Shelter

by Dave Hutchinson

  “I don’t fucking know. People shooting at each other, is what I heard.”

  “I was going to go and see them.”

  “Who?”

  “The Taylors and the Lyalls.”

  The figure thought about it again. “Yeah,” it said finally. “That’s grand, Monty. You do that.” And they disappeared from view.

  Morty sat where he was for a minute or two, but nobody else came to talk to him, and eventually he urged the horse away from the farm.

  It didn’t occur to him until much later that he had ridden through the early days of a war that morning. Everything seemed quite peaceful, save for the occasional shot in the distance, and that could have been someone hunting rabbits or taking care of a pack of dogs. The drizzle hissed down onto the trees and the undergrowth, dripped from the hood of his coat. Someone – he couldn’t remember who – had told him that ten or twenty years ago this had been a dangerous place to travel alone, beset by bandits and wild animals, but now it seemed tranquil and rather pretty. It was certainly better than Southampton. Morty fancied himself a country boy at heart.

  All the farms he passed seemed to be locked up, their gates closed and armed patrols moving in the distance, but no one bothered him. He rode on, and the drizzle finally dried up and the birds sang. It was nice to just be riding along, not a thought in his head.

  Eventually, more by accident than design, he found himself on a trackway leading to the Lyall farm. The gate was shut, people with rifles and shotguns stood on the parapet watching him approach, and when he drew up outside, a stout, harassed-looking woman called down, “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Morty Roberts,” he said.

  The woman seemed surprised to see him, which was a first for Morty. Most people barely noticed him. She said, “What do you want, Morty Roberts?”

  “I heard about the trouble.”

  “Yes?”

  “And I just...” And words failed him. It was all right Karen telling him to come here and talk to the Lyalls, but what on earth was he supposed to say? “I...”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve got a farm over there.” He waved in what he hoped was the right direction. “Down on the south side. By the Mercers.”

  “Right...?”

  “And it’s just me and my wife, just the two of us.”

  “Okay...?”

  He’d been hoping that the woman would fill in the blanks, but that obviously wasn’t going to happen. He said, “We don’t want any trouble.”

  The woman glared down at him with a mixture of wonderment and annoyance. “Well, here’s what you do then, Morty Roberts,” she said. “You go back home and you lock your doors and don’t come out until things settle down, okay? No one’s going to make trouble for you unless you make trouble for them.”

  “Right.”

  “Now, I’ve got a fuckload of stuff to do and you’re stopping me doing it, so if you don’t mind...?” And with that she vanished out of sight, to be replaced by two armed men who just stood there looking at him until he rode away.

  Plodding along, he wondered if this was going to be sufficient for Karen. Lock your doors and don’t come out until things settle down sounded like excellent advice to him, but it really wasn’t the guarantee of safety and security that she seemed to want, and reaching a crossroads, he halted the horse and sat there in an agony of indecision. He imagined himself passing on the Lyall woman’s message, imagined the disappointed shake of the head from Karen, imagined her telling him to go out again and make sure they weren’t going to get involved in whatever the hell was going on here.

  Eventually, instead of turning left towards home, he turned right.

  The Taylor farm was a fortress. It was the first time he’d seen it, and he couldn’t help but be impressed by the ring of old freight containers surrounding the compound, or the neat, tidy, well-tended fields and outbuildings beyond the wall.

  He never managed to get close to the gate, though. As he approached someone on the wall fired a shot into the air and then pointed their rifle directly at him. “That’s close enough!” they shouted. “What do you want?”

  “I’m Morty Roberts,” he shouted back, reining in the horse. “Over on the south side.”

  “What?”

  “We heard there was some trouble up here.”

  The figure on the wall had a brief consultation with someone standing next to them. “Morty Roberts? Down by Mercers?”

  Morty sighed. “Yes.”

  “What the fuck are you doing up here?”

  “I came to see if there was anything I could...do...” The words were out of his mouth before he was quite conscious of thinking them. Volunteering was the last thing on his mind right now, even if he’d known what he was volunteering for.

  The two figures had another consultation – quite a long one this time. He saw one shake its head, and he saw the other’s shoulders move in a way which suggested suppressed laughter.

  “Nah, you’re okay, Morty,” shouted the first one. “We’re good. Go home and stay there. Now fuck off.”

  Morty sat where he was.

  “Fuck off, Morty Roberts,” the figure shouted, “or I’ll fucking shoot you myself.”

  That seemed unequivocal enough. Morty turned the horse, and as he did, he saw a group of people coming down the track towards him. They had a boy with them, shaken and dishevelled, and as they passed by, Morty saw that his arms were tied behind his back and he was practically being carried along. The gate opened just far enough to let the group bundle their captive inside, then closed again and Morty heard shouting from the other side of the wall, then there was silence.

  Nothing much seemed to be happening here, so he turned and rode away towards home.

  HE’D BARELY GONE half a mile before he came upon a group of men standing in the middle of the track, all of them pointing guns at him. Morty was not a brave man, but this seemed so peculiar, on top of all the other peculiar things which had happened to him today, that he didn’t feel particularly alarmed. This was the Parish, it was his home. What could possibly happen to him here?

  The horse didn’t need to be reined in. He had the feeling that it had had enough for one day; it just plodded to a halt and didn’t seem upset when one of the men stepped forward and took the bridle.

  “This your horse?” he asked.

  “Yes, it is,” Morty said.

  “No, it’s not,” the man said. “It’s mine.”

  “Who’re you with?” asked another. “Taylors or Lyalls?”

  “I’m not with either,” Morty said. “I’m from the south side, down by Mercers. And this is my horse.”

  “No, it’s not,” said the first one again.

  “Lads,” Morty said, arranging the Morty Face for maximum effect. “I don’t want any trouble. I’m not armed.”

  “You’re a fucking idiot, then,” someone called from the back of the group.

  “What brings you all the way up here on my horse if you don’t want any trouble?” asked the man holding the bridle.

  “It’s not your horse.”

  “Oh, yes it is.” He didn’t seem angry or threatening, more amused than anything else.

  “I know this bloke,” said another of the group. “It’s that Monty Roberts. The one from Wiltshire. Him with the wife.”

  Morty weighed the pros and cons of correcting his name and place of origin in front of a large group of armed men, and decided against it.

  “Poor fucker,” said someone else. “Leave him alone, Fred.”

  Fred – the one holding the horse – looked over his shoulder.

  “Who’s running things?”

  “Not you, that’s for sure, you cunt,” someone called, and Morty suddenly, finally, felt a thrill of alarm. This wasn’t an organised group. It was a mob.

  Fred turned back to him and said, in a low, reasonable voice, “Get off my horse, Monty.”

  Morty thought about it. There was never any question of giving up his life for a
horse, that would have been absurd, but there was a principle here.

  In the end, the principle lost. He climbed down, suddenly almost nose to nose with Fred’s sneering grin. “Good lad,” Fred said, and actually reached out and patted him on the head.

  Morty felt a strange sensation at the touch, and it took him some moments to realise that it was anger, and some moments more to realise that actually there was rather a lot of it and that it had been there for a very long time and he really quite liked it. Years of embarrassment and ridicule, working his heart out only to receive, at best, the pity of his fellows. He thought of Big Keith Mercer, with his pirate king’s swagger and his easy charm, and something burned away to ashes inside him and when it was over, there was nothing left but a howling emptiness and the Morty Face, looking out on the world, eager to help and shrug off all slights. It was that simple.

  Fred, maybe, saw it happen, because he withdrew his hand and seemed momentarily uncertain. Then he recovered himself and said, “Good decision, Monty Roberts. No need for any unpleasantness.”

  Looking out at the world from behind the Morty Face, Morty heard his voice – or something that sounded like his voice – say, “No. That’s right. No need at all.”

  THEY WERE SITTING in the kitchen when he got back. Karen and Big Keith. He closed the door behind him and looked at them.

  “Where’ve you been?” Karen said. “You should have been back hours ago.”

  “Someone stole the horse,” he said.

  “What?” She and Keith exchanged glances – more of a smirk, on Keith’s part, to be honest. “Who?”

  “Fred,” he said. “Fred stole the horse. I had to walk back.” He supposed he was tired and footsore, but they were distant sensations, like smoke on the horizon.

  “Have you any idea how much that horse cost?” she said, her voice a near-shriek.

  “Yes,” he told them. “Yes, I do, because I bought it. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.” And he navigated himself past them and into the hallway, and as he walked upstairs, the howling void inside him performed what would once have seemed like an impossible calculation, based on their body language and their faces, the way they had been sitting leaning towards each other as he opened the door, and he realised that they hadn’t expected him to come back.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE SIGN SAID DREAMLAND. It jutted vertically from the face of the building, towering over the promenade. Once upon a time, it had been picked out in hundreds of lightbulbs, but they were all broken now, rendered brittle by decades of frosts and shattered by howling hailstorms. Adam had almost stopped noticing it, unless he was feeling particularly tired and miserable, when it took on a satirical meaning.

  It was raining again, and veils of sleet occasionally swept across the town, blending with the breaking waves that lashed the seafront so that half the time the rain tasted of salt and stank of rotting seaweed. Adam and the others huddled near the entrance of the old amusement park, sharing cigarettes and bitching about whatever came into their heads. Looking along the front, he could see a long curve of shops as far as the clocktower, where Frank and his family traditionally hanged those who displeased them. Beyond that, it was hard to make out details through the rain, but he thought he could see the angular shape of the old Turner Gallery and the dark band of the harbour arm.

  “Smoke?” asked Seth, limping up and offering a damp rollie.

  Adam shook his head. “No, ta.”

  The old man tucked the cigarette behind his ear and pulled up the hood of his coat again. He turned and glanced at the little group of men and women hiding from the worst of the wind and rain. “How long have we been doing this?”

  “About a hundred years,” Adam said.

  Seth chuckled wetly. “Must be lunchtime by now, surely.”

  Adam glanced at the sky, but there was no clue there, just low, driving clouds. He shrugged.

  “Watch out,” one of the others said.

  Adam and Seth looked back along the promenade and saw a small group of enforcers coming along the pavement towards them from the direction of the station. As they drew level with the workers, they stopped and their leader said, “Oi, shirkers.”

  “Who’s shirking?” Seth demanded loudly. “We’ve been at it since first light.” Seth tended to overestimate the value his carpentry skills brought to Margate. He thought they gave him a certain latitude to talk back to the enforcers. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t; it was always somewhat fraught to be standing next to him when he got into a slanging match with them.

  Today was another lucky day for everyone, it seemed. The enforcers were just as wet and miserable as they were; it was just too much trouble to stand in the rain beating people up.

  “Get back to work, you daft old bastard,” the enforcer said. “We’ll be back this way in a bit; if you’re still here, you and me can go and have a chat with Albie.”

  The mention of Albie’s name was enough to make the rest of the working party shuffle their feet in a manner which suggested this break was none of their fault and they would have been happy to keep working until midnight if it wasn’t for those two blokes. Seth just curled his lip and spat his cigarette onto the wet pavement at the enforcer’s feet.

  The two of them looked at each other for a few moments. Adam fought the urge to take one step away from Seth.

  The enforcer shook his head, gave Seth a final hard stare, and walked away towards the clock tower, followed by the others.

  Adam and Seth watched them go. There were various sounds of qualified relief from the work party, but Seth was unrepentant. “Fucking arseholes,” he muttered. He took the roll-up from behind his ear and lit it, bending over and cupping his hand around the match. “Fascists.”

  Adam glanced at him. He doubted there were more than a thousand people in the entire country who understood the proper use of the word ‘fascist’. He said, “You’re going to get yourself in trouble one day.”

  Seth snorted. “I’m not afraid of those jumped-up little shits.”

  The crew reluctantly picked up their toolboxes and set out again into the rain. They had spent the morning boarding up broken windows in a big old hotel overlooking the beach near the station, the tail end of a job which had occupied them for several days. Adam had to wonder why they’d bothered. The place had been overwhelmed by damp and mould; it would take years to make it habitable again, and even then no one in their right mind would want to live there because decades of storms beating at the coast had started to undercut its foundations.

  For lunch, they trooped into one of the community canteens in the maze of little streets just behind the seafront. They sat in what had once been an artisanal chocolatier’s shop and ate thin, watery mutton stew. You could tell a person’s place in Thanet’s hierarchy, more or less, just by looking at them. The general populace were thin and grey and weary, managers and overseers a little more sleek, enforcers generally fit and muscled. Frank and his family looked as if they had never missed a meal in their lives. Seth and some of the others muttered darkly about the quality of the food, but the two women who ran the canteen just shrugged. “You’re welcome to go somewhere else, lovey,” one of them told Seth.

  Aggie’s crew had been together for the best part of a year, going wherever they were sent, doing whatever they were told. They had been pig-sick of it long before Adam joined them, and now they were just going through the motions in return for food and shelter, just like everyone else. Frank and his family had Thanet well-organised, but they were not making it happy. Which Adam thought was a vaguely heartening state of affairs. It was far from being an atmosphere of rebellion, but it was a start.

  That evening, he wearily climbed the steps of The Sands, pushed open the door, and stepped into the foyer, was greeted by the familiar Margate smell of seawater and damp, occasionally mixed with a powerful whiff of decay drifting up from the harbour. Some days, when it wasn’t raining, one could stand at the windows of the dining room and watch Frank
and members of his extended family taking the air or inspecting their troops. Adam didn’t know what to make of it all; there was an element of grim comedy about things here.

  He plodded, bone-tired, up the stairs to his room and unlocked the padlock on the door. The padlocks were a nod to privacy, but the enforcers had duplicate keys to almost every lock in the town, in the name of ‘security’, so it was best not to keep any secrets in your room.

  Adam actually shared the room with two other people, but by a quirk of scheduling, he had never seen them; they were always out while he was there, and vice versa. The only evidence he had that they existed at all was various bits of detritus which appeared mysteriously; discarded clothing, a single boot with a split sole, sandy footprints on the sticky carpet. At first, he hadn’t known what to do about these seemingly phantom manifestations. Then he had tidied them up. Now he just left them where they lay and eventually, after a few days, they went away again.

  He sat down on one of the beds and unlaced his boots, then lay back with his eyes closed and wiggled his toes. It was not, he thought, that he was exactly unused to hard physical work. It was just that he didn’t enjoy it very much. When he first arrived in the town and Mr Harper had shown him the room, he’d had to fight an instinct to just leave again. But that had never been an option, and anyway he barely noticed the place any more. All he did was sleep here because most of the time he didn’t have the energy to do very much else.

  The door opened and Albie poked his shaven head into the room. “You ready?” he said. “Time to go.”

  Adam sighed.

  SETH CALLED CLIFTONVILLE ‘the chav ghetto’, a term Adam was not familiar with but presumed was not complimentary. Albie allowed him a quick wash and change of clothes and then drove him out to Frank’s house, and all the way tried to slow his racing heart, adrenaline fighting exhaustion. It was two days since his nocturnal visit to Mon Repos. The following morning there had been something of a fluster among the ranks of the enforcers and he’d readied himself to flee, but nothing had happened, and that evening Frank had seemed as avuncular as ever. The same the next evening; Frank had even become mellow and expansive enough during the reading to offer Adam a glass of whisky. The safest, the most professional, thing to do would have been to get out of Margate as soon as possible. But his job still wasn’t done, and anyway he’d abandoned professionalism when he let his temper get the better of him and he broke into Frank’s house. He was just going to have to wing it, pretend nothing had happened, and hope for the best.