Shelter

by Dave Hutchinson

  “What’s that?”

  Albie grinned. “It’s not a what, it’s a where. Margate. In Kent.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “We’ve got a good place there. Well-organised, a lot of people. You could do worse than think about coming back with us.”

  Adam snorted. “Right. And the moment we’re out of town you shoot me and take my stuff. No thanks.”

  Albie looked hurt. “We don’t need to rob the likes of you.”

  “Not that you’d get very much.”

  “Look,” said Albie. “We’re leaving tomorrow morning. There’s a bunch of people coming with us. Come along with us, have a look at Thanet. If it doesn’t suit, you can always leave.”

  Adam made a show of thinking about it, shook his head uncertainly. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  Albie shrugged and grinned. “It’s a free country, right? Nobody can make you do anything you don’t want.”

  It was certainly a free country; nobody was ever going to argue with that. There were, in fact those, and he worked for some of them, who felt that this was the whole problem. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry. It was great to meet you, Adam.”

  They shook hands, and Adam walked off down the street.

  IT WAS RAINING the next morning as he walked into town, rucksack over his shoulder. George had been a little annoyed at the news that he was leaving, but that was life, wasn’t it?

  The Thanet people – Thaneters? – were gathered around a couple of wagons outside a rooming house. There were perhaps twenty people in the wagons, all of them locals, by the look of it. The big bulky men were all on horseback. There was a jolly air about the scene, like a family going off on holiday, and as he approached, Adam felt a thrill of apprehension. Last chance to turn away...

  But of course that option was never there in the first place. His initial reconnaissance of Thanet had confirmed what he’d thought – he couldn’t walk into Margate, poke about a bit, and walk out again. Frank doesn’t take kindly to strangers just wandering in.

  Albie saw him approaching and broke into a huge grin. “Change our mind, did we?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, something like that.”

  Chapter Five

  THE FIRST MORTY heard of it, he was coming back from market day in Goring, having failed to sell the four sheep he’d taken with him. He’d given one to Evie Holt as payment for a night’s bed and board at The Goring, and on account for several more, but he was bringing the other three back and wondering what Karen would say when he got home.

  What Karen would say was uppermost in Morty’s mind most of the time these days. She was never angry with him, never used a harsh word, but the weary tone of disappointment in her voice when he let her down yet again was starting to grind him down in ways he only dimly recognised.

  He was thinking about this – and not urging the horse along, particularly – as he reached the Parish and saw a rider coming towards him along the Ridge Way.

  As the rider came closer, Morty saw it was one of the Andersons – Jim or maybe Tim. He didn’t know the family well – they were over on the other side of the Parish, but then he didn’t really know anyone here very well, apart from old Kath Mercer and her nest of twats.

  He drew the horse to a halt as the rider approached. “Hi,” he said, noncommittally.

  “Hi,” said the rider. Tim, Morty thought. “You from round here?”

  This was the sort of question which was guaranteed to buff up Morty’s resentment for the Parish in general and the Mercers in particular, but he swallowed his temper. “Morty Roberts,” he said, putting on an air of amiability which he did not feel. “The Roberts farm.”

  Tim looked momentarily nonplussed. “Oh. Right. Sorry. Didn’t recognise you for a second there, Monty.”

  Story of my fucking life... “Morty.”

  “Yes, of course. Just back from market?” He nodded at the sheep penned up in the back of the wagon, and Morty knew he was wondering what would possess anyone to buy such scrawny scabby creatures.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s right.”

  “You heard about Max Taylor?”

  Morty sighed inwardly. The Taylors were one of the two big landowning families in the Parish. Been here for generations, big farm, lots of animals, doing really well for themselves, blah blah, yadda yadda. They might as well have been Roman emperors for all he cared about them.

  “No,” he said, feigning interest. “What’s happened?”

  “He’s been shot. Came home with the bodies of Harry Lyall’s eldest and two other lads.”

  The Lyalls were the other big family, although even now Morty wouldn’t have been able to describe any of them; they were just names, distant rumours. He thought it was like the days when there were kings; you knew they were there, but you never saw them.

  “Oh?” he said.

  “He’s really sick. Nobody knows what happened.”

  Morty put on the appearance of giving a fuck, and shook his head. “The things that happen when I go away, eh?”

  Tim gave him a strange look. “You okay, Monty?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Never better. Got to get on, though. Things to do, yeah?”

  “Sure,” said Tim. “See you later.”

  “Yeah,” Morty said under his breath, shaking the reins and urging the horse to start plodding along again. “See you later.”

  IT WAS, THE aged gaffers of the area said – the ones who could be bothered to talk to him, anyway – just one of those things. Some farms were doomed to fail, nobody knew why. You could work your heart out all your life and you would still fail. Some trick of the landscape, a quirk of microclimate. Perhaps they were even cursed. No one knew.

  Which was all fucking well and good for the gaffers, with their thriving farms and their big families and their dozens of workers. They didn’t have to drag themselves out of the door every morning, bone tired because they’d been working from dawn to dusk the previous day trying and failing to make their farm work. They were doing just fine, the patronising cunts, with their ramshackle folk wisdom and their pipes clenched between their teeth. Patting Morty on the head, Eh well, you’ll never make a go of it, son, but we can’t be arsed to give you a hand but here’s a little story about what this bloke did once seventy years ago. Fuckers.

  The Roberts farm – and that name had long since become a bitter joke in Morty’s mind – was the smallest and meanest of all the farms in the area. It sat on the southern edge of the Parish, where the Downs swept away towards Lambourn and Newbury and distant Hampshire. Nothing much would grow there, for no particular reason anyone could see. Sheep grazed on the land refused to thrive. The old farmstead had been occupied and then abandoned more times than anyone could remember. And then Morty had turned up with his runaway bride and become the laughing stock of the whole of Berkshire.

  A few hundred yards from the farm, but out of view of the house, Morty stopped and put down the tailgate of the wagon and let the sheep jump down. They looked at him accusingly for a few moments, then wandered off in different directions, and Morty carried on towards what he satirically called ‘home’.

  The place was so utterly rubbish that it didn’t even have a compound. It didn’t need one; there was nothing there that anyone would want to steal. Even wild animals turned their noses up at it and went looking for better pickings. There was just the house – once the home of some mucky-muck executive or other – and surrounding it was an inexpertly-maintained fence with an almost-dead privet hedge running along it. Inside, there were hen houses – all but two of them empty – and a small, dead, kitchen garden. The rest was weeds and bushes and overgrown shrubs which Morty could not cut back fast enough.

  There had been a time when Karen would have been waiting for him in the open doorway of their home – although when he thought back to that time, it seemed to Morty that it had been brief. These days, though, there was no sign of her. He drove the wagon around to the ramsha
ckle stable block behind the house – once a two-car garage – and unhitched and fed the horse.

  No sign of Karen in the house, either, and that was more and more usual these days. He mooched around the kitchen, looking for something to eat, but the best he could come up with was a slice of stale bread and a chunk of cheese which, when he’d cut the mould off it, was about two inches square. He’d had a big bowl of mutton stew at The Goring last night, and it already seemed to him like a thing from a fairy story.

  She turned up an hour or so later, dressed in jeans and a thick pullover and an old parka she’d found abandoned in one of the cupboards in the house. She was humming to herself as she put the key in the lock, but stopped when she realised it was already unlocked.

  “You’re back, then,” she said, coming into the kitchen and seeing him sitting at the table.

  “Yup,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Any luck at market?” She took off her coat and hung it from the hook on the back of the door.

  “Sold the lot,” he said. There was no chance of her checking the livestock; most days it was all she could manage to go and feed the chickens.

  “What did you get?”

  “Couple of bags of chicken feed and a side of bacon and some veg.” He could go over to one of the neighbouring farms tomorrow, the Wrens maybe, or the Prestons, and offer to muck out their stables in return for some food. He’d done it before, so often that none of them was embarrassed about it any more.

  She looked round the kitchen. “So where’s this bacon and veg then?”

  “On account. They’ll bring it over tomorrow.”

  “They? Who’s they?”

  “Old gaffer from up Risborough way. He’s coming through to see the Lyalls. He’ll drop it off on the way.”

  Karen sighed, and Morty felt himself shrink inside. “You bloody fool,” she said with that tired tone of voice. “How many times have I got to tell you? Maybe your memory’s going. You don’t sell stuff on account. We can’t afford to do that.”

  “He’s good for it,” he told her. “You’ll see.”

  “Yeah, right, sure.”

  “Where were you, anyway?”

  “I’m tired,” she said, heading for the hallway. “I’m going to have a lie down.”

  He watched her go upstairs, heard the bedroom door open and then close, and then he was alone with his piece of bread and his tiny chunk of cheese.

  He’d known her since they were kids, on the outskirts of Southampton. Her father, the widowed and perpetually-fierce Terry, had had four daughters, all of them older than Karen and all married off. Terry didn’t want to let Karen go because she was the only one left at home to look after him. That was, at least, what she had told Morty, in those long-ago days when they were courting. What passed for courting, anyway.

  He fell in love, of course, promised her all manner of things. She was noncommittal, worried about what Terry would say if he knew she was seeing him. “Dad’s got a temper on him,” she said, and that was true enough. Terry was legendary for it.

  In the end, he talked her into eloping. It was difficult, at first, but then all of a sudden she was enthusiastic about it, making plans about where they would go and what they would do when they got there. They talked about the children they would have, the house they’d live in. He said he’d get her a kitten, and he did, eventually. It grew into a cat which adored her and despised him. The one time he’d tried to pick it up, it had laid his cheek open with a single swipe of its paw.

  But that was still in the future when he sneaked out of the house early one morning, hitched their most rickety wagon to their sickliest horse – he couldn’t find it in his heart to take anything useful from his family – and drove to the crossroads where Karen had promised to meet him.

  She wasn’t there. He called her name and there was no answer, got down from the cart and looked around in case she was hiding. Got back onto the cart and sat there in terror, unable to work out what to do.

  Karen arrived an hour later, full of apologies. Terry had gone to bed late, she’d had to wait for him to fall asleep. Morty was frantic, torn between waiting longer for her and sneaking back home. Another couple of hours and his family would be up; they’d find the horse and cart gone, and him gone, and then he didn’t know what would happen. He was so relieved to see her that he didn’t notice until later that she had only brought a big bag of clothes and assorted personal junk with her – none of the food and barter goods she’d promised to provide for the journey.

  He’d only brought with him a couple of changes of clothes and what little food he could scrounge – his family couldn’t spare much – so they wound up stopping at farms on the way. They’d pitch their tent in any compound which would let them in, and he’d do a few days’ work in return for their keep, but nobody wanted them to stay. Everyone seemed suspicious and impoverished and only grudgingly willing to help the two young strangers. More than once, Morty had to endure some gaffer or his wife spelling out just how stupid it was to travel round the country with nothing more than a rusty old twelve-bore for protection. Karen didn’t voice her disappointment, but at night with the drizzle hissing down onto the tent and water dribbling through holes in the ancient fabric, she sighed and turned away from him.

  They wound up drifting, just two more souls on the road among the tinkers and traders and homeless who washed back and forth across the South. He tried to be upbeat, but Karen took to sighing heavily whenever he pointed out that at least they were together and they were in love. It was, at least, a mild summer, and less rainy than most. There were whole days when the drizzle dried up completely and the sun could be made out through the overcast. In dark moments, he knew he had let her down.

  They stopped for a while in Newbury – Berkshire was, for the two of them, a faraway land of legend, and it was something of a let-down to discover that the people living there were not that much different to those in Southampton – and one day, while he was going from farm to farm looking for work, he heard of a community on the very edge of the Chilterns, where they overlooked the Vale of the White Horse. Good people, he was told. Welcoming to strangers. Plenty of land available for a young couple who were in love and were prepared to work hard to make their new lives become a reality.

  Karen was not so keen. She was rather taken with Newbury; there couldn’t have been more than a thousand people in the town, but they had the place running well. There was a sense of purpose and organisation which had been quite absent in Southampton, where people mostly kept themselves to themselves and looked after their own business.

  “We can go up there and have a look,” he suggested. “It’s not that far. If we don’t like it, we can always come back, but I hear we could have our own farm. Imagine that.”

  Karen looked at him with that long-suffering, pitying expression he had grown so familiar with during the weeks of their elopement. Finally, she sighed and said the words which sealed everyone’s fate. “All right,” she said. “But just a look, mind.”

  Chapter Six

  ROSE WOKE BEFORE dawn and went to check on Max. Nell, who had sat up with him during the night, was reading a book by the light of a lamp. When her mother came into the bedroom, she just looked up, said nothing. She looked worn out.

  Max was asleep – or something like sleep, anyway. His forehead was hot and there was a smell of sickness in the air. Rose dipped a cloth in a bowl of water by the bed and laid it on his forehead, went to wash and dress, then went downstairs.

  Patrick was already up, cooking bacon and eggs for the younger children. Rose felt her footsteps falter as she walked into the kitchen and saw them all sitting around the table, but she kept going, mentally put her shoulders back and her chin up.

  “He’s doing okay,” she told them. Laura, her youngest, got up from the table and ran over and hugged her legs. Rose tousled her hair. “He’ll be fine.” She and Patrick looked at each other, and she shook her head fractionally to forestall anythin
g he might be thinking of saying.

  “Can we see him, Ma?” asked Christopher, just a couple of years older than Laura and already a solemn boy.

  “Not today. He needs his rest. Maybe tomorrow.” She looked at her children and wondered how much longer she could remain strong for them. It seemed to her that she had been doing it all her life.

  Old John Race came in just as they were finishing breakfast and a couple of the younger children were clearing the table. He shook rain from his coat and hung it on the peg behind the front door, made a business of taking off his boots. “Morning, Taylors,” he said to everyone. “Morning, miz.”

  He’d never, in all the time Rose had known him, called her by name. It was always ‘miz’. The kids loved him; he kept a couple of old coins in his pocket and delighted them by performing simple little sleights of hand, making the coins disappear and reappear. Not this morning, though.

  Rose clapped her hands. “All right, everyone,” she said. “Washed and dressed, please.”

  Normally, there would have been complaints and grumbling and Laura would have found something to do in the kitchen so she didn’t have to go upstairs. But this morning the kids filed out, leaving her and John sitting at the table. Patrick checked that no one was listening outside the kitchen, then closed the door and joined them. Rose felt her shoulders slump.

  “We should find Doc Ogden,” John told her. He’d removed the crossbow bolt and stitched up the wound, but like almost everyone else his medical knowledge was basic at best. “Max lost a lot of blood, there’s almost certainly an infection.”

  “No one leaves the compound today.” She said it to both of them, but she was looking at Patrick.

  “You need to think about that, miz,” said John. “The longer we wait, the harder it’s going to be to treat him.”

  Rose shook her head. “Today the family stays together.” She didn’t just mean her family; she meant the other families who worked for the Taylors and depended upon them for food and protection, the people who had been her family ever since she was a little girl. “Make sure everyone knows that, John.”