“Oh, bugger!” said Leila.
When they arrived at the grassy area outside the Jollity Theatre there was already a crowd of about a hundred other people there. Most of them had that vacant, dispirited look that typified the residents of the Camp. They were wretched looking creatures. They all had red-rimmed eyes and many of them trembled habitually. Others were so devoid of expression that it was hard to know if they were even aware of their surroundings.
A tall, thin man wearing a long white coat, like a hospital doctor or lab technician, was wandering through the crowd trying, completely ineffectually, to get the people arranged in lines. “I wonder if you two, yes, you two over there, if you might be so good as to stand to the left of that young lady there? And you over there, if you could… oh dear, the two people I sent to join the young lady seem to have wandered off in quite the wrong direction. Never mind, if you three could just move to your left a bit and then…”
Suddenly a raucous voice cut through the air with a rasping bellow like a bull in a very bad temper: “Line up! Line up! You nasty, useless looking bunch of ’orrible stinking, unwashed layabouts. Get yourself lined up on the double or I’ll have you beasted faster than you can say ‘Marilyn Monroe’s Knickers’…”
Geoff whispered to Jonathan: “What’s ‘beasted’ mean?”
“Oy! You!” bellowed the bull-like voice, “Yes, you! The scruffy one!”
Geoff realised, with horror, that the man was pointing towards him. “What, me?” he mumbled.
“Who else would I mean? Of course bleedin’ you! You will not talk when I am in the process of shouting at you. Do you understand?”
“Yes… well, I suppose so.”
The shouting man pushed his way through the crowd towards Geoff. It was only then that Geoff had a clear view of him. He didn’t like what he saw: he was well over six feet tall, had a thick bull-neck, a barrel chest and a face that looked as friendly as a cornered grizzly bear. He was dressed in military uniform and carried a short stick which he was waggling threateningly in Geoff’s direction.
“Did you say ‘I suppose so’, lad?”
Geoff nodded. “I suppose so!”
The man put his face so close to Geoff’s that when he bawled at him, droplets of spit landed on Geoff’s cheeks. “I suppose so, Sergeant Major! Got it?”
Geoff nodded.
“Then say it!”
“I suppose so, Sergeant Major,” mumbled Geoff.
“Louder!”
“I suppose so, Sergeant Major,” he said.
“Louder!”
“I suppose so, Sergeant Major,” he yelled.
“I can’t hear you.”
“I suppose so, Sergeant Major!” he screamed.
“All right, all right, lad,” said the Sergeant Major in a quiet, conversational tone of voice, “No need to shout.”
Sergeant Major ‘Crusher’ Edwards was a sergeant major of the old school. He didn’t believe in the modern namby-pamby approach of treating his inferiors as equals. His inferiors were, by definition, inferior and he believed in treating them as contemptible vermin that were no better than the scrapings off the bottom of his size 10 boots. In the opinion of Sergeant Major ‘Crusher’ Edwards, everyone was his inferior, except of course for superior ranks who were, by definition, superior and who therefore deserved to be treated with a special sort of contempt reserved for snotty-nosed officers with their Eton and Harrow educations and their inability to wipe their own bloody noses, let alone any other parts of their useless bodies. The truth of the matter was that Sergeant Major ‘Crusher’ Edwards hated officers every bit as much as he hated everyone else. But, being dedicated to upholding the fine traditions of the British Army, he tried not to show it.
Within five minutes of being shouted at, the disorderly crowd had been assembled into a rough approximation of three orderly lines. Sergeant Major ‘Crusher’ Edwards strode purposefully along those lines, stopping periodically to aim a finely honed insult at a chosen target. One man was slouching, another had a snotty nose, a young woman had scruffy hair, another man was wearing a stained tie. Sergeant Major ‘Crusher’ Edwards’s comments on these deficiencies were spiced with a rich variety of obscenities and unflattering observations on the parentage of the person at whom he was shouting.
Presently, two men wearing dark grey lounge suits strolled up to the sergeant major. One was a tall, willowy individual with a slightly beaky nose and wavy fair hair. The other was a man of medium height and stocky build with a military bearing which, even though out of uniform, made it readily apparent that he was a British Army Officer. This was the man who now spoke. He briefly thanked the sergeant major and then, with his hands held behind his back, he addressed the shambolic lines of campers in a declamatory voice: “Awfully good to see so many of you here tonight. We have a wonderful show lined up for you which I’m sure you’ll all enjoy. As you probably know, I am Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Digby…”
The willowy individual standing next to Digby leant towards him and whispered in his ear.
“Ah yes, thank you, Captain, er, I mean Mister Smedley.” He continued in declamatory fashion – “The Entertainments Officer, Mr Smedley here, has reminded me, quite rightly, that, er, that I speak to you today as the, er, well I’m not entirely sure of the job title, but as the senior resident officer of the Jollity Holiday Camp and, well, in that capacity, I welcome you all to this show, which I am sure you will enjoy every bit as much as I shall.” Here he turned to Sergeant Major ‘Crusher’ Edwards and mumbled, “Be so good as to lead them in, would you, Sergeant Major!”
“Sir!” snapped Sergeant Major ‘Crusher’ Edwards, “You heard the officer, you ’orrible, ignorant, smelly rabble. At the double, into the theatre, one-two, one-two, one-two…”
“Good show, Sergeant Major,” muttered Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Digby.
The Loneliness of the Short-distance Runner
“Bing-bong! Good morning, all you happy people. The sun is shining, there’s barely a cloud in the sky and some of you lucky campers are about to go on the cross-country ramble. Wakey-wakey, rise and shine! Bing-bong!”
“Seven o’bloody clock. Uncivilised, that’s what this is.” Jonathan was sitting next to Matteo in the Dining Hall. When he’d approached Sergeant Major ‘Crusher’ Edwards on the way into the theatre the previous evening to ask for permission to take a look outside the Camp, he had assumed that Geoff and Leila would want to take a look too. He had not allowed for the possibility that Sergeant Major ‘Crusher’ Edwards’s sunny personality might have given Geoff and Leila second thoughts.
“Sometimes it’s earlier,” said Matteo between mouthfuls of Cornflakes. “Six o’clock. Half past five. Sometimes.”
“Nobody warned me it would involve a cross-country run. I’m too old for running. Twenty-eight. Nearly middle aged. I shouldn’t be running at my time of life.”
Matteo began laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“How does he smell?”
“What?”
“That man. Last night. The man with the stripy jacket. My dog’s got no nose.”
“You are talking about Cheerful Charlie Rubenstein? The comedian? In the ‘Songs From The Movies’ show which we were led to believe would be packed with a glittering assortment of musical and comedic talent?”
Jonathan grimaced involuntarily at the memory. The show had been dreadful. Various members of the staff of the Camp, the so-called whitecoats, had been dragooned into musical numbers ranging from “Puttin’ On The Ritz” to “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (a man after midnight)”. They were all execrable. None of the cast had any singing talent, the tap-dancing routines couldn’t have been any worse if they’d been done in hob-nailed boots and, worst of all, Cheerful Charlie Rubenstein kept popping onto the stage at regular intervals to tell jokes that were so old they practically had mould growing on them. The audience, other than Jonathan, Geoff and Leila, were entranced. The applause was rapturous.
; “My dog’s got no nose,” repeated Matteo, “How does he smell?”
“Terrible.”
“What?”
“That’s the punch line. To the joke. Pass the toast, would you? Thanks. And the marmalade. You see, there’s a sort of a play on words involved. When you say ‘My dog’s got no nose’ the natural question is ‘How does he smell?’ meaning, of course, in the absence of nostrils, how is he able to detect the whiffs and odours wafting all around him. But then comes the punch line ‘Terrible’ and…” Jonathan noticed Matteo’s glazed expression. He had the impression that his explanation was far too complicated for Matteo to understand.
Jonathan decided to change tack. “How did you end up in here, Matteo?”
“They brought me in.”
“Where were you before? Have you got a family? I mean, were you living with your parents?”
“Nope.”
“Where, then? In a home? You know, a home for people with special needs?”
“Sort of.”
“Where was that?”
“Cambridge.”
“Really! That’s a coincidence. We’ve only just come from Cambridge. Where was the home you were in?”
“Trinity.”
Jonathan laughed then realised that might seem rude so apologised. “It’s just that there’s a college there called Trinity. Quite a famous one. I thought for a second you meant that you…”
Matteo nodded. He had managed to get marmalade all over his chin and was picking off the bits of orange peel and putting them into his mouth. “Trinity College. Yup.”
Jonathan looked aghast. Was the boy confused? Jonathan had assumed he was mentally deficient in some way. Or might he really have been a Cambridge student? That was possible. If he had been infected, the sickness might have damaged his mind in some way.
“You were really an undergraduate at Trinity?” Jonathan said.
“Doctor. I wanted to be a doctor.”
“You were studying medicine?”
Matteo laughed. “Don’t be silly. P…H…D… Doctor of Philosophy. History. That’s things that happened in the past.”
“Yes,” Jonathan said, “I know what history is.”
“No call for historians now,” giggled Matteo, “Nobody wants to know about the past, do they?”
*
The run through town helped Jonathan to work up both a sweat and a deep feeling of depression. The town had all the look of a seaside holiday resort without any holidaymakers. The few people who wandered the streets had about them the blank-eyed, hungry look of people who carry on living but have forgotten why.
“They look like zombies,” Jonathan said, in the gaps between puffing and panting, running to keep up with the pace being set by the more athletic runners at the front of the group.
“They are the lucky ones,” Matteo answered, “They don’t know they are unhappy because they can’t remember what happiness is.” For someone who usually had difficulty stringing together a sentence, this sounded like a suspiciously profound observation. There was more to Matteo than met the eye.
A loud bellowing voice cut through their conversation. Sergeant Major ‘Crusher’ Edwards, who was running alongside, keeping an eye on the group as a whole, sprinted up and shouted, “Never mind gossiping like a pair of bleedin’ pansies. Move them scrawny legs and get runnin’, you lazy blighters!”
“Yes, Sergeant Major!”
Sergeant Major ‘Crusher’ Edwards ran on towards the front of the group, which left Jonathan and Matteo free to talk again. “Where are the red-eyes?” said Jonathan, “I thought we’d see lots of them out here, outside the Camp.”
“Not here. When they see any red-eyes, they shoot them. The people here are either uninfected or cured.”
“Cured?”
“Project Exodus. They cure the sick by turning them into vegetables.”
A woman in a yellow headscarf stood at the side of the road, smiling broadly and waving to the runners as they went past.
“Take her, for instance,” said Matteo, “She hasn’t got a clue what she’s smiling at. She’d smile and wave at a rabid dog or a gang of terrorists wielding machetes.”
The more he saw of the town, the more the town looked, to Jonathan, like the set of a movie. The streets were too clean, the shops too empty. People walked about as though everyday life was continuing along normal lines. But, as far as Jonathan could see, the people didn’t do anything. They stood on street corners, they glanced into shop windows. They looked like extras in a film waiting to be given instructions by the director. But there was no director. There were no instructions.
“Were you really doing a PhD at Cambridge?” asked Jonathan.
“Absolutely. Anglo-Saxon burial practices. Do you know much about them?”
“Not a lot.”
“If we ever get out of here, I’ll tell you. Fascinating subject. Have you ever visited Snape in Suffolk?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“The Snape Anglo-Saxon cemetery, of course. It always surprises me how few people have ever heard of it.”
It was difficult to keep up the conversation as they were running. Sweat was pouring down Jonathan’s face and he had to space out his words between gasps… “If you don’t… mind… my saying so… you seem different now.”
“Really? Different from what?”
“From every time… I’ve ever spoken to you. From… this morning. Over breakfast. You were… going on about… Cheerful Charlie Rubenstein’s… bloody awful jokes. You seemed like…”
“A simpleton?”
“Well, yes.”
“I did a bit of acting. At Cambridge. We did ‘Of Mice and Men’ last term. I played Lennie. It was terribly good practice.”
“You’re telling me that you are… acting?”
“I’m playing the part of Lennie. All the time. Not the American accent, of course. But in all other respects.”
“You’re not acting now, though.”
“No need, is there? Nobody can hear me. Not while we’re running.”
“But, I thought…”
“Left-right, left-right, you put your left leg in, your left leg…”
“What?”
Jonathan caught sight of Sergeant Major ‘Crusher’ Edwards. He had jogged back to their position again. Matteo had noticed him before Jonathan and had instantly reverted to his simpleton performance.
“You two seem to be having a bloody good natter!” the Sergeant Major bellowed, “What the ’ell you been nattering about is what I’d like to know?”
“Songs, Sergeant Major,” said Jonathan, “Matteo was singing songs. Running songs.”
“If you got the energy to sing songs, I’ll ’ave to suppose you got the energy to run another ten miles, won’t I?”
“I’ll try to keep him quiet, Sergeant Major.”
“You better bleedin’ keep him quiet or I’ll have you cleaning the bleedin’ sports ground with a bleedin’ toothbrush when we get back. Understood?”
“Understood, Sergeant Major.”
After that, they ran on in silence.
Blood, Swabs and Biscuits
“Just roll up the sleeve of your shirt. That’s it. This won’t hurt a bit.”
“Ouch!”
“Try not to move while I take the blood. There, that’s all there is to it. Now my colleague will just take a little swab from your mouth and that’s everything done.”
Geoff rubbed the spot on his arm where the nurse had stuck in the needle. It was the same arm where a mad old farmer with a gun had shot him earlier in the year. The gunshot wounds had healed just in time to be subjected to the hypodermic wound of the mad old nurse.
The nurse who took the swab seemed less enthusiastic about her job than the nurse who took the blood. Maybe that was because taking a swab didn’t involve inflicting pain.
Standing in line behind Geoff, Leila was arguing with the nurse with the hypodermics. “You come one step nearer to me with that needle
and I’ll take your damned head off!”
“Now, now, my dear, there’s really nothing to it. Look the other way if the sight of blood worries you.”
Leila laughed. “The sight of blood doesn’t worry me in the least, my dear. Just as long as it’s someone else’s blood. And if you come any closer to me with that needle, I know exactly who that someone else is going to me.”
The nurse tutted. “This is most irregular. I have to fill in the details here on the form. I can’t submit the form if the details aren’t filled in.”
“Then you know what you can do with your damned form then, don’t you? And if you don’t know, I’ll be only too happy to show you!”
There were just a dozen or so people left standing in line now. The ad hoc clinic had been set up in a room called the Jollity Grill. In former times, campers had come to the Jollity Grill to dine on steaks and chops. Now the chairs and most of the tables had been stacked against the walls. Three tables had been arranged end to end and covered in white cloths. Three nurses, all in uniform, stood behind the tables with boxes of disposable needles, syringes, swabs and chocolate biscuits. The third nurse, a tall, craggy-faced, unsmiling weasel of a woman, was in charge of the biscuits. After each camper had given a sample of blood and a sample of spit, she was charged with giving them a biscuit as a reward. From the expression on her face, Geoff reckoned she’d probably prefer to do something more painful: extracting teeth without anaesthetic, perhaps?
Leila moved along the line until she was standing in front of the nurse with the swabs. She allowed the inside of her mouth to be swabbed with ill grace. Then she passed on to the nurse with the chocolate biscuits. The nurse looked her up and down but did not hand over a biscuit. “The biscuits,” she said, “are for those who have given blood.”
“I don’t want your damn’ biscuit, my dear. You can put your damned biscuit in the same place she,” (nodding in the direction of the first nurse) “can put her damned syringe!”
The Exodus Plague | Book 2 | Imprisoned Page 13