A Wrinkle in the Skin

by John Christopher

  April said, “I think we could knock off for a cup of tea. The kettle should be just about boiling.”

  Matthew noticed then that beyond the pile of tins and various bags and items of clothing, a small fire was burning between bricks, on the top of which a battered silver kettle was balanced. He said, “You have tea?”

  “We have tea,” the older man said, climbing down from the rubble. “We have a fair supply of sugar, thanks to finding a sack of the stuff protected from the elements. We have a little tinned milk, but we would dearly like to stumble on some more. My name’s Lawrence, by the way.”

  He held his hand out, and Matthew noticed that he had managed to keep his nails short and clean. They looked capable hands, the fingers long and sensitive. A musician, possibly? Not that it was relevant.

  April and the girl went to see to the kettle. Lawrence introduced Matthew to the others. The young man was George, the redheaded one Archie.

  “You’ve met April,” Lawrence said. “That’s Cathie with her. And Charley is lookout on the other side.”

  “These lookouts,” Matthew said. “Against what?”

  Lawrence asked, “Since you got across—are we the first you’ve met?”

  “We saw two women, but they ran off before I could talk to them.”

  “It was a rhetorical question,” Lawrence said. “You still have your packs and they look as though they have something in them. And that shotgun. Any cartridges for it, by the way?”

  “A couple of dozen.”

  “That’s a considerable armament. The point is, my dear Matthew, that some dig but some do not. Some prefer to have their digging done for them. Hence the lookouts. It is infinitely depressing to labor amongst muck and dust and corpses only to have the fruits of your labor taken from you. And not gently, either.”

  “There are bigger groups than yours about?”

  “Much bigger. There’s one, in particular, that’s getting on for thirty strong, and something like two-thirds of them men in their prime.”

  “They re not actually murderous?”

  “No. Why should they be? At this stage, at least. As I say, they like to have their digging done for them.”

  Matthew looked at the mound in front of them. “This place—I should have thought it would have been worked over already. Since its on a main road.”

  “It has been. But not thoroughly, of course. None of them are, particularly in view of the hazards. And for the same reason, we switch around as much as possible. It’s not a good thing to get fixed in patterns of behavior.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “You don’t sound convinced. I was out in Africa when I was a young man. The buck used to go down to the water hole, and the lion went after the buck, and we went after the lion. These are our water holes. Another attractive thing about this particular one is that you have a goodish view in the two most likely directions—along the road. Ah, that looks like the tea at last.”

  Matthew gleaned a little more about the general situation while they were drinking tea, for the most part out of heavy red plastic cups which had apparently been obtained from a picnic set. As far as this group was concerned, Lawrence appeared to be the titular head, April the major influence. This was, in general, reminiscent of Miller and the girl Irene, but the personalities concerned were vastly different. Lawrence was a more intelligent, more cultured and weaker man than Miller had been, and the strength in April was not the cold negative strength of Irene, but something more positive and more emotional.

  How far the link between them was sexual, Matthew was not sure. She showed little in that respect; Lawrence, in the way he looked at her, was more revealing. Their shared middle-class background would throw them together. The others in the group, with the possible exception of the absent Charley, to whom the girl Cathie had taken a cup of tea, had clearly been working-class. The distinctions had only to be made for their absurdity to be recognized, but in desperation people were likely to cling to absurdities. For a while. Eventually they would settle for what they had.

  Apart from April, who stayed fairly silent, they plied him with questions—chiefly about crossing the seabed. They found the idea bizarre and exciting, but there was more to their interest than that. He realized that what appealed to them was the very thing which he had found disquieting: the isolation, the knowledge of being alone in an empty land. It was part of the wistfulness of the preyed-upon and hunted, which was still foreign to him.

  Lawrence asked, “What about water?”

  “We had enough.” He pointed to the plastic container, tied to the pack.

  “But did you find any fresh water on your way over? There should be springs, surely.”

  “There were a couple of streams. They were both brackish.”

  “Residual salts, I suppose. Anyway, one couldn’t live out there, could one? Even your friend the captain’s time is limited. We could only carry enough food to last us a week, and there would be no way of getting more.”

  “You’ve got a store of food?” Matthew asked.

  “Yes. We’re trying to build it up.”

  For a time, he supposed, it might be possible to build up, but as the mounds were ransacked over and over again, the aspect would change. There would be the running down, the desperate hunt for the few remaining tins, finally starvation. And the winter to come.

  He said, “Hasn’t there been any attempt to organize things?”

  “Organize?” Lawrence asked.

  “On a more long-term basis.”

  “We found a goose,” Lawrence said. “A live and kicking goose. We clipped her wings and penned her. Who knows— we might have found a gander. Or traded something with someone who had one.” He shrugged. ‘The yobbos got her. They had roast goose that night—a few mouthfuls each, I suppose.”

  “But can’t they see how stupid that is?” Matthew said.

  April said, as though driven into speech by impatience, “What was your idea of what’s happened? Who do you think survived? Just the teachers and bank clerks and local government officers, with some nice honest policemen, and perhaps the chief constable of the county as President? That’s the way it ought to have been. But things weren’t done as neatly as that. What did you expect, for God’s sake? The orderly people, the people who could plan more than a few days ahead, have always been in a minority.”

  “Can’t a minority do something?”

  “Yes,” she said, “they can practice their running. They can pit their wits against the others, and learn how to keep out of their way.”

  “There must be some who are still civilized,” Matthew said. “Other groups, like your own. You could team up with them, couldn’t you?”

  April looked at him with the same fierceness, but did not answer.

  Lawrence said, “What good would it do? It would only make it harder to hide, and offer a more tempting target to them.”

  “You might find you outnumbered them.”

  “One particular gang, perhaps, but they can combine, too. They would if there were good pickings. It might only be on a temporary basis, but long enough to strip us of everything.”

  “It seems like a bleak outlook,” Matthew said.

  There was a pause before Lawrence said, “We won’t argue about that. Can you show us the way to a better one?”

  Jane, he thought, living this sort of life … The idea was unbearable.

  Lawrence said, ‘1 suppose you don’t feel like throwing in with us? We could take you and the boy.”

  April had not spoken to the others about their first conversation. She looked at him and then, indifferently, away.

  Matthew said, “If Billy wants to stay, and you’ll have him—” Billy said quickly, “No, I don’t want to.”

  “I’m going on,” Matthew said.

  “Right away?” Lawrence looked at the boy. “I would prescribe a few days’ rest for the boy. He’s had a grueling journey.”

  Looking at Billy himself, Matthew saw how true that wa
s. He looked peaked, and desperately tired. He would have been glad for the boy to stay, to be free to continue his journey on his own, but he saw the impossibility of that. He represented whatever stability and permanence remained for Billy in the exhausting and frightening world in which he now lived. And had a responsibility for him—limited, he told himself, but a responsibility.

  He said, trying to keep the grudgingness out of his voice, “A day’s break might be a good idea, if you can put up with us.”

  “As long as you like.”

  “We have our own food. We won’t be using your stocks.” “That’s not important. Whatever does finally bring us down won’t depend on a day or two’s rations for a man and a boy.” Already beginning to regret the delay, Matthew said, “Where is your camp? We don’t want to go back on our tracks.”

  “Our base isn’t far away. A few miles north.”

  “I was hoping to get to Southampton tomorrow. I thought there would be plenty to forage for there.”

  “There is,” Lawrence said. “Plenty. And plenty of yobbos waiting to take the stuff off you as soon as you’ve got it out. Most of the gangs operate from the outskirts.”

  The tea had been too hot but was now cool enough to drink. The taste, sweet and metallic, took him back to army days, when he had thought the world was mad and desperate. He sipped the tea and remembered how safe and unimaginably secure it had all been.

  11

  MATTHEW HELPED THEM with the digging. They broke up the wardrobe and ransacked it; there were a couple of men’s suits, a heavy overcoat, a hacking jacket, a cardigan and three pairs of shoes in good condition. Not far away they found a broken wooden chest with blankets in it. The ones on top were damp and evil-smelling, full of mold, but the bottom layers were not too bad. All were brought out and added to the pile of things. Before abandoning work for the day, they found another stock of food, including two tins of coffee and an unbroken glass jar, a foot high, of plums.

  Lawrence was particularly delighted with the coffee. ‘The first we’ve found,” he told Matthew. “We got tea in the early days, stacks of it. It’s better than nothing, but coffee’s always been my drink. I used to have one of those automatic coffee makers beside my bed. It was damned good. I used to switch it on as soon as I had a night call, and by the time I was dressed it was just about ready. I think I miss that more than anything. Material things, that is.”

  “Night call?”

  “I was a doctor.” He stared at the tins of coffee. “How long will these last? A dozen brews—perhaps a few more if not everyone likes coffee. But they’ll drink it now, if they never did before. One doesn’t pass up a novelty these days. I found myself eating pilchards last week. And liking them.”

  “A doctor,” Matthew said. “I should have thought that would—well, carry some weight still.”

  “Weight? With whom? The yobbos? You’re still overrating them.”

  “The more primitive people are, the more impressionable, surely. And dependent on the mysteries of authority.”

  Lawrence shook his head. “It’s a question of scale. There was a paper in the Lancet not long before it happened. A study of the psychological effects of the South Island quake, linking up with previous catastrophe reports—the Skopje earthquake, the bombings at Dresden and Hiroshima. Much the same results. Something like three-quarters of the population that survived showed mild mental disturbances of various kinds, about one in ten more seriously ill but little lasting psychosis, and what there was occurring among people apparently predisposed to it. The effects of the Bust seem to have been a bit different. I could do a nice little paper on it myself. In fact, I dreamed the other night that I had done it and that it was published in the B.M.J. Funny thing, I can remember the papers immediately before and after it, too. One on a new technique for nephrectomy and the other on strangulated piles. I’d called mine ‘The Anthill Syndrome.’ Rather a neat title, I thought.”

  “Why anthill?”

  “Because I read somewhere once about the way ants behave when the anthill’s taken a beating. Up to a certain level of damage, the pattern’s not unlike the one reported in the Lancet: initial disturbance and confusion but fairly rapid recovery as the survivors—or the more enterprising ones amongst them—get over the shock and set about putting things to rights. But it’s quite different when the damage exceeds the level. Then, as far as the survivors are concerned, there’s no recovery. Their behavior becomes more and more pointless and erratic and destructive.”

  “Because the queen’s dead, I imagine.”

  “I have an idea that wasn’t the operative condition, though I can’t be sure. But isn’t our queen dead, too? I don’t mean the person—the guiding force in our society, the source of purpose and identity. It’s an interesting speculation. The point is that we’re behaving like the second category of ants. There’s a mass psychosis, which it would be absurd to try to influence. I suppose there may have been a few relatively sane ants, too. It made no difference. They died with the rest.”

  “Don’t you think you might be generalizing on the basis of special local conditions? It wasn’t like this back on the island. One or two individuals were off their heads, but the rest got together and were doing things.”

  Lawrence smiled. “My dear man, you’d better do a paper, too! It could well be different in a small isolated community; in fact one would expect it to be. A few survivors in a tiny place surrounded by sea—or by seabed, anyway—can re-establish identity. I hope they’ll prosper. Perhaps our salvation will come out of the islands and the Highlands. By our, I mean human, of course. In a generation or two, perhaps.”

  They headed north as the sun went down, burdened with their spoils of the day. They had a variety of bags and haversacks, and a number of netlike arrangements, woven of thick twine, which could be slung over the shoulder and used as carryalls. The country they went through was pardy wooded, partly open, with relatively few ruins. Billy, who had rested during the afternoon, was very cheerful, and chattered as he walked beside Matthew. In pairs ahead were Charley and Cathie and George and Sybil, the latter two showing signs of close physical intimacy. Lawrence and April brought up the rear, and little Archie trotted along in front. He carried a bag full of tins in one hand, and with the other held a net, containing blankets and clothes, on his back. It was a heavy weight, and badly distributed, but he made no complaint.

  Matthew had been expecting to see a camp something like the one they had left on Guernsey. He was surprised when they stopped in grounds which, though badly overgrown, retained the outlines of a large and fairly elaborate garden. It would have needed a couple of gardeners to keep it in anything like shape. In front of them was the rubble of the house to which the garden had belonged, but nothing else. The others put their burdens down, and he did the same with his.

  He said to Lawrence, “Is this a break for a rest?”

  “No, were here. As I’ve said, we have to take precautions. You’ll see.”

  The men of the party began shifting timbers from the ruins. They worked quickly, as though they were familiar with the routine, but it was something like ten minutes before they cleared them away to show a big oak refectory table lying upside down, most of its underpart shattered but the table top seemingly intact. The men got together and heaved at this. It was clearly very heavy, and they had to strain to lift it. Beneath it there were wooden stairs, leading, presumably, to a cellar.

  The sight of it brought up the familiar fear of confinement. He would not do it, he decided. He would sleep in the open. But April went down, and the others followed, carrying the various items they had brought back.

  Lawrence touched his arm. “Come and see Ali Babas cave. It wasn’t his cave, though, was it? He only found it. Do you know, I meant to take my grandchildren to a pantomime last winter. I hadn’t been since I was a boy myself. In the end, I was too busy with the practice. I thought next year would do. Mind your head, as you go.”

  He was afraid of showing his fe
ar, and followed. There were two candles lit, and April was using the second to light a third.

  It had been a big cellar, about twenty feet square, but one corner had filled with debris where the roof had collapsed. The floor was flagged, uneven in places where the stones had been forced up. The candles stood on two trestle tables in the center of the room, and the food and clothing were put down on the tables in a jumbled heap. The bare brick walls carried some shelving—diverse and crudely made stuff which had clearly been put up recently. Things were laid out on the shelves and on the floor beneath them: food in one part, blankets, clothing and so on in another, and in a third section various pieces of equipment. He saw coils of rope, saws, hammers, nails, a high-focus battery torch, lengths of galvanized iron, a roll of roofing felt, shears and heavy scissors, a metal ladder, and a whole assembly of other things. They were very neatly ranged. The most conspicuous item was the back axle unit of a small motorcar, with wheels attached.

  Lawrence, seeing Matthew’s eye on it, said, “I thought we might rig up some sort of handcart with that. But were none of us very mechanically minded. And it would be difficult to hide it. It’s probably too big a project for us, anyway—too purposeful.”

  April and the others were sorting out the things they had brought in. She gave them quick decisive instructions, and they took them away to the places she indicated. The order that existed was of her making, Matthew realized.

  He noticed a door, in the wall on the left. Pointing to it, he said, “Do you sleep in there?”

  “Sleep? My God, no! Not below ground. That’s only a cubbyhole, anyway. It was the wine cellar. We had a lot of glass to clean out, and surprisingly a few bottles survived. A Beaujolais, a Mateus rose, a Musigny, and a Chateau Leoville-Poyferr6, ’34. No whites, I’m afraid, which is a pity because I preferred white. But then, we have no means of chilling. We’re keeping them for occasions which call for celebration—so far there haven’t been any. Oh, yes, and one bottle of brandy came through. A Biscuit Grande Champagne. I’m keeping that for medicinal purposes, which shows to what criminal depths a man can descend. I keep the rest of my medical stuff in there, too.”