Runners

by Ann Kelley

  ‘Can’t we go back to the cow lady?’ Lo beseeched.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because.’

  He carried her for a little while on his back before putting her down again. His shoulders were sore.

  ‘How will Mammy find us, Sid?’

  ‘Look at the daisies, aren’t they pretty?’ Sid was following the little road westwards. He had remembered the name of the other place with ‘z’ in it. They stopped every now and then to listen carefully for the sound of a vehicle. None came.

  ‘My feet hurt.’ Lo whined.

  ‘Look at the seagulls, Lo. Showing us the way, they are.’

  A pair of magpies hopped onto the road in front of them, and pecked at a dead badger. Something big had run it over, some time ago. Sid had never seen a badger and thought it was a dog. He picked up Lo and hid her eyes from the dead thing. The magpies reluctantly abandoned the carcass until the children had gone by, then went back to their feast.

  ‘Want to see, want to see,’ said Lo.

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  At the signpost to Marazion they turned off the road and headed along a dusty lane. In the distance were women, heads bent, bundles of straw and twigs on their shoulders, walking the edge of a field. Sid pushed Lo into a dry ditch and put a hand over her mouth. She giggled and squirmed. A robin chipped out an alarm call. When Sid thought it was safe they carried on. A tank churned up the grit on the road they had left. It had a particular sound, louder, slower, but more terrifying than other military vehicles. Even though he couldn’t see it, Sid imagined the gun, turning like an alien nose, sniffing them out.

  ‘Cawwy me, cawwy me.’

  ‘Can’t always carry you, Lo. Heavy bag. Put on your boots again for a while.’

  She grumbled quietly, moaning and sniffing, but did as he suggested. It was quite dark now and there was a full moon.

  It was further than he thought. Maybe they should find somewhere to sleep for the night and carry on early in the morning? They drank from the bottle before moving on. Then in a gap between trees he saw the island, lit by the moon. It looked closer than he remembered. But it was the same island.

  ‘Look Lo, a castle on an island.’ The small child gazed at the blue vision, the swathe of light glimmering on the water.

  ‘Look, Wabbit, a faiwy castle,’ she whispered.

  They came to a large pond with a mass of reeds. The starling flock had only recently roosted and their murmuring rose from the reeds like fluting music. Even Sid was entranced. They carried on and arrived at a pebble beach and they picked up stones and threw them over the rolls of razor-wire into the calm sea.

  They made for a disused car park, walked between the tall and untidy buddleia and rosebay willow herb that had grown through the cracks in the old tarmac, and tried the door of a small shed. But it fell off its rusty hinges and a horrible smell came from inside as if someone or something had died in there. Sid dragged her away from it. They walked on, footsore and hungry. There were three old train carriages in a siding. They climbed in through the glassless window of the nearest one and slept on the rotting seats.

  Next morning before dawn Sid left Lo sleeping and went to look at the town of Marazion. He was having second thoughts about this place. He could see no terraces of houses with gardens at the front. No monkey puzzle tree. Beyond the rolls of razor-wire on the beaches, were coastguard lookout huts on stilts. The island was much nearer than it should be. They were in the wrong town.

  Lo wasn’t in the carriage.

  ‘Lo, where are you?’ He thought maybe she had woken and gone outside for a wee. The toy rabbit was on the floor under the seat. Lo was nowhere to be seen. In desperation he shouted her name again. No answer.

  As he was making a frantic search outside, a skinny man, naked except for a pair of sagging Y-fronts, staggered out of one of the other train coaches. Sid felt for his knife.

  ‘Whassamatter, mate? Lost something?’ He had one eye covered in a dirty pink patch, many missing teeth, a long twisted nose with a stud in the side and a grey straggly beard.

  A Runner, thought Sid, must be.

  The man tried to smile but only achieved an even more fearsome expression. His one eye was yellow and bloodshot.

  ‘My little sister. Eight. Small for her age. You seen her? Pink dress.’

  ‘Might ’ave.’ The man didn’t look at Sid but focused on a point above his shoulder.

  Sid didn’t trust him. He could have taken Lo, hidden her in his carriage. He drew out his knife and pointed it at the man. ‘Where is she? I’ll kill you if you don’t let her go.’

  ‘Hold yer horses,’ the man laughed, showing black stumps of teeth. ‘I ain’t got her. Have a look if you don’t believe me.’ He held the carriage door open. His fingernails were curved claws, filthy and jagged. As he brushed past, the unwashed stink made Sid feel sick.

  It was dark inside. The door slammed behind him.

  Sid turned, too late.

  He found the window, which seemed to be painted on the outside because he couldn’t see out of it. He yanked at it but it would not shift. He shouted, but knew it was useless, he was trapped. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom he saw that it was an old sleeping carriage with two bunk beds. There were piles of filthy clothes, empty tins, a full water bottle. He wiped the lip with his T-shirt and drank half. Then he banged on the sides of the coach in frustration. In the corner was a cabinet with a wash-basin – no water came from the tap – and underneath was a cupboard, hinged at the bottom and inside was a stained pot. He shat in it, wiped himself on one of the man’s vests, which he threw in the pot, replaced it in the cupboard and closed the tilting door. ‘That’ll teach him, the old sod,’ he said to himself.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE PIRATE – THAT’S how Sid thought of him – came back to the sleeping coach after dark, after Sid had heard the starlings again, swarming like bees and screeching above him before they disappeared into the reeds.

  ‘Give us the knife, boy, and you can go.’ The man sounded sly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll get it off you anyway. Give it me and I’ll let you go.’

  ‘Tell me what happened to my sister.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because. Because she’s only a baby.’

  His voice broke as he said the word baby. She was just a baby and he had failed to take care of her. He listened at the door.

  Silence.

  Then, as if the man thought it was a reasonable argument, he said, ‘They took her.’

  ‘Who? Where?’

  ‘How should I know? Women. Three of them.’

  ‘Kidnappers?’

  ‘New-Earthers.’

  Sid banged on the door The man was not dangerous, he reckoned, only stupid, though that could be dangerous too.

  ‘What’s New-Earthers?’

  The man opened the door and Sid fell out, astonished at the sudden blue gaze of the moon and the salt smell of sea-air. He flailed around with the knife but felt the man’s bony fingers grasp his wrist and wrench the weapon from him.

  ‘Calm down, sonny boy. I only want the blade. Ain’t going to do anything to ya. Not that way inclined, am I?’ He examined the weapon and swiped the air with it. Sid was mortified at being beaten by this puny, nearly naked man. But he was free, and frantic to find Lo.

  ‘What’s New-Earthers?’

  ‘Live in a wood somewhere. Women Runners.’ He coughed and spat green phlegm. ‘We’ve quite a few of Runners in these parts. Plenty of places to hide.’

  ‘Will they hurt her?’

  ‘No idea. No idea. No idea.’ He pranced around, the blade glinting. Sid was embarrassed. The man had gone doolally, as his dad would have said.

  ‘Which way did they go?’

  The man pointed away from the sea and the island towards the landmass, dark and forbidding.

  ‘Do you know someone called Joe?’ Sid asked.

  ‘Who? Joe? D
on’t know no Joe.’ The man laughed maniacally. ‘Ho, ho, no, no, don’t know no Joe!’ He was still laughing and dancing around, scything the thick warm air with the knife, as Sid ran away over the bridge, past the whispering reed beds, to a grass roundabout.

  There he saw another signpost – ‘Penzance 2 miles’. He was tempted to run towards Penzance, surely that must be where his grandparents lived. They would be able to find Lo. He was hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and after all, only a boy. But the trail would be cold if he didn’t follow it, he should go after Lo now, while he had the right direction in his mind. Their grandparents might be dead or gone away. Reduced. Anyway, he might not be able to find them. Undecided, he ran across the empty main road and eventually onto the high moor. He stumbled towards the treeless hills, the unknown dark mass of granite outcrops, where the wind sighed and nightjars crept, and where a large dog fox caught scent of the frightened boy, and flattened himself to the still warm earth, ears back, teeth bared, until he had passed.

  Darkness fell late in the far southwest, but when it came it was solid, heavy, enveloping, and he had to listen to it, smell it, touch it, feel it with all his senses, to become part of the night.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SID SLID OVER boulders, caught his clothes on brambles and scratched his face on stunted blackthorn. He needed somewhere to spend the rest of the night. On a hillside he reached a metal gate, tied shut with wire. He climbed over it, his heart beating loudly at the creak it made. Before him was the entrance to a stone-built farmhouse. There was no door, and the wind blew through the lifeless rooms. He crept into a corner like a stray dog and slept fitfully, a torn curtain his only blanket, woken every now and again by gusts of wind rattling the broken sashes and banging the inner doors. On the wind was a smell of gorse flowers and something else, sweet and putrefying.

  At dawn, a vixen screeched three times.

  They came for her while she was sleeping. A whisper in her ear, a strong arm that whisked her up and out and away. She didn’t struggle. In her befuddled mind it was her mam who had come for her.

  ‘Sid says I’m eight,’ she told the red-haired woman, in whose arms she found herself.

  ‘Yes, sweetheart, of course you are,’ the young woman said in a soft, sing-song voice. She and the other women kept an eye on the skinny man in his underwear, who stared at them with his one eye from the old carriage.

  ‘Are you taking me away?’

  ‘Taking you somewhere safe and lovely. You’ll see.’

  ‘Is Sid there?’

  As she was carried along, Lo fell asleep again, feeling safe wrapped up in a clean blanket and held in strong arms.

  When she woke there was canvas surrounding her, a brisk breeze whining through the gaps. Her mouth and eyes felt dry. She couldn’t focus. She slept again, a poor sleep with many dreams of shooting and hurrying and screams. Her skin was hot, dry, fevered.

  Someone gave her a warm sweet drink and she slept again.

  Lo had cried at first, missing Sid and Wabbit but had been soothed by kisses and goat’s milk. As well as a goat there was a pig, several chickens, real rabbits and white ducks. There were other little girls to play with, a stream, even a donkey to ride. She was scared of its large yellow teeth, fascinated by the long silky ears. And women, soft bosomed women, like her mammy. She thought this might be heaven, though she hadn’t yet met any angels.

  ‘Is there a monster?’ she asked the smiley woman who held her in her arms and introduced her to the goat.

  ‘No monsters, sweetheart.’

  Lo plucked at the woman’s fine fair hair and sniffed it. Mam had hair this colour too, but it hadn’t smelled nice and clean like this did. Sucking her thumb she nuzzled her head into the woman’s warm neck.

  ‘Why’s it got funny eyes?’

  ‘Has it? I suppose it has. I don’t know, sweetheart.’

  Lo liked being called sweetheart. ‘He’s called Billy,’ she announced.

  ‘Actually, she’s a girl, like you, and she’s called Wilhelmina.’

  ‘She’s got a beard,’ Lo pointed and laughed.

  At first light Sid looked around the building in case there was something of use. There was a table with a dirty oilcloth, a wooden chair, a sunken greasy armchair, a bed with a soiled thin mattress and no coverings, and an old cast iron oven, cold as ice. The living room ceiling was yellow-brown, smoke-stained. And in the sooty fireplace, a dead jackdaw, its claws curled tight.

  All the windows were broken. The Victorian coloured glass of the entrance porch, red, yellow, deep blue glass, splintered but churchlike, threw coloured lights onto the ceiling and walls.

  Sid was angry at a world where beauty was broken for the sake of it.

  He became aware of a lark singing hysterically as it rose higher and higher. This wouldn’t do, lingering here. There was nothing to take, no weapons, no food. In the yard he drank from a metal trough and filled his bottle. He opened the door to the barn and gagged as he smelled, then saw, the decomposing body of a man hanging from the rafters by a rope. Blue-black flesh melting on his bones, skin peeling off. Sid pressed his T-shirt to his nose and mouth. On the straw-scattered earth nearby was a dog half eaten by rats, its teeth frozen in an eternal snarl. It had been shot. He found a rifle, barely hidden by the kicked-over chair, in straw under the hanging body. The man must have first shot his dog, then tried to shoot himself, but only managed to shoot off an ear and part of his jaw. Then he must have hanged himself.

  Searching in the man’s jacket, which had been hung on the chair back, Sid found a box of lead shot. He quietly closed the barn door and vomited.

  Sid walked fast, glad to put distance between himself and the farm. In the middle of one field, there was a circular stone on a plinth, with a cross carved into the head. Hairy green lichens sprouted from the stone, like whiskers.

  There was nothing, not even potatoes growing in the poor soil. He found a horse mushroom that hadn’t been too chewed by slugs and ate it hungrily. Hoping for more in the field, he saw the white tip of a rabbit’s scut as it leapt away and heard gulls calling to each other as they flew westward. The sea was on both sides of him, the little island on one side and the rocky coast on the other, a very narrow strip of land.

  On one side the soil was richer and there were crops, on the other side it was poorer soil, windswept and bleak.

  Belatedly, he thought that now he had a rifle he could have shot the rabbit.

  From this height Sid could see a big town – it must be Penzance, and just outside the town, a heliport with military helicopters and a lookout tower. Sid had the Reducer’s khaki T-shirt to camouflage him and he rubbed mud onto his face in stripes, like a soldier. Skirting fields and keeping low, he moved away from the town, onto the higher moor. A pair of buzzards cried above him, keow, keow. White butterflies with orange tips flitted among the heather and gorse. He wanted to lie down in the short grass and pretend to be happy. But he had to go on. He drank from his bottle and chewed a piece of sweet green grass. There was one low thorn tree, bent away from the prevailing wind, contorted and humped like an old witch in a story.

  He thought of little Lo, and was terrified at the idea of not finding her. He didn’t trust the old one-eyed man. He’d never heard of New-Earthers. Maybe they were a figment of the crazy man’s imagination. He might never see Lo again. No, he would never think that.

  A bee buzzed in a gorse flower. The buzzing sound grew louder, but it wasn’t the bee. Sid dived for cover, flattening himself on the ground as the helicopter roared overhead, not daring to look up until the noise had been replaced by the bee, still looking for pollen. He wished he were a bee or a butterfly, unaware of danger, unaware of sudden death. He lay there for a minute watching a small black spider jump from stone to leaf. He had no idea that spiders could jump. And ants! So many ants, carrying dead sisters and brothers, or maybe mothers and fathers, purposefully, it seemed to him. What were they doing with their small lives? What should he do with his?


  He took off his trainers and socks and walked barefoot, savouring the sensation of cool grass between his toes. This is what it’s like to live in the country, he thought. When

  I find Lo, we’ll live somewhere like this, where you can hear birdsong and see the sea. He breathed in the clean air and coughed. As the ground cover became thicker and thornier he put on his shoes and made his way towards a distant wooded valley.

  The dense wood was full of birdsong but no sign of a camp. He stopped for a moment to watch a squirrel carry a hazel nut and bury it under the layer of leaf mould. Sid trudged out of the wood and up the side of the valley to high ground. The wind moaned between the rocks. There were no trees up here, only stunted blackthorn leaning away from the prevailing south-westerlies. He clambered onto the outcrop of lichen-covered boulders. From this high point he could see the sea on both sides of the narrow peninsular. To the south was the town, three miles or so away, and all around him were moors with granite outcrops. But he could see that there were many wooded valleys and cliffs that edged both coasts. How was he ever going to find Lo?

  Clouds gathered, large and fast moving, until they built into anvils, and shed large lumps of hail, flattening thistles and dandelions and soaking him. Lightning lit the darkened sky and thunder crashed immediately overhead. He had never bothered to notice storms in the city, there had been too much other noise, cars hooting, wheels screeching, before The Emergency. And afterwards, when the civilian traffic stopped, he remembered only the sound of guns and people shouting, but here the big sky seemed to be all around him and he felt as though he were being chased by daggers of fire. He ran, the rifle over one shoulder, downhill towards the clumps of trees, leaping over boulders and thickets of thorns. He pretended he was a soldier being shot at by a deadly enemy. He darted from cover to cover, moving speedily, camouflaged. He arrived at the first trees and slowed to get his bearings. Newly sawn branches were propped up obscuring a gate. One had fallen down to reveal a handmade notice: FREEDOM FARM was written in green paint. In smaller letters underneath were the words NO MALES ALLOWED.