by Alex Marwood
‘Hello, 143,’ he says. ‘A word, if you don’t mind.’
Among the Dead
November 2016
20 | Sarah
There’s a toilet at the back of the staff room, and although there’s a general one much closer to her office she tends to use this one, because a toilet used by adults is always going to be more fragrant than one accessed by several hundred children. She likes to use it in the middle of the second period in the morning and the first after lunch, when most of the staff are in classrooms or meetings and the coast is likely to be as clear as it ever will be. A strange inhibition left over from her upbringing: that the sound of other people sharing the space makes her bladder freeze. The relief when she’s out in public and finds a disabled toilet is always intense. As a child she would run home in lunch break simply to pee, and then – oh, the fear that she might be too late one day – to change the bulky towels with which her mother preserved her putative virginity. You don’t shed inhibitions like that overnight.
Ten a.m. and she’s sitting on the toilet when the sound of the outer door opening makes her muscles clench. She checks her watch. Another twenty minutes until the next changeover. She has time to sit it out.
‘ … who it was?’ asks a voice as it passes through the door. A woman, with another. Not all the staff are teaching all the time, of course.
‘I should think someone on staff with kids in the school, don’t you?’
‘Careless talk costs lives.’
‘Little pitchers have big ears.’
‘True. Anyway, whatever. It took three weeks but the cat’s well and truly out of the bag now. Tricia says the phone’s been ringing all day.’
Tricia. The principal’s PA. Something wrong, clearly.
‘It’s ridiculous. It’s not like either of them was implicated. They’re hardly, you know, going to be poisoning the water supply.’
Oh, hell. This can only be about one thing.
‘Try telling that to the parents.’
‘I know, I know. It would help if they weren’t so weird, though, wouldn’t it? Have you got them in any of your classes?’
‘The girl.’
‘I’ve got both. Do they ever take their eyes off you for one second?’
A shiver-laugh. ‘No! It’s freaky! It makes me feel like I must have my skirt tucked into my knickers!’
‘Oh, I think Ben McArdle would let you know if that were the case!’
‘Or Marie Spence.’
‘God, I wish someone would poison her.’
‘Tell me about it.’
The doors either side of her cubicle close and lock. I could make a run for it now, she thinks, but toilet gossip – so unguarded – is the best chance for information that she’ll get.
‘Poor sods,’ says the voice to her left, ‘they don’t stand a chance, really. Even without everyone finding out. I mean, she’s a bit weird herself, isn’t she? Who’s going to show them how to be normal?’
‘Oh, I know. Scurrying around like a squirrel, apologising all the time.’
Sarah’s cheeks burn. It is never a privilege, hearing how other people see one. You don’t have the first idea! she screams inside her head. How brave I have to be every single day just to leave the house.
‘Isn’t she part of that Congregation lot on the High Street?’
‘Is she? Well, the apple doesn’t fall far.’
‘Imagine,’ says the voice to her right, ‘you get freed from one cult and they put you straight back into another.’
‘It does seem tough.’
‘What does Helen say?’
‘Oh, you know Helen. All “I daresay”s and “maybe”s. You’ll never get a judgement out of a therapist.’
‘And in the meantime we get to deal with the fallout.’
‘I don’t know, maybe we need another bullying assembly or something?’
‘Oh, please God, no. It was bad enough after the last one when half of Year Nine decided they were non-binary.’
‘Yes, but I do feel sorry for them. That Marie’s a stirring little minx.’
‘What’s she done?’
‘Says they smell, says the girl has a thing for her, keeps asking people if anything’s gone missing from their locker while staring at them. The usual.’
‘They don’t help themselves, though, do they? All that walking around together like he’s her bodyguard or something.’
‘And the clothes! What was she thinking?’
‘I know! The shoes!’
‘And those smiles! They’re like … puppets or something.’
A flush on one side, a flush the other. The doors unlock.
‘Well, we shall see what we shall see.’
‘Yes, well, they’ll either carry on being freaks or they’ll learn to fit in.’
Footsteps cross the floor and the door slams shut behind them. Sarah finally urinates, and burns with rage. They talk about my children like that, she thinks, and they don’t even wash their hands when they’ve been to the loo, the dirty bitches.
21 | Romy
Two years after my brother Ilo was born, four young men with backpacks full of explosives entered the London Transport system. They never left, and nor did fifty-two commuters who shared their bus and railway carriages. In Tokyo in 1995, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas on the subway, and twelve people choked to death on their own bodily secretions. In 1987, a mix of hair, skin flakes and grease, built up on the underside of an escalator, burst into flames and the rising tunnel funnelled the blazing heat straight into the faces of thirty-one people in the ticket hall of King’s Cross station. It took seventeen years to identify one of the bodies.
Millions ride it every day, but just the thought of entering those tunnels sends a shiver down my spine. Father got hold of photographs from inside those train carriages and showed them to us on the dining hall projector screen. Blood and intestines, jagged metal, body parts, a handbag abandoned on a slatted wooden floor. Safe in Plas Golau, I never dreamed of putting myself at that kind of risk.
There are buses to Finbrough. They go from a town called Reading. But the buses to Reading go from Heathrow, and Heathrow is two stops on the Piccadilly line from Hounslow West and the police will pick you up if you try to walk along the airport roads. It might as well be in Croatia. No amount of beta blockers and mindfulness and breathing techniques will get me through those tunnels. I went into the station concourse, and the rush of hot wind coming up the escalator felt like the very breath of hell, and sent me back into the flat for two more days. I’m not the person I was, baby. I’ve seen death, and it’s left me weak.
So I try hitch-hiking. Somer used to do it all the time, she told me, with me tucked into a papoose across her breasts. We spent the summer after I was born on what she called the ‘festival circuit’, her running Chai Tea stalls and bacon sandwich stalls and delivering something called ‘e’ to tents while I crawled about in the mud under the laissez-faire eyes of people with dreadlocks and tattoos and feathers in their hair. It was on that circuit that she met Vita, who gave her work in the Ark’s mobile café in August and took her to the Glastonbury house when the season ended in September. So, in the end, hitch-hiking is what made me. Made us. Brought us to Plas Golau.
It’s surprisingly easy. I don’t have to stand for more than ten minutes on the A4 with a sign I’ve made from cardboard before a woman in a vehicle so grand I have to step up to get into it stops and throws open her door.
‘You really shouldn’t be hitching,’ she says. ‘I only stopped because frankly you look as if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s not safe, you know. There’s all sorts on the roads.’
‘I know,’ I reply. I’m getting better and better at making up stories. ‘But the car broke down and I promised I’d take my grandmother to church.’
‘Well, that’s good of you.’ The seat is made of leather and I swear there’s a heat source somewhere inside. I settle back and feel my aching hips go aaaa
hhhh. ‘But I bet she wouldn’t want her granddaughter standing on the side of the A4 looking for lifts. I’m sure she’d be okay to miss church just this once.’
‘She’s in a wheelchair,’ I say. And this seems to satisfy her.
She goes out of her way to drop me in Finbrough – she’s going all the way to Newbury to look at a horse, she says. I’m surprised there are no horses closer to London to look at, but perhaps it’s a special horse. She gives me a thing called an energy bar to eat as we join the M4 motorway, and asks when I’m due.
‘February,’ I tell her, which I think is about right. But I’m a bit appalled that she’s spotted it so easily. I’d thought the extra weight I’d put on was a good enough disguise, but six months is six months, I suppose.
‘Well, promise me you won’t be such a fool again,’ she says, and presses the accelerator to take us into the fast lane.
It’s not much of a place. To come from. Or to go to. In Plas Golau, I imagined it to look a bit like Dolgellau, the only town I’d ever visited. You construct your imaginary landscapes from the things you know, so the birthplace I’d imagined was all narrow winding roads, tall narrow buildings, small windows, granite walls, hills. Everywhere on the Outside looked like Dolgellau in my head, except the Taj Mahal and Angkor Wat, because there were pictures of them, I’ve never known why, on the Pigshed walls.
I wave goodbye to Caroline, my chauffeur, and look up and down the London Road. Finbrough is bungalows. Paved forecourts, squat black-and-white signs naming the roads. Roundabouts. Endless little roundabouts, and pedestrian sanctuaries every two hundred yards. I look up my map on my telephone, and then I walk back a couple of hundred yards and turn up Cardigan Street, for buried behind these shabby little houses is a much older town.
The motorway is less a sound here than a feeling. If I stand stock-still and hold my breath I can hear the traffic rush by out there, the building and waning drone, and though I’m not aware of it at a conscious level while I’m walking I guess some bit of me must be, beneath the surface. I feel restive, unsettled. But maybe that’s because I have a mission, and I have no idea how it will turn out.
Then the sound of people. Voices – calling out, talking, laughing – clanking, footsteps, the occasional grumble of a car engine, music; something that goes thook-thook-thook and, competing with it, a woman singing – wailing – about sex or dancing or something. And then I turn the corner into the High Street and I’m in the middle of Finbrough market. Rows and rows of little stalls, vans with open back doors and watchful men taking cash and ready to run. Colour everywhere, men shouting, women shouting, children shouting. Lucien would literally have his eyes screwed shut right now and his hands clamped over his ears. He hated people shouting. Avocados free for a pahnd, getcha cleaning products. A dozen food smells tumbling over each other: spice and oil and caramel, the scent of grilling meat. I recoil at all this brightness in this grey little place, and then I plunge in.
I am dodging through a world of strangers, and any one of them could be armed, could be waiting for their opportunity to be the catalyst that sparks the revolution. Any one of them could be incubating the final pandemic. Any one of them could do something that starts a stampede.
Then a scent so overpoweringly delicious that it snatches my breath away snaps into my nostrils, turns my head. It’s so strong, so hypnotic, I swear I can feel you shift in my belly to turn towards it too, though I know that’s just fantasy. Or a growling stomach. I’ve never smelled anything like it. Heat and citrus and salt and crimson-brown in my head. I look, track it down to a stall where a black man with a great bunch of snake-like tendrils tied against the back of his neck is turning chicken pieces over and over on an open grill. I go over. He’s old. He must be forty at least. But he smiles at me as if we’re contemporaries.
‘What is that?’ I ask.
‘Jerk chicken, my love,’ he says.
‘What’s that?’
‘Old Jamaican recipe. You bite it and your head jerk,’ he says, and jerks his head in illustration.
‘What’s in it?’
‘Secret recipe,’ he says. ‘I don’ share my trade secrets wi’ no one. Want to have a try?’
‘How much?’
He picks up a knife and a fork and nicks a thumbnail of flesh from the blackened outside of a drumstick. Offers it to me on the point. I take it gingerly between my fingers, sniff it and pop it into my mouth, and the whole universe explodes. I think my head actually does jerk, because the man’s smile practically splits his head in two as he bellows with laughter. It’s hot – so, so hot I think my tongue will ulcerate – and … I don’t know how to describe it. Complete. It feels completely whole, as though all the flavours in the world have come full circle. I didn’t know. My God, I didn’t know. I didn’t know that food could be like this.
‘Oh, my God,’ I say.
He smiles a slow, crafty grin. ‘Best jerk in the West Country,’ he says. ‘All the way from Bristol, with love.’
I need this. I want to buy everything on his stall. I want to throw my arms round him, round his food, round the whole world. ‘How much?’ I ask again.
‘Six pieces for a fiver,’ he says. I have no idea if that’s cheap or expensive or what. According to the internet it’s the bus fare back to Reading. I dig in my pocket and find five pounds, press it into his hand, then I snatch the chicken from him and practically run to find somewhere to sit.
A few yards along, I find a low wall in front of a building set back from the road. It has railings, but there’s enough wall in front to give purchase to my buttocks, and my need is so urgent that I’m happy to make do. I perch and open my box, breathe that heavenly aroma once again. And then I pretty much inhale a thigh and a wing. I actually close my eyes to concentrate on the complexity, the challenge, the greasy caress of the flavour, actually hear myself letting out little grunts and ‘oh’s of pleasure. Never, I think. Never, never, never has food felt like this, in my whole life. How can people who make food like this be bent on self-destruction?
I suck the last of the meat from the bone and drop it back into the box. Just one more. If I just have the other wing, there will still be enough for later. People walk past me, unaware. People in jeans and dresses, in sweeping coats and sharply cut jackets, people in boots and leggings, people with scarves wrapped round their shoulders, slung round necks, tied round heads like turbans. They’re fascinating. Every one striving, in some way, to stand out, to project some part of their personality for the rest of the world to see. There’s a scarf in among my donated wardrobe: lightweight green wool with black silhouetted songbirds printed on the weave, faded but still charming. I must try these other ways of wearing it; it had simply never occurred to me that they had a function beyond keeping the neck warm.
Oh, stop, Romy, stop. They warned me over and over of this danger, of the seductive veneer of the world of the Dead. You can become addicted, they said. Enslaved. You will only truly be free if you keep yourself separate. Four and a half months in and I’m already looking for fashion tips. And then I bite through the crisp skin of the chicken wing and am once again filled with this weird nostalgia for a life that never was.
I stand up and go over to a rubbish bin to dispose of my bones. An old lady in a pink tweed coat gives me a big wrinkly smile. ‘Heaven, that, isn’t it?’ she says. I nod, for I’m still so caught up in the flavour that I can barely speak. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘You hear all that grumbling about immigrants, but I’m old enough to remember how boring this country was before them. People used to think olive oil was something you bought in a dropper bottle, to put in your ears, you know.’
She obviously wants to engage, so I take the opportunity to look at her. I’ve not been up close to many old people and it would be good not to show shock when I meet my grandparents. We didn’t do old people at Plas Golau. They just seemed to melt away when they reached their fifties, and, as it was our custom to never speak of a deserter again, one just didn’t
ask. Father was the oldest there by some years, and he was only sixty-six when he died. I guess I just didn’t think about it much. I suppose it made sense, that we were mostly young. You don’t make old bones in the Apocalypse, and the main use for someone who can no longer work would be as a back-up food supply.
But I’m surrounded by them now. Shuffling along with their sticks and their bags-on-wheels. They don’t scare me any more.
‘Do you know,’ I ask, ‘where I can find a place called the Lord’s House?’
‘The Lord’s House?’ she asks. ‘No. Is that a café?’
‘No,’ I say, ‘it’s a church.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘What sort of church?’
I’m a bit stumped. Then I think of something.
‘Not church,’ I say. ‘Congregation.’
‘Congregation,’ she says. Then, ‘Oh! That lot! You’re standing right outside it!’
She points at the railings where I’ve just eaten my spectacular meal. And there it is, baby, and I was so distracted by my food that I simply didn’t notice. The place my mother came from. The railings enclose a flagstoned front yard, and behind it is a large and elegant house, all oblong windows and handsome cornices. I don’t know how I didn’t notice it before, but a large black notice-board stands above the railings, on which the words ‘Finbrough Congregation’ are picked out in fading cream.
But it’s empty. There’s nothing pinned to it, nothing written there apart from someone’s initials done with a tin of spray paint. The gate is closed and secured with a chain and padlock. And the yard is full of drying leaves, though I can’t see any trees from which they might have come.
‘I don’t know if they’re still going any more,’ says the old lady. ‘Used to see them bothering people with leaflets all the time on market days, but I’ve not, for a while, come to think of it.’
‘How long for?’
‘Gosh, no idea. There was something happened, but I can’t remember what. I think someone died. Best part of a couple of years, I’d say. Something like that.’