by Alex Marwood
‘Yeah, not really,’ says Sarah. ‘She’s in a facility at the moment, apparently.’
Facility. Oh, the lengths we’ll go to, to avoid saying ‘mental hospital’.
‘Sarah,’ says Helen, ‘it sounds as if you’re talking yourself into it, honestly.’
The bell goes.
‘Oh, hell, here we go,’ says Helen, and goes back to her post. ‘Brace!’
An escalating rumble, a salvo of slamming doors and the rumble becomes a thunder. Children tumble from the classrooms like water over rocks, ignoring raised voices begging them not to run. The big ones toss the littlies aside like flotsam; thousands of words burst from hundreds of mouths as though their owners have been in solitary confinement for days rather than the hour and a half since morning break. Sarah stands her ground as the wave breaks. The rebels first: big boots, greasy unisex hair, girls pouting and boys with ties at half-mast. Tuesday is chip day in the canteen – the only prospect that will make the rebels break into a run. Then, once they’re safely out of the way, the normal kids, the ones who have friends to walk with, the ones who have nothing either to fear or to prove. And finally, blinking into the light like dormice emerging from hibernation, the kids who want to avoid the attention of the ones in the front: the undersized, the ones with the cumbersome musical instruments, the geeks and the uncool and the socially awkward. And, hanging over it all, the scent of body odour.
And then here comes Marie Spence. Always the last to appear and always, nonetheless, at the head of the queue. Every school has one, at any given time, and the moment one melts away to join the real world, another springs up in her place. At her shoulders, inevitably, following in her wake like Secret Service agents, Lindsay and Mika and Ben McArdle, this year’s court favourites. Sarah can’t stop a wry smile rushing across her lips when she sees that they have taken to sporting white earbuds dangling from a single ear. It’ll be Ray-Bans next, and grey suits. And even from this distance she can smell Victoria’s Secret body spray.
Marie swanks up the hall past the staff room, and the smaller children – the less privileged children, children who don’t want trouble – part before her like the Red Sea.
She reaches the queue, walks past as though it doesn’t exist.
‘There’s a queue, Marie,’ says Sarah.
‘Someone’s saving my place, miss,’ says Marie. Tosses her hair over her shoulder like a shampoo ad. ‘She’s got my purse.’ And she walks on past, her sentinels in step behind her.
Sarah looks up and catches Helen’s eye.
Helen winks. ‘God, I hate that girl,’ Sarah says, as they count up the lunch tickets, and Helen doesn’t even bother to ask who. The entire faculty hates Marie Spence and her Jaguar-driving parents.
‘The curse of entitlement,’ says Helen.
‘A curse on who?’
Helen laughs. ‘God, on everyone. Like the universal quest for victimhood. It’s a zero-sum game, in the end.’
‘I can’t wait for GCSEs,’ she says. The school doesn’t have a sixth form. They go to college in Newbury, or one of the big schools in Reading, if they want to go on to A-levels.
* * *
* * *
‘The sister,’ says Helen ten minutes later, picking up their earlier conversation. ‘Can you maybe track her down and get in touch, at least?’
‘I’m not sure how.’
‘Ask someone?’
‘I suppose.’
‘It might give you some sorts of clues, at least. See what she’s like? I mean, she might well be fine.’
‘She’s in a loony bin, Helen.’
‘We don’t say loony bin these days,’ says Helen, all professional offence.
‘Okay, sorry. I mean yes, if I could. It would be helpful to meet someone who’s got some knowledge, but I don’t think that’s particularly an option.’
‘Well, just think about it a bit more, then, Sarah. Don’t take this decision in a rush, please. If you really are the last resort, and it sounds as though you are, they’ll still be there.’
5 | Romy
The circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles. There are 123 billion acres on its surface, of which just 37 billion acres are land. The Plas Golau estate was 487 of those. I knew the size of the Earth – for knowledge, as Lucien has told us many times, is the key to our survival – but the gulf between knowing something and understanding it is vast. I used to look at Cader Idris, towering above our farmland, and believe it to be a behemoth. Now I know that its 2,929 feet are just a pimple on the surface. The world is huge, and that scares and excites me all at once.
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 pa
ge 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.