Shelter

by Dave Hutchinson

  Days like that, Aggie, the permanently-angry middle-aged woman who led the crew, was more than usually hard to get along with and nobody talked much except Seth. Seth was in his sixties, a wiry grizzled man who limped quite badly because he’d fallen off a ladder and broken his leg and it had been set all wrong. Frank took a dim view of invalids, on the whole. If you couldn’t work, he didn’t have a lot of use for you. But Seth was a master carpenter and even Frank could appreciate the value of his skills.

  “Why do you suppose they didn’t get out?” he mused one particularly bad day while they were clearing a house of four mouldy skeletons.

  “Maybe they were sick,” said Adam.

  Seth pulled down the piece of cloth covering his mouth and nose, spat on the floor, covered himself again. “I’d have been out of here like a shot,” he said. “Sick or not.”

  “Where would you go?”

  Seth looked round the room sourly. “Anywhere but here,” he said.

  “Are you two done yet?” Aggie said from the door.

  “Almost,” Adam told her, using a broken-off chairleg to scrape a skull and some arm bones into a bag.

  “Well, get a fucking move on,” she said, and she went back out into the hall, where the rest of the crew were repairing the front door.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Seth said. “No, ma’am. Three fucking bags full, ma’am.”

  “Heard that,” she called from the hallway.

  Seth, who had run out of fucks to give some considerable time ago, put two fingers up in the direction of the door and returned to helping Adam bag the remains. “What a fucking awful place to die,” he said.

  “Isn’t everywhere?”

  After three weeks in Margate, Adam had not seen Eleanor, or even anyone who resembled the sketch of her he’d been shown in Guz. He was more or less certain she wasn’t on any of the crews working in town. The people out at the Glasshouses worked long shifts and didn’t mix much with the others; he was still trying to come up with an excuse to go out there. He was conscious of having to do the job properly, but at the same time he was sick of this dreadful mouldy waterlogged corner of Kent, and he was sick of Frank.

  Gossip among the work crews had it that Frank’s family had come here in the first days of the Long Autumn from somewhere in South London, where they had been scrap metal dealers. They had found the town undamaged but almost deserted. Even after looters had been and gone, the shops were still full of food and tools and other supplies, the houses were mostly empty of living inhabitants. Weary and heavily-armed and – if Frank himself was anything to judge by – utterly without scruple, they had chosen to stay a while. Some locals, they discovered, had occupied a big out-of-town shopping centre a couple of miles away, and after a brief period of unpleasantness the Pendennises had turfed them out and begun living on the riches contained within.

  Others turned up, wandering the sleet-lashed countryside. Frank’s family offered them shelter, for a price. They began to work the Glasshouses, producing tomatoes and potatoes and other crops which were hard to grow out of doors in the sudden autumnal shock. And so, down the years, Frank’s little kingdom had grown. His people worked to maintain the town and clear the roads along the coast as far as Ramsgate and Reculver, and some way inland. There was no one to stop them; this far corner of Kent belonged to them. They started to farm. They ranged far and wide and found more recruits, more weapons. In the early days, they still had motor vehicles and petrol to run them. Later, they raised horses.

  In time, they performed a census, and discovered that almost three thousand people were living under their rule. Three thousand people was an army, and they set out to conquer the little fortified farms and settlements which had established themselves in Kent in the years after The Sisters. Well-armed and well-organised, they ranged down to Dover and Folkestone, and almost as far west as Maidstone.

  And there they paused. The High Weald belonged to another family, and London was a nightmare not even the Pendennises would contemplate. It was, after all, the place they had fled. Sometimes, they looked across the Estuary and thought about Essex – the acres of rusting metal in the burned-out wreckage of the oil import terminal at Coryton were much on their minds, perhaps something about it called to a dim corner of race memory – but there was still a lot to do on their own territory. They bided their time.

  There were stories, Adam had heard them more than once during his time in Margate, of interlopers from France or the Low Countries crossing the Channel in motley boats and trying to land at the dead of night on the beaches from Deal to Dover. He wasn’t sure whether to believe it or not – multiple comet strikes in France had left it almost uninhabitable for nearly a century and much of Holland was simply drowned – but the accounts of pitched battles on the Kent beaches sounded in character. Frank’s people were nothing if not patriotic.

  The bag filled, Adam tied it at the top and stripped off his leather work gloves and wiped his eyes. In spite of the damp cold in the house, he was sweating.

  There was a commotion in the hall, and a few moments later Aggie looked around the door and said, “Adam. Someone wants you.”

  Adam and Seth exchanged glances. Adam handed his gloves to Seth and went to the door. Albie was standing in the hallway with two other enforcers. They were smiling, but Aggie was subdued and the rest of the crew was nowhere to be seen.

  “Hallo, Adam” said Albie. “Frank wants a word.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing at all, old son. Just wants a word. Now.”

  There was a horse and cart outside. The two enforcers climbed up onto the front seat and Albie indicated Adam should join him in the back.

  They drove for about ten minutes, plodding unhurriedly up a long hill from the seafront and along narrow winding streets of houses being slowly unpicked by the weather. At one point, they passed the school where most of the workers from the Glasshouses were housed, and Adam looked about him incuriously in case he might see Eleanor. But there was no one about but enforcers guarding the gates. Frank prized gardening skills above all others and he didn’t like his workers just wandering off.

  Finally, they pulled up another steep street and stopped outside what looked like a small public library. Albie got down from the cart and beckoned Adam to follow him up the steps.

  Inside, Adam found himself in the broken and scattered remains of a gift shop, Frank sitting on his own at a little table, smoking a pipe and watching the drizzle bead on the windows. Today he was wearing green whipcord trousers and jacket, over a black sweater. He smiled as Adam and Albie came in.

  “Adam,” he said happily. “How are you?”

  “I’m all right, thanks,” Adam said. There was a faint, but terrible, smell in here.

  “Albie, get Adam a chair.” Albie brought a chair from a haphazard pile and set it at the table and indicated that Adam should sit.

  “So,” Frank went on when Adam was seated. “How are you finding things here?”

  Adam shrugged. “It’s okay, thanks. Working hard.”

  “That’s good.” He waved at Albie, who went back outside. When they were alone, Frank said, “I understand you can read.”

  In one of the houses they’d worked in last week, Adam had found one room miraculously free of damp and mould, and in that room had been a wall full of bookshelves. He’d stood looking at them long enough for Aggie to shout at him, then he’d taken one book – a paperback Raymond Chandler – and slipped it into his pocket. He wondered who had seen him do that, who had told who, how word had got back to Frank. It was like catching a glimpse of the secret machinery grinding away under the run-down, broken surface of Margate, the machinery with which Frank ran things.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  Frank gave him a long, level look. “I like stories,” he said. “My Ma could read, a bit, and she used to read stories to me.”

  Completely at a loss, Adam said, “Oh?”

  Frank got up and said, “Let me show you som
ething.”

  Adam followed him across the gift shop to a short set of steps ending in a heavy-looking door. Frank took a key ring from his pocket, selected a key, and opened the door.

  The smell that billowed out was so awful that it was all Adam could do not to take a step back. Frank seemed not to notice, was fiddling about with an oil lantern. He finally got it lit and handed it over. “Take a look,” he said. “Go on, nothing down there’s going to bite you.”

  Adam held up the lamp and saw the stairs continued under the building, curving away out of sight. The walls were grey and looked strangely textured. He took a deep breath and went down a few steps. The walls, he saw, had hundreds of thousands of little shells embedded in them, and as he reached the bottom of the steps he could see more, set in the wall in simple patterns. It was freezing down here. All of a sudden he had a terrible vision of Frank closing the door on him, and he retreated back up to the gift shop.

  Frank was standing there nodding soberly and puffing on his pipe. “Don’t know what this place used to be,” he said. “Something for tourists, I expect, when there were tourists. Now it’s where we put the bad folk. A few days down there, they’re not bad any more. You’d be surprised.”

  Adam, who was fairly sure he was going to have to burn his clothes, shave off all his hair, and scrub off the top layer of his skin to get rid of the smell, would not have been surprised at all. He watched Frank close and lock the door again.

  “Anyway,” Frank said, taking the lamp from him and extinguishing it, “I miss those stories.”

  Adam stared, suddenly realising where this was going.

  “So,” said Frank. “You’ll start tonight, then. Albie’ll pick you up. You can walk back to your crew, can’t you.”

  Chapter Eight

  KATE MERCER HAD three sons. Alan, Graham, and Keith, who styled himself Big Keith after his late and, if local gossip was anything to go by, entirely unlamented father. He was nineteen that day he met them on the track, only a couple of years older than Morty and Karen, but he had a raffish, devil-may-care handsomeness about him. “A bit like a pirate king,” his mother once said to Morty. “His dad was an ugly cunt, though.”

  They were pretty much on their last legs by then, thinking about turning back for Newbury. It was days since they’d found anyone who would give Morty work, the horse was sick, the weather had turned and the continual rain was only enlivened by the occasional shower of hail. Karen had begun to voice doubts about Morty’s abilities in a wistful tone which would become grindingly familiar.

  And then there was Big Keith, on his horse, riding down the track towards them, rifle slung over his shoulder, grinning.

  “What have we got here, then?” he called. “Orphans in the storm?”

  Morty felt Karen, who had been sitting listlessly beside him on the driving seat, stir. He said, “Looking for work, maybe somewhere to start over.”

  Big Keith’s grin widened. “Well, we have all the work you can cope with.” He was speaking to Morty, but looking at Karen, who was now sitting up attentively. “And there’s plenty of places round here you could have that nobody else wants. Why not stay a while?”

  “Yes, all right,” said Karen, before Morty could open his mouth again. When he made to speak, she turned to him and said, “I’m sick of travelling, Morty.” She put her arm through his and hugged him close. “Let’s stay a while, eh?”

  So they did. They pitched their tent in a corner of the Mercers’ compound, and for a while, even though they didn’t have a place of their own or any security at all, they lived happily. Karen pointed out, quite reasonably, that it was unfair to expect her to sleep rough any more when there was a spare room in the main house. It was just a box room, mind, and not big enough for the two of them, but it was important that she be well-rested because she was already planning their future in the Parish.

  Karen moved into the Mercers’ house, and Morty stayed in the tent. A couple of the other hands took pity on him and helped patch it up, so at least he was dry, and if he was honest, he was usually too tired to feel lonely out there because Kate Mercer worked her people hard. “No time for passengers, young Morty,” she told him more than once.

  Karen took to accompanying Big Keith on his trips around the Parish. Looking for somewhere to live, she told Morty, and lo and behold, one day, three months after they arrived, she came out to the tent and told him that she’d found somewhere.

  “What happened to the last people who lived here?” Morty asked.

  “Moved on,” Big Keith said. “Couldn’t hack it. Someone told me they went to Goring.”

  Morty, whose knowledge of the Chilterns was still only sketchy at best, had no idea where Goring was, but he thought that maybe they should think about going there too. The farm had been abandoned, and had clearly not been particularly successful even when it was occupied. The main house was damp and dirty, the henhouses filthy and deserted apart from half a dozen mouldy carcases lying in a sea of half-liquid droppings. Two painfully-thin sheep were listlessly cropping the grass in the yard, their fleeces matted and covered in mud and shit. Morty didn’t realise it at the time, but this was his life from now on, summed up in one handy picture.

  “It’s brilliant,” Karen said eagerly, giving his arm that little hug again. “A place of our own at last, Morty.” And she beamed at him. And so did Big Keith.

  That night, their horse died.

  HE WAS UP on the roof, mending slates – the place leaked like a sieve, no matter how many repairs he did – when he saw two riders coming up the half-overgrown trackway towards the farm. He felt himself shrink a little inside. He knew that he occupied a space in the Parish somewhere between an object of pity and an object of fun, and he tried to avoid mixing with the locals unless he couldn’t possibly avoid it. The day before, he’d done some handyman work at the Wren farm in return for a bit of bacon and a bag of vegetables, to shore up his lie to Karen, and he’d hated every moment of it, conscious of the way everyone was looking at him. But he’d put on his Morty Face, the cheerful one that said he was everyone’s friend and always happy to help out, and he’d got through it. Watching from the slope of the roof, he willed the riders to pass by as most people did, but they came right up to the house and sat looking up at him.

  “That you, Morty?” called one.

  He called back, “That’s me. What’s up?”

  Down below, he heard the scrape of the front door opening – he needed to sand it down or something, it was always swollen with damp – and saw the two riders tug the hoods of their coats respectfully as Karen came to the door.

  Carefully arranging the Morty Face, he half-climbed, half-slid down the roof until he reached the ladder, and climbed down into the yard. Found himself looking at two men he barely recognised; he thought they worked for Harry Lyall, but he couldn’t be sure. They were both carrying shotguns, and one had a crossbow over his shoulder.

  “Hey, Morty,” said one, rain dripping out of his beard.

  “Hey,” Morty said, still none the wiser about who they were. He looked at Karen, who was standing in the doorway with their shotgun in her hands.

  “You heard what happened to Harry’s boy?” asked the other rider, barely out of his teens himself.

  Morty remembered meeting Tim Anderson on the Ridge Way. He said, “Yes?”

  “There’s some unpleasantness going on between us and the Taylors about it,” said the bearded one.

  Morty couldn’t see any earthly reason why he should care, but he modulated the Morty Face into an expression of concern. “Oh yes?”

  “Harry reckons people could get a bit excitable,” said the younger one. “He doesn’t want any more trouble.”

  Again, Morty had no idea what this had to do with him, but he said, “Absolutely.”

  The two riders exchanged a glance. The bearded one said, “So, no going out taking potshots at people.”

  Morty nodded enthusiastically. “Of course not.”

  The r
iders looked at him for a couple more moments, then they nodded to him, nodded to Karen, and turned and rode off without another word.

  Morty turned to Karen, but all she did was hold the shotgun out to him. “You should have been taking care of me,” she told him, without quite meeting his eye. “That could have been anybody.” He took the shotgun from her, and she turned and went back into the house, closing the door on him.

  THE NEXT DAY, another pair of riders turned up. Karen was out this time. Morty put on the Morty Face again and went out to meet them. He took the shotgun this time, just in case.

  Again, he had no idea who they were. He just nodded hello to them amiably and said, “Lads. What can I do for you?”

  “You heard about Max Taylor?” asked one.

  “Yes. Yes, I did. Can I help at all?”

  The rider was not in a mood for small talk, and neither, it seemed, was his friend. He said, “There’s to be no retaliation. Rose’s orders. Understood?”

  Well no, not really, but Morty nodded. “Yes. Understood. Absolutely.” And without another word the two men rode off, leaving Morty standing in the rain wondering what the fuck his neighbours were playing at.

  Chapter Nine

  “YOU SHOULD HAVE sent for me right away,” said Faye Ogden. “What were you thinking?”

  Rose just sat there, clenching and unclenching her fists out of sight below the tabletop.