Runners

by Ann Kelley

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  WHEN MORNING CAME, there were scenes of devastation along the narrow valley. A cottage had been destroyed in the flood, fallen into a torrent that all the locals had known only as a small trickle of water before. Luckily, no one was living there any more – fled the year before, in fear of the Reduction.

  Two farmers had a lucky escape when their chimney was struck by lightning and had fallen through the roof. It had gone through a ceiling and crashed onto the empty beds of their daughter and the little grand-daughter they had lost to the flu twelve months before. Mud had washed into kitchen doors, and sewage welled up from drains, and flooded floors. Foul-smelling sofas and armchairs sat in small gardens with spread out carpets. The usually reclusive occupants of the hamlet talked to each other over garden walls. Neighbours helped neighbours to rebuild damaged sheds and shared provisions. The farmers repaired the roof, replanked the wooden ceiling and made the little girl’s room as it had been before the storm: a shrine to their lost daughter and grandchild, with dolls, bunk beds, and pretty curtains.

  Half a mile away there was a stony beach, where the stream emptied itself into the Atlantic Ocean. Oystercatchers searched for shellfish among the rocks, beaks probing, red legs hurrying. Cormorants dived for small fish. On a large clump of rocks that made up a small island, others stood, stretching out their ragged wings to dry. Hungry gulls complained and squabbled, lifting on the thermals above the granite cliffs.

  Waterfalls gushed out of the cliff onto the deserted beach. The sky was the blue of a robin’s egg. Sun gilded the wet pebbles. A man came out of a small hut built up against the cliff, and scratched his grey beard. He wore his wispy grey hair in a pony-tail and carried a sack over one shoulder. His shorts (which had once been dark blue but were now an indiscriminate colour), were held up around his waist with blue string. He kept hitching them up to stop them falling over his skinny hips. His dark tanned face and neck were wrinkled with a thousand lines. His muscled legs bore scars and snaking blue veins.

  Sniffing the air, he knew that the hot autumn weather had broken at last. He detected burnt bracken, a hint of sewage, and the usual salt-sea aroma of seaweed. He placed buckets under little waterfalls that gushed from the cliff and stooped to gather driftwood. Once the sack was full he made his way easily over the boulders and pebbles to a deep cave where he kept his boat. The cave was dry and the boat still secure where he had hidden it the night before. Then he went round a rocky headland to where the stream emptied onto the shore to see if the flood had brought him anything interesting or useful.

  The dog whined and wagged his tail and licked the face of the unconscious boy. He growled and tugged again at the heavy backpack slung around the boy’s shoulders.

  Sid coughed.

  The puppy’s barks woke him from a dark place. A man stood over him silhouetted against a deep blue sky. Sound of waves breaking on rocks. Smell of fish and fire. He coughed up water and vomited dirt. His tongue felt thick. The puppy kept on barking. Sid felt himself lifted up and carried. Was aware of the crackle of pebbles rubbing together. He heard gulls calling and thought he was flying. It was a good feeling, exhilarating. He felt safe. Then he drifted back into the dark deep place, where water was all around him and he was helpless.

  The man pushed an enamel mug at Sid’s lips. The boy coughed and shivered and didn’t open his eyes and couldn’t drink the hot tea. The man had wrapped him in a blanket, but the boy still shook. The man took the boy in his arms and using the blanket as a towel he rubbed the boy’s back and chest hard, and then did the same with his legs and arms. The boy’s head lolled. The dog wagged his tail and yapped.

  ‘S’orright, boy, he’ll be right as rain soon.’

  Izzi sat gazing intently at Sid. The man had fed the dog rabbit meat, which Izzi had eaten enthusiastically. The young dog needed sleep but more, he wanted the boy to be awake and talking to him, fondling him. The boy slept on the plank-wood bed, while the man went about his work, drawing a sketch of the faithful dog, the unconscious boy. He used up nearly all the charcoal. He chose a piece of hardboard from his stack in a corner and opened one of his last tins of paint – thrown up by the sea a year ago. He used the stalk of a deep-sea weed – he hadn’t a brush – to spread red paint over the board.

  Sid felt warm again, but exhausted, as if he had been on an epic journey, though he was confused about where he had been and where he was now. He ached all over. Izzi yelped with delight and licked the boy’s face as he groaned and opened his eyes for the first time. Sid was in a small room that smelt of tar and paint. The sloping roof was made of tin. How did he get here? He could hear the sea shuddering and falling. He coughed and spluttered and brought up phlegm and dirt.

  ‘Orright then, boy?’ said the man leaning over him.

  ‘Where am I?’ Sid wiped his mouth with his hand.

  ‘My place. You’re safe, boy. Nearly drowned, you were.’

  ‘Drowned?’

  ‘Reckon the dog saved you. Some strong he be, for a young dog. Dragged you out of the flood anyway. Found you in rocks, I did.’

  ‘Izzi!’ Sid held the large puppy in his arms. He hurt all over but nothing seemed to be broken. He had bruises and minor abrasions on his legs and arms, and large welts where the backpack straps had cut into him. The dog was uninjured. All around him on the floor were buckets and bowls full of water. It still dripped from holes in the roof. The dog pulled away and lapped from one of the buckets.

  ‘Do you remember what happened?’

  ‘I was under a bridge sheltering from the lightning.’

  ‘Flash flood took you, I reckon. Here, have some brew.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ‘THANKS,’ HE SAID to the man, who looked and smelt like a tramp but his blue eyes were kind. ‘You’re an artist!’

  The small room was lined with paintings on board; even the planks that made up the walls had paintings on them. They reminded him of the gallery where the North Newlyn Repops were based: sailing boats that looked like gulls, gulls that looked like boats, moonscapes and seascapes in black charcoal, and paintings all in red.

  ‘What’s your name, boy?’

  ‘Sid. Sid Kingdom Freeman. Sidney after my mam’s father, Kingdom after the engineer.’

  The man grinned. ‘Big name for a lad. Call me Gaz.’

  ‘Gaz?’

  ‘Short for Gascoigne, but no one ever called me that, except Mother.’ He was about sixty, short, wiry and muscled with not one ounce of fat on him. He had a wire ear-ring in one ear, with a cockleshell dangling from it and around his neck he wore a leather string with another cockleshell strung onto it. On his head was a battered seaman’s cap with fish hooks stuck in the band. His fisherman’s smock was the same faded blue as the sky.

  ‘Not a Runner, are you?’

  ‘Nah, I’m a Repop.’ Should he tell the man about Lo? He wasn’t sure.

  ‘What’s a Repop?’

  ‘Special. Going to Repopulate the planet, when it’s time.’

  ‘On your own?’

  Sid laughed, coughing up more muck. The man laughed with him and the dog barked and jumped up and down, wagging his tail in excitement.

  ‘Well, Sid Kingdom Freeman, put these on and come with me. Got to get you moving. Warm you up.’ The man shoved a faded denim shirt and a pair of paint spattered shorts at Sid. ‘Going foraging.’ He gave Sid some string to tie the waist of the baggy shorts to stop them slipping down. Sid limped behind Gaz along the shore and onto the rocks at the edge. It was low tide.

  ‘See this clump of mussels? Well, go for the big ones; leave the littl’uns to grow some more. Get the ones without barnacles or weed on, they’re easier to clean.’

  ‘They’re difficult to get off, aren’t they?’ Sid tugged at the shellfish that were stuck hard to each other and the rock. The sleeves of the man’s shirt were too long for him and he had to keep folding them back, but the action was warming him up.

  ‘Twist the stringy bit and y
ank them off, like that.’

  Sid noticed that Gaz was missing the top of the middle finger on his left hand.

  They soon had a bag full of mussels, which Gaz put in a bucket of fresh water, and he showed Sid how to get rid of the byssus, the stringy bit that acted as anchor. Sid’s fingers were sore from pulling at them.

  ‘Soon toughen you up, boy, don’t you worry.’ He showed Sid his red hands, roughened and calloused. Sid wanted his hands to look like that. Tough, lined, wrinkled, like the man’s face, full of wisdom, he thought. The dog chased the waving weaving seaweed, barked at gulls always just out of reach on the green granite rocks. The herring gulls, feathers blowing backwards, stared at the yapping dog. Before he reached them they lifted, disdainfully, away from danger.

  Gaz put the cleaned bivalves in a pan of water with some added torn up wild onion leaves over a cooking fire on the beach until they opened and were ready to eat.

  ‘Won’t the coastguard see the smoke?’

  ‘Don’t you worry about they. I’ve never seen one.’ He scooped a mussel up from the hot liquor with his fingers. ‘Take the mussel in both hands and pull the shells apart, like so and swallow the meat.’

  The mussel meat was yellow and white and looked quite different from anything Sid had eaten before. He tentatively chewed one. It was delicate, not rubbery, and tasted like the sea. He had never tasted anything so good. He watched Gaz use one mussel shell as a spoon and copied him. Companionable and silent except for the slurping noises, they shared the soup from the pan.

  ‘My dog can catch fish. He got three in a pool.’ Izzi sat close to the boy, wagging his tail. Sid threw him some mussel meat and the dog wolfed it down.

  ‘That’s a rare beast you have there,’ he said. ‘You’re some lucky, you are.’

  ‘He’s called Izzi.’

  ‘Is ’e?’

  ‘That’s right, Izzi. After Isambard Kingdom Brunel.’

  ‘So, your name Kingdom, is that after Isambard Kingdom Brunel, too?’

  The boy nodded proudly, sipping the mussel soup. ‘You’ve heard of him, then?’

  ‘Oh ’es, built the bridge between Devon and Cornwall, over the Tamar. Learned it at school.’ The man casually set about making an under-sand fire. He buried a good-sized log deep in a firepit, sitting it on dried seaweed and bracken to get it going.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’

  ‘Making charcoal.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Artist, ain’t I? Need charcoal to draw.’ He smiled. He didn’t have many teeth. Sid thought of the man in the train carriage. He hadn’t had many teeth either, but he felt that he could trust this man.

  Sid told him about the firepit he had had on the roundabout. He also told him about Mal and how he had nursed him.

  ‘Stay away from roads, boy, I do. Stay away from people if I can. Don’t trust people, me. Nasty, most of them.’ He spat onto the pebbles.

  Sid thought about all the people he had met on his journeys: Mal, who had shot a rabbit and cooked it for them, but was a killer; the one-eyed man in the train carriage who had taken his knife but had told him where the New-Earthers had taken Lo.

  The flick-knife! And the rifle. Where were they? He must have lost them in the flash flood.

  He thought about the Repops, his friend Buzz, who had not let him down; Rook, who had been nice to him at first, but had told the military leaders about his photo. It was Rook who had told the other lads to kill the puppy. It was difficult to tell who was a good person and who wasn’t, he thought. People seem to have both good and bad inside them. And he remembered with a pang of guilt, how, when he had the rifle, he had shot at the women in the field, to scare them, just because he was angry with them. They hadn’t done anything wrong, only mocked him. He was like everyone else, he thought sadly, bad when he had power over someone, nice when he needed them.

  When the charcoal was made, Gaz even let him try his hand at drawing. Sid drew a picture of Izzi and another of the man.

  ‘I never look like that, do I?’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘But I’m old! What will the ladies think? Better shave off my beard.’ The man laughed and propped the picture up against the wall with all the others.

  ‘Why are all these paintings red, Gaz?’

  ‘Bleddy geet tin of red oxide thrown up on the beach, last year, I think it was. Good for them sunsets.’

  A couple of days later, while Sid was sheltering in the cave from the cold easterly wind that had blown up, he spotted his rifle on a high shelf of rock. He supposed that it had washed down onto the beach in the flood and Gaz had found it.

  ‘That’s my rifle in the cave,’ he told the man when he saw him.

  ‘Finders keepers,’ said Gaz.

  ‘But, it’s mine, I lost it when I was swept away.’

  ‘So what? Mine now, boy.’

  ‘Didn’t find my flick-knife, did you?’ Strangely, Sid wasn’t put out by the idea that his weapons had been confiscated by Gaz. It felt good to have someone he trusted take charge.

  The man shook his head, disapprovingly. ‘What d’you want with a flick-knife?’

  He rummaged around in the shack and came out with a steel-bladed knife with a bone handle. ‘Here, you can have this if you like.’

  ‘Oh, it’s ace! Thanks, Gaz.’

  He spent the afternoon whittling himself a stave from an old broom handle he had found on the tide line. He rather missed the Repop lance. Was Buzz still alive, he wondered, and if so, did he appreciate the sacrifice that Sid had made? The new lance wasn’t as long or heavy as the old one, he thought – or maybe he was stronger now, and taller.

  ‘Ain’t you better be getting back to they there Repops, then?’

  ‘Do you want me to go?’ He tried not to sound anxious, but more than anything he wanted to stay here on the beach with the man.

  ‘Do what you want, boy, don’t worry me. Stay as long as you like.’

  Sid still hadn’t mentioned Lo. He knew that he would have to make a decision sometime. Was he going to fetch her, or leave her where she was with the women?

  ‘Anyway, can’t go back. No dogs allowed in Repops. They’d reduce him.’

  He threw a stone into the waves and Izzi chased it joyfully, nuzzling the water and wagging his tail.

  They went out on a foraging trip for more wild food. Gaz carried Sid’s rifle and a sack.

  ‘No harm in you learning how to find food in the countryside,’ Gaz said, picking at a clump of pennywort that was growing from a dry-stone hedge. ‘Just the penny- shaped leaves, see, not the yellow flowers.’

  ‘How do you cook them, Gaz?’

  The man chewed a few leaves. ‘Eat ’em raw, like. Taste.’

  Sid plucked a few for himself and chewed tentatively. Gaz carried on searching the length of the ancient wall between two fields.

  ‘See this? Ivy-leaved toadflax, it is.’ He ate a few leaves. ‘Not bad, eh?’

  As they walked they gathered whatever Gaz identified as being edible – young nettles, which he grabbed firmly so as not to get stung; young alexanders, which he said he would fry up if he had some butter, but as they hadn’t any, he would put them in a soup with the nettles. He plucked a bunch of gorse flowers, not bothered about the thorns. Sid winced as he tried to do the same thing. The mustard coloured flowers had a coconut scent to them.

  ‘What will you do with those?’

  ‘Make a fine tea, they do, you’ll see.’

  Izzi sniffed the air and growled softly. Gaz thrust the sack into Sid’s hands and told him to be quiet. At the edge of the sea-field sat a hare, tall ears twitching. One shot and it was lying on its side.

  ‘Fetch!’ he told the dog, who raced over to the dead hare and carried it back in his soft mouth, dropping it at Gaz’s feet. Gaz skinned it straight away, throwing the guts to the dog, who sniffed then gobbled the still steaming offal, his tail wagging in joy. The man put the pelt and the meat into his sack.

  In the
far field, the doe slunk away, alone now and uncomprehending.

  On the way back they walked through the small hamlet on the bluff and were seen by a tall farmer woman peering at them over a granite wall. She half raised an arm in greeting, but Gaz ignored it.

  ‘Why don’t we get food from the farm?’ Sid asked, perplexed at the man’s obvious hostility.

  ‘Don’t choose to be beholden to anybody.’

  Sid remembered the home-cooked food he and Lo had had from the Zennor woman, and regretted the man’s independence.

  Back at the beach, Gaz bruised the gorse flowers by rubbing them in his hands and then threw them into a pot of boiling water.

  ‘Should have honey in it to make it sweeter,’ he said, sipping from a tin mug. But Sid thought the drink very tasty. He wished he’d known about wild food when he was living on the roundabout.

  Gaz had stripped off two steaks from each side of the hare’s spine. The legs were laid with the steaks on top of a grill across the fire. They crouched together and enjoyed the cooking smells, man, boy and dog, in the setting sun. The pelt was curing close by, high up on a string, like a piece of washing, so that Izzi wouldn’t be tempted to eat it.

  ‘Don’t waste anything,’ Gaz remarked. Never know when it will come in useful.’ Behind the hut was a pile of found things that ‘might come in useful’: an odd rubber flip-flop, rolls of wire, old fishing nets, fish boxes, plastic bottles, anything that the tide carried in and left on his doorstep.

  ‘I suppose I better be going soon,’ said Sid, regret in his voice. Izzi was paddling in the shallow pools, scrabbling with his paws and biting at floating weed and scuttling crabs.

  ‘Where are you going, then?’

  ‘To find my little sister.’

  ‘Lost is she?’

  ‘No, not lost, but…’

  ‘Don’t tell us if you don’t want to, boy.’

  ‘No, I do want to tell you. She’s with some New-Earthers, only I’ve forgotten where they are.’

  ‘They women what don’t allow men in their camp?’