by Hall, Sarah
There seemed to be new becks everywhere, spilling out of the walls and fields. When the tyres gained traction again he eased off. He repeated the question. ‘They’ve been lifted for me, yes,’ I said. I tried not to sound anxious or furtive. I looked over at him, thinking that, for all his talk of hiking, he had probably guessed something was wrong anyway; me alone on the road, having ranged so far out of town, and with no apparent way back. I waited for him to challenge me.
He pointed to my rucksack. ‘Have you got a tent in there? Cause you’ll not be getting back for a bit. I’m going to Rosgill and then on to Blackrigg. You’ll be all right if you’ve still got people out here. I’d probably know them, I know everyone that’s stayed. Only a handful left, if that. Most have been struck off, daft buggers, but not me – I work up the reservoir, at the draw-off tower. There’s not much to do, just sit about and work the sluice. I’ve got a permit and a priority quota for the van; it’s all official, like. I’m doing my bit for the recovery. No one else is much in and out these days, just me when I pick up my supplies, or come for an engineer, and I won’t be off again for a good three weeks, maybe more. You were lucky I was passing when I was.’
I was lucky. I knew that. If I rode with him to Rosgill he would save me fifteen blistered miles. He rattled off a short list of local people who had been stubborn enough to stay, as if I might volunteer to some relation, and then began to complain about the ever-tightening allocation of fuel and the lack of fresh rations in his blue box. ‘UHT milk, I bloody hate it,’ he said. ‘Tastes like cock-wash, doesn’t it? Excuse my manners. It’s what we get for shafting the farmers, though, all that centralisation nonsense. When we need them, they’ve all been put out of business.’ I let him talk, trying to keep my head clear and my mind focused.
The original plan had been to leave Rith as early as possible and walk the whole way. If I kept a good pace and didn’t rest too long I thought I could be close by dusk. I’d looked at an old OS map that Andrew kept in one of the boxes under the bed, and it seemed feasible in a day, or at most a day and a half, though the last bit looked steep, tightly hatched with contours as it was. It was going to hurt, getting there. But it would be worth it. When I got to the farm everything would be better. The women would see to that.
In all the weeks of planning, I hadn’t contemplated the possibility that they would be gone. Or worse, that they would turn me away. I hadn’t given those ideas any room for development, fearing they would throw me off course. The only thing left for me was to hope. It was hope that nourished me day after day, in a way the imported canned food never would. The reality was that I could not be sure of the reception I’d get at Carhullan, what I would find there and who. But I was unwilling to believe the place would now be empty, that they’d have given up. I knew if I’d let those thoughts stay with me, I never would have set off.
No genuine rural reports had been broadcast for at least five years. It wasn’t in the interest of the Authority to issue them. Their circulars never made mention of the other half of the landscape, the other half of Britain. Occasionally some diehard would turn up on Rith’s outskirts, a rider on a pony, a customised bike, or on foot, but they only came to see what developments were being made, to stare at the New Fuel factories, the Uncon oil refinery, or to make a plea for antibiotics. Sometimes they exchanged things on the black market. Now and then they would come to report a death, a burial. But it was of little concern to those in charge. Anyone who had not participated in the census was now off record. Anyone living beyond the designated sectors was considered autonomous, alien. They were discounted. They had chosen not to help with the recovery, and they were no longer part of the recognised nation. The Authority simply called them Unofficials.
‘Don’t get me wrong, I couldn’t stand all the tourists,’ the man was saying, ‘but it’s been dead out here. There’s no community and we used to be good at that. There’s no life. There’s nothing but rabbits and bloody deer. I’m not a man that does well without people.’ He looked over at me again. I leant forward and unlaced the fastening of my bag, and carefully took a jumper from inside. I pulled it on over my wet vest, wishing I could strip off first. ‘Oh, you should have said if you were cold. The heater works.’ He opened the dashboard vent and I felt a rush of musty warmth against my face and my shins.
The man went on. ‘Not that I’d want to be in town. I can’t stand the town, especially now, when it’s like a bloody ghetto. All the rules. And the vermin. It’s a joke. Who’d have thought we’d end up like a bloody third-world country. I’m glad I got the post here. I’ve got some space and some clean air. I’m my own boss.’ I nodded and he quickly looked over again. ‘Listen, don’t do anything daft when you get out there,’ he said, ‘otherwise I’ll feel responsible for dropping you off. You better give me your section number, just in case. Write it down or something.’ I nodded, but said nothing, and looked out of the window.
His conversation ran on to fill my quiet. ‘Aye. It’s nice to have a visitor back. Things must definitely be looking up. It’s been so bloody desolate out here, especially now there’s no pub. And I can’t stand the news. It’s all lies. They think we can’t take it. They think we don’t know what a mess everything is. Don’t get me wrong. I’m behind our soldiers a hundred per cent, and the King – he’s got balls to be out there – but come on, what is the point?’ He sighed. ‘You know, you forget what it’s like to talk normally with folk. You forget a lot of things.’
The air inside the cab was quickly hot and stifling. I felt a trickle of sweat or rainwater run down the ridge of my back. I could smell the gamey damp underneath the man’s arms as he lifted his elbows and leaned forward on the steering wheel. He opened his window a crack. ‘You never said where you wanted to be dropped, did you? Look, tell you what, if you like you can wait a while with me before heading up the fell, have a bit of food, and rest up. I’ve just picked up some dried pork.’ He put on a sarcastic American accent and said, ‘It’s from our Christian friends in the Yoonited States.’ Then he laughed, snidely, shaking his head. I felt his gaze on my legs, moving over the wet contours of my thighs. ‘Hey, listen, do you mind my asking, are they still, you know, sorting the women out, so we don’t get overrun?’ He laughed again, his face glowing. ‘That’s the one good thing about all this, I reckon, a return to the era of free love. Mmm, yes.’ His fingers flexed on the steering wheel.
A flare of adrenalin went off inside me. I felt it scorch against my breastbone and light my nerve endings. Suddenly I wanted to be out from under everything, I wanted to be as unsnapped and reckless as this journey I was undertaking warranted. I had made it this far. I’d made it out and away, without hesitation or incident. I would not be taken into the back of a cruiser and humiliated again. Behind me was a husband I could no longer bear to speak to, a factory of useless water rotors where I hated punching in, and the monitor who had me lower my overalls in front of his colleague, who had come forward with a gloved hand, joking about dog leashes, and though the wire of my coil was easily seen, he had still examined it.
There were no regulations out here. There was no human mess, no chaos, poorly managed, and barely liveable. There was just me, in my own skin, with my blood speeding up. I was taking a chance on something that felt not like a gamble now but like my only option.
‘I’m not going walking,’ I said to the man. ‘I’m going up to a place called Carhullan.’
He made an airy sound with his nose and jerked his head back, as if blowing a fly out of his nostril. ‘Carhullan?’ he repeated, breaking the word into two pieces as if it was too difficult to manage all in one. ‘Is this a joke? You having me on?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I said ‘That’s where I’m going.’ He blew air down his nose again. ‘Oh my God. You’re serious. That bloody place! You stupid, stupid girl. What the hell are you thinking of …?’
He left off, scowling now, his mouth slack. I knew he had heard of it, more than heard of it; he had an opinion about the farm’s residents. And I had said the
name with little doubt that I knew its history also. I glanced over at him. His face had flamed redder. His eyes were shuttling about in their pink sockets, left to right.
‘Well. I don’t know. Whatever you’re doing, or think you are, you’ve got the wrong idea. I don’t know. You better just be careful of that lot, eh. I don’t know. They’re worse than ever they were, I’ve seen them, marching about. I don’t know what they think they’re on with. Or why anyone would bother with them. A nice woman like you. They never should have been allowed to stay up there, like a gang of bloody terrorists. It’s sick if you ask me.’
I looked straight ahead, lowered my voice. ‘I didn’t ask you,’ I said.
I felt another flash across my chest, but it was exhilaration this time, not anger. They were still there then. They were still at Carhullan. They had held on after all, through everything. How many would there be now, I wondered. Fifty? More? And what kind of conditions would they be living in? I wanted to ask all this of the man sitting next to me. I wanted him to say something else about them, bad, insulting, prejudiced though it may be, just to give me another positive confirmation that the place was up and running. I wanted to know what else he could tell me, even if he told it in anger and disgust. What I wanted to know most of all was whether she was still there. Jackie Nixon. I wanted to know whether she was still involved. Whether she was still in charge. But it was too late now. I knew it would be impossible to find these things out from the man. The conversation was over. After this exchange we wouldn’t speak about it again, or about anything else.
The van sped up and he fought with the steering wheel to take a sharp corner. He was bright with indignation and disapproval and I heard him curse softly under his breath. When the bend was rounded he shut off the heating vent, no longer keen to make me comfortable. Like the smell in the van, the atmosphere had turned sour. We had gone to war, it seemed, over one simple word. I had declared my proclivities, as he had his. I was no longer good company for him, no longer a person he might share his food supply with or try to fuck. All these months he had no doubt been hoping to see a return of residents to his lovely wilding valley, a sign that civilisation was being reinstated, with its old arrangements, its traditional preferences, and what he’d got instead was a deviant, a deserter.
He didn’t try to talk me out of it. I think he must have realised that I was serious. There was a reason he had seen only one person travelling on this road in the years since the collapse. I knew there was more he would have said, given the chance, that he was composing arguments in his head, or readying insults. There were other choice words, no doubt, perched on his tongue, sitting behind his stubby decaying teeth, and I had heard them all before. Cult. Faction. Coven. I thought maybe he would spill his vitriol; reiterate all the worst rumours about Carhullan from the time before, when there was a media to be curious and to condemn the place. The babies, the mutilation, other terrible practices. Or I thought maybe he would slam on the brakes and make me get out.
But the old van ground on, over trellises of disrepaired concrete, and through the autumn sluice. I held my nerve, waiting for whatever would happen next.
With no one to cut them the hedges had grown tall and wide. Branches reached down over the road, scratching the paintwork as the van crept underneath. There were brambles everywhere, but the fruit looked black and tiny, as if it had ripened too soon and too small and then shrivelled away. Rhododendron was slowly taking over the lower fields. And there was a plant I didn’t recognise, a thick green creeper that had wound its way up the telephone poles and round the trunks of trees.
We passed through a hamlet and I saw a dozen or so cars, left to rust in gateways and cottage garths, abandoned on the roadside. Some were covered with flapping tarpaulin, or belted down under plastic sheets, their previous owners hopeful maybe that at some point they could be recovered, converted to bios, or that there would be some kind of compensation paid out. In Rith there were yards of parked vehicles where the supermarkets had once been, their keys locked away, their number plates recorded in the Authority’s logs. Here people had been far less trusting, it seemed, unwilling to give up their former property, unwilling to be disqualified.
I looked at the manufacturers’ badges as we passed by, imagining people choosing them in showrooms and dealerships. The loans that had been taken out to finance them. The observances of airbags and seatbelts, stereo systems. It all seemed so ridiculous now. In the gardens of the empty houses, grass had grown up around their wheels and under their hubcaps. Mildew smeared their windscreens, and their wing-mirrors hung at broken angles. Rain had eaten at the bright paint. Inside, their engines had no doubt rusted and clogged, mice and birds had probably nested among the metal frets and shafts.
It had all come about so quickly and ruthlessly, the shortages and price hikes, and soon afterwards the ban. Nothing on a large enough scale could have saved them, and now nobody believed it would. They were useless, husks of a privileged era. The New Fuel industries and Uncon combined could barely supply the power grid, let alone wide-scale transport. Ordinary people would continue to be deprived. I realised then what the strong smell in the van was. It was one of the petrol collocates burning in the exhaust.
I got out when the man next slowed down, not even waiting for him to come to a proper stop. I opened the passenger door and leapt down, landing messily with my rucksack in a rit of gravel. He braked savagely and a few feet on the van skidded to a halt. ‘You stupid bitch!’ he shouted after me. ‘If you think it’ll be any better up there, you’re dead wrong. You’ve got no bloody idea, have you, girl? Give it a week and you’ll have your tuss back down here and you’ll be begging me to take you home. I guarantee it.’
I was already walking away. He reached over, slammed the door and drove off, my security details forgotten. His voice had contained an alarm that bordered on hysteria. I could almost believe he was afraid for me. For a moment I felt sorry for him. He had picked up a woman off the road and helped her, only to have her say she was signing up to a life where he was nothing, no more use than one of those redundant cars. I hadn’t flirted. I hadn’t been interested in him, had not even made a pretence of it for the sake of the ride. There was nothing he could take away from the meeting, to keep in his head and use later. Or maybe just a picture of a rained-on body would be enough.
I shivered. The air was cool and damp outside. But I was glad to be out of the van. Suddenly I saw an image of the man bent over me, his broad white thighs rocking, his hands holding down my arms, smothering my mouth, blind with what he craved and unstoppable. I was not frail, but I would not have been strong enough to stop such a thing. I knew that. I hadn’t properly calculated the risks of accepting the lift. He had probably been alone at the reservoir for years, getting more and more frustrated, his faculties congealing with loneliness, his fluids thickening up.
But as quickly as the image of our struggle arrived another one took its place. In it I was standing over the man, heeling him in his face until it split and came apart like a marrow. And it was clearer to me, this second image; it was the stronger of two possibilities, if only in my mind. I knew that I had done the right thing by leaving Andrew, leaving the harsh orchestration of the town, the dismal salvaged thing that the administered country had become.
The van disappeared behind the tangle of waxy green bushes lining the road. I heard it stall, and its ignition turn over phlegmatically, like the congested coughing of the town’s sick dogs. It caught, revved dirtily, and grumbled away out of earshot.
I hadn’t asked the driver how to get to Carhullan. But I had not needed direction. Vaughsteele was written on the signpost opposite. Up ahead the road split and a church stood to one side. I’d memorised the map before I left, got the directions locked in my head. I’d need to bear right through the settlement, and at the last building take to the rocky howse, then go about four miles, moving gradually upwards on the fells, until there was a split in the track. I’d keep to the right past a
property called Moora Hill and go on up, another three miles, imagining the High Street summit, following the old dry-stone walls until they finally ran me in through Carhullan’s gateway.
I’d left the map in Andrew’s box under the bed. I wouldn’t need to use it again. I wasn’t planning on going back.
*
For a minute or two I stood in the village. It was deserted as I’d expected it would be. The slate cottages were dark. They looked cold and hollow now, like cattle bothies. They seemed nothing more than the elements of which they had been built. I knew this village reasonably well. When I was very young it had been popular with walkers and tourists, and my father had brought me here to hike. There had been a working school and several farms that had survived the troubles at the turn of the century. People from the South had once bought retirement homes here, under the blue shadow of the fells.
After the fuel crisis it had been left to its own devices, and slowly it must have emptied like all the others, before the orders were finally given to evacuate. On the wall of one cottage someone had written the words Rule Britannia in red and white paint. They had tried to draw the Cross of St George but it looked distorted, bent out of shape. I couldn’t tell if it was an act of vandalism or one last loyal statement from the proprietor before leaving.
It was eerie. There was no drift of chimney smoke, no voices outside the pub, no washing snapping dry on lines strung across the gardens. The strange ivy creeper ran up gables and onto roofs. TV aerials were strangled by it. No signals or electrical impulses had passed through them for years. These were non-priority venues. The plots of land next to the houses had run amok. Gooseberry bushes, vegetable patches, rhubarb and vetch had grown wild, furling over lawns and tangling up gateways and arbours. Anybody coming back to their old rural lives would have to slash their way through foliage that had grown huge and confident, swallowing the habitations back into the earth.