by Alex Marwood
It’s Willow. Stern and stiff-backed as she’s become over the two years since she left the Pigshed. She watches as Somer empties cupboard No. 5. The barrel is brimming and Somer is hurried and self-conscious as a girl nearly half her age supervises her. As she thumps the metal lid into place, its liquid interior splashes out around the seal, coats the cupboard wall, sends a fine spray of droplets onto her right cheek. She doesn’t flinch.
Willow stands there with her crossbow and pulls a face of pure disgust. ‘You’re going to have to clean that up,’ she says.
‘I know that, yes,’ says Somer patiently.
‘No need to be insolent,’ she says.
‘No,’ says Somer.
‘You shouldn’t let them get that full,’ says Willow.
‘I know,’ says Somer. ‘But you can’t predict how people are going to use them. A couple of the others were almost empty.’
Willow tucks her thumbs into her toolbelt. Uri does that, Romy’s noticed. They’re all starting to mirror his gestures. ‘Are you trying to blame other people?’ she asks.
‘No, Willow,’ says Somer, ‘I’m just stating facts … ’
‘Well, don’t, 142,’ she snaps. Somer starts, and gazes at Willow with big, hurt eyes. Then her shoulders slump and she turns away. She may be a Leader, but she knows who’s boss. She edges the barrel out of its cupboard and leaves it on the path, fills a bucket from the pump and crawls inside with her scrubbing brush.
Romy swells with shame and rage in equal measure. How can Somer be so humble? How can Willow have turned into such a monster?
Willow opens cupboard No. 1. All clean inside, the blue tub in place, scrubbed and only slightly soiled. She checks the three others, looking for fault, finds none. When she emerges from cupboard No. 4, Somer is standing on the path, picking at her rubber glove. She gets it off and dips the hand into the bucket, splashes the water onto her face.
‘Not much point in doing that,’ says Willow.
A flash of defiance. ‘I don’t need your permission to wash my face,’ she replies.
Willow raises a hand, and slaps her. Not a lady slap: the full whack, hand cupped to catch the ear. Somer goes down without a sound. Crumples to the soiled earth and clamps a hand over the ear, her face white where the blood has rushed away.
‘Don’t ever, ever speak back to me like that, 142,’ snaps Willow. ‘Once more and it’s Purgatory.’
Somer doesn’t move.
‘Do you understand?’
Still no movement on the ground.
‘Do you understand?’
Somer nods. From their perch in the tree it looks as though even nodding hurts.
A rustle of leaves. Ilo has tensed. Romy keeps her eyes on the scene below, puts a hand out to hold his arm. No. They don’t know we’re here. Better that way. His small, hard bicep flexes, relaxes.
Somer sits on, staring at the trodden earth, as Willow walks away. She lays the flat of a hand to her cheek, but her eyes are dry. Romy and Ilo slip down from their hiding place and go to her. She looks up as they approach, and mortification fills her face.
‘I wish you hadn’t seen that,’ she says.
‘Are you okay?’ asks Ilo.
‘Yes.’ She drops her hand from her face and they see the imprint of Willow’s hand. Nothing half-hearted about that slap. They’re getting bolder, thinks Romy. Not even waiting for Lucien and the elders to judge infractions. Summary punishments, and no one’s discussing it.
The Dung Squad is not Uri’s only innovation. He’s turned the crypt beneath the chapel – too damp for food storage, too airless for even one of their cramped dormitories – into a sort of jail. They call it Purgatory, and no one who’s spent a night or two there wishes to return. Punishments have got harder, and are handed out more frequently as well: short rations and extra work, night shifts added in until rule-breakers are stumbling with exhaustion, obedient zombies. There’s not a day passes when someone isn’t in Coventry, shunned and eating alone on the Great House steps.
Ruaridh, Leader of the Blacksmiths, fifty-five, former owner of nightclubs across Glasgow and Stirling and recruited from a rehab where Vita was working as a locum, lost his temper when Uri announced in the Council Chamber one evening that there would be spot inspections. Leapt to his feet and roared in Uri’s face: Nobody’s made you Leader yet, bhoy! You’re not the boss o’ me! Five days later he disappeared, taking his box and his leather boots, and they never spoke of him again.
Romy knows where he went, though. Oh, she knows.
Romy holds out her hand and helps her mother to her feet. A smear of privy mud runs up her body from knee to elbow. Yesterday was laundry day. She will have to wear her uniform like that until Saturday now, or rinse it out and wear it damp in the autumn chill. Ilo picks up her knitted hat, brushes it down and holds it out.
Somer pulls it over her vulnerable skull and looks at them with injured eyes. ‘Don’t … ’ she says.
I will, thinks Romy. Just a bit. Just enough to make her sick. She’s on my list now.
But she says nothing.
Somer turns away and levers her tub of effluent onto her trolley. Plods down the path towards the slurry pit without another word.
They stand and watch her go. She looks smaller, thinks Romy. But I suppose that’s because I’m bigger. A bit of wolfsbane in Willow’s boots, that’s what I’ll do. They all leave their footwear on a rack outside the Guard House door at night. I’ll slip some in and it will work through her socks and into her skin. Just enough to lay her low. Not enough to stop her heart.
‘She won’t survive without us,’ she says to her brother, and he knows who she means.
‘No,’ he says.
‘So do you still want to be a Guard?’ she asks.
‘Oh, yes,’ says Ilo, and glances in the direction Willow has taken. ‘Absolutely.’
Among the Dead
November 2016
28 | Romy
So that’s how it feels to kill a human being. I didn’t know. In many ways, it was more upsetting to kill a pig.
I follow the road back to the motorway roundabout. It’s not as far as I’d thought. Time and distance expand in times of stress. It felt as though we were driving for ten minutes after he turned off the motorway, but it turns out that it’s only maybe a quarter-mile.
It’s nearly midnight. At this time of year I have the cover of darkness for another seven hours, before I will need to be in the sanctuary of my flat, no one looking at my rainbow face and wondering. Though maybe, if they do, they’ll just think I’m a Hallowe’en stop-out dressed as a vagrant or a deranged serial killer. My nose feels strange, as though it’s been popped out of alignment, one of my eyes is already beginning to close, and I can feel my split lip swelling. Only a mile and three-quarters to cover every hour. It should be easy.
I killed a man tonight. Not exactly in cold blood. I should feel something, but I don’t. Perhaps what Uri’s asking of me won’t be so hard after all. Especially if I start with Jaivyn. Jaivyn will be more like practice, the way the man was practice.
The others? I don’t know.
What I will do to keep you safe, baby. You must be the size of a kitten now. I wonder if you felt it all, buried as you are in the cushioning of my internal organs? You must at least have felt the adrenaline, must have jarred and bounced as he dragged me, dropped me.
You must trust me to keep you safe. I will do anything to keep you safe.
A road, another roundabout, another bridge. Two a.m. and I doubt I’ve gone more than two miles. I slide down the bank, jog across the tarmac with my head bent down, scramble up the other side, and in the adjustment from streetlight to moonlight through shadow I put my foot on something that rolls, wrench my ankle and hit my bad leg on something hard as I go down, and a supernova explodes inside my head. Something hard and sharp has stabbed straight into my scar, and the pain is so intense I can do nothing more than whimper. God, don’t let it have broken open. I roll onto my side a
nd curl up in the foetal position.
I will not survive if I am this weak. We will die if I am this weak.
I breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way Vita taught us. And eventually I can open my eyes, and see that I’ve hit my leg on an old water tank, dumped among the stinging nettles. Hard edges, but not sharp, thank God. I lift my hands from where they’re clutching my thigh. The blue of my leggings is still uniform. A streak of mud on the grey marl of my hoodie sleeve. But no blood. No more blood, I mean.
I sit up. I hurt so much. Grazes and bruises, and now this. I think I’m still on the eastern outskirts of Slough. I will never make it to Hounslow before day. If I’m not careful, I won’t make it at all.
My walk lasts well into daylight. As we get closer to London the traffic builds and the motorway splits and splits again and I’m forced off it for fear of getting mown down, forced to use footbridges hundreds of hobbling yards up the subsidiary roads. My ankle throbs and my thigh throbs, and every piece of me is pain, and a blister in my other boot sings out a sharp note in my brain.
Fields give way to the remains of villages, built up, filled in, unloved and shuttered, their street plans a blow to my fantasy of walking straight home. Judging from the map on my new phone, staying to the left of the airport is pretty much all I can hope for. A plane passes over while it’s still dark, cruising in to land. Then another, then another, and then the villages join up into one long sprawl of roads and mean concrete houses and frustrating cul-de-sacs, and the lights start to come on, upstairs at first and then on the ground, at kitchen level. People start to emerge onto their weedy concrete parking spaces and notice me. Their eyes look up and see my face, and look hurriedly away.
They think I’m a Homeless, like the man outside Iceland.
I tighten the cord on my hoodie to cover as much of my face as I can, and concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. My blister is bleeding now, and that’s something of a relief, for at least it lends a slickness to the lining of the boot. But with each step I’m getting weaker – my thigh jars with every step and my ankle is screaming and I have to grind my teeth to hold in my keening.
I get to Bath Road at half-past nine, and I start to weep with relief as I pass the little café and smell the bacon, the coffee. We can lie down soon, baby. Lie down and take the pain away.
And then I see my mother sitting on my doorstep, and for a moment my heart leaps. And then I realise that it’s my aunt, and my hopes implode.
29 | Sarah
Pregnant. That’s something she hadn’t been expecting. But the pregnant young woman limping towards her in a stained hoodie is definitely her niece. She can tell from the way her pace breaks when she sees her sitting on the doorstep, and then from the way her hair falls over her face as she resumes her approach like a charging billy-goat. Alison used to do that. You’d see her coming down the street head-down and eyes glaring out beneath her fringe, and you knew not to get into a disagreement with her. It’s only now Sarah sees her that she remembers, and realises how much of it was just teenage bluster. She doesn’t see much other physical resemblance, but she recognises her as Alison’s daughter from that alone. She gets to her feet and waits.
She’s little. Four or five inches shorter than Eden, and light-boned, with a swirl of thick, shiny black hair. She’s chopped it off at chin level and hacked a rough fringe into the front, and it looks spectacular. As she gets closer, Sarah sees that she has the most beautiful almond-shaped jade eyes. And that her face is covered in livid bruises.
Sarah wants to turn tail and run. This isn’t what she’d envisaged at all. But the girl knows who she is – she clearly knows who she is – and it’s too late now. I shall be British about it, she resolves, and pretend I haven’t noticed a thing.
Romy stops six feet away and stares at her challengingly. Her skin has an unnerving yellow tinge. Jaundiced yellow, or at least, she judges from the sheen on her forehead, the bleaching of illness. The bruising must be more extensive than just on her face, if it’s causing her to turn yellow.
‘You know who I am?’ asks Sarah.
Romy nods curtly. ‘You’re my aunt. You look like my mother.’
She’s surprised. She has never thought of herself as looking like Alison before. But twenty years will change anybody. ‘Yes. Sarah. Sarah Byrne.’
She offers her a hand. The girl looks down at it with something like surprise, as though the gesture is unfamiliar. Then she slots her palm against Sarah’s and gives it a sharp shake. The hand is a bit damp, and there are brownish stains further up her wrist where her sleeve has slid up. Sarah wipes her own surreptitiously on the back of her coat when she lets go. She has a little bottle of anti-viral gel in her handbag; she’ll rub some on when her niece turns her back.
‘Romy,’ she replies. ‘Romy Blake.’ She fishes some keys from her pocket and eyes Sarah uncertainly. ‘Do you want to come in?’
‘If that’s okay.’
Romy shrugs, as though she doesn’t care much either way. Then she opens the door on to a dingy staircase covered in green lino and limps ahead without looking back.
The flat is grim. Low ceiling, windows covered in condensation, sad old broken-down furniture. It’s a little-old-lady flat. Probably died in situ or got carted off to a twilight home. Sarah bets there are hand rails in the bathroom. A little row of kitchen cupboards in olive-green formica. Miserable blue and yellow curtains that end a good inch from the windowsill, half-closed. Romy goes over and throws them open.
‘I need to pee,’ she says, and leaves the room abruptly. Sarah stays where she is, unsure whether her invitation extends to sitting down. A scratched little coffee table, one of those oval ones from the 1950s with the three spindly legs. Flowered wallpaper gone grey with age, a patch of damp high in one corner, a blackened Axminster carpet. It’s hot, from the launderette downstairs, and yet feels strangely, unwelcomingly cold.
How awful, she thinks, to be having a baby here. And then she thinks of Alison, caring for this very girl as a baby in a caravan in the middle of winter, and feels unspeakably guilty again.
She’s gone a long time, for someone who’s having a pee. Sarah hears the sound of water running in the bathroom, a door opening and closing in the corridor. She feels awkward, doesn’t want to touch anything in case doing so violates her welcome. Eventually she wanders over to the window and looks out at the street. Run-down, respectable west London, two tube stations conveniently close by. She could have fetched up in worse places.
Then a plane thunders past so close to the roof that she ducks and covers her head. Maybe not. It must be torture, living here.
The door closes in the passage again, and her niece comes back, with clean hands, and in clean clothes – leggings and a black jersey mini-dress with one of those flippy hems. Thoughtlessly stylish. But her face is a sight and she’s still limping on her bare feet.
‘Would you like to sit down?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ says Sarah, ‘thank you,’ and lowers herself gingerly onto the sofa. It’s not dirty, at least. The girl clearly knows how to clean, like her siblings. But it’s a joyless place. She’s tried to cheer it up with a scattering of bric-a-brac on the mantel over the old gas fire, but otherwise there’s very little evidence that she lives here at all.
Romy, still standing, considers some more. ‘Tea,’ she says. ‘I have tea. Would you like some? I have milk too.’
‘That would be lovely,’ says Sarah. She watches as Romy fills the kettle and puts it on to boil, then gets a single plain white mug down from a cupboard, opens a box of PG tips and takes out a bag. ‘Aren’t you having any?’
‘No,’ says Romy. ‘I don’t drink it.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be a bother.’
The girl’s eyes narrow. She’s trying to work something out. ‘Oh, right,’ she says. ‘You’re not just meant to give it to people, you’re meant to have some yourself?’
‘Yes, that’s sort of norm
al,’ says Sarah, and now she sees the children in her. Half-feral and trying to work out the mystery rules – only Romy is having to do it all alone, with no one to help. ‘It’s like a custom. To share a drink, or some food.’
‘Oh, the breaking of bread,’ says Romy, and turns back to the cupboard. When she reaches for a second mug, Sarah notices that her hand is trembling.
‘Are you okay, Romy?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ says Romy. ‘Bad night, that’s all.’
‘Can I ask what happened?’
‘I got – what’s the word? Mugged. I went into London a couple of days ago and I got mugged.’
‘My God. Jesus, are you okay?’
The girl shrugs. ‘I will be.’
‘Where did it happen?’
She gulps, as though she hadn’t been prepared to be questioned so closely. ‘I’m not sure. I went to King’s Cross, just to see. It was somewhere near there.’
‘I’d thought it had got better up there, with the regeneration! What did they get?’
‘Not much. Some money. They seemed to be angry because I didn’t have anything else.’
‘Not your phone?’
She shakes her head.
‘Did you call the police?’
A what’s-the-point face. Just like Ilo’s when she offered to get the amulet back. God, Sarah, she’s living in a different England from you. The England you see on the news, not the one most of us live in. It’s weird, in a place like Finbrough, how easy it is to forget that for other people robbery and stabbing and damp walls is just another day at the coalface. Actually real, not drama designed to make the comfortable feel happy with their lot.
That face looks nasty, as though someone has punched her full in it.
‘I know you probably get a lot of opinions,’ she says, hesitantly, ‘what with the baby and all. I know everyone has unsolicited advice to offer when you’re pregnant … ’
‘How do you know that?’ She doesn’t turn, just stares at the empty mugs. ‘Have you been pregnant?’