by Alex Marwood
* * *
* * *
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 noticeboard 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.’
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘Sorry,’ she says.
‘It’s not your fault,’ I tell her, which when you think about it is pretty obvious.
So Eden clearly won’t be here. I’m not sure what to do next. Uri certainly won’t think much of my seeking skills. There’s probably something about what happened on the internet, but all I did was look up the address.
Then I look harder. There’s nobody here any longer, but it doesn’t look derelict. Maybe there’s something inside that can lead me to where I’m trying to go. Their address, perhaps. Then I can go to their house and see.
I go for a walk through the streets until I fetch up at the back of the building. There’s not much to see. A terrace of red-brick houses and, halfway up, an alleyway topped off with a high wooden gate. I walk down and test it. Locked. Hardly surprising. But it looks like a simple enough lock. I guess I’ll have to wait till it’s dark, though. Till there’s no one around to see me picking it.
22 | Sarah
She comes home to a dark house, and she feels surprisingly disappointed. After three years of turning on the lights herself, it’s been nice to find someone else there when she opens the door.
She switches on the hall light and hangs up her coat. Takes a breath to call out, but something stops her. This quietness is like the quietness when they first arrived. When she would come home to the house uneasy and still and they would emerge from one bedroom or the other, always together, and greet her with that spooky smile. There has been less of that lately. She’s started to look forward to their presence. Sometimes they will even have made a start on dinner. Ilo, it turns out, is a good cook, and she’s eaten better since he volunteered that information than she has since Liam left.
But now the house is cold and quiet.
And then she hears a sob.
Sarah freezes in the hallway, the very hairs on her body listening. As her ear tunes in, she hears voices.
Who’s crying? It sounds like Eden. And then she hears hissing, angry tones of accusation, and Ilo’s light, breaking tenor, propitiating.
Sarah hangs on the bottom step. Of course she has known that this would come eventually. But they didn’t do tears in the Maxwell household, especially once the tempestuous moods of the rebel daughter had been dispatched. Liam said that there was something wrong with her. Women cry, he told her. It’s what they do. His little girlfriend cried all the time, she’s sure of it. Cried to display her womanhood, cried to persuade him that his wife had no emotions. But, if your early training teaches you that tears bring penalties, you learn not to show them unless you’re alone.
What do you do with tears? She’s not trained. No one has ever cried in front of her in her life – well, not anyone who mattered, about anything that mattered, and it sounds as though this matters. She has no idea what to do with it.
Despite her covenant with herself that she would not be dishonest with them, that she would not be the sort of person who spied on children without their knowledge, she creeps to the top of the stairs and listens.
The sob was an angry one. Definitely. ‘You’re meant to look after me, Ilo,’ she says. ‘Where were you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I was in the entrance hall. Waiting for you.’
‘Well, that’s no bloody good, is it? You’re meant to look after me.’
‘It was crowded,’ he says. ‘There wasn’t anywhere to stand.’
Eden makes a sound of frustration. Of contempt. ‘You’re fucking useless,’ she says.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. ‘I’ll do better.’
A wail. Despair. ‘It’s too late now! Oh, my God, what am I going to do? I will die without it, Ilo! I will die! Don’t you understand?’
Sarah tenses. The hyperbole of adolescence, or should she be worrying? Eden sounds ... deranged. What’s made her this way?
‘I’ll get it back,’ he says.
‘How? Go on – how?’
‘I’ll ask.’
‘Ask? They’ll laugh in your face. You won’t even get close. Ilo, I’m going to die without it. Don’t you understand? You don’t seem to have the first idea how dangerous it is out here, for someone like me. I’m nothing without it. I might as well ... just do myself in now ...’
‘Eden, I – no – maybe if we ask someone ...’
‘Who are we going to ask?’
‘I don’t know. Aunt Sarah?’
‘And what’s she going to do?’
‘Eden, she’s meant to be on our side.’
‘Oh, come on,’ snaps Eden. ‘Nobody’s on our side. We’re on our own, Ilo. It’s just you and me, so really it’s just me, isn’t it?’
‘Eden—’ he begins, but she cuts him off.
‘You’re nothing,’ she says. ‘If I die and the world ends, it’s your fault.’
Sarah feels a sting of hurt. All that effort and Eden, at least, clearly trusts her no more now than she did at the beginning. And then she has a pang of conscience about what she’s doing. You should have learned your lesson about eavesdropping in the toilet on Monday, she thinks. Serves you right. And if they don’t trust you, you need to put more effort in to make them trust you.
She retreats to the foot of the stairs and calls out. ‘Hello? Anybody home?’
A ringing silence. The way cicadas go quiet in the night at the sound of a predator. Then the door opens, and there they are, smiling. Smiling, smiling. No sign of ill temper on Eden’s face, no apology on Ilo’s. They’re totally playing me, she thinks, then no, come on. They just don’t know you yet. You’re the grown-up. It’s up to you to gain their trust, not the other way round.
‘Hello, Aunt Sarah,’ says Eden. ‘You’re early.’
‘Friday,’ she tells her. ‘Poet’s Day.’
Little frowns of incomprehension cross their faces.
‘Piss off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday,’ she says, coming back up the stairs, but not even the mild cuss word seems to amuse them. ‘I was getting a bit worried for a moment. You were so quiet I thought you’d run off and left me.’
‘No,’ says Ilo. ‘We were just ... up here.’
‘How was your day?’
Come on. Trust me. Tell me. How are we going to move forward if you don’t trust me?
‘Okay,’ says Ilo, and Eden says nothing.
‘Are you all right, Eden?’ she ventures.
Eden’s hand paws at her breastbone, where that ugly little pendant usually lives.
‘Have you lost your necklace?’ she asks.
Eden turns rou
nd and slams her bedroom door closed. Ilo stands awkwardly on the landing.
‘Is she okay?’ asks Sarah.
He looks forty years old. ‘She will be,’ he says. ‘She’s stronger than she thinks. It’s okay, Aunt Sarah.’
‘Would it help if I—’
He shakes his head. ‘Not right now, I think.’
Don’t push it. It’s the difference between cats and dogs, she thinks. You go to dogs, if you want them to love you. Cats, you have to allow to come to you.
‘Have you eaten?’ she asks.
He shakes his head.
‘D’you want to come and give me a hand? We can take some up to her if she doesn’t want to come down.’
* * *
* * *
Ilo even seems to like cooking.
‘Perhaps you’ll be a chef,’ she says. ‘You’re so skilled already.’
He brightens with the praise, dispatches an onion at the speed of light, his blade flashing as he chops. ‘Thank you,’ he says.
‘Did you cook much, at Plas Golau? You’ve got amazing knife skills. You’re practically professional!’
Seems a bland enough sort of question to bring up the subject with.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘In the Guard House. I wasn’t much use for anything else, as I’d only just joined. But it’s good practice.’
‘I can see!’ she says. ‘So I have to ask, Ilo. Has something happened at school? I can’t pretend I haven’t spotted that Eden’s upset.’
The knife pauses, carries on. ‘It’s nothing,’ he says. ‘Just stupid stuff. She gets upset. It’s difficult for her. Harder for her, being normal, because of who she is. It’s easier for me. I was never particularly special.’
‘Who she is ...?’
The knife pauses again. ‘Sorry. I thought you knew she was Lucien’s?’ he asks, as though that were explanation enough.
‘Oh.’
How many questions is too many? At what point does it stop being interested and start being intrusive? I must remember that this stuff is still real to them.