left of the launderette, with the number 136b in metal letters screwed to the front. I guess we’re here.
Inside, it’s warm, and smells of soap. After the sour pong of the Halfway House, it’s pleasant for a moment, until the underlying scent of damp kicks in and I see from the light filtering through the windows that they are steamed up. Through the floorboards I hear the rumble of the machines below, turning over and over, beating out dirt, tumbling out steam. It’s so warm I long to take my coat off, but I’ve got this far without anyone finding out about you, and all it would take would be for her to see me at the wrong angle and my liberty would be lost.
Janet switches on the light. I see a space that’s large, after what I’ve been used to. Maybe twenty feet by twelve, with kitchen cupboards at one end and a couch and a little low table under the window. The walls are covered in flowered wallpaper – small pink roses on grey trellis, ivy leaves between – and the couch is covered in a shiny fabric that almost, but doesn’t quite, match it. Clean patches on the wallpaper show where other furniture has stood, where pictures have hung. A low ceiling is lined with plasticky tiles that would melt and drip on your head if there were a fire.
We had plain whitewashed walls at Plas Golau. Nothing to divert our attention from the end of the world.
‘Oh, my goodness!’ she says. ‘They’ve left the telly! Lucky you. I’m surprised the house-clearance didn’t take it, but it’s very old-school. I don’t suppose it’s worth anything. That’ll be company for you.’
I guess it will be a good distraction, while I build up my courage. I like the channels with nothing but people selling things. The astonishment and enthusiasm about gadgets that solve problems you never knew you had, and clothes that even I can see are guaranteed to make you sweat.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Let’s go and get the boxes and we can get you settled in.’
I have three boxes and a suitcase, and I don’t really know what they contain. I packed the suitcase myself, but the boxes came in the back of Janet’s car with her. She said that it was ‘bits and bobs we’ve all collected’, and I know I should be grateful. No, I am grateful. I’ve met extraordinary kindness: kindness that’s at odds with what I was told about the Dead. All the people I’ve met, even the junkies and the alkies, have rushed to press things into my hands, to think of things I might need. I left the police station with three dresses, two skirts, two pairs of jeans and five T-shirts, some of them brand new. At our parting session, Melanie gave me two sets of sheets and pillowcases, and a boxed set of plates and bowls and mugs. ‘This probably counts as getting too involved with a client,’ she said, ‘but there you go. Four of everything. Start your own home.’
By the time we’ve got everything up the stairs, I’m puffed out and red in the face and the scar on my leg is throbbing. I’ve got so unfit, in only three months. Physiotherapy hurt, but it was hardly a comprehensive fitness regime. I
must restart my training. Father would be ashamed of me. ‘You never know when you may need to run,’ he used to say. It was the basis of everything we did. Run, fight, hide, farm. But we had Plas Golau then, so we had somewhere to run to. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now or where I’m supposed to go. I need to work out the back exit from this place. There must be one. And then I need to work out the fastest route to open countryside.
Janet plods up behind me, a canvas carrier in one hand and a duvet, wrapped in plastic, brand new, white, unsullied, under the other arm. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘Here’s your bedclothes. You want a hand putting them on the bed?’
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I’ll be okay.’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Time for your first cup of tea in your new home, eh? There’s a kettle in that box. Only a basic one from Asda. But you have to have a kettle.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Tea.’ I don’t understand tea, or why it’s so important to the Dead.
‘In the box,’ she says. ‘And a pint of milk.’
A whole pint of milk, all to myself. I still haven’t got used to the luxury they all take for granted. I guess this is what I’ll use Melanie’s mugs for.
‘There’s chocolate digestives, too,’ she says proudly. ‘I did you a little box of staples, so you won’t starve while you’re settling in. Pasta. Bread. Marge. Some apples. A few tomatoes. A bit of cheese. That sort of thing.’
‘Thank you,’ I say. They like their pleases and thank yous.
‘And in here,’ she says, opening the canvas carrier, ‘I’ve got something I think you might be happy to see. I had a word. With CID. I’ve got a friend, comes in useful. It’s not orthodox, but she could see my point. They’ve been through it, obviously. But it’s not like you’re a suspect, and they’ve got a whole warehouse full of evidence. Here.’
In the carrier, down at the bottom, is a box. My box. The one I made myself, as part of my training. We all made our own, when we did our Carpentry apprenticeship. I made it from a lovely piece of beech from a tree that came down the winter before. A tiny bit of privacy in a world where everything, everything, was in the open. ‘Oh.’ For a moment I feel tearful. Here it is, the whole of my past. ‘Thank you,’ I say, and this time I mean it.
Janet touches my shoulder, and I do my best not to flinch. ‘I thought you’d like it,’ she says, kindly.
‘I do,’ I say. ‘I mean, what you’ve done. Thank you.’
She stays until she’s sure I’m not going to burn myself to death. She shows me how to work the gas cooker, how to turn on the TV and where the meters are for the payment keys, and advises me to clean the fridge before I put anything into it. ‘It will have been off for months,’ she says, ‘and when they’re off they’re like little bacteria farms.’ I suspect she thinks I’ve not actually seen one before. As we’ve driven along she’s explained windscreen wipers, traffic lights, and the purpose of the windmill that towers over the road at Reading. Like most people, she seems not to fully grasp what ‘off the grid’ means. Not that I myself knew the phrase, until I saw it in the Daily Mail in a long article about us, most of it wrong. We weren’t a free-love organisation, for a start; the complete opposite, as anyone with half a brain would be able to tell from our birth rate. And our expectation of the coming Apocalypse had nothing to do with God. And it wasn’t that we had no power. We had solar panels and a small, well-hidden bio-gas plant. We just didn’t squander energy. We rose with the sun and, in summer at least, went to bed with it, too. We weren’t medieval and we weren’t ignorant, but my vocabulary is cut off some time around 1984, when Plas Golau was bought and the library stocked. We shared the classics – the war poets, Shakespeare, Asimov, Dickens – in groups, on long winter evenings, but there was nothing modern, nothing the Dead would call current.
‘Are you going to be okay?’ she asks. A silly question, really, for what’s she going to do if I say I won’t be? Take me back?
‘Of course.’
‘Right,’ she says. ‘I’ll be off, then.’
‘You don’t smell off,’ I say, then have to give her another grin. Everyone who comes into contact with me, who knows my history, seems to expect me to be earnest, serious, rocking in a corner. It will be a relief to be able to make a joke without someone taking mental notes. Though I’m not sure who I’ll be able to make a joke to. Eilidh was my joke buddy, and Ilo, sometimes, when he could be persuaded to take the world lightly. Lord, I miss them. I still find it hard, after all these years, to believe I’ll never see Eilidh again.
She laughs, eventually. ‘Good luck,’ she says.
‘Thank you,’ I say, and edge her towards the door. ‘I’ll need it.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you won’t,’ she says.
And then she’s gone, and I am alone in my little kingdom. I draw the curtains and strip off my clothes; release the strapping and liberate my poor crushed breasts. I put a hand on my stomach and stroke it with my thumb, and relish the fact that I no longer have to hide you away. So far so good, baby. Three months out of Plas Golau, and we’re still alive.
6 | Sarah
She stays sitting after she’s finished her ready-meal lasagne, finishes her glass and pours another, looks at her dining room with a social worker’s eyes for the first time in her life, with the home visit a few days away. ‘Christ,’ she says.
Clutter has built up, and she’s never noticed it. She’s never had a reason to eat a meal at the table, or to feed anyone else, so she’s been using the table as a filing system since she moved back in. It’s elbow-deep in paper and the floor’s not much better. The paintings have collected cobwebs and the furniture that lines the walls is grey with dust. Miss Havisham hoping to find herself an Estella, that’s what I’ll look like, she thinks. This is what happens if you hardly ever have guests.
She walks through the house with the same eye. On the wall in the hall, an oil painting of a warty old woman in a black dress and white lace bonnet. Hester Lacey, founder of the Finbrough Congregation. She saw Jesus down by the river and dedicated her life to making a nice house for him to come back to. The antique shops of the M4 corridor have filled with portraits of her as the Carpenter’s Estate houses have been sold off. They’re so commonplace now that even the charity shops are turning them away. She’s imitating a look of benevolence in this picture, but you can see that she had a heart of steel.
So many things she’s not opened, not looked in, in the two years since she inherited. She walks through to the kitchen – memories of ham salads made up and sitting beneath fly-screens on the table for silent post-church meals. Always a pan of brown soup waiting on an unlit burner ‘to warm us up’, brown earthenware bowls on the side. Oxtail. Almost always tinned oxtail, the smell a mix of abattoirs and laundry baskets. Sarah longs to be free of all of it. Dreams of a place as far from Finbrough as she can get, of open skies and open windows with no hum from the motorway, and a new beginning. A sense of purpose, she thinks, that’s what I need. Not to just be drifting through life doing a nothing job just to pay the heating bill.
I’ll get a skip, she thinks. I shall get a skip and just dump the contents of every drawer I haven’t opened since I’ve been back straight into it. That’s one of the main decluttering tips, isn’t it? That if you’ve not needed it in the past year, you don’t need it at all? I’ve been paralysed all this time, but I can’t go on living like this. Even if I wanted to, I can’t bring children – my own or anyone else’s – into this.
She gathers up an armful of papers and goes up to her father’s office in the attic. Out of sight, out of mind, and she needs to find the birth certificates – her own and Alison’s – to show the case worker when she brings the kids for their visit. Belatedly, it’s occurred to someone to ask her to prove that she’s who she says she is.
More dust. She feels ashamed. The room is lined with filing cabinets and the boxy old desktop computer sits on a big wooden desk. Otherwise, there’s nothing on show. No family photos, no paper clips, no paper. E
verything put away, as though he knew he wouldn’t be coming back. He liked his secrets, Bruce Maxwell. Kept things separate – records here, the cash in the safe at the church – so that only he could really make it all add up.
She tries the drawers, looking for the folder she found it all in, two years ago. She opens the desk drawers first – a jumble of office-related bits and pieces, a whole drawer of blank paper. Another of paper that’s printed on one side, a single line drawn across the print with a pen. Her parents never recycled. Thought of it as a socialist concept. But they were thrifty.
Leaflets. The ones she handed out on the High Street every Saturday from when she was baptised at five to when she left for university. ‘THE WAGES OF SIN’. ‘WHO WAS HESTER LACEY?’ ‘YOUR BLESSED WATER: HOW TO USE IT’. In the bottom drawer, the Congregation’s own special brand of greeting-and-damnation cards.
It’s all well labelled, at least. He might not have wanted his congregation to know what he was up to, but he liked to be able to lay his hand on anything in a moment. Church accounts. Church history. Correspondence. The latter turns out to be a collection of yellowing letters from people responding to Blessed Water ads, and a folder of receipts from newspaper ad sales departments. The Membership drawer is poignantly sparse. She leafs through a couple of files. Copies of will bequests, details of addresses and phone numbers, little else. The occasional folder is stamped with the word DECEASED. After a point he must not have been able to bear to throw any more away, as the membership counted down to zero. The day he collapsed and died at the lectern in the Lord’s House Chapel, he was preaching to a congregation of thirteen. And only two of them were below retirement age.
I’ll take the lot down there, she thinks, and leave them in the office. She still has a key, of course; several. But she’s not set foot in the place since her father’s funeral and has only the vaguest idea if anyone is there at all any more. It always looks shuttered and neglected when she walks past on market days. Maybe they realised it was all over, and sold up and cleared out the safe and got the hell out of Dodge, and the Lord’s House is just going to rot there until the resurrection. She hopes so, for their sakes.