A Wrinkle in the Skin

by John Christopher

  Shattered glass and scattered sweets told him he had reached the part he was looking for. Burrowing on, he found bars of chocolate, and took an assortment for Billy. He found an old sack, too, which he could put the tins in for carrying.

  That was a relief, but also a reminder of the depressing number of essentials they lacked. He dropped the things into the sack, and humped it on his back.

  In the field, he put bricks together to form a rough field kitchen, and he and Billy found dry wood and made a fire. He made a stew in one of the saucepans, from a mixture of meat, peas and sweet com. When it was ready, he poured some into the other pan, set it in the douit to cool for a few minutes, and gave Billy the ladle to use as a spoon.

  He said, “What does it taste like? Can you eat it?”

  “Jolly good.”

  “And how’s the arm?”

  “It hurts a bit. Not much, though.” He stared past Matthew. “Lookl”

  A white cat was treading its way through the grass toward them, presumably attracted by the smell of food. It came to Matthew, arched its back, and mbbed against his leg. It was very much a house cat, sweet-natured from pampering. Billy offered it a piece of meat, and it went to him, sniffed delicately, and took it to eat.

  ‘There are other things alive, then,” Billy said.

  “Some. I don’t think many.”

  “Perhaps people?”

  “Not so likely. Dogs and cats were more likely to have been out in the open when the earthquakes started. And the smaller the animal, the more chance it would survive without having bones broken.”

  Billy finished his stew.

  Matthew said, “No pudding, I’m afraid. Will this do?” He produced the chocolate and saw the boy’s face light up.

  “Thanks! Can I give Cobweb some?”

  “A little if you like. There probably won’t be any more after this.”

  Matthew poured some stew for himself and ate it. It was not bad, though the sweet com was a little hard. There was meat left in the pan, and he put it down for the cat. It ate with small growls of pleasure. If one cat had survived, there were likely to be others. They would go wild, but they would breed. He was not particularly keen on cat as a source of protein, but it was better than rat. And there would almost certainly be hedgehogs, too. The gypsies, he remembered, baked them in clay.

  He was going to the douit to wash things when the ground moved sharply beneath him. He heard Billy cry out, and saw him lying on the ground. As he ran to him, there was a new tremor and he threw himself down beside him.

  “My arm …” His face was twisted with pain. “I think its all right, but …”

  “Let me look.” Matthew felt the arm gently; the splints were still in place. “Have another piece of chocolate to take the taste away.”

  The earth was quiet. He helped the boy up.

  Billy said, “Are there going to be earthquakes all the time?”

  “You get little ones for a while after a big one—the earth settling down. And last night’s was pretty big. You’ll have to be prepared, and train yourself to fall on your good arm.”

  Talking to the boy helped him also. Each new tremor brought an instinctive fear which seemed as severe as those in the night. Without the boy it could have been paralyzing. The urge had been to roll himself into a ball, close eyes and ears— forget everything.

  The boy was sobbing, his slight body shaking.

  Matthew put an arm across his shoulders. “The pain will go soon. You’re not eating your chocolate.”

  “It’s not that …”

  “Then what?”

  “The cat.”

  Matthew looked and could only see the pieces of meat on the grass. He asked, “What about the cat?” The sobs continued and he could not make out what the boy was saying. “Slowly. Take it easy.”

  “She’s gone. … I thought she would stay with us, but she’s gone. I wanted her to stay.”

  He was not weeping for the cat, but for his parents and sister, for everything that had happened since he snuggled down peacefully in bed the night before.

  Matthew said, “She’ll come back. She was frightened, that’s all. I was frightened, too. Don’t worry. She’ll feel better after a time and she’ll come back.”

  Billy went on sobbing and Matthew stood close by him. He felt a tightness and misery inside himself which would not disperse; in a way, he envied him.

  In the afternoon Matthew set up camp. The need to be out in the open clashed, he found, with a fear of the open, a longing to huddle against some protecting thing. He finally settled on a corner of a field, on high ground. Most of the surrounding hedge was down, but a clump remaining on the corner itself gave an illusion of security. A douit came from the next field into this, along the bottom of the hedge. He was able to trace it back and found that it ran about a quarter of a mile, apparently uncontaminated, to an underground spring. It was as safe as any water on the island would be.

  From his garage he had rescued a tarpaulin. It was stiff and cracked, but would shelter them from the rain. Not that there was any sign of that, at the moment; the day had all the calm and golden peace of summer. He secured the ends of the tarpaulin to stakes of wood driven into the ground, making a forward-sloping roof, and tied blankets up for sides. In the end he had a square tentlike construction which could house the two of them fairly comfortably. He used Cobweb as a beast of burden, and got a couple of mattresses up to the field, taking them from the mins of the Lucie house. He found Miss Lucie’s body while doing so, and, after covering her, drove an upright piece of wood in to mark the spot. He decided he would do that in future, to avoid turning bodies up again in later salvaging operations.

  The light faded, the sun setting in a cloudless sky. Matthew made another stew with foods from the broken freezer, and afterwards opened a tin of peaches. He had found spoons during the afternoon; he was beginning to build up his supply of useful articles. He would have liked a cup of coffee, but had not come on any yet. And cigarettes. He was not a heavy smoker, but he could have done with one now.

  Their tent opening looked south. It was full dark when they settled down, and they could see out to the starry sky. And a horizon that glowed faintly. In France? A town burning, or a new volcano? The latter seemed a little more probable. There had been no sign of fire here; probably the successive shocks had put out any that might have started.

  “Are you all right, Billy?” he asked.

  “Yes, Mr. Cotter.” There was a pause. “She hasn’t come back, has she?”

  “The cat? Give it time. We’ll find her again. Go to sleep now, Billy.”

  Matthew himself lay awake for some time. The lift which had come from finding the boy, from the need to look after him, was lost in the quiet dark. Depressed and wretched, he stared at the glow on the horizon. It varied in intensity, flickering, flaring up and dying down. A volcanic fire, he supposed, would look like that, but so might a burning city. He tried to feel something for all the others, the millions, who had died or were still suffering. But it was no good; there was no projection. Except for one.

  It seemed that as soon as he fell asleep, he was dreaming. It was all happening again, the shock and roll of the earth, the crash of bricks, the giant’s howl of the withdrawing sea. But in and through it all he could hear Janes voice, calling him. He struggled and woke in a sweat to find that the earth was indeed in shock, but only with one of the mild tremors they were becoming used to. Billy was sleeping. Matthew lay awake, remembering the sound of his daughter’s voice crying out.

  4

  IN THE EARLY MORNING there was a quite violent shock which woke them both. It lasted for something like half a minute, and in the field outside Cobweb brayed her distress. Matthew reached out and gripped the boys hand.

  “Easy. Easy, old son. Its not really a bad one. In fact, it’s just about over.”

  There was very little light, but he could see that Billy’s face was white. The boy said, “I thought it was happening again.” />
  “Nothing like that. It’s stopped. You see? How’s the arm feeling?”

  “Stiff. It’s not bad, though.”

  “Good.” Matthew pulled himself up out of the blankets. “Look. Now that the alarm clock’s gone off, I’m going to get moving. I’ll make us some breakfast, and then I want to go out foraging. I want to get hold of as much stuff as I can during the next day or two.”

  Billy sat up, too. “I’ll come with you.”

  “No need.”

  “But I’d like to.” He hesitated. “I don’t want to stay on my own.”

  “Fair enough. Can you manage to wash yourself with one hand?”

  Matthew had put kindling—paper and wood—under cover in the tent, and he took them out and set about making a fire. The moon was paling in a sky from which the stars had faded. There was a small fresh breeze from the east. The donkey, at peace again, cropped the dewy grass. He made the fire, opened a tin of pork sausages, and cooked them. They speared them on slivers of wood and ate them. Matthew was reminded of a recent cocktail party, the little sausages on toothpicks being carried round on a silver plate, the atmosphere of slightly vicious chatter and tasteless luxury. Only ten days ago? It seemed much longer.

  They tethered Cobweb in a new patch—this was a hayfield and had been almost ready for cutting—and set out. St. Peter Port was the first objective Matthew had set himself. It had obviously been terribly damaged, but the shops there, if he could get to them, would provide all sorts of things that they needed. He had given some thought to the best way of approaching the town and decided that the south, the Val de Terres, offered this. They could reach it by way of mainly open country, avoiding the need for climbing over rubble, and then, going down the hill, get into the town itself from the Esplanade. Once there, he had a mental list of priorities: chemist, hardware, food, footwear. He would get as much out as possible and stack it in a cache. Later he could bring Cobweb in to help get it all back.

  Going past ruins, they called out as before but not expecting any reply. They saw three dogs in all, and a couple of cats, but not the one that had visited them the previous afternoon. There were some strange sights: In one place a wall had survived, all of eight feet high, and in another a television set, apparently undamaged, showed them its blank screen from the top of a small pyramid of debris. And some unpleasant ones. A case where a man seemed to have got halfway out of a window before the house collapsed and the frame crushed him. An arm, bleached of blood, lying in grass like a branch fallen from a tree. A baby that, though dead, seemed untouched until, coming nearer, he saw that rats had been there during the night. He turned away, sickened, and managed to prevent the boy’s seeing that.

  He made a short detour to take in Meg Ashwell’s house. It had stood in a dip, surrounded by quite a large garden. A chasm gaped across the neat lawn and continued through to the house itself. The fragmentation and destruction were so great that there could be no hope that anyone had survived beneath it. Matthew stared at it for a time, but did not call.

  Billy said at last, “Did someone you know live there, Mr. Cotter?”

  “Yes.” He turned away, not wanting to disturb the sunlit silence. “We’d better get on.”

  So they came up the hill to the jumble of bricks that, like a high-water mark, outlined the Fort Road. This was the point which offered one of the finest views in the island—the Fort George headland, green and wooded, on one’s right, ahead the expanse of sea, broken by the other islands, Herm and Jethou and the more distant Sark, and on good days Alderney, its cliffs bright in the sunshine. And the town below, the huddled terraces dropping, layer on layer, toward the waterfront and the harbor.

  He saw the islands first. They stood where they had always stood, but islands no longer; between and round them lay the rock and sand and banks of weed of the seabed. In the middle of the Russell a cargo boat sat, broken-backed, on an upthrust shoal. Nearer, Castle Comet was broken, leaving a few bits of wall. It looked, on its rocky eminence, like a shattered tooth. Nearer still …

  He had expected total ruin, even a desert of smashed brick and stone, all salient features destroyed. But the reality had power to amaze and shock him. The town had gone completely. Where there had been houses and shops one saw raw earth and rock, the contours, exposed again, of the time before history. All that remained was a vague outline of front and harbor; at one point the twisted stub of one of the big cranes stood out. As he looked more closely, he saw that the bed of the Russell, as far as the eye could see, was speckled with debris. What he had seen before on the island had been ruin; this was obliteration.

  Billy stood beside him. He said, in a quiet voice, “What did it?”

  “The sea.”

  “All that?”

  “Like a wall,” Matthew said, almost to himself. “A wall of hammers, battering rams, bulldozers, beating and scouring. My God! And to think I thought there might have been fire there.”

  They were silent, looking down. It was possible to trace the course of the tidal wave by the great smear of erasure, running along the sides of the hills on which the town had been built, to the north spilling inland. There would be nothing left of St. Sampson, either, very little of anything on the far north of the island.

  Billy said, “Are you going to go down there, Mr. Cotter?”

  He shook his head. “Not now.”

  But he continued to stare, trying to force eye and memory to come to terms with each other.

  Billy turned away. He said suddenly, “Mr. Cotter!”

  “Yes, Billy?”

  “A man.”

  He spun round himself. The figure was approaching them, and not more than fifty yards away. He seemed to be about sixty, but his condition made it difficult to judge his age with any accuracy. His feet were bare, black with dirt, and he was wearing only a pair of pajamas of torn and stained red cotton. His long thin face was blackened and bruised, his hair thick with dust. His hands, Matthew saw, were scarred and bleeding. The extraordinary thing was the way he came toward them without any sign of recognition or greeting.

  Matthew wondered if he could be blind until he noticed the assurance with which he walked over the uneven ground. He called out to him, “So you’ve survived, tool What part are you from?”

  The man made no reply. He was not walking directly to them, but to a spot a few yards away. He stopped, gazing at the abraded slopes where the town had been.

  “God looked at them,” he said. It was a normal, educated voice. “The saints and prophets had warned them, but they took no heed. Then in the night God looked down and wept for their iniquity. And his tears were like thunderbolts, and his sigh was a tempest.”

  Matthew said, “You look as though you’ve had a rough time of it. Have you eaten anything since it happened? You’d better come back with us, and we’ll get you some food.”

  He walked over to the man and touched him on the arm. The man did not turn his gaze from the scene below.

  “Down there,” he said. “Down there they lived. Down there they ate and drank, lied and cheated, danced and gambled and fornicated. And in a second, in the twinkling of God’s eye, they were swept away.”

  “You ought to eat something,” Matthew said. “Come back with us.”

  He took hold of the man’s arm, to guide him. He brushed it away, but looked at Matthew for the first time.

  “Then why spare me?” he asked. “I lied and cheated, I lusted and gluttonized and blasphemed. Why was I spared the terrible vengeance?”

  It was not the madness which was disgusting, Matthew thought, but the self-obsession. Though one could argue, perhaps, that this was what madness was. But the melodrama, the note of ham that crept in as the voice went on? He thought:

  There is nothing I can do for this man, and it is bad for the boy. He said quietly, “We need to be getting back, Billy. There’s no point in staying here.”

  Billy, who had already backed warily away, nodded eagerly. They began to retrace their steps.

/>   The man called, “Wait!”

  Matthew turned round.

  He took a step in their direction. “I must confess my sins,” he said. “Before God looks again, I must confess my sins.” “Confess them to God, then,” Matthew said. “I’m not a priest.”

  He touched Billy’s shoulder and they walked on. There was a scrabbling of loose stones behind, and he realized that the man was following them.

  “Listen,” he said, “listen. I blasphemed. I took the name of the Lord God in vain. I cheated. When I was in business in England, I put money in my own pocket that should have gone to the company, to the shareholders. I drank, and I did not observe the Sabbath. I lusted after women …”

  He was walking at about ten paces’ distance, calling out. As Matthew stopped, he stopped also.

  Matthew said, “Shut up. We don’t want to listen. We don’t want to hear what you did, or anything about you. Go away and find peace in your own way.”

  He started wallang on again, with Billy beside him.

  The voice resumed: “You will listen.” There was petulance in it, as well as melodrama. “You must listen so that I can save my soul. Because I have been a great sinner, as great as any of those who were killed by God’s wrath. There was a woman. She is dead now, with all the others. She had a mouth like honey, breasts like sweet soft fruits. She looked at me and I was tempted …”

  Matthew stooped and picked up a loose stone. “Go away,” he said. “Shut up and go away. I mean it.”

  He stood looking at Matthew, and laughed. “You must listen to me. I was the only one saved, and now there is you and the boy. You to listen to my confession of my sins, the boy to carry my message to future generations. For I lusted after this woman, and one night—”