“Just don’t flush it,” he murmured to her.
Peter had faced that quandary himself in the early days. He had flushed the toilet out of habit alone in the first house he had occupied, and was rewarded with three callers at his door within as many minutes. He’d stolen silently out of the back door and reminded himself not to do that again.
A week later he decided to try another method and peed in a bucket instead. Through trial and error at a couple of houses, he came to study the effects that his bodily functions had on his survivability, and found that the smell of fresh urine outside was about as sensible as flushing the toilet, but if he kept the bucket inside and tipped it into the toilet carefully, or just used the toilet without flushing, then neither the smell nor the noise would bring unwanted attention.
Suffering the eye sting of ammonia from his own pee was an easy trade-off when balanced against having his body torn apart and eaten by people.
Turning on the gas to the stove, he stepped back and struck a long match before leaning his body away to light the burner. It caught with a whoomph and he instinctively shook the match in his hand before dropping the smoking stem of thin wood into the sink. He boiled the water, intermittently checking beyond the drawn curtains to be sure that nothing had detected the subtle atmospheric change caused by a pan of water boiling, and he watched Amber from the corner of his eye as she fussed the cat, who was still trying to encourage her to feed it. He tested the pasta, scalding his fingers as he pulled a single piece from the pan to chew it, deciding that it was soft enough. He drained it with some difficulty, then replaced the pan on the burner and opened a can of meatballs to tip the contents in and stir it messily around with a wooden spoon.
When that had warmed through and begun to sizzle and catch on the bottom of the metal, he turned off the gas and let the pan rest while he found two wide china bowls in an off-beige colour with a ringed flower pattern encircling the lip. He selected them a spoon each and set the table, then opened another tin of cat food and used a fork to spread half of the contents out on a small plate of the same pattern and colour.
As soon as the can opener had made its unique sounds on the tin of meatballs, the cat abandoned Amber as though she no longer existed, stepping away so suddenly and without even a glance of farewell that the girl deflated. It jumped up on the kitchen worktop and made itself a nuisance until the cat food was displayed on the plate, then followed the boy like he held in his hand cat ambrosia. Peter placed the cat’s dish on the kitchen table at the head and pulled out a chair before beckoning Amber over. They sat up and ate their mostly-cooked breakfast of meatballs and pasta shells with the thin tomato sauce barely covering their portions as the cat ate noisily, sitting up at the table with them.
It purred as it chomped on the chunks of unidentifiable smelly goodness and jelly, making more sound than both children combined as they slurped their own food. The cat finished first, despite its repeat of the ventriloquist act and remained sitting up to lick its paws and wash its face, while it seemed to wait for the others to finish. Amber became full fairly quickly, as did Peter, who had survived for a month on snacking, and some days didn’t get to eat for hours and hours on end if the houses he had chosen to rest in were poorly stocked with tinned goods.
Peter rose to take the dishes away, using plates to cover their bowls for the rest to be eaten later when they had room in their bellies. The cat seemed to have room for more and meowed pitifully at him as he stood in the kitchen, until he relented and scraped out the remainder of the tin and chopped it up with a fork.
The cat licked the jelly off a chunk for less than half a minute, then abruptly turned and flashed the circle of light skin at the base of its tail in Peter’s direction as it got down and trotted to the settee, where it jumped up without invitation to knead Amber’s legs through the duvet again.
You didn’t want food then, Peter thought in annoyance, you just wanted me to feed you.
He cleaned up in the kitchen, leaving the dirty pans in the sink and reorganising the supplies he had found in the cupboards, before returning to his settee. The cat, curled into a neat circle with paws and tail tucked in, raised its head and opened both eyes to glare at him as he sat down. Peter was taken aback by the unexpected look of hostility, and watched with his mouth partly open as the cat jumped down and stretched before walking to the kitchen and jumping up to look at the open window as it calculated the precise physics of the intended stunt. Leaping up and wobbling in balance on the frame, it dropped outside and disappeared once more to leave them alone.
Amber looked saddened by the animal’s exit, but she expected the cat to return in its own time. The two of them sat in silence until their boredom made them fidget and somehow feed off each other’s inactivity. Peter cracked first, standing up to begin a more thorough search of the house for something to do. Again he arrived at an assumption about the woman who lived there; she must have catered for having kids visiting her occasionally. Perhaps she was an aunt and saw something in a charity shop one day to keep by for when nieces or nephews visited, but the faded and yellowed cardboard of the box made him smile.
He took it back and sat on the carpet between the settees, smiling at Amber as she watched what he had in his hands expectantly. He lifted off the lid, feeling that sticky dryness where old sellotape had yellowed more than the once-white cardboard beneath. He shook the box lightly, pouring out the stiff pieces of the game and arranging them on the carpet, where Amber slid down from her seat to join him.
They played in silence, after Amber had shown Peter how to play the game using a simple demonstration. The girl had still not spoken a word since the previous night, and Peter had given up trying to get her to talk, assuming that she would speak to him in her own time if and when she was ready. They played the game, filling their plates with the good food and rejecting the bad as they made each other laugh quietly by pulling disgusted comedy faces at the worms and mud on the cards they picked.
“Aww, tummy ache,” Amber said softly when she had collected a full plate of bad food. The sound made Peter jump, and he chose then to ask her what had happened.
“Was that your mum?” he asked her, “the woman with you in the other house?”
Her face dropped, and her eyes glazed over instantly. She nodded slowly then began to cry. Tears ran from both eyes and her bottom lip quivered uncontrollably. Peter leaned over to her and put a hand on the carpet beside her. She put her own hand on the top of his as he spoke.
“Don’t cry,” he told her, “I’ll look after you.”
He kept his hand there, leaning awkwardly forwards until she decided to break the contact. Just then, they both snapped their heads towards the kitchen as a half-familiar sound erupted there. The cat dragged itself back inside the open window and dropped down to trot over to the scene without recognising the important emotions on display. With its tail held vertically. it stepped lightly between them and nuzzled Amber’s face and begin to purr again.
~
“Sir,” Johnson said in simple greeting as Captain Palmer nodded to him from the map he was hunched over. He had been summoned to assist in mission planning and walked in at the same time as Lieutenant Lloyd, who had his sleeves rolled up and his green beret worn proudly.
“Gentlemen,” Palmer said to the assembled men, including three of the four navy pilots, “good morning. As you know, the powers that be are planning to send us some more assets and supplies.” He held up a hand to stem the flow of questions from three of the men.
“I know, we have our priorities and they have theirs,” Palmer said to change the subject away from the circuitous conversations they had already had, “They are going to give us a CO,” he said with an uncommon touch of annoyance creeping into his voice, “and his own admin team, as well as some other military assets which they have been very tight-lipped regarding,” he added, leaving the intimation clear in the room.
“Sneaky-beaky stuff, Sir?” Lloyd asked. His own status as le
ader of elite infantry would be knocked down the ladder should someone more elite be ordered to their island.
“Your guess is as good as mine, Lieutenant,” Palmer said, “but that isn’t the priority for today. If we are sent any specialist troops, I doubt they would fall under our domain anyway. For now, we are tasked with planning and executing a mission some sixty miles inland to escort an engineering team to and from a target.”
Looks were exchanged but everyone kept quiet to wait for the rest of the information.
“You may have noticed, gentlemen,” Palmer went on, “that, as disciplined as we are being, our lights are still on.” He looked around the room to see the admission on their faces that they hadn’t considered that fact so often taken for granted. To keep from attracting any unwelcome and cannibalistic attention, they had been operating good light discipline and only using lights that couldn’t be seen from the outside. That prompted the central switch for the streetlamps on the island to be switched permanently off, and this led them to live their lives mostly in the dark anyway, so the lights remaining off wasn’t that noticeable.
“That is courtesy of a nuclear power station, and yes, you guessed it, sixty miles inland,” Palmer finished.
“Where’s the engineering team coming from?” Lieutenant Commander Barrett asked.
“America,” Palmer answered simply.
Lieutenant James Morris, Barrett’s co-pilot smiled and affected a Brit’s attempt at a southern states accent and said, “Now, wwhhut can they teach us about our own power station?”
“A good deal, I should imagine,” piped up a nasal voice from behind the navy pilots as Second Lieutenant Palmer walked in to hand a sheet of paper to his older brother, “seeing as they designed and built it for us about ten years ago.”
Johnson’s eyebrows lowered slightly as he fought against the natural urge to narrow his eyes in suspicion that the most junior officer was in possession of information that the others had not yet been given. The balance of power was tentative, although the officer classes were too polite to mention the vulgarity of who should be in charge, as the navy pilots were army equivalent ranks of majors and captains themselves. Command of ground activities, however, had been devolved to Palmer as the most qualified. For all the men present, all of them were very aware that the Captain’s younger brother was tolerated under sufferance only due to his older brother, just so long as he didn’t get in the way of anything. For him to swan into a senior officer’s meeting and act as he did set every spine in the room firmly on edge.
“Thank you, Second Lieutenant,” Captain Palmer said with a chilly tone of official annoyance, then scowled gently at his brother’s back as he left the room. He was too well bred to offer an apology for his sibling’s words, so he continued to explain.
“The yanks have sent a carrier,” he said, his expression meaning nothing derogatory as he clearly had an affinity with the Americans after working with them in Germany, “and they’ve apparently pre-empted our nuclear needs. They built two for us, and they believe that both of them will be at risk of overheating or some such problem in the near future. We need to get them there safely, clear out the place, then keep them safe until they can stabilise the reactors and do some kind of witchcraft with cooling.”
Lieutenant Commander Murray whistled low, looking to his naval colleagues, who seemed to understand. He saw the two army men looking at them expectantly and explained.
“If the Americans have sent a carrier, that must mean they’ve sent an entire carrier strike group,” he said, seeing that this news still hadn’t sunk in.
“That means a carrier,” he said as he checked off on one finger, “at least one destroyer, a pair of frigates, half a dozen support ships and,” he glanced at the other pilots, “a nuclear attack sub.”
Then it sunk in, and their faces showed fresh nervousness.
“Any word from the Soviets?” Johnson asked in an uncharacteristically taut voice.
“Nothing,” Palmer said with equable seriousness, “and nothing from the Chinese either. It appears that Communism doesn’t want to speak to Democracy, even when hell empties and all the devils are here.”
Palmer’s lapse into Shakespearean prose betrayed just how much time he had spent glued to the planning board and the radio. He was tired, not just physically but emotionally, and his own personal war was being swallowed by the global politics in play. Everyone around the table understood the potential severity of the response that the Soviet Union could feel forced into. Even though the Cold War was, as they all believed, in its dying stages and intelligence reported that the Union was close to collapse, none of them could even begin to predict what a desperate government would do, given the current climate, if they felt threatened. The arrival of a carrier strike group and an American nuclear attack submarine only a few hundred miles away in the English Channel ran the obvious risk of disaster.
“Why haven’t we spoken to them yet?” Lieutenant Lloyd asked the room rhetorically, “Surely they can see that what’s going on is bigger than countries fighting each other?”
“One would have hoped so, but that is somewhat beyond our control for now,” Palmer answered to move the conversation onwards, “Now, they should be here by tonight I’m assured, rendezvous with the joint fleet in the Channel, and will send their men in tomorrow morning to us. I assume via helicopter, even though the means haven’t been confirmed to us as yet. I can only presume that we might be expecting our new commanding officer and his entourage at that time, so I would fully anticipate being evicted from here. Whatever other personnel come with them, if any, will be our responsibility to house and feed but I highly doubt they will become our men to instruct. So,” he paused, “assuming the mission will go ahead, I propose that I lead it via one of the Sultan wagons,” he said as he kept his eyes down and away from Johnson’s, “I’m sure we can all agree that taking my Chieftain would be slow going and possibly be a touch of overkill, but I want a troop of the Fox cars with me and one quarter of your marines,” he added, looking up to Lloyd and receiving a nod, “Your sergeant will suffice, and I presume we can spare a man to drive them in a Saxon?” he asked, finally making eye contact with Johnson, who was just waiting to be told he was sitting that one out. He nodded, going over the particulars, which mainly encompassed routes and alternatives, and left the actual entry, assault and clearance of the power plant as general intentions rather than specific actions, as the men coming from America knew the plant intimately and would be needed to make those calls.
“If I may, Sir?” Johnson asked politely, having calmed down from his initial annoyance of not being allowed out to play. Palmer gestured for him to speak.
“I’d suggest splitting your marines over two Saxons, with an engineer in each,” he said simply, leaving the obvious reasons out of his explanation.
“Very good, Sarn’t Major,” the captain answered with a nod as he saw the logic in the recommendation instantly, “tomorrow then, we should know more when they arrive, but I’d like men ready and briefed. Thank you.”
Johnson left, trying to decide whether to throw Sergeant Strauss back into the lion’s den or to put trust in others he wasn’t totally certain of.
Chapter 14
Pauline finished her allocated work duty of cooking and cleaning in the hotel’s modest kitchens. There were over thirty people there now, half of whom would leave if they could guarantee success in finding somewhere safer to be. It was the lesser of two evils. When she returned, she found Clare in the same position; sitting on the bed with her heels tight into her thighs and her forehead rested on her knees. She didn’t look up when Pauline was shown back into the room, not even when she placed a wrapped meal of fresh bread sandwiches.
Pauline went into the bathroom of their hotel room-cum-cell, and when she came back out, she saw Clare eating the food with her cheeks puffed out and her jaw working almost desperately as she raised the fingertips of one hand to her lips.
“Sorry,” she said
through her full mouth, “I just…”
“Don’t be silly, my lovely,” Pauline told her kindly as she sat down opposite her, “I brought it back for you anyway, you need to get your strength up.”
Clare chewed and winced as she swallowed her mouthful too soon and had to force the lump down her throat.
“The bread,” she gasped before snatching another bite, “where did it come from?”
“I made it,” Pauline said simply, “the kitchens here still work fine, and all I have to do is make food. They don’t make me do anything else,” she went on, pausing hesitantly before continuing and speaking faster to change the subject, “and they keep the people out, so it’s a fair enough trade…”
Clare looked at her seriously with dark, red-rimmed eyes.
“You think it’s fair?” she asked dangerously, “They snatch people away from their families and you think it’s fair?”
“No,” Pauline said carefully, dropping her own smile, “I don’t think what they’ve done is fair at all, but I don’t know what I’d be doing if they hadn’t come here. I’m just trying to get by, and I don’t think I can… I don’t think I can kill people.”
“Well I’m bloody ready to,” Clare responded. Eager to change the subject, Pauline pointed at the battered paperback book on the low bedside table beside her.
“Did you read any of that?” she asked, hopeful that she had been given a lover of literature to share a room with.
“No,” Clare answered through another mouthful of food, “I haven’t got my glasses and I can’t hold it far enough away to see it.”
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