by Ian Watson
“Yes. Of course.” Sheri frowned. “Thank you for telling me.
Oddly she seemed to accept this atrocious account coming from Jack’s lips. It occured to Jeni to wonder whether the American woman could have understood half of what Jack said. Jack might as well have told her in Norwegian. The fact that he’d told her was what counted. The manner of Felix’s murder wasn’t too abominable even to be uttered: that relieved her mind, just a bit. And Sheri visibly made up her mind to accept this, and ask no other details. Jack, who’d been watching her reaction circumspectly, nodded to himself. He must have chosen his words intentionally. Jeni felt a surge of gratitude and warmth towards him.
Good thing that Sheri hailed from somewhere in the Mid-West, not from Appalachia or New England or wherever they still spoke vintage English, otherwise she might have understood. Might have.
Where was Appalachia now? Where was the Mid-West? Burnt, blasted, poisoned, frozen. They must be. Along with Russia and Europe and everywhere else. Could Sheri somehow suffer a larger loss because she came from a larger country?
Dead Ned Boxall tottered towards the bar, wagging an empty dimple mug which had never been full. Dead Tom Tate focused his functioning eye foggily on it.
“Pint of,” said Ned indistinctly, and set down his glass an inch short of the bar top. The mug crashed on to the floor, though the thick glass didn’t break. Mitzi giggled hysterically.
“Wey,” said Jack, “we should organize worsels. These lads needs supervizin’. The haal village does. We mustn’t shork.”
“You’re right,” said Sheri. “We’ll work, together. We’ll survive. We’ll keep…the wounded…walking. Give them a purpose.”
Bert nodded. “Let’s form ourselves into a proper committee. Let’s do that tomorrow. I…I must go back and see to Pauline.”
Nell asked him hesitantly, “You aren’t planning to stay at home, are you?”
“With my dead wife in the house? Is that what you mean?”
Nell nodded.
“What else should I do?”
Nell laid a hand on Sheri’s. “Can I come and stay with you, for company?”
“Oh yes. Yes!”
“Me too,” Mitzi chipped in. “Okay? I couldn’t sleep on my own at that Gareth’s. I know it sounds silly, but I wouldn’t feel safe.”
“You’re more than welcome.”
“We’d best shift wor Andy in with yor neighbours, hadn’t we, Jen?” said Jack. “Aa cuddn’t exactly fyace sharin’ a room wiv the lad.”
*
That night while Jack kipped downstairs on the sofa – with the durrah rug hauled over Jeni’s sleeping bag “as a hap to keep worm”, since there was no longer any electricity supply – up in the Dolly Mixture nursery every now and then Jeni hove into wakeful awareness in her bed like some sea mammal, a seal, surfacing for air, as though in the meantime of unconsciousness Melfort might have moved back to what it was before the war, and before the Power gripped the village; as though she might find herself in sight of some headland of sanity.
In vain.
At least no dreams came to her, nor nightmares.
No need. Nightmares had already taken up residence in all the houses round about.
Twenty-two
So the next morning at Jeni’s the committee had got down to business for the first time, most wearing thick sweaters against the March chill. Bert Morris, chairing. Jeni, as secretary. Jack volunteered himself as treasurer and proposed Sheri as bookings officer.
“Or ye could call Sheri social secretary,” he explained, “cos we have to organize events, divven’t we? To keep the corpses tickin’ over. Rouse them oot o’ their houses, into yor hall an’ the boozer. An’ the dead bairns need their play, an’ maybe a bit of edicatin’.”
Bert stared at him. “Gareth was supposed to be organizing a wine and cheese evening. But surely you aren’t proposing –?
“Gannin’ on wiv it? Wey not, man? Wey not a darts toornament? Then there’s them skittles. An’ folks as gans to chorch could try a bit o’ singin’, te remind them. Wey, we could whip up a congregation for the funeral.”
“No!” cried Jeni. “Not in church!”
She’d almost managed to forget about the vicar. She must never go back inside St Mary’s, ever again. That church should be out of bounds. Nobody should enter it. Because. If they did. She glanced in panic at the bare pine planks of her floor, but of course Jack had rolled the durrah up and stuck it away out of sight behind the sofa to stop the rug from getting dirty if any of Jeni’s visitors trod mud in without thinking to wipe their feet. You couldn’t blame someone for forgetting. Not in the circumstances, coming in out of that eerie grey pall.
Jack oughtn’t to have lain asleep under that rug with its tree of doves. The rug could creep, and change! It could hide a yawning pit.
The floor was perfectly solid, and Jack had assured her the sofa was comfortable.
“Not in the church,” she improvised. “That would be a parody, like holding a black mass.”
“Wey, Aa didn’t knaa ye were religious, Jen.”
It would seem like a service to propitiate the Power, to worship it. Since what other power was there? And that Power certainly existed; whatever its nature.
“Sheri here might be religious,” went on Jack. “She may appreciate a service even if it’s of wor own devisin’.”
“No, no, not there! In the graveyard, yes, but not inside the church. Don’t you see how the Power might enjoy that?”
“It could equally relish us stuffin’ him in the groond without a service. Let’s come back to the Power under any other business, or whatnot? Aa’ve some notions.”
“I don’t see anything irreverent about simply laying a body in the good soil,” said Nell. Jeni quickly nodded agreement.
“Quaker-style might be best,” suggested Mitzi. “A time of silence.”
“Whoa!” Bert held up his hand. “We need to take things one at a time, or we’ll get nowhere. We need a proper agenda. Jack’s right about tabling certain items under any other business. As to your little boy’s funeral, Mrs Diamond, it’s surely your wishes that count.”
“I don’t have…wishes for Felix. Not any more. I daren’t have wishes.”
Bert nodded his sympathy. “I’d better add one note of caution. Our vicar kept St Mary’s locked up a lot of the time. He worried himself about vandals. Naturally the churchwarden and the caretaker and the flower rota held keys too, but we mightn’t be able to lay hands on those if the church happens to be locked. We can’t exactly break into the church the way we bust into the White Lion.”
“Of course not!” agreed Jeni.
“Aa’ll gan an’ see if it’s locked. Later on.”
“You do that, Jack,” said Bert. “Now, if our pro-tem secretary has her pen poised, let’s work out a proper agenda.”
Jeni poised her biro over a largely unused John Clare exercise book from which she had torn out the essay on the non-existent British Revolution. How about an essay for next week, class, on the causes of the Third World War? That happened. That wasn’t imaginary history. Only, no one would ever write a book about it. Or print one. Or read one. Ever.
“Hang on a mo,” interrupted Nell, “why should we need a treasurer? Money means nothing any more.”
“Money’s nowt, pet, you’re reet. But we have te inventory aal the canned food in the village, an’ drinks. The deed mightn’t be peckish but we’ve got to eat. The power’s off, so freezers is buggered. Aa divven’t see any falls of manna from the heavens.”
“Oh God, so we’re going to starve.”
“Na, Nell, there’s the village shop, an’ folks’s larders, an’ the pub. Likely there’s enough bait for a year or two. We also got te dee something aboot the animals an’ chickens an’ things.”
“Right,” said Bert, “we’ll table the inventory straight after the election of officers. Come to think of it, maybe Jack ought to be in the chair.”
“Na, man, you’re th
e properly constituted authority. An’ once we get wor hoosekeepin’ sorted oot, someone’s got te take a trip by bike doon the road to see what’s outside Melfort, if anythin’. That’s a job for the treasurer.”
“By bike?” echoed Mitzi. “That’s crazy. You’d need a car for protection.”
“The electromagnetic pulse from the bomb could have fettled any car electrics, pet. Besides, Aa’m thinkin’ that maybe we’d not get very far afore the Power stopped us somehow. Aa suspect that’s what we’ll find. Ye divven’t suppose any bugger as pleases can traipse in an’ oot of a paranormal village of the deed, dee ye? Though Aa’m curious te knaa for sure….”
For lunch following the meeting they grazed on perishables from Jeni’s dead fridge. As Jeni had been dreading, Jack then took himself off for a quick sortie to the church.
Why should she worry? He wouldn’t get in.
While Jack was gone, they sat drinking Nicaraguan coffee made with water boiled on Nell’s gaz camping stove which she kept in the boot of her VW. They sorted out the afternoon’s tasks: make a start on the inventory – then animal welfare – then social work. Rather than wine and Cheese in the village hall they had resolved to kick off the season’s events with a skittles tournament held in the White Lion, ordinarily a popular item.
Ten minutes later Jack returned out of breath.
“Chorch is locked aal reet…body lyin’ ootside as looks like the vicar…ye knaa, black cloak an’ paraphernalia – ”
“That’s Partridge,” Bert confirmed.
“His bloody heed’s missin’ –”
Oh yes, that’s why she had been worrying.
“Aa couldn’t see his heed nowhere. An’ he’s plain deed. He ain’t up an’ aboot like aal the other corpses.”
“How could he be, without a head?” Bert asked wearily.
Sheri shivered. “Maybe the Power hates men of God. It would, if it’s the opposite. Maybe it got rid of his head so that the church would have no head, no voice.” (And Jeni kept quiet as a mouse.)
“Aye, to make him had his gob. Aa wonder if we should bury his body incomplete? That might be a mistake. How aboot we just hump him back to his vicarage an’ stow him there?”
“His bungalow?” Jeni agreed vigorously. “That’s the best place. That’s where he belongs.”
“Dee we aal concur?”
“I’ll help you shift him,” offered Bert, “but let’s pop down to my place first. We’ll probably need a barrow. And I’d like to look in on my Pauline.”
That wasn’t, as yet, the particular committee meeting towards which Gareth would be stumbling….
Twenty-three
A congregation for Felix’s funeral! They hadn’t even tried to drum up an audience. Yet by the time they had privately scheduled – three o’clock – a dozen and more walking corpses had wandered into the overcast graveyard as if by homing instinct. These were the better class of walking corpses, such as Harry Blesworth’s old Dad and Ned Boxall, Marianne Bennett thickly caked in face powder now, and snoopy Enid Jackson whose goitre looked almost fashionable these days; not to mention Nancy and Gareth. They were still a piteous, soiled, decaying bunch, exhibiting sores and swellings, discolouration, drippage, and nervous disorders. Enough maggots and mould were in evidence.
Jack had dug a small grave that morning, about three feet deep. No coffin had been fashioned out of boards or pallet wood; there was just too much else to do, and the result might have been tatty. So Felix was wheeled to the churchyard by barrow and lowered into the grave still in his black rubbish bags.
They stood in silence for a while, the way Mitzi had advised. Jeni stared away into the grey haze which had once been a view of fields unrolling towards Kerthrop. Now there was nothing at all, just a consuming emptiness. The dead pressed closer round her.
“Would anyone mind terribly?” Sheri quavered, “if I sang…the Star-Spangled Banner over him?”
“Wey, ye dee what ye need te dee, Missus.”
So Sheri began to sing. Her voice rose clear and proud, and to her own amazement Jeni found herself humming along. “Dum-ti-dum-dum-dum-dum –” Her throat puckered, and her eyes were wet with tears. How could she possibly weep at the American national anthem? Oh it wasn’t merely the music, the emotive music. And the emotive words. She could as easily have wept for the Marseillaise just then. “Da-da-dada-da –” No, that was a lie. She was weeping for all the human hope and energy and glory embodied in that particular anthem. The dawn’s early glow. The twilight’s last gleaming. She wept for all that had been lost. For the future, for space and the stars which human beings would never now touch. For cities of endless light and freeways. For freeways which had been warped by military men and mega-money corporations and media preachers and patriotic politicians and secret agencies until a great society became a sort of lethal octopus squeezing the world and finally crushing it – by accident or by mistake or by the design of plausible madmen who believed in a personal God and a fetishised flag and crusades for their own version of freedom.
As Sheri sang, Jeni realized that she quite loved America deep down, in a gut way in which she couldn’t really love Russia or China, but the America that she loved had been deeply submerged like some wonderful Atlantis by its own visible and invisible leaders under the waves of destructive power. In a way America had been ruining its own inner self years before the greater, nuclear ruination. Yet its people, when they weren’t pointing an M-16 at you, were usually as wonderful individuals as Sheri was right now. Even though Sheri was a nuclear bomber’s wife, widow. Even though.
So Jeni wept.
When Sheri stopped singing, she smiled lamely.
“Sorry, you guys,” she said, “but it’s part of me. Jesus, I’m so lonely.”
Mitzi moved to touch her. “We’re your family now, Sheri. We’re all each other’s family.”
“You know, when I used to go to summer camp as a kid to do the frontiersman routine…how to cook on an open fire, pitch a tent, handle a canoe…I was always scared of touching the flag in case I let it fall. There’s a special way of folding it, into a pocket handkerchief. There’s a whole art. Whenever it started to rain we’d rush to haul down the flag and fold it, and if it even touched the ground I used to think the earth would open.” She looked at the open earth of the grave where her son lay inside rubbish bags. “If that happened, you’d have to kneel next to the flag and kiss it forty times. Some girls said twenty times would do.” She looked as though she might sink on her knees by the grave and kiss the soil, but then she stiffened. “One girl said you wouldn’t have to kiss it, but you’d never see that same flag again. It would have to be hidden away in shame because it had been dishonoured. Hidden.” She kicked some soil down on to the shapeless black lump; then some more. Mitzi led her aside. Bert took over, with a spade. Soon the grave was a modest hump.
Somehow the dead had hemmed Jeni round, separating her from the others. The dead were nudging her, trying to herd her – towards the church door! Gareth was in the forefront of this moribund mini-mob. He gargled incomprehensibly at her. So did Enid Jackson, her suppurating goitre wobbling like a huge turkey’s wattle. Gareth’s skin was bright pink with leaky sores as an ape’s bum.
What did they want? She feared she knew too well. They wanted her to unlock the church and go into it to confront…what they knew was there. But they were feeble and unco-ordinated in their attack. It was almost an attack. How they stank.
She broke free roughly and ran to join her friends. Behind, the dead milled slowly, confused. Wondering where she’d gone to, like a rabbit who has a juicy apple leaf snatched away from in front of its nose and can’t work out where the thing went to. Filling its universe one moment; vanished the next. You’d never fool a cat the same way. But the dead weren’t cats, they were skinned twitching simple-minded bunnies. Their re-animated minds chewed thoughts that were dead grass.
It must have been the close proximity of the church that afternoon which made the dead try
to crowd her and manipulate her. When, a few evenings after, the White Lion was jam-packed with corpses for the skittles tournament Jeni felt in no way pressured by any of them, only by the smell. It was she and the other survivors who had to do the manipulating; urging the dead to the pub like cows at milking time, like sheep to a new pasture; and once players and audience were assembled in the bar you had to wind their body clockwork up now and then by timely nudges and reminders.
But prior to that tournament, which was itself well before Gar-eth’s shambling approach to a subsequent committee meeting, Jack had ridden out of the village by bike to test the extent of the grey blanket, their protection and their prison wall, as well as to check on the state of any deadstock in more distant fields….
And even as all these various events were unwinding, it seemed to Jeni that time wound round and around on itself. Time had become dreamlike and nightmarish, following a dream logic of associations rather than straightforward sequence. That was rather the way time had behaved, or misbehaved, during her LSD trip back in Oxford. On the morning after the funeral Jeni remembered sitting and thinking very hard indeed about this treachery of time. Or the treachery of her perception of time.
It became clear to her that she no longer knew in what order events were occurring; could no longer quite capture the correct order. Some incidents, when they took place, already seemed to have occurred once before. The memory of other incidents, when Jack or Mitzi or Sheri referred to these, took her by surprise as if they couldn’t possibly have happened yet but sprang into being right then for the first time ever. Yet she did know about these events. She fished them from the future, to become instant memories.
“I’m going insane,” she thought to herself. “I’m going four-dimensional. Or something.”
She remembered thinking. She’d already done so once; or would do so.
“Are we set loose from time?” she wondered. “Are we in some sort of eternity?” While outside of their grey bubble the poisoned snows of the nuclear winter fell from a black sky upon a dead land in a dead world…where forests and cities might still be burning, only their failing flames lighting the stygian scene.