Shelter

by Dave Hutchinson

  He thought about it, then nodded.

  Patrick said, “Ma...”

  She shook her head again. “No, Patrick. We stay home and we take care of our business. Anyone comes to visit, we’re not entertaining today. Understood?”

  It was obvious it wasn’t; he was still too angry. But he said, “Yes, Ma.”

  “Tell them thanks for their concern and your father’s hanging on, but we don’t want to see anyone.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “Now go and make sure the children are getting ready.” She saw the look on his face and added, “Nell’s sitting with your father; they’ll just be up there throwing water at each other. Go on.”

  He got up unwillingly and left. He left the door ajar, though. Rose went and closed it, came back to the table and rubbed her eyes. “So,” she said. “What’s everyone saying?”

  John shrugged. “Just a lot of rumour. Nobody really knows anything.”

  “Lyalls?”

  “Sitting in their compound. Just like us.”

  “Good. That’s good. I don’t want any accidents, John. No harsh words, no punch-ups. I don’t want this to get any worse.”

  “No, miz.”

  She looked round the kitchen. Yesterday morning, it had seemed like the happiest place in her life, the place her family came together and ate and laughed. Now it seemed embattled, under siege. “If Max doesn’t improve, I want you to go and talk to Doc Ogden tomorrow. Just you. Nobody else. Don’t make a fuss about it.”

  He nodded. “I was thinking maybe we should let Blandings know, too.”

  “No. I don’t need Betty bloody Coghlan’s help.”

  “With respect, we need all the help we can get.”

  “No.” She’d never really understood the web of favours which bound the Taylors and the Coghlans. For most of her marriage they’d seemed a distant irritation; now they were a looming threat, an alien influence on her husband. “We’ll do this ourselves or not at all.”

  John sighed. “It’s market day in Goring next week...”

  “No, John.”

  He sat back and looked at the tabletop.

  “I’m sorry, John,” she said wearily. She reached out and put her hand over his. “I need you to be strong. I need all of us to be strong. And I need everyone to do as I say. All right?”

  “Yes, miz.”

  “I need you to make sure no one does anything silly.”

  “Yes, miz.”

  “Anyone who does anything silly can go and find somewhere else to live. You tell them I said that.”

  He looked at her. “What are we going to do if the Lyalls do something silly?”

  All through the sleepless night she had lain in her bed in the spare room, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about that. “We’ll cross that bridge,” she said.

  HARRY STUMBLED ON autopilot through a hangover so intense that it felt as if his teeth were about to explode. He ignored the looks on the faces of his family and went and stood in the drizzle for a while. Even the raindrops falling on his face hurt. He did a circuit of the yard, another, realised he was avoiding the shed where they had put the bodies of Rob and the two strangers.

  Alice had always said the farm was haunted. Like most of the other holdings in the area, it had begun life as a big family house, one of the expensive executive homes of the Chilterns commuter belt, handy for the station and the motorway to Reading and London. After The Sisters, in the first freezing rain-lashed days of the Long Autumn when everything was breaking down and no one knew whether the world was ending or not, Alice’s great-great-grandfather had come here and found the house empty, abandoned by its owners, a message scrawled in lipstick on a mirror in the hallway, GONE TO ALEX’S. Who Alex was, and who the message was intended for, he never found out.

  They hadn’t been gone long; there was still fresh food in the fridge, although there was no electricity to run it. There was still one car in the three-car garage. There was a bedraggled and starving cat which had obviously decided, in the way of cats, to go off and hide while its owners tried to find it. If they’d tried. Back then the first instinct of everyone had been to flee, whether they had an idea of where to flee to or not.

  Alice’s great-great-grandfather had fled from London, part of a great shockwave of people who had some dim, ancient sense that they were safer out in the countryside than in the city. They had been wrong – nowhere was safe, particularly – but no one was thinking straight, there was no power, no communication, no order, no idea of what had happened to the world.

  The house was secluded, set behind a high wall in a few acres of grounds. It was easy to miss – Alice’s great-great-grandfather had almost walked past the lane leading to it in the driving sleet. He went through the abandoned rooms, opening cupboards and wardrobes. He stood in the garage and looked at the car, weighed up how far he would get on one tank of petrol in the chaos outside. He found some cat food in one of the kitchen cupboards and put it in a saucer, and in time the cat came to eat.

  Others found the house. There was a family called Richards whose car had been hijacked by an armed mob as they tried to get out of Swindon. A couple named Holt, from Reading. They arrived cautiously. Alice’s great-great-grandfather, who had found a gun cabinet hidden in the back of a walk-in wardrobe in one of the master bedrooms and managed to crowbar the door off, greeted them with a shotgun in his hands, but they were too exhausted to make trouble, even if they’d been of a mind to, and they stayed.

  None of them knew anything about farming – Alice’s great-great-grandfather had been an advertising copywriter and Terry Holt had designed websites for a living, skills now long extinct – and they got by, that first year, mostly on tinned food looted from supermarkets, although that was an enterprise fraught with risk because the countryside was awash with starving, armed people. They hunkered down and waited, like everyone else, for the emergency to end and order to be restored, but it never did. The power never came back on. They sat it out, through the rioting and the mass starvations and the epidemics. Tucked away in the woods in this little corner of Berkshire, the long dieback of British society passed them by.

  Eventually, it became apparent to them – and others had joined them at the house by now – that if they were to survive, they would either have to leave and try to find some vestige of civilisation, or make the best of it where they were. They’d already begun trading with some of the farms in the area – doing a day’s work in exchange for some fresh food – and they asked for advice, and in time – and it took almost two decades – they had carved themselves a working farm. They expanded it beyond the original grounds, built new farmhouses and outbuildings. By then they were no longer Holts and Richardses and Barretts and Prestons. They were all one family. And when Harry married Alice, they had become his family too, the farm had become the Lyall farm.

  Haunted, Alice, had said. Haunted by the original owners, by those early families. Haunted by the children she had lost. Haunted by Alice herself, whose cancer had consumed her in less than five months. And now haunted by Rob.

  Harry found himself standing in front of the shed, tears pouring down his cheeks. He’d always done his best, and it had always seemed as if it wasn’t good enough. The farm ticked over, but it still wasn’t good enough. Alice was gone. Rob was gone. What was the point of going on, if the only point was to go on?

  James, coming out of the house, saw his father standing there. A couple of the hands were standing a respectful distance away, watching. They saw him and drifted off, embarrassed to have been caught witnessing such a private moment. He stood on the doorstep, agonised. Finally, he turned and went back inside. Closed the door and left his father with his pain.

  Harry opened the door of the shed and looked inside. At first, all his mind registered were the rows of agricultural tools hanging from the walls, most of them decades old. Scythes and sickles, rakes, spades, their handles worn shiny with years of use. Everything neat and in its place, the way his father had l
iked it.

  The three bodies lay side by side on the floor, still covered with the tarps the Taylors had laid over them. He’d had some of the senior hands in here to look at the faces of the other two boys, to try and solve the mystery of who they were, although he had no idea what he was going to say to their family. It was the right thing to do, though. Someone had opined that they might be from up Risborough way, which meant they were a long way from home, but Harry remembered that a year or so ago Rob had been sweet on a Risborough girl he’d met at Goring market. Had she had brothers? He couldn’t remember. He did know that Rob had been away a lot over the past twelve months, but he’d gone through a phase like that when he was Rob’s age.

  He sat on the floor with his back to the wall and hugged his knees to his chest, still turning it all over in his head. If Max and the boys had been attacked by bandits, he should have people out right now looking for them before they did any more harm. But he didn’t because he knew it hadn’t been bandits. Strangers passed through the Parish all the time, to trade or to do specialised work or simply to travel the old road of the Ridge Way which ran along the northern edge not so far from the Taylor and Lyall farms. But the Parish had its own fairly efficient bush telegraph, an informal word-of-mouth arrangement between the farms which went all the way back to the really bad days when refugees from the fighting in London had swept through the area, looting as they went. There had been no word of bandits or footpads or highwaymen. Harry knew in his heart that Rose was right. Max and the boys had had a fight out on the road somewhere, for whatever reason, and now Rob and the two strangers were dead and Max was fighting for his life, and Harry felt his life teetering on the edge of an abyss.

  Chapter Seven

  THE FIRST THING Frank said to him was, “Hullo there, I’m Frank Pendennis. Great to meet you.”

  The new arrivals were standing in ranks in what had once been the car park of Margate railway station. Looking a little way down the hill, Adam could see the sea, lashed by storms. He shook hands with Frank and said, “Adam Hardy.”

  Frank was a short, burly man in his sixties, all muscle and unruly grey hair. He was wearing a long overcoat with velvet lapels, over an old tweed suit, and a trilby. “Albie tells me you can do windows,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Good!” Frank was all grins and welcome, as if they weren’t all standing out in the rain. “That’s grand.”

  His review of the newcomers apparently complete, Frank walked back out to the front of the group, beside Albie, who towered over him. “We have a good place here,” he addressed them in a loud voice. “It’s a good place because people work hard. People here want to work hard, and if you don’t want to work hard, there’s no place for you in Thanet. We’re building something special, rebuilding civilisation, and people are going to talk about what we achieve here for centuries. Now, Albie here and his boys will take care of you, find you places to bed down and settle in. Tomorrow morning you’ll get your work assignments and you’ll be part of our family.” He beamed at them and then turned and walked away.

  Uncertain of what to do now, the group shuffled their feet and started to talk among themselves, but Albie put a stop to that. “All right, everyone,” he said. “I’m going to split you up into two groups. You in the first two rows, you go with Larry here.” Larry was a tall, cadaverous-looking man with a rifle slung over his shoulder. “The rest of you, go with Jim.”

  Adam looked at Jim, who seemed to be aspiring to Albiehood, that same bulky shaven-headed look, trouser-cuffs tucked into his boots. There was a long wooden baton tucked through a loop on his belt. Nothing he had seen so far in Margate had inspired any hope in Adam at all. The place was a work camp, pure and simple, hundreds of thin and grey people toiling in the rain.

  They’d managed a remarkable feat, clearing many of the roads around the town and dragging old cars out to a dump some miles away. Most of the shops and houses had been stripped of anything useful, and those which were not occupied were boarded up against future use. The place was swept by gales and storms howling down the North Sea coast. No one, apart from Frank and his enforcers and his favourites, looked particularly happy.

  Jim gathered the back two ranks of newcomers – Adam among them – and without a word beckoned them to follow. They marched down the hill to the seafront and along the long curve of boarded-up shopfronts lashed with wind-driven salt spray. Decades of storms had scoured much of the paint from the buildings and they had a raw look.

  Up another hill, and Jim led them to a big building with THE SANDS painted in red on a big sheet of plywood mounted over the door.

  “This is where you’ll be staying,” Jim told them. “Go on in. Mr Harper will assign you rooms, then come back down to reception and I’ll give you the tour.”

  Inside, the hotel smelled strongly of damp carpet and mould. Mr Harper regarded the newcomers sourly and led them up three flights of stairs to a corridor lined with doors, each one secured by a padlock and hasp screwed into the wood.

  Mr Harper had a big ring of keys, and he doled one out to each of the new arrivals in turn. As Adam opened his door, he heard his neighbour look inside their new quarters and mutter, “Fucking hell.”

  “Hot water for washing from the kitchens between five and six in the morning and seven and eight at night,” Mr Harper recited. “You bring it up here yourself. Breakfast at seven. If you miss it, you go hungry.”

  Adam swung the door open. There were two single beds, a kitchen chair, a small table, a battered-looking wardrobe. Slug trails glistened on the carpet. Beyond a half-open door he could see what he presumed was the bathroom. The room was freezing and it stank of sweat and piss.

  “Doors locked at all times when you’re out,” Mr Harper said. “Don’t lose your keys. There’s a laundry in the basement where you can wash your clothes.”

  Adam went into the bathroom. There was a bucket full of water by the toilet, for flushing, and two empty buckets in the shower. A hard sliver of soap on the handbasin smelled strongly of sheep. He put his hands in his pockets. Well.

  Back in the corridor, there was an air of disgruntlement among the people who had arrived with him. He could see one or two of them considering leaving Thanet.

  Maybe Mr Harper could see it too, because he said, “This is just a place for new bodies, until we can find you somewhere more permanent. There’s a lot of empty houses in town; if you work hard and keep your noses clean, you’ll be assigned a place of your own.”

  Newcomers at Guz were housed in a village of old modular accommodation units on the edge of town. They were a bit spartan, but they were warm and clean and there was hot running water and there were flush toilets – something Adam regarded, notwithstanding men on the Moon and space probes to other planets, as the height of human civilisation – and a twenty-four-hour canteen. People were expected to work for their keep, but that litany of ‘if you work hard and keep your noses clean’ was as disturbing as anything Adam had seen or heard here so far.

  They all trooped back down to the foyer, where Jim was slouched in a threadbare old armchair. He clambered to his feet and said, “Right then, let’s be having you.”

  Back outside, squalls of rain and spray blew in off the sea and broke against the buildings of the seafront. The group huddled down into their coats as Jim marched them around the town for the best part of an hour, calling out relevant landmarks. They saw people working, repairing some buildings, boarding up others, removing items from still more and loading them into carts and lashing tarpaulins over them. Nothing they did seemed to improve anything; the town still looked awful, looted in the first days after The Sisters and then mostly abandoned during the Long Autumn. The people were all working in groups of four or five, and each group was being watched over by someone like Jim or Albie.

  The tour over, Jim took them back to The Sands and then went off on another errand. The newcomers stood around in the rain for a few moments and then, because there was nowher
e else to go, went inside. Adam stood at the top of the steps, looking about him. He went back down onto the pavement.

  On the seafront, the tide was in, and waves and spray were breaking over the sea wall. Adam wandered along, hands in pockets, buffeted by the wind, until he encountered three of Albie’s colleagues up near the station.

  “Oi,” said one, “where are we off to, then?”

  Adam shrugged. “Just off for a walk. Have a look round.”

  “What work gang are you with?”

  He shrugged again. “Just got here.”

  The enforcers – that was what they were, why not acknowledge it? – all gave each other long-suffering looks. “Well you can’t just fucking wander about like that,” said the first enforcer. “This isn’t a fucking holiday camp, you know.” And the others laughed. “Where are you bunking?”

  Adam thought about it, as if the name had momentarily escaped him. “The Sands Hotel,” he said.

  Another exchange of looks, this time amused. “We’ll see you back,” said the enforcer. “In case you get lost.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Adam said. “I just wanted to have a look round.”

  All the amusement went out of the enforcers. “Nah. Best if you don’t, eh?” And the enforcer’s hand moved an almost imperceptible distance towards the baton hanging from his belt.

  “Okay,” Adam said. “Let’s go back, then.”

  IF IT WAS run-down and impoverished, Margate did at least have one great resource – a complex of enormous greenhouses which had once produced vegetables in unimaginable amounts. Half of Adam’s intake of newcomers had been sent to work there, and as the days wore on he first came to envy and then hate them. At least they were working indoors.

  For him, and the work crew to which he was assigned, there were various jobs maintaining and renovating houses. A lot of this was outdoors, in the driving rain. And even when they were indoors, it wasn’t much more pleasant. The whole town was afflicted by damp and mould, the buildings were freezing cold, and no one had looked inside many of them since the disaster. More than once, they came upon the remains of townspeople who hadn’t managed to flee. Guz had a respectful protocol for this kind of thing, but Frank did not. They scraped the remains together into bags and dumped them on a huge pile of similar offerings rotting in the rain in a great open hole in the fields on the edge of town.