Iris II, he notices now, has been pulled back out to sea, and has resumed her southwards voyage, passing them by along the coast. Ash shades her eyes, stands with him watching the little boat drift. Her hair has gone wiry from the saltwater spray, and the down below her nape is delicately frosted.
He has to do something with his hands, and plunges them in his pockets.
Ahead of them, half-submerged in the sand, is a pillbox. The cement structure, blackened by some past fire, stands out in the surrounding whiteness, and by silent agreement that’s what they’re walking towards. He is shaky on his feet; the ground still seems to rise and fall with the waves.
Closer to the bunker he sees that graffiti, layers of it, covers the blackened walls. The grass that dots the dunes has taken root on top of the bunker, incongruously growing blonde out of the black cement head. The loopholes, the graffiti-tattooed face, the blonde smock of hair: the bunker looks like a sub-Saharan mask. A pagan god; grim, disappointed at their arrival.
They drop their luggage in the sand.
‘Let’s leave everything in there,’ Jessie says.
But inside it is filthy, so they climb a dune and leave their bags on top of the bunker, hidden in the grass. They decide to only take the rifle and water.
The plan is to find a car, and they head inland. From the top of a dune he sees they are a few hundred feet away from a road that snakes down the coast. They can see the outskirts of a town.
What will they actually do when they meet people? It will be a meeting like no other in history. Will they shout at one another from a safe distance?
‘Do you speak French?’ he asks the girls.
From behind her mask, Jessie gives him a look.
2
The signs of chaos are subtle. There’s garbage on the streets, and overflowing bins, but not much more than on a Saturday morning on Dean Street. Jessie has removed the rifle from her shoulder and is holding it in her hand. They are on a residential street, advancing slowly, haltingly, squinting at the empty, windblown verandas on either side, so on edge that he has a small shock every time his glance falls on the girls’ masked faces. The silence is uncanny, too. It’s as though someone has turned nature to mute. He looks up: where did all the birds go? Are they just momentarily gone, or did something happen to them?
The sky is the shade of azure he used to think of as benevolent.
Many windows are wide open, here and there a windowpane is broken. He imagines riots and looting, but then a breeze and the creak of a hinge make him realise that they must have smashed shut and broken in a strong wind.
Sweat runs into his eyes and he breathes heavily. The flimsy surgical mask is an instrument of torture in this heat.
He spots a poster glued to a lamp-post. A knot in his stomach, he thinks he can see the nuclear trefoil, but as he comes closer the markings turn into a sketchy map, the words ‘CENTRE DE SECOURS’ above. Secours means help, he remembers that much from elementary French.
What was the word for hope – espoire?
Tim had been studying French, or at least he had several French textbooks in the apartment. When Harry tried to get someone at Tim’s work to meet with him, this was one of the things he meant to ask: was Tim studying French for work? In the event, he got no nearer to meeting any of Tim’s colleagues than the Scottish-accented voice of a PA (only briefly bewildered, then cool and dismissive), then the answering machine, and finally a pockmarked security guard who repeated, ‘Nothing for you here, mate,’ while escorting him out of the building, through a little square, and all the way on to the public footpath of Leadenhall.
The memory jars somehow, and he thinks it’s the humiliation he felt at the time, but no, there’s something else.
‘Just look at this,’ Jessie says, pointing around her. ‘Aliens will think Earth was populated by cars. They’ll do all their experiments on them.’
There are plenty of cars around, parked on the kerb or in driveways. When they talked about it back in England, they left it just at that, we’ll take a car, but now, surrounded by cars, they are at a loss. He follows the girls into another street.
Ash is quiet behind her mask, struggling, he guesses, with the desolate scenery. Jessie talks too much. She was subdued after she lost his bag, but the prospect of acquiring a car has abruptly animated her. Her eyes have hardened, and she harries them along, implying that there is but one car out there for them, and they will not only have to work hard to find it, but also fight off competition. She’s in one of her manic modes, full of an energy that offends and exhausts him, that makes him want to lie down and do nothing at all.
‘We can’t be stupid about this.’ Jessie turns to them, refusing to stop, talking while walking backwards. She doesn’t seem to be joking.
Ash joins in half-heartedly, now and then thinking out loud desirable specifications.
‘We’ll probably need to sleep in it sometimes. It needs to be big.’
‘Big boot, too. For food and stuff.’
‘Manual,’ he offers, and Ash says, ‘Does it matter?’ and this is how they choose to inform him that neither of them knows how to drive.
‘Ah,’ he says. ‘I’d been wondering what you need me for.’
He makes the reproach without thinking, just a humorous comment, so that it’s only in hearing the words that he considers them. Then it hurts; the hurt grows within him like an ink stain.
‘For your supplies of self-pity,’ Jessie says.
Before he can reply she encircles his arm and laughingly drags him along, she won’t let an argument divert them from their task. And so they keep wandering from car to car, shield their eyes and peer inside. They test the doors, kick at the tyres. They’ll say, ‘I like this one’, but in the absence of a firm decision they move on.
He thinks how one does things, or one doesn’t do things, in the hope that it doesn’t matter. So many times. Half a life, maybe more, willingly scrunched up as doodles and chucked in the bin.
‘Come on, what kind of car do we want?’ Jessie asks.
She now believes it should be a 4x4.
He doesn’t disagree, but when they come across a dusty Rover, all four doors are locked and Jessie just shrugs and walks on.
They arrive at a Supermarché and a car park scattered with vehicles, and suddenly he and Jessie, surgical masks and everything, are engaged in a parody of customer and car salesman. ‘Zis one, Monsieur,’ Jessie puts on a terrible accent, ‘does zero to one hundred miles in three zeconds. Moreover, it is very economical. It will cost you nothing at all as long as you’re willing to extract by zuction the petrol of other vehicles. And Madame will have beaucoup boot space for her Louis Vuitton bags.’ Ash smiles at this, the sun in her face, the eyes sharp indigo slits. There’s a vein at the side of her forehead that despite the world ending goes about its business of being a vein.
When he does portraits he pins blown-up segments of photos to the wall – an ear, the eyes, the corner of the mouth with its cumbersome grooves – and he thinks now that with Ash he could well reverse this process, with Ash, he could recreate the enlarged photos from the details of his memory.
But they’re in France, in a car park. He pats his pockets, pretends to offer an imaginary wallet to Jessie the salesman. They carry on for a few minutes, until they make out a shape on the floor of the car, it could be bags but also something else, it is a body, and they recoil, abandon the vehicle and the car park altogether, embarrassed and ashamed.
‘This is stupid,’ Jessie says when they’re back on a road. ‘What we need is a car straight off a driveway. The keys will be in the house. If the front door is locked, we just break a window.’
They walk on. There’s a fire in the distance, releasing black smoke. Outside a restaurant they come across an abandoned ambulance, the doors wide open, keys in the ignition, and it’s tempting to take it, for the space, but of course it will be full of germs. This debate he has with himself, having stopped at what he hopes is a safe distance
to look into the ambulance. The girls just walk past.
At a street corner, a pile of yellow bodybags, and gallon-sized plastic containers that the girls say is disinfectant. ‘The hospitals couldn’t cope with the number of patients, so they did that instead.’ It is Ash who goes on to explain about the mobile care centres; Jessie is kicking up dust, growing bored with the day and their search. ‘Then they gave up on that too,’ Ash says.
He is dimly aware of a list of things that matter and that are lost. A grand, ordered list, official and just, hanging down from the heavens. How can he grieve for his stuff? He realises he should have dived for that sketchbook just to save some speck of his work from competing on this list.
‘Are you OK?’ Ash says.
He’s about to say something when they hear a noise from behind a house. Faint and metallic, like the creak of a gate. He points at the house where the noise came from, means to walk over, but hears Jessie say, ‘It’s probably nothing.’
She has taken the rifle off her shoulder and is aiming it at the house.
‘It’ll be the wind,’ Ash says. She has moved in close to her sister.
He ignores them and goes to the house, a semi-detached building with a straggly palm tree out front. To get to the back, he has to pass through a narrow path between the house and the tall wooden fence separating it from the neighbours. About halfway through, he hears the noise again. He stops, turns to look at the girls, and is met by the sight of the muzzle and Jessie’s squinting eye. She shakes her head at him by way of ‘what are you getting us into?’ He grabs the barrel and directs it away from him.
Sweat runs from his nose and eyebrows; the drops feel ice-cold now.
They keep going until a backyard opens up before them. It’s an abandoned construction site. The steel skeleton of some kind of structure rises at the back. Brick and sacks of cement lie in a pile, along with electric drills and other tools. A huge bucket dangles from a rafter by a chain.
He has stopped, one arm stretched out sideways, blocking the girls’ path. But Jessie pushes him aside and goes, rifle pointed, to the bucket. She gives it a shove. That creak they heard earlier, but also a scraping sound, then out comes a rat. It teeters for a moment on the rim of the bucket, face to face with Jessie, who stumbles backwards, swearing. Quick as water the animal circles the rim, jumping off the bucket on the opposite side. It disappears into the pile of bricks.
‘Christ,’ Jessie says, then she turns around and leaves. He hesitates, peers through the columns to the back. But there’s only a mound of earth and, behind it, the wooden fence. He follows the girls.
Out in the street, Jessie tears off the surgical mask.
‘That’s it,’ she says. ‘There’s no one.’
‘You’re going to shoot someone if you keep this up,’ he says.
She wants to say something, but stops herself.
‘You missed what happened in London,’ Ash says. ‘You’d have been wary too.’
‘Then speak to me, woman! You go around all trigger-happy, claim there’s good reason for it, but won’t explain a thing!’
He has thrown off his mask as well, has stopped in the middle of the road and is shouting at them.
‘You’re serious?’ Jessie says. ‘You can’t guess what it’s like when everyone’s desperate, and there’s no authorities?’
‘We’re just being cautious,’ Ash says.
‘People. Who made it. Are like us,’ he says.
Jessie shoulders the rifle and strides ahead.
He thinks he is being reasonable, but he has been wrong so often lately, so naive in his optimism, that maybe the girls are right. Maybe it’s not insane to want to shoot any of the last remaining humans. He remembers the farmer and his son. They were terrified, too.
‘We’re just tired,’ Ash says when he is level with them. She pats his back. ‘We shouldn’t be arguing.’
In the end, he’s the one who spots their car. He sees it from the road, a broad golden rear end in the courtyard of a low, sprawling house. The car is almost blocked from view by a bizarre-looking agricultural vehicle, a red spidery thing. They enter the courtyard, walk in silence around the car.
It’s an old Mercedes – from the early seventies, he guesses. It’s dusty with sand blown in from the beach, but otherwise it looks in perfect condition. He burns his hand on the sun-baked metal wiping the sand off the top of the car. Underneath, the chassis really is golden. Metallic, shiny.
‘Hey,’ Jessie says. She has opened the driver’s door, and after they all step back from the blast of hot air, they crowd around her to look in. The seats are cream-coloured leather. The dashboard is made of wood, dark brown twirls across the caramel sheen. The steering wheel is cream-coloured like the seats, and also covered in leather.
‘The wheels,’ he mutters, and does another tour around the car. All four look sound.
He steps in, grabs the steering wheel. The seats are enormous, there’s a palm’s width of leather on each side of him. The car is so wide, a third person would easily fit between the driver and the passenger.
Inside, the car is spotless. He strokes the wooden dashboard. ‘Someone loved this car.’
‘Isn’t it too old?’ Jessie says. She has climbed in next to him. ‘It might not even work. It looks … decorative.’
‘It’s German,’ he says.
‘I guess we can take this one for now and swap it any time,’ Ash says.
‘We still need keys,’ he says.
Someone has to go into the house.
He’s the man, he should take the risk. But he’s too slow. He’s glad to see Jessie put on a surgical mask as she gets out of the car, muttering, ‘At least I’ll know not to fall into some cellar again.’
He watches her in the side mirror do her gangland walk, hands in her pockets, towards the front door, and he forgets about their reality for a moment. In the afternoon light, that casual walk, the bikini top, the sand strewn in the courtyard: she could be going inside to fetch beers for a barbecue.
They will be tempted to pretend that all is as it should be, he realises. That there’s life in the next house, life and laughter around the corner. They might go mad before they die.
Ash stands by the car, her arms crossed, watching her sister. ‘She should have taken the gun,’ she says.
‘If they’re not by the front door, just forget about it!’ he shouts after Jessie.
But she returns quickly, dangles a leather keyring in front of them. The same carefree walk. They don’t ask her if she saw anything. Anyone. He just makes her wipe her hands before getting into the car.
‘I hope you know,’ Jessie jumps in, ‘you’re only getting your way with this silly old car as compensation for your drawings. We’re all square.’
She sticks her tongue out at him; it’s a joke, apparently. He thinks, is it because she’s a doctor? This lack of pain.
The car starts at the first turn of the key.
Ash jumps into the back seat, marvels at the space. ‘I could do yoga in here.’
He opens the glove compartment. The car’s papers, a green marker pen, a map, a yellow piece of soft cloth, and a jar he turns this side and that, decides that it’s balm for the leather seats.
He unfolds the map.
‘Goodbye, GPS; hello, map,’ Jessie says. ‘Aren’t we retro?’
They drive back to the pillbox and load everything into the car, and while doing that he tells himself that this place is just one tiny corner of Europe, close to devastated England. The world is huge, and people are resourceful. They will have left. Espoire.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘The continent.’
‘Don’t we have to check which route is the shortest?’ Ash says.
‘It’ll take a week at most, whatever route we take.’ He drops the map in Jessie’s lap. ‘We’ve got plenty of time.’
‘There was always someone to ask,’ Ash says quietly, peering over their shoulders at the map. He knows what she means. Institutions, expert
s, authorities, the internet. All that’s gone now.
3
‘We’re going south-east, right?’ Jessie takes out the green marker and draws a straight line across the map, through France, Germany, Austria, the Balkans, all the way to Istanbul where she turns the line into an arrow, makes it look like the emergency exit signs in public buildings. Makes it look like they’ll be flying.
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Now swap places with Ash. I need the sensible sister when I’m driving.’
He even reaches across Jessie’s lap and opens the passenger door, to make it clear.
‘Harry, I get motion-sick if I read in a car,’ Ash says from the back seat. ‘I can’t help with the map. Sorry.’
‘Call me Co-Pilot.’ Jessie grins. She fully means to remind him of the boat and his drawing kit at the bottom of the sea, she even winks at him.
‘I’ll keep a lookout for road signs, if that helps,’ Ash says.
‘It doesn’t,’ he says.
But what is he to do?
The car drives easily, its bulk and the power behind it reassuring. The windows are all down, the air still warm as it hits his face. They don’t see anyone, no movement on the road or in the fields.
On the back of the map, Jessie draws twenty-five circles. The nuclear countdown, she calls it.
He finds himself speculating about evacuations, about people having fled cities and towns. He wants to establish some grounds for hope. ‘We’ll run into someone before Lyon,’ he says, to disdainful scoffing from Jessie. He can’t work out Jessie – neither of them, in fact: they seem convinced that the disease has wiped out everyone, yet they are watchful, on their guard, scanning roadsides and alleyways as though nuclear apocalypse might spring on them from behind a bush.
Someone will just walk out in front of them, when they least expect it. That’s how it’s going to be. It was foolish to hope for healthy communities so close to England, but there will be the odd survivor, their French equivalents.
Under the Blue Page 12
