The Night the Lights Went Out

by John Eider

As we’d moved inward from the rural coast to the urban centres of the South East, so the need to move at night and be ever wary while doing so became paramount. It also meant we sometimes found stretches of road or track between places that we could use. On one such road as we walked I remember was a piece of twisted metal, still wet with the rain it seemed almost purposely positioned to collect… Wareing moved to the side of the road and pushed at the overhanging branches from a low, round bush; and there within it, dead fingers nibbled away, was the still, huddled body of a vagrant. Age hard to judge but elderly and female, the bulk of her body was protected from the small animals that had attacked her extremities by the thick coat that she still held tightly around herself. We kept on walking.

  By the early hours one morning a low drizzle was picking up, blown right inside my jacket’s collar by a tricky breeze. With the first signs of a deep blue dawn breaking, I saw Wareing’s eyes move over the landscape, I guessed looking for somewhere to rest that day. Abutting the field we were at that moment tramping through were the end houses of a short road that may have led off to something of a town. The house at the end of the small and untouched cul-de-sac could have been a step back in time to three months earlier, but for the unmown lawn. As we neared we also found a car layered in dust and sitting on half-flat tyres. Here was a house in which we could surely sleep for the night without worry.

  The back door gave with a loud crack, but there were none around to notice.

  ‘Wow, they kept this place nice,’ I said as I found myself wiping my boots on the mat. The broken door led through into a cosy kitchen, not recently updated but a room you felt had soaked up joy and laughter over the years. Framed photos on the wall showed smiling faces at holiday locations. Despite not being heated, the kitchen still seemed somehow snug, not at all chilled by the breeze outside.

  ‘No panic here,’ observed Wareing, the only disturbance in the well-kept room being some as-yet unwashed pans and bowls soaking in the sink’s murky water…

  ‘They made a last meal,’ I said suddenly, the house no longer seeming quite as jolly.

  ‘Don’t be daft, no one knew which meal was their last.’

  But in the lounge I saw what I took as further proof of my theory,

  ‘Look, they came in here afterwards to share chocolates.’ The box was still on the arm of a chair I would otherwise have happily sat down and nodded off in.

  ‘You’re being unusually fanciful this evening.’ My partner picked one up from the box to try, ‘Hmm, strawberry, a bit stale. Not three months stale though…’

  But I had already skipped back to the kitchen, remembering something from when I’d stopped to wipe my feet,

  ‘Two pairs of boots by the door,’ I called back when I got there. ‘His and hers. They never left.’

  Meeting back in the hall, we both looked up and made for the stairs. The house was small enough to offer only two bedrooms for us to check out. In the larger of the two we found them lying on top of bedclothes in each other’s arms. On one of the tables at either side of the bed were two glasses, I not wanting to disturb the scene by going any nearer to see what they contained. Beside the glasses was a note in large looping handwriting, readable from five feet away:

  Laura, if you ever read this, know we loved you, but that we couldn’t go on not knowing if you were safe. Our lives are over, we have had a great life. We saw the Pyramids, we saw whales in Scandinavia. We had the greatest daughter, granddaughter and son-in-law God could have send us. We love you all, you, Chris and little Sammi.

  All our Love, Mum and Dad.

  ‘Come on,’ urged Wareing, a hand on my arm. There were other houses to try, but neither of us fancied a day indoors along that street. It was probably good to stay out a bit anyway – we saw little enough daylight as it was. We returned to the fields and kept going another hour through the wet breeze.

  And the sights kept coming… Another time we saw a dead dog seemingly struck by some kind of seizure, it front and back legs outstretched as if it had died on the rack. No smaller animals had yet touched the carrion, as though, like a suicide buried at a crossroads, the nature of its death saw other creatures treat it warily.

  This scene was not much in itself; until an hour later we saw another body, this one human but equally undevoured (I realised grimly some time during our travels that the only body you would normally find would be a fresh one, anything older than a day or two likely to have been dragged away and ripped apart by something starving). Yet, other than them both lying lengthways along the path, then there was no connection, the methods of death utterly different upon examination.

  He was a young fellow: greatcoat, knapsack, bloodied head and snapped-back foot – he seemed to have caught his boot in a root on the trackway, been pulled down, and then struck his head as he fell. The path was stony, and there must have been one right beneath his head to cause that much bleeding.

  I felt in his pockets, finding only home-rolled cigarettes, a folded drivers’ map, and a graduation photo of a smiling young woman in gown and mortar board. I studied the back of the photo, marked ‘University of Nottingham’.

  ‘He was going to find her,’ I said. ‘They must have lived in different towns.’

  ‘Come on,’ urged Wareing, having gone through the lad’s pack and found little we didn’t already have.

  ‘He was on the right path at least,’ I thought aloud, ‘if he was coming from somewhere like Kent.’

  ‘Skirting London, very sensible,’ praised Wareing.

  ‘But we’ve no way of tracing her, of letting her know what happened to him. There’s no name on the photo.’ I couldn’t leave this scene alone.

  ‘And what would you say to her if there were a name?’

  ‘We’d let her know that… Wait, we don’t have his name either.’

  ‘Well observed.’

  ‘But that means we’ve no way of recording this, of reporting what happened to him.’

  ‘What have I told you? Don’t let’s get maudlin.’ He pulled me back into marching stride; but even as we walked there seemed no way of shaking from my mind what I’d just seen, I musing as we trod on,

  ‘Perhaps we don’t need names anymore then, now that we can’t be recorded, remembered. If I were to die like that, if it we’re one of us found there on the road… they wouldn’t know who I was, couldn’t get word back to…’ I paused involuntarily.

  ‘To your family?’ guessed Wareing. ‘You’ve almost-mentioned them a couple of times, haven’t you. Come on, what aren’t you telling me? Now’s the time if ever it was.’

  ‘I was on training, as I told you. Miles away from home on E-Day…’

  ‘…with no way of getting back: no cars, no trains; no way of calling without phones; with every Government office and civic institution going into meltdown; your orders keeping you at base regardless, and so leaving you not even knowing whether…’

  He paused, I expected out of respect for my feelings. But I took up the theme,

  ‘No, let’s say it – not even knowing whether they’re alive or dead. I don’t even know if my parents are alive or dead.’

  ‘And what would you say to them, if you could?’

  ‘I’d ask them if I’d been a good son.’

  Wareing took a deep breath, ‘You want to just walk there, forget everything you have to do, forget your duty, forget your responsibilities to wherever it is you’ve ended up and to whatever agency you find yourself serving; forget that the towns and cities are so dangerous now that you know you might not even get halfway there; forget all that and just walk, walk for days, weeks, forever – just like that lad heading all the way to Nottingham, or wherever – just to know your nearest and dearest will ever be seen again.’

  We shared a look then, I knowing there wasn’t a thing he had just said that he hadn’t thought a hundred times in relation to himself. He never told me his tale, but I knew it from those words. I knew it because it was the same tale for all of us.

&nb
sp; The report writer Scanlon, though a scientist, could dip a toe in the waters of sentiment himself at times when he wanted to, albeit under the guise of logistical concerns; concerns such as those that at the time so consumed me, as I would later read in his full report published a year after the disastrous event:

  The sudden breakdown of every form of transport within Britain, and of every form of communication within Britain and between Britain and the rest of the world, has left most of those remaining in the British Isles as cut off from each other as at any time since the Neolithic.

  Apart from the obvious and cataclysmic effect this has had on the Body British, there is a secondary effect upon the nation’s mental landscape, that of a feeling shared by anyone surviving those first chaotic days and so having time to appreciate the longer-term effects of a post-E-Day world: a feeling, once panic for security and food supplies has been broached, of the near impossibility of locating or contacting anyone not immediately present in the (very) local vicinity in which they have found themselves since, at the very latest, E-Day+2 or +3.

  From anecdotal evidence, those who travelled for a living can have found themselves hundreds of miles from the ones they love, in a frightening new world without such commonplace cultural holdfasts as petrol, public transport or passable roads. Regarding the latter, from stories I and others have been told, it seems that despite the lack of electricity having little direct effect on the passability of a road network (and even less on motorways that didn’t feature traffic lights), by E-Day+3 the Queen’s Highway was already as unsafe for travellers as it had been at any time since the days of the fabled Highwaymen calling for ‘Your money or your life.’

  This emotional secondary effect has itself a secondary effect: for while this not knowing how well far and not-so-far flung friends and relatives are faring in such unpredictable times is upsetting enough, it also means that anyone in a position since E-Day of having to organise people and galvanise them into action has also to deal with a group-maudlinity among the people in their charge. This group effect can present itself as a total motivational shutdown, a sense of, ‘If I can’t help or even contact those I most love, and if none of what we’re doing here to survive can change that, then what is the point of doing anything?’

  Oh Scanlon, couldn’t you give yourself a break? Even if you had your family with you at your commune in Leicestershire, you must have been killing inside for all those others you were missing. Yet you claim to be reporting these ‘emotional effects’ – essentially a grief for the living – primarily in relation to the difficulties they bring to those trying to organise ‘the people in their charge.’ Just own up – you were hurting, we all were. We all understand.

  The emotional equivalent of his report has yet to be written, for we are still too busy fixing things. On the day we get the lights back on, the lorries moving, the rows and rows of houses back full of fed and happy families, on the day we get the bodies buried… on that day we can get the definitive lists written, can plan our marble memorials; on that day we can collapse and cry.

  Chapter 11 – Scanlon’s Anecdotal Traveller