Shelter

by Dave Hutchinson

  Frank answered the door himself, recently-bathed and smoothly-shaved, wearing his tweed suit with a cravat tucked into the neck of his shirt. “Adam!” he said cheerfully. “Mate! Glad you could come! Please, come in.”

  Adam stepped into the hallway and stood dripping on the carpet. The house was well-lit by oil lamps and there was an almost unbearable smell of cooking. “Hello, Frank,” he said.

  “Here,” said Frank. “Let me take your coat. Do you want to dry your hair? Rhoda!”

  Rhoda came to the kitchen door, not nearly as happy and well-nourished as her boss. She was wearing an apron and holding a tea towel, and the bruises on her face were poorly-hidden with make-up. Her nose was swollen and one of her lips was split. “Yes, Mr Pendennis?”

  “Fetch Adam a towel, there’s a good girl.”

  “It’s okay,” Adam told them both. “I’m fine. Really.”

  “You’re not,” Frank said. “Just look at you. You’ll catch your death.” Which seemed unlikely; the house was heated to within an inch of its life. “Get him a towel,” he told Rhoda.

  “Yes, Mr Pendennis.” The girl went upstairs, came back a few moments later with a fluffy white bath towel, which she handed to Adam without looking him in the eye. Adam stood there with the towel in his hand, momentarily unsure what to do with it, as Rhoda returned to the kitchen.

  “Thought we’d have a bite of dinner before we get started tonight,” Frank said amiably, leading the way towards the dining room.

  “All right,” said Adam. Just another normal evening at the Pendennises’.

  “So,” Frank said. “How are you doing? Everything going all right?”

  Adam unfolded the towel and rubbed it over his hair. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said. “Thanks for asking.”

  “I like to look after all my friends,” Frank said amiably. He also liked to look after his enemies, although not quite in the same way. Adam fought to remain calm.

  After weeks coming here, the dining room still looked absurd. The curtains were drawn against the wind and the rain and the night, there was a fire burning in the hearth, and there was another young woman, this one dressed as a waitress, standing to attention beside a table set for two. Adam had a very strong urge to grab a fork from one of the place settings and stab Frank repeatedly in the face with it.

  But instead he allowed himself to be seated at the table, and sat there, overheated and damp, while the girl managed to serve steaming bowls of oxtail soup without looking either at him or at Frank. He wondered where the blind woman was, what she had told Frank, if anything.

  “So,” Frank said between slurped spoonfuls, “what have you been up to today?”

  Adam, who hadn’t tasted anything remotely as good as this soup for longer than he could remember, took a moment to realise he was being spoken to. “Sorry, Frank?”

  “Work-wise. What have you been up to?”

  “Oh. Boarding up windows in that big hotel near the station.”

  “You’re quite pally with that old sod Seth Godden, aren’t you.”

  “We’re on the same crew. I wouldn’t say we’re ‘pally’.”

  Frank chuckled. “He’s going to get you all in trouble one day, talking to my lads like that.”

  “I told him that.”

  “I bet he told you to fuck off.”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  Frank chortled. “I remember when he first turned up, you know,” he said. “Must’ve been, what, twelve, fifteen years ago. My dad was still alive back then; he liked to have a quiet chat with all the newcomers, if he could.”

  Adam wasn’t sure whether to believe some of the stories he’d heard about Frank’s father, the monstrous Leonard, but if only a fraction of them were true, the thought of him welcoming new arrivals was actually quite scary.

  “So Seth turns up,” Frank went on genially. “Scruffy as fuck; he’d walked from...oh, I don’t know, Hampshire or something. Half-starved. And my dad says to him, ‘You know what? I like the look of you, young Seth. You can stay here so long as you work hard and keep your nose clean, and we’ll do right by you.’ And do you know what Seth told my dad?”

  Adam looked down at his soup bowl. He had somehow managed to empty it without being consciously aware of doing it. “Of course I don’t, Frank. I wasn’t there.”

  “He said, ‘Fuck you, I don’t work for no man.’ Imagine that.” And he chortled again.

  “That sounds like Seth, all right,” Adam agreed.

  Frank sat back and clasped his hands across the smooth swell of his belly. “That tickled my dad, that did. So he broke Seth’s leg with a lump hammer.”

  Adam laid his spoon down beside his soup bowl. After a few moments he said, “He says he fell off a ladder.”

  “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” Frank shook his head. “Always a hands-on sort of chap, my dad.” There was a tiny little bell on the table; he picked it up and tinkled it and put it back down. “Anyway, once he’d done that, Seth didn’t have any choice but to stay here and play nice.” He beamed.

  The girl came into the room and tidied away the soup bowls. A few moments later, she returned from the kitchen with plates, which she set in front of them.

  “What’s her name?” Adam asked, when she had gone back to the kitchen.

  “Her?” Frank looked surprised. “Dunno. She’s new.”

  Adam nodded and looked at his plate. Slices of dark meat, potatoes, green beans. Two days’ meals for one of the people in his work gang. He frowned at the food.

  Misreading his expression, Frank said proudly, “Venison. Bet you’ve never had that before.”

  Frank would have been surprised. The New Forest was full of deer, and a lot of venison made its way west. Adam cut a morsel of the meat and chewed it. Not bad. Not great, but not bad. Frank’s family had made good use of the Glasshouses. They were not farmers, but even they could appreciate just how valuable the place was, in a world where crops were failing and people were starving.

  “Where’s Gussie?” Frank asked.

  Adam looked at him, silently counted to three. “What?”

  “Gussie,” Frank said calmly, spearing venison, potato and beans with his fork. “Where’s Gussie?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Oh, come on, son.” Frank put the food in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “You can do better than that. Tell me where Gussie is and we’ll forget all about it.”

  “I don’t even know who Gussie is, Frank.”

  Frank put his knife and fork down on his plate and crossed his arms. “You know,” he said reasonably, “it’s a shame to spoil a nice dinner like this.”

  “To be fair, Frank, I’m not the one spoiling it.”

  Frank looked at him for a few moments more. Then he reached out, picked up the little bell, and rang it again. This time, instead of the girl in the waitress’s uniform, Albie stepped into the room.

  “So,” Adam said. “No dessert, then?”

  “YOU KNOW WHAT your problem is?” asked Frank.

  “I have a good heart and a trusting nature?” tried Adam.

  Frank chuckled. “Well, that too, I don’t doubt. But no, no. Your problem is you don’t know when you’re well-off. Do you want something to drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Frank got up from the table and walked over to the window. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back and looked out over the vista of rooftops and houses. “Don’t know when you’re well-off,” he repeated, half to himself.

  They were sitting in a room in the Barracks, where Frank quartered his enforcers. It was a big old apartment block almost on the seafront, and it towered over everything else. Adam had lost count of the number of times he’d walked past it, but he had never stopped seeing it. It was just one more visible manifestation of Frank’s power. The room itself was almost bare of any furniture; just the table and a couple of chairs and a filing cabinet, which probably didn’t contain much of anything.

  “My gr
andad built this place eighty years ago,” Frank said without turning from the window. “Came here from London, walked out with his mum and dad and some friends.”

  Adam was weary of hearing about Frank’s family history, but he wasn’t in any position to complain. He looked down at his feet, which were bound by the ankles to the legs of the chair, and he thought that was the real answer to the question, ‘You know what your problem is’? He looked at Frank, all unruly grey hair and badgery eyebrows. He looked at Albie.

  “You could just let me go,” he suggested.

  Frank looked at him, a surprised expression on his face, as if the thought had never occurred to him. Which of course it hadn’t. “Nah,” he said eventually.

  Worth a try. Adam flexed his wrists, but the cords binding them to the back of the chair didn’t give. At least no one had hit him yet.

  Frank returned to the table and sat down again. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up above the elbows, and for the first time Adam noticed the knots of muscle in his forearms. The two of them looked at each other for quite a long time.

  Finally, Frank said, “This isn’t a good situation, you know.”

  “I had noticed.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean for you,” Frank said irritably. “I don’t care about you. It’s not a good situation for me.”

  Adam sighed.

  “I can’t have any fucker just swanning in here and taking stuff from me,” Frank went on. “It makes me look stupid. It makes me look weak.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “If I look stupid and weak, people are going to start wondering what the point of me running things is.”

  “It’s a difficult one, Frank, I agree.”

  “Don’t patronise me, son. I’m not the one tied to the chair.”

  “I was just thinking that, Frank.”

  Frank glared at him. “I want Gussie back,” he said.

  “I don’t know where Gussie is, Frank. How many more times?”

  “You were seen.”

  Well, that hadn’t happened. Unless the blind woman had been a lot less blind than he’d thought. Frank was fishing, although to be fair he was fishing for the most recent person he had introduced to Gussie. “Whoever told you that is lying.”

  Frank sat back and regarded Adam. “Why? Why would anyone do that?”

  Because they’re shit-scared of you and they’ll say anything at all if it means you giving them an extra square meal a day. “I don’t know, Frank. Maybe they don’t like me.”

  “Well, I can see how they’d feel like that. I don’t like you.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know,” he said. “Did we treat you badly or something?”

  “I haven’t done anything, Frank.”

  “You’ve stolen from me.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  Frank looked past Adam, who heard a shuffling of feet behind him and tried to tuck his head entirely down between his shoulders. He wasn’t fast enough; there was an enormous concussion on the side of his head which left his ear ringing. He blinked away the pain and stared at Frank and Albie hit him on the other side of the head.

  “So,” said Frank. “Where’s Gussie?”

  THE BARRACKS MUST have seemed ridiculously out of place, even before the disaster; it was a huge concrete and glass block, far taller than any other building in town. From its upper floors, on one of the rare clear days, you could see along the coast to Sheppey, but the room where they put Adam had no windows. They didn’t bother untying his hands and feet, just dumped him on the floor and locked the door as they left.

  He lay where he was, counting the aches and pains. It took a while. He didn’t think anything was broken, but a couple of his teeth felt a bit wobbly. Maybe it was his imagination.

  After some time, he rolled over on his back and managed to sit up. Pushing with his heels, he managed to hutch by degrees over to the wall and rest against it. The room was small and shelved on two sides, some kind of storeroom. It smelled of mould and cobwebs. The whole fucking town smelled of mould and there were slugs everywhere. There was a vent in the door, near the bottom, and the faint lamplight coming through that from the corridor outside was the only illumination.

  Escape never even crossed his mind. Before he did anything else, he was going to have to free his hands and feet, which was much harder than people tended to assume. If he managed to do that somehow, he was going to have to get out of the room. He’d managed a glance at the door as they bundled him inside, and it didn’t look particularly solid, but without a key his only option was kicking his way through it. Which was going to be noisy enough to bring the whole town running. After that, he was going to have to get out of the Barracks, which was full of armed people. And after that, he was going to have to get away from Margate somehow, with no supplies and no weapons. No, escape was not, at the moment, a realistic possibility. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

  Hours passed. He was deep within the building and the only sounds he could hear were the footsteps of people walking along the corridor outside, the occasional quiet conversation. He dozed uncomfortably, woke up, dozed again.

  Eventually, someone came down the corridor and stopped outside the door. The key turned in the lock and the door opened.

  “Time to go,” said Albie.

  “THE GAFFER’S GOING to give you one last chance,” Albie said in a low voice as they headed for the stairs leading to the ground floor. When Adam didn’t respond, he said, “Do yourself a favour, son. Tell him where Gussie is.”

  Adam put his head down and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. They’d untied his ankles and then retied them with a short length of cord. Just enough to shuffle along, not nearly enough to save himself if he lost his balance.

  “We had someone like you last year,” Albie went on. “Outsider. Ella, she called herself. Said she was from Lincolnshire, but who knows? She just walked in one day, like you did. Good girl, hard worker, good with her hands; the Gaffer put her to work helping to do up some houses in Canterbury – you know what it’s like there. Mind your step.” They’d reached the top of the stairs. “Wouldn’t want to take a tumble and hurt yourself. Anyway, someone saw her making notes and hiding them outside town. A spy. The Gaffer was livid, of course. We hung her.”

  Adam jumped over the banister.

  Had he actually taken time to think about it, it would probably have occurred to him that jumping into a stairwell of uncertain depth with his ankles tied and his wrists bound behind his back was not a terrifically good idea. On the other hand, they were going to hang him anyway, or put him in the Shell Grotto to starve to death. He hopped briefly up onto the banister, took a fraction of a second to balance himself, and jumped out into the stairwell, concentrating on keeping his balance and praying there was no rubbish at the bottom.

  It was a drop of about thirty feet onto a flat hard floor. He bent his knees and rolled, used the momentum to bring himself to his feet again. Two flights up, there was a racket of running feet and shouting.

  Now what?

  He was in a short corridor lit by a single oil lamp. At the end was a blank wall with what looked like a big metal door set into it at around chest height.

  Ah, fuck it.

  He shuffled quickly down the corridor to the door – they were almost at the bottom of the stairs now – and nudged it with his shoulder. It hinged up slightly and he thought for a moment. They’re going to hang me anyway. He shouldered the door up and threw himself through.

  And found himself falling again, sliding down a steeply-angled metal chute that dropped him, after a few panicked seconds, onto a pile of musty mouldy cloth with a force that drove the breath from his lungs and almost dislocated his shoulders.

  No time to pause. Tucking his knees up to his chin, he managed to bring his feet between his bound wrists and get his hands in front of him and stand up.

  Right. Now what? He was in a large, echoey concrete-walled room strewn
with masses of rubbish and illuminated by dim light coming in from a line of narrow, filthy windows set high up near the ceiling. He glanced around as he tried to loosen the cords around his wrists with his teeth. Some kind of storeroom? There were doors at either end, and a line of shelves along the opposite wall, piled high with junk and ancient boxes. Dust and cobwebs everywhere, and the place stank of rodent piss. It didn’t look as if anyone had been in here for a very long time.

  There was a thunderous rattling in the wall behind him, and with a bang one of Frank’s enforcers dropped out of the hatch and thudded onto the pile of cloth in a cloud of dust. Adam looked desperately around the floor near his feet, saw a length of piping sticking out of a pile of rubbish, grabbed it, half-turned, and hit the enforcer squarely in the face as he stood up. The man crumpled and lay still. There was a knife strapped to his calf; Adam took it and cut the cords binding his wrists and ankles, then he scooped up the enforcer’s fallen shotgun and looked around the room again. A minute had passed since he jumped down the stairwell; maybe two. Albie had sent one of his men down the chute just in case, despite it being a poor tactical move. The rest of them would be running downstairs to the basement and any moment now one of those doors was going to fly open, and then there would be a brief period of shooting, after which Adam and a number of enforcers would be dead.

  He went over to the opposite wall and looked up at the windows. They looked almost too narrow to squirm through, but he climbed up on the shelves for a look anyway and saw that the windows weren’t built to open; they were set into solid frames. He thought about it briefly, then jumped down, ran over to the enforcer and stripped off his waterproof waxed jacket. Going back to the shelves, he climbed up again, swung the shotgun, and smashed one of the windows.