Cold

by John Sweeney

  They had run out of their last charcoal the previous night and had three matches left. If they didn’t find some driftwood, then they would suffer from the cold. Joe rose at sunrise and walked round the perimeter of their island, seeing if any flotsam and jetsam had escaped his notice on previous searches.

  Nothing. At the shingle beach he stripped off and marched into the sea, the shock of the cold making him gasp. He swam out fifty yards, nodding to the seals bobbing up and down as if they were familiar commuters on the Northern Line back in London, then spinning round to examine the length of the northern shore. There, hidden from him when he had looked for it on the island, jammed in a cove – oh joy – was a wooden pallet. That could keep them warm for weeks.

  He swam to it, wrestled it out of the rock and, dragging it behind him, returned to the beach, feeling ridiculously proud of his trophy. He left the pallet on the flat rock where Katya loved to sit when the sun was out, and stooped underneath an overhang to get to the side of the rock pool in the shade. A cormorant sulkily flapped out of the way. Sunlight made the fishing line all but impossible to see, and besides, he’d had his best luck there, and turned into a man of stone.

  Joe had never lived so simply in all his life. No electricity, no phones, no TV – just wood for a fire, and fish, crabs and cockles to eat. Would Seamus keep his promise and return? How could they possibly make it to Utah? When would Reikhman and his men find them? All of those questions mattered to them, very much, but the most important thing in the world right now was the suspense: would he get a bite on the line?

  Three hours later, Katya emerged from their tiny castle and her eyes widened with delight when she saw the pallet drying in the sun. She put her hands together and clapped, and he inclined his head, acknowledging her applause as if he were a violinist playing in a quartet.

  No sooner had she settled on her rock – it was strange how routines developed, even when life was so primitive – than his line began to thrum. Joe jagged it towards him and soon the mackerel joined its brothers, five of them lying in a row. He’d hidden them from her, but there were few pleasures greater in this new life of theirs than surprising her with an unexpected gift. The mackerel, toasted on kebab sticks homemade from splinters from the pallet, was delicious, washed down with rainwater, made briny from sea spray. They picked over every morsel of flesh, not daring to let a sliver of fish go to waste.

  Reilly got more than his fair share, of course. Katya slipped the dog her last bit of mackerel and smiled at Joe. ‘You make a good caveman.’

  Joe grinned at her and returned to his overhang.

  Reilly heard it first, the gnarl of Seamus’s outboard, in the wee small hours of the night. The dog let out one soft bark and then stopped, as if even he appreciated the need to be quiet.

  Joe and Katya were up in seconds, gathered up the sleeping bag, and were waiting for the dinghy before it nudged against the rock by their home. Accustomed to darkness by now, they jumped into the front and waited for Reilly, never that fond of boats, to join them. The moment the dog was in, Seamus handed Joe a bottle of Bushmills and Katya a chocolate bar.

  ‘So?’ yelled Joe over the buzz of the outboard.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ said Seamus. ‘They left two nights ago, but I’ve been waiting for a fishing boat to give you a ride. I’ve found one that can take you farther west.’

  ‘Somewhere warm?’ asked Katya.

  They couldn’t see his smile in the gloom, but they could hear it in his voice: ‘Not quite. Iceland.’

  They saw the fishing boat rising and falling in the big Atlantic swells to the west of the island, the deck awash with navigation lights and a searchlight tunnelling through the darkness. Having the rendezvous on the seaward side of the island made good sense, away from prying eyes on the mainland, but sea conditions out here were dangerously rough for the small dinghy. Seamus yelled at them to get ready, and they poised to jump. On the word ‘Go!’ Joe propelled Reilly over the side, and he and Katya leapt for the side of the boat.

  Two fishermen in yellow oilskins helped them on board, but immediately as they found their feet on the swaying deck, the door of the wheelhouse opened and a fierce-looking man with beetroot cheeks poked his head out and yelled at Joe, ‘Nobody told me about a fecking dog!’

  Joe replied, ‘The dog stays with me.’

  ‘Does he bite?’

  ‘No.’

  The wheelhouse door slammed shut. Only then was Joe free to realise that he had not said goodbye to his brother. Out to sea, the dinghy was just a darker black against the blackness, rising and falling, falling and rising.

  YAKUTSK PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL NUMBER FIVE, SIBERIA

  Disco ball John Travolta in a white suit dancing dancing dancing staying dead staying dead staying dead buttercup cranberry vodka fish fish fish ganglion dukhi carotid saffron green a grave opens and an old woman stares at him and says I’m not your daughter idiot and a boy with a hole in his face is eaten by a crocodile and a yellow-faced girl opens a door and out of the corner of his right his left one is so fuzzy and cufflinks tied to his wrist cufflinks the wall next to his bed will not stop wobbling and the ceiling won’t stay rises and dipping an earthworm’s squiggle the file burns in acid in acid in acid walls hag zipped chests nerve gas white scarlet bat-black etch wretch retch the floor ripples and a boy with kohl around his eyes and lipstick on his lips and a Kalashnikov in his hands rises up from through the linoleum and hisses at him while a fat man looks on and a Yakut throws a spanner spins plane falls toys dead naked dead some more and shots ring out and a dead boy lies on top of his dead father and sing the Soviet anthem lights are too bright but the idiot with the ack-ack gun is too stupid to fire at them so his lads will die wants to masturbate and tries to move his hands and the wall wobbles dangerous throat hurts gags wrists don’t work legs don’t work don’t don’t don’t dead boy old lady in grave heads spin ceiling buckles walls are no longer white but no can’t dance if you’re chained to a bed crocodile bites the grave chains handcuffs chains he’s chained to the bed hand and feet heads they’re spinning closes eyes and the bat-black walls crouch in and he’s falling falling falling in a helicopter in Afghanistan and it crashes and the fucking dukhi will kill them all cell door opens and a grey-haired nurse with a sadist’s smile in a white nurse’s outfit wheels in a wheelchair and unlocks his chains and places him in the chair and somehow relocks a new encumbrance of chains and wheels him away and he’s moving so fast he feels sick and vomits shit shit shit caviar fish fish bum over himself and on to the corridor and the wind keeps hissing in his ears and they pass a woman being wheeled the other way and her mouth is drooping and spittle and froth are gurgling from her blue lips and he she is Venny and he loves her and she is gone and he is wide awake and although he can’t see through his left eye and he feels like shit he knows they’ve pumped him and Venny full of chemicals and that’s the cause of the chaos inside his head and he knows they have the tape of the psycho killing his daughter in the lift and the name of the psycho is Reikhman and that’s why they’re fucking with his head and Venny is his friend his lover and she and him are fucked and because deep down Venny and he are not not not mad not mad not mad sane sane sane in a world ruled by the madmen he passes windows and somehow he knows because the light is strong and eastern that they are in Siberia because he was once a general and they enter a room whiter than white so white it hurts hurts hurts and there is a man in white like a god like God who are you his voice a Hero of the Soviet Union so that’s who I am your psychiatrist and you have a paranoid personality disorder no you’re not a proper psychiatrist you’re a dickhead and he vomits again but through the vomit he knows that it is the first coherent thought he has had for days and they killed his daughter they killed his daughter and the nurse sadist and the man in white rolls back his sleeve and the syringe plugs into his bloodstream and buttercup ganglion dukhi carotid saffron green disco ball John Travolta in white staying dead.

  SEA AREA SOUTH-EAST ICELAND<
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  Thick fog shrouded their whole world, the Atlantic itself somehow awed by the murk, its restlessness dimmed in the unseeingness of it all. Only the bip-bip-bip of the echo-sounding sonar guided the captain towards the shore. The fishing boat’s engine was trickling along at a few knots when they bumped into land before they had properly spied it.

  True to form, Reilly leapt the moment the fishing boat hit the naturally formed jetty, an outcrop of black volcanic lava reaching out into the sea. Katya followed a second later, and Joe wasn’t long behind. It had been a dire journey, nothing like as dangerous as piloting the SleepEasy through the storm on the Irish Sea, but morally and mentally draining.

  The captain had clearly not wanted them on his boat but had not had the stomach to overrule whoever had fixed their passage. He’d visited his grudge on the three of them – man, woman and dog – tirelessly. So they were only too happy to shout out their hurried goodbyes to the crew and captain, and he was only too happy to reverse engines and vanish into the fog.

  Katya turned to Joe, her black eyes widening. ‘Promise me, we never go in a boat again.’

  Joe nodded but she kicked him in the shins, none too lightly. Irritated, he scowled at her and her eyes widened once more, drawing him in. He buckled and said, ‘I promise, we never go in a boat again.’

  ‘Good Irishman,’ she said and kissed him. Joe worried that if they dare not fly, and they were trying to get to Utah and they were stuck in Iceland, promising never to go by boat again was foolish. But then he reflected the kiss was nice, to put it mildly, and that Katya was the worst, most difficult person to have an argument with on the whole planet.

  Black rock underfoot, no horizon, no end to the murk – still, hard rock was hard rock and the three of them swayed from their mind’s memory of the rocking fishing boat and giggled at the joy of solidity. Joe found himself singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, and Katya was stunned by the fragile beauty of his voice and kissed him again, and Reilly rocketed to and fro, vanishing and reappearing in the fog, his tail swishing this way and that frantically, like a tadpole on LSD.

  Perhaps it was a sea fret, perhaps the winds were different onshore, but within another hundred yards the murk lifted; a sun, of sorts, wafted lukewarmly in an evening sky, and beyond that to the north they could see the black rock taper towards an immense ice field crowned by a volcano. For as the far as the eye could see, there was no sign of humanity – no homes, no churches, no roads. Only black rock and white ice and a sky of deepening blue.

  As they walked on, the sun began to fall in the sky and they could feel the temperature drop. The wind picked up and the awful bleakness of this place began to drill into their minds. If they didn’t find a road soon, death from exposure wasn’t just a possibility. It was fast becoming a likelihood. And then it started to snow.

  The light had grown crepuscular, which explained why Joe did not see the sign; he tripped over it. It was tiny, at foot height, made of wood and written in a strange whirling script: ‘Huldufólk’. The sign led directly to an outcrop of volcanic rock, forty feet high, carved by wind and rain into a fist of stone, pointing at the sky. At its base was a small hole, the width of a man. Joe ducked his head inside and could see nothing, only gloom. He knelt down and crawled in, using his hands to explore. The cave had somehow been carved by volcanic action, smooth underfoot, billowing out so that he was able to stand up in the middle. The temperature was cool but not as cold or as windswept as outside. Strange resting place though it may be, the cave of the Huldufólk was their one chance of staying alive.

  Joe’s fingers stumbled on a small box shape – at the very end of the cave, quite lost in the gloom – that sloshed when he picked it up, a big tin of something, and a rectangular packet which smelt, deliciously, of chocolate. Gathering up the stash, he reversed back on his knees and stuck his head out of the hole to see the entire landscape bathed in scarlet. The sunset revealed his treasure to be a carton of fresh milk, a tin of ham and a slab of dark chocolate – presents, he guessed, for the Huldufólk. They were Iceland’s version of leprechauns, he guessed again, and the food had been provided by locals keen to keep them happy. Still, whoever they were, they wouldn’t mind sharing with two humans and a dog.

  He wanted to share his finds with Katya and Reilly but they had disappeared. In the distance he heard a squeal – of fear, delight? – and Reilly’s unmistakable soft bark: Woof! Woof!

  Joe loped around the other side of the rock outcrop. The stink hit him first, a noxious blend of bad eggs and stale farts. A dense cloud of steam vapour sat above a pool in a basin of volcanic rock, which Reilly was circling, occasionally dipping a paw experimentally in the water. Katya’s clothes were strewn to one side. Joe stripped off, put in a toe to test the temperature, and howled with pain. The water was hot, blisteringly so.

  ‘Come around the side, the water gets cooler,’ said a disembodied voice from deep within the steam. Fearing making the same mistake twice, Joe went to the very end of the pool and dipped in his toe. The water was freezing. Again, he emitted a howl.

  ‘Pussy,’ came the retort from the lady hidden by the steam. He backtracked, experimenting with the water temperature, which climbed from frigid to tepidly lukewarm to pleasantly warm. Gingerly, he lowered his body into the water while Reilly skipped to and fro, both excited and appalled at this fresh spectacle of humankind’s madness. Joe swam towards where the steam cloud was at its most impenetrable, and slid into an embrace as magically and bewilderingly erotic as a dream.

  MOSCOW

  Sausage fingers danced nimbly on the laptop’s touchpad, idling through YouTube, finally finding what he was looking for, and then he sighed and clicked play. His computer came to life, the image fuzzy, not especially distinct, but clear enough to be damning: Zoba, in black suit and tie, on his way to the Kremlin, on foot for once, a warm Moscow summer’s day, bumps into a crowd of nobodies, families from the sticks, his natural supporters, kids, grandmas, the usual. A boy, no more than seven years of age, ash blond, stick arms and legs, a symbol of Russian innocence, none purer, catches Zoba’s eye and suddenly, catastrophically, the President stops and kneels – kneels, for God’s sake – before the boy. The child is wearing cream shorts and a white basketball top, edged with black. Zoba’s hands lock onto the boy’s torso, he lifts up his top, caresses his ribs, leans forward and kisses the child on his naked belly. He pats the boy’s head and then is moving away, fast, surrounded by the usual complement of officers from the Presidential Regiment. And no one stops the slime who is filming the whole thing, the slime who uploads it onto YouTube so the whole world can laugh at Zoba.

  Grozhov extracted a silk handkerchief from his suit pocket and dabbed his jowls, forehead and the back of his neck. His fingers were on the move again, caressing ‘Filters’, coquettishly hitting ‘View Count’, and up popped 306,664. About that, about them, he could do nothing. Of course, there were more sites out there, showing Zoba kissing the boy, but that one site was his constant migraine. Its numbers went up, not down.

  Grozhov’s chins wobbled in gentle agreement with each other as he tapped away at the laptop, capturing all 539 comments and printing them.

  He scooped up the pages from his printer, took out his black-ink fountain pen, and scribbled on a note to operatives on lower floors of the Lubyanka, the best-paid IT technicians in Moscow, that they should investigate any Russian citizen who had dared to mock Zoba for a simple affectionate kiss of a young patriot. Nothing direct, of course, but if one of these snotty fuckers drove to work, then the vigilance of the traffic police towards violations of speed limits and parking regulations would be rewarded; the Tax Inspectorate to be alerted, too; the housing, health and safety, education and social services inspectorates also to be put on their guard. No action by the state organs should be in any way connectable back to the security organ, the FSB – that was a given.

  That task complete, he studied the report from Dr Penkovsky, the lead psychiatrist at the FSB’s specia
l hospital in Yakutsk, six time zones east of Moscow. Grozhov allowed himself a moment’s self-congratulation.

  Patient 10095 – he relished the anonymity of the numerical coding of ‘difficult’ psychiatric cases, a system he himself had devised – is in a state of catatonia. Thus far, he has not responded to pharmaceutical treatment and when the effect of the drug treatment appears to lessen he returns to his anti-social and obnoxious attitudes towards the authorities. His most dangerous delusion is that his daughter was in some way murdered by an officer of the Tax Inspectorate, a fantasy he will not desist from. Regrettably, I suggest that the only possible treatment available to us is a severe course of electroconvulsive therapy. May I have the permission of the relevant authorities to start this therapy?

  The Hero of the Soviet Union had always been a difficulty, Gennady’s fame creating a bubble of impenetrability around him. Killing him was always a possibility – but better, far better, for him to undergo psychiatric treatment. Afghanistan had driven many people mad, and why should that tragic fate not also affect the nation’s youngest general to serve there? Why not indeed?

  Grozhov smacked his chops with satisfaction and lifted up his fountain pen.

  ECT – proceed, he wrote, and signed underneath.

  Grozhov was about to turn his attention to matters more pleasurable, to considering the merits of a new batch of orphans from Krasnoyarsk, when he realised that the note from Dr Penkovsky continued over the page:

  Patient 10096 has not proved receptive to pharmaceutical treatment in any way. Her medical knowledge makes her an intractable patient.

  Grozhov’s mind struggled, momentarily, to remember who on earth ‘Patient 10096’ might be. Ah, yes – Venny Svaerkova, the irritating pathologist who had produced multiple autopsies of use to the fascist enemy, propagating the absurd notion that there were Russian forces inside Ukraine. Irritating, moreover, because she had become some kind of bedfellow with Gennady in his campaign to blame the authorities for the so-called death of his daughter.