She looked me up and down, baulking at my boat hook crutch. She slapped it back and forward with her fingers and shook her head. ‘No good. No good at all.’
Before I could speak Suyin turned her head like a dog at a distant postman. She growled something, snatched a catapult from her workbench and marched to the door.
‘Seagulls!’ she yelled, flinging the door open and arming the catapult with a rock in her pocket. ‘Go away!’
She launched the rock at the closer of two gulls pecking at her tomatoes.
‘Get out!’
The rock sailed harmlessly beneath the wing of the gull, which had already taken flight with its cohort, and pinged against the roof of the opposite shack. The gulls gazed down with lazy smirks.
Suyin let another rock fly. It missed too, but it was enough to convince the gulls to scavenge elsewhere. She returned and slammed the door, muttering, ‘Far-king-gulls.’
She threw her catapult on the workbench and stood before me once again. With a sigh she resumed her assessment.
‘Wait here,’ she said, and made for a darkened corner of the shack where she rummaged among what sounded like a mountain of bottles and tin cans. The noise was deafening, punctuated only by her cries of frustration as she tried to find whatever it was she was looking for. Eventually the clattering ceased.
‘Ha,’ she said. ‘I found you.’
She returned carrying two things. One was a crutch – a proper one with a rubber foot pad, handle and a soft rest – and the other was a prosthetic foot. It was plastic with brown leather straps, and two of its toes had melted away.
‘Where did you get these?’ I asked.
‘Like I said,’ replied Curtis, ‘never ceases to amaze, what folks call trash.’
Suyin thrust the crutch at me first. I took it, dropped the boat hook and placed the soft rest beneath my armpit. It nestled into my flesh, instantly soothing the bruised skin. Suyin quickly claimed the boat hook and hurled it into her corner store, where it clattered into the hidden mountain of things. Then she offered me the foot.
I looked at the worn cup in which my stump would fit. Though the pain was less than it had been on that first day, the thought of placing weight upon it filled my mouth with the taste of recently digested mystery bacon.
‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘it’s too soon. I only … I only lost it a few days ago. It needs to heal more before I can walk on it.’
Suyin nodded, closing her eyes and extending the foot towards me. ‘It’s better now.’
Curtis rubbed his chin. ‘Truth is I don’t know the best time to start on a prosthetic, but a buddy of mine lost half a leg when he was hit by a limo on Madison. It was his fault, ’course, full o’wine and running all over the road, but the rich little kitten in the back of the car felt so bad she paid for his surgery and all the shit he had to do afterwards. Private ward, personal physiotherapist, the whole goddamn bit. Got him off the booze for a few months too. ’Course he went straight back on it when he left. Anyway, he had a whole half-leg prosthetic on in under a week, on account of his wound healing so quickly. How’s yours? Healing OK?’
‘It is.’
He shrugged. ‘Then maybe it’s worth a try.’
I sat on a stool as Suyin and Curtis gently helped me on with the foot. My forehead beaded with sweat as the socket approached, like some grisly space capsule docking with an alien mothership. I flinched at the first touch, but Suyin reached for my hand and smiled.
‘Try to relax.’
I tried, and this time when they reintroduced the foot I resisted the urge to tense from the approaching shock. I surrendered to it, and in doing so found that it was not as bad as I had expected. Still, my lungs and heart flew into double-time as Curtis tightened the straps.
‘Relaaax,’ insisted Suyin, squeezing my fingers.
You relax, I thought, gritting my teeth. You try and fucking—
‘OK,’ said Curtis, ‘you’re all set.’
They both stood, and Suyin handed me my new crutch.
‘Take her for a spin?’
It wasn’t quite the spin they had hoped for. I couldn’t put weight on it, not fully at any rate, so I let the foot hang like my stump had before and performed a few turns to prove at least that it remained stuck to my leg. Satisfied, Suyin smiled, clapped and returned to her work. I thanked her and we left, making for the shore.
The boat was now a hive of activity, with Josh, Dani, Bryce and Carmela scurrying about under Frannie’s orders. Bryce’s laughter filled the air, roaring whenever he was given another task and snapping to attention whenever Frannie passed him on the deck. She grimaced, but I saw her chuckle once and dig him in the ribs. Dani was now permanently attached to Josh, seeking his presence even in her work.
I had only known death a few times in my life – unquestionable death, that is, not the uncertainty of my family’s fate after the asteroids fell. When my grandmother died the loss I felt had no edges. The empty space she left – like my foot – ached through everything. It had no map, no direction, and no hope of resolving itself. I think this is how grief is for most people; a maze in which you spend your time trying to escape the way you came, until you realise the only way out is through.
But there was an immediate will to Dani’s grief for her mother. She knew precisely how to escape the maze and she was going to do it as quickly as she could. Not by curling up, not by weeping and not by asking questions that had no answer, but by spending time with the people around her, whoever they might be.
Her friends.
Richard remained quiet, his injured hand consigning him to the job of carrying wood, tools and other small items from the shore to the deck, but even he smiled at Frannie pushing Bryce around. And watching all of this from a battered camping chair was Harold, enjoying what I imagined to be a temporary increase in his privileges. He had a pipe, and when I asked him what he was smoking he looked up with a gaping, toothless grin.
‘All of life is here, missy. All of life.’
Evie served us vegetable soup floating with bits of broken spaghetti for lunch, then everyone returned to work – Curtis to his chickens, Mikey and Evie to their vegetables, and the rest to the boat, while Johnson and Leo sourced parts from the scrap.
This left me to an afternoon to myself, which I spent walking the island.
Gradually I got used to my new foot, assimilating the parameters of its pain. There was a contract beneath me; a solid promise of punishment if I exerted too much pressure, but, although I was far from being able to walk, the empty space below my ankle had been reclaimed and filled. A wholeness was returning.
I met Johnson raking through a waterside scrap heap on the opposite shore to the boat. ‘Is that New York?’ I asked him, peering into the haze to our west. I could barely make out the shoreline, or any of the lumps which I assumed were buildings. He said yeah, that was New York, although the smog over everything made it hard to tell exactly which part. Sometimes he thought he could make out the stump of the Statue of Liberty, but he might be imagining it.
Either way, judging by what he could see from the top of the highest pile of garbage on the clearest day – which was never particularly clear – they calculated that they had drifted about eight miles out and stopped. It was the same up and down the shoreline, he said; the land had crumbled like dry bread.
I asked him if they had ever tried to get back to dry land, and he shook his head. ‘No need just yet. We’re happy here. Besides, this water’s a minefield of junk and broken land, so there’s no way through it on a boat.’ He gave me a firm look. ‘You’ll be heading south, Beth, when the boat’s finished. Steer clear of that water over there.’
I walked some more, talked to Curtis at his hen coop and waved as I passed Suyin’s shack. I found Bryce and Leopold on the fishing jetty, a bobbing rig of barrels and wooden slats. Leopold was teaching Bryce how to fish.
‘Young man, you’re tying your bait all wrong,’ said Leopold. ‘And what in the hell are you us
ing worms for? You need fish, dried fish, here take some of mine. Where did you learn to fish anyway?’
Bryce grumbled that he had never learned to fish, which made Leopold hoot with laughter. ‘Boy,’ he said, leaning close to him, ‘if you weren’t so cute I’d banish you from this dock this second, you hear me? There, now cast away, go on, get that sonofabitch in the water. Good.’
His arm was around his shoulder as I placed my crutch on the jetty. Bryce looked up and said: ‘Looking good, darlin’.’ I said thanks, and asked how the work was going on the boat. It was all fixed, he told me. We would be ready to set sail again in the morning.
‘Hell, that’s a shame,’ offered Leopold, with genuine sadness. Then: ‘Oh, shit, look.’ Bryce’s rod was twitching, and he snapped to attention. ‘Pull it in, son, pull it in!’
I left them struggling with the rod and headed back towards the boat. On the way, I caught sight of Richard and Josh sitting outside one of the sleeping shacks. I stopped out of sight and listened. Josh was speaking.
‘I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean what I said. It’s just that you’re always telling me what you think I have to do. Otherwise you’re punching my arm and calling me Joshy or chief or captain. You never just want to talk.’
‘Talk about what?’
‘About Mum, for a start.’
Richard’s head fell at this.
‘You’re always with Dani,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I don’t want to interrupt you, cramp your style.’
Josh looked away. ‘There you go again,’ he said, ‘you have this idea of who I am, and it’s not …’
‘Not what?’
Josh turned back to his father.
‘I speak to Dani because she listens, and I listen to her.’
‘Good. That’s good. God knows if your mother and I had done more talking we might have been happier. Josh, it’s great you’ve found a girlfriend who you can talk to.’
‘She’s not, Dad.’ Josh leaned in. ‘She’s not my girlfriend. And she never will be. Do you understand?’
Richard’s face seemed to undulate with thoughts, feelings and, finally, realisation. He straightened, opened his mouth to speak, then closed it and returned to his original position. He looked at his son.
‘I’m – I’m not very good at this, Josh. You’re right, your mum was better, I know. But I want to learn. Will you help me?’
Josh nodded and they hugged. I took the opportunity to hobble on towards the boat. As I passed I caught Richard’s eye, still in mid-hug, and he smiled.
There was nobody there at the boat so I rested on the shore and looked east. I must have sat for two hours scanning the horizon, imagining a white speck cresting it or the far-off sound of an engine. But there was nothing but flat water and a cloudless sky, and as I saw my shadow stretch out before me on the sparkling man-made shingle, I felt a weight shifting; an evaporation of the threat that had been prickling at my neck since leaving Gibraltar. He had failed. The storm had taken him, or the maelstrom, or maybe he had just given up and gone elsewhere. I didn’t care. Tony Staines was gone.
I returned to the lagoon and found them all two glasses down of Staten Island’s best. Even Dani and Josh were in the water, and they all cheered and raised their glasses at my approach. Evie beckoned me from the kitchen with quick flurries of her hand, and I went to help her prepare food. She talked in excited half-sentences, explaining my tasks. Chop this. Fry that. No, slice it, slice it. It’s gumbo. Have you tried gumbo? It’s tasty, you’ll see, you’ll see.
Rhona brought out an ancient guitar with three strings, and sang songs with her feet in the water. ‘I only know Tom Waits and Joni,’ she explained, ‘and my Joni’s even rustier than this piece of junk so that leaves Tom.’ She went to work, growling and rasping and hammering the thick strings as the rest of us clapped along. Mikey roared with her through ‘Telephone Call From Istanbul’, Evie danced around me in the kitchen to ‘Jockey Full of Bourbon’, grinning and tickling me in the ribs, and we all joined in with ‘Heartattack and Vine’. When her repertoire was complete, Rhona laid down the guitar, gave a theatrical bow and said: ‘That’s it, all out, done.’
But as everyone called for more and Mikey argued with Rhona about the accuracy of her lyrics, I saw Dani pick up the guitar and pluck cautiously at the strings. Nobody paid much attention, still lost in their own pleas or disagreements, but I watched her, the spoon I should have been using to stir Evie’s gumbo hanging loose. Her touch was fragile, but a tune emerged, and then from nowhere she opened her mouth to sing.
Everything stopped. All heads turned. All mouths opened.
It was as if some wounded, exotic bird had suddenly fallen from the sky and bled into the pool. I was sure I had heard the song before, but never sung like this. It was simple enough; she played two strings, walking and reworking the fretboard up and down, and repeated variations of the same phrase. I could hear the words sometimes – something about being dislocated from the world, hiding out in the places beneath its surface – but there was something to her voice that made me forget them and listen to what was beneath. There was another song encoded in there, and there was a distance to it, a terrible space between the words, the notes and even the cracks in her voice that trapped the breath in my lungs. I could not move. And when she finished, all that distance hung there, deepening, widening, stretching out into an in agonising void, and I found that all I wanted to do was close it. So I did. I dropped the spoon and went to the lagoon side, enveloping her in my arms, and everyone else did the same, wiping the tears from her eyes and their own.
Then we ate gumbo, and drank another bottle of Staten Island’s best moonshine, and shared more stories beneath that clear, starlit sky until it was time for bed.
They were good people.
Chapter 32
I woke early to grey, mist-muted light. Ed’s arm was still around my waist, so I lifted it gently so as not to wake him, took my crutch and slid out into the silent morning.
I made for the lagoon, passing the shacks in which the others still slumbered and snored. The mist clung to everything, pressed down by a cool, wayward drizzle through which the shapes of the lagoon, and its kitchen, gradually emerged. At the far end of the water was the dim but unmistakable outline of Mikey, head back against the side.
‘Morning,’ I said, and went to the kitchen. I lit a fire in the stove, and while I waited for the pot to boil I got into the water. I would have a coffee, then wake the others. Despite the welcome rest we had had with our hosts, I was eager to get going.
A thought struck me as I enjoyed the cool water for the last time, and I turned to Mikey.
‘Mikey, do any of you want to come with us? I mean, I know it would be a squeeze, but we’d manage I’m sure.’
Mikey said nothing.
‘Mikey?’
As I peered through the mist I saw something in the water moving in tendrils towards me. I jumped, thinking it a snake, but then noticed it was dissipating. A cloud was spreading across the lagoon. A dark cloud – blood.
‘Mikey?’
I clambered from the lagoon and hobbled round to where he sat, but froze halfway as he came into view. Mikey’s eyes and mouth were open, his throat cut wide apart.
I tightened in a freezing rush of horror. There was a noise from along the track towards the far shore where Johnson had showed me the coast the day before. Voices. Shaking, I crept through the murk towards them. Not far from the lagoon I saw Rhona face down in the mud, unmoving. Her face was turned to one side, and her bulging eyes and the puddle at her neck told me she had suffered the same fate as Mikey.
I walked on. Another body. Harold lying across the path, reaching for something.
The voices were growing louder. Deep, demanding English voices. I stopped in my tracks. There, outside the chicken coop, knelt Curtis before a tall, bull-chested guard carrying a rifle. I recognised him and my insides heaved.
‘No,’ I whispered. ‘No, it can’t be.’
Th
ere were other figures with guns, and I thought I could make out Johnson, Leopold, Frannie and Evie standing nearby, their heads bowed.
‘Where are they?’ said the man looming over Curtis.
Curtis looked up, tried a smile, and muttered something.
‘Tell me!’ bellowed the man.
Another smile. Curtis brought up his hands. The man smashed his rifle butt into the side of Curtis’s head and he sprawled to the ground.
Johnson jumped forward. ‘You son of a bitch!’ he growled, but the man had already whipped round his gun. A shot went off and Johnson was lifted from his feet as if by an unseen fist. A spray of blood arced from his mouth and he fell in a heap on the floor.
Leopold made a sound I cannot describe but will never forget. He drew Evie close, and she buried her face in his chest.
‘Now –’ the man turned on them ‘– which one of you two cunts is going to tell me where they are?’
Shaking, I backed away, my voice hoarse.
‘Ed …’
I turned and ran, immediately hitting a semi-bare grey-haired chest adorned with trinkets. Two hands gripped me. A crocodile’s smile.
‘Hello, Beth.’
One of his men was behind him. He raised a fist.
More time passing without me. So frustrating … I don’t have time for this … this lack of consciousness … I’ve got things to do, places to be, people to … save. Please wake up, Beth. Please wake up, wake up.
Mummy, please wake up.
My eyes shot open. I was sitting staring at the ground. The compacted mess of bottle tops and crisp packets. I couldn’t move my arms. They were behind my back, tied to something.
It was dark and there were voices. Mumbles, sobs, whispers, prayers.
‘Beth?’
I looked left. ‘Ed … ow.’
Pain shot down my neck.
‘Beth?’
I turned again, slower this time. ‘Where are you?’
‘She’s all right, Ed.’
It was Richard’s voice. He was closer and behind me. I felt a hand tap my hip.
The End of the World Survivors Club Page 29
