The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow

by Collingbourne, Huw

  Later that evening, while I was in the kitchen helping with the washing up, I asked Mrs Clompton about Lord Degris’s claim to have shot someone dead. “I wasn’t sure if he was joking,” I said.

  She shook her head. “No, lad, he wasn’t joking. He killed someone just a couple of weeks back. But don’t you mention it to him. And don’t say I told you.”

  “You are serious?” I said, “Who did he kill?”

  “His son, Percy.”

  I thought of the photograph on the piano. The good-looking young man with dark, curly hair. The musician, the composer, the young man whose guitar I had been playing when his mother had left the room in tears. At any other time, it would have been impossible to imagine what could have happened to cause a father to shoot his beloved son. Mrs Clompton didn’t relate the full circumstances of the event. There were tears in her eyes and I could tell that she didn’t want to talk about it. All she would say was, “It was for his own good. As well as ours. He’s better off out of it, if you want my opinion.”

  17

  Since Old Dooley had now been recruited to the task of repelling invaders, Geoff and I were no longer needed to add defences to the battlements. Which meant that Lord Degris had to find something else for us to do. There was plenty of choice. He needed petrol for the generators and oil for Mrs Clompton’s Aga stove. Geoff and I went and syphoned fuel from tanks we found in houses and farms round about. Lord Degris needed tiles on the roof fixed. We fixed them (after a fashion – though I’m not sure I’d trust them in a downpour). He needed his pigs’ sties cleaned; we cleaned them. He needed his sheep treated for the innumerable parasites to which sheep are prone; we treated them. He needed the horses (he owned three), fed, groomed and exercised. I didn’t mind the feeding and grooming but there was no way anyone was going to get to ride them (those horses were incredibly tall – if you came off them, you’d land with one heck of a thump). Both Geoff and Leila knew how to ride horses and I was happy to leave that task to them.

  Leila spent most of her time in the kitchen. It turned out she was a fantastic cook. Not quite as good as Mrs Clompton, but not far behind. Between the two of them they managed to make some of the best meals I’ve ever eaten. There was no longer much that surprised me about Leila but her culinary skills did. I knew she was good at killing things. It hadn’t occurred to me that she’d be equally good at cooking them afterwards.

  One day, Geoff teased her about it. “Ah well,” he said, “I’ve always reckoned a woman’s place was in the kitchen.”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Leila floored him with a forearm jab to the throat. Nothing more was said on the matter. Leila had made her point and Geoff had learnt an important lesson in life. If you want to eat the food, don’t piss off the cook.

  In many ways, our life at Degris Manor was idyllic. But it couldn’t last. For a while, I think we deluded ourselves into thinking that this would be how we would live for the foreseeable future. Lord and Lady Degris treated us as members of the family. As for Mrs Clompton – if you hadn’t known better, you might have thought that Leila was her daughter, she mothered her so much. Even Pat O’Brien turned out to be a decent bloke, in spite of our initial mistrust, as long as you didn’t make the mistake in drinking with him. He had a prodigious intake of whisky. If you tried to keep up with him, glass for glass, it was touch and go whether you’d be sober enough to get out of bed the next day.

  Some time in early April, I was walking in the woods when I noticed the first few bluebells beginning to uncurl. That’s when it struck home to me how long we had been at Degris Manor. It must have been more than a month. I was getting the itch to move on. Much as I loved it there, fond as I had grown of Lord and Lady Degris, Mrs Clompton and Pat O’Brien, this was not where I needed to be. It was a false life. A fake life. Degris Manor was remote, cut off from the rest of the world, the ‘real’ world. I couldn’t imagine myself growing old there, cloistered away like a monk. I needed people. I needed the world. No matter how dangerous that world might be.

  Geoff and Leila felt the same way. There was something stultifying about life at the manor and they were eager to be off again. When I broke the news to Lord Degris, he took it in his stride, barely batting an eyelid. Lady Degris, however, seemed genuinely quite shocked. It only then occurred to me that she too might have felt cut off – lonely. The morning we left, she called me into the Sitting Room and told me she had something for me, “a little keepsake”. I couldn’t believe it when she handed me a beautifully made leather case containing her son’s guitar. It was such a wonderful instrument and clearly meant so much to her that I was reluctant to take it. But she was insistent. “My son will never play it again,” she said, “But it deserves to be played. Don’t you think?”

  What could I say? Of course it deserved to be played. Nevertheless, I was overwhelmed with emotion. I actually flung my arms around Lady Degris’s neck and kissed her. This, I am quite sure, was a gross violation of etiquette. But she didn’t seem to object. I knew I would miss her. I would miss them all – Lord and Lady Degris, Mrs Clompton, even Pat O’Brien and his endless bottles of whisky.

  But once we’d decided to leave, there was no going back. On a warm, sunny morning in mid-April we packed our things into the back of the Land Rover (I wrapped my sleeping bag carefully around the guitar case to try to cushion it against the bumpy ride it was about to have) and we waved goodbye for the last time. We drove down the gravel-covered drive towards the great iron gates set into the high walls around the grounds of the manor. Pat O’Brien was waiting there to open the gates which were held tightly shut by a heavy, padlocked chain. My initial fear was that our exit might be blocked by red-eyes. We had often seen small groups of them roaming around but they generally seemed slow and sickly and I wasn’t sure how much of a danger they really were. But, in any case, I needn’t have worried. The road beyond the gate was clear.

  Occasionally there were some bodies on the verges at either side of the road, though. I’d seen them before on our scavenging trips around the countryside. They were all neatly arranged in heaps, as though someone had moved them there to keep the road free.

  The road ran alongside the manor wall, leading down towards Pat O’Brien’s Church. There were half a dozen or so more bodies lying at the base of the wall. When we were out of sight of the gate, I decided to get out and take a look. I’d never bothered to examine the bodies before. But now that we were leaving, my curiosity got the better of me. The fact that the bodies lay only on the roadside next to the manor wall intrigued me. I can’t say I was greatly surprised to see that each body had been shot through the head. I imagined them trying to climb over the gate or scale the walls.

  I remembered all the gunfire we’d heard in the mornings and evenings. I realised then that Lord Degris must be every bit as good a shot as he claimed to be.

  I recalled asking him if he’d ever shot a person and he had replied “Once”. Cleary he didn’t think of the red-eyes as people. What did he think they were, then? Subhuman? Animals? Once upon a time they had been his near neighbours, living, working and growing up in the small hamlets and remote farms dotted around the countryside. They had been mothers and fathers, sons, daughters, friends and lovers. Maybe some of them had worked for Lord Degris – fixing his roof tiles, pointing his walls, tending his gardens. But now they were less than human. He could shoot them with as easy a conscience as he might shoot a pigeon.

  Yes, he was a good shot, right enough. But I felt sure that one day his luck would run out. I felt equally sure that he knew it would. And he didn’t care.

  18

  “Are you sure it’s safe?”

  “Nowhere’s safe,” I said, “Just keep your eyes open.”

  “Why don’t we just keep on driving?” Geoff said.

  “Because I’m tired, you’re tired, Leila’s tired…”

  “No I’m not!”

  “…and Bobby needs to have a pee.”

  The dog had been scurryin
g around in the back of the Land Rover for the past twenty minutes. Since I was in the back of the Land Rover with him, if he decided to have a pee, I’d be the one to know about it first. That wasn’t the main reason I was keen to have a break, though. If you’ve ever travelled in the back of a long wheelbase Land Rover with no seats and no upholstery, you will appreciate why my heart skipped with joy when I saw a service station at the side of the motorway. It would give us the chance to pull in, stretch our legs and let the bruises which I’d acquired from being thrown about in the back of the Land Rover recover a bit before they took their next battering.

  Geoff was, as usual, driving. He pulled over towards the slip-road that led up towards the service station. We’d seen very little moving traffic on the motorway that day. There were the usual dead cars, of course, slewed inconveniently across the lanes, crashed or burnt out. Who knew the stories behind those? Left-over wrecks from joyriders? Vehicles that had been driven by old, sick people at the moment of death? We had started to take the wrecks for granted. We barely even noticed them.

  The sun was shining and, for early April, the weather was warm. It would have been wonderful to go into a café and order a cold drink or an ice cream. But there was no chance of that. Everything was quiet and still. No sound of traffic roaring past. Just the whispering of the wind through the bare branches of the trees and the ever-present twittering of birds.

  When I opened the back door of the Land Rover, Bobby leapt out and immediately went off in search of a convenient lamp post. I made my way, almost by instinct, towards the foyer of the service station. I don’t know why I did that, really. Force of habit, I suppose. You stop at a motorway service station and the first thing you do is walk over to the foyer. Go to the toilet. Have a look around the newsagent’s. Maybe grab a coffee and a sticky bun.

  Leila called out that she was taking Bobby for a walk. There was a weed-infested grassy area and a small copse of straggly trees behind the service station. Geoff went with Leila and Bobby. They had no sense of adventure.

  The glass doors leading to the foyer would, once upon a time, have slid open thanks to the magic of cutting-edge-glass-door-sliding-open technology. In the absence of electricity, that technology had gone the way of all other cutting-edge technology. It made you realise why wooden doors with handles that you had to turn were such a good idea; they continued to work whether or not modern civilisation happened to have crumbled all around them.

  The glass foyer doors must have been closed when the power gave out because they were closed now. They might have been a barrier to me but for the fact that some considerate vandals had smashed the glass so I could step through the metal frames unimpeded.

  The place stank. It smelled of decay and dampness, piss and putrefaction. The newsagent’s shop had been wrecked. Magazines and paperback books had been scattered everywhere. The coffee shop had been wrecked too. There were broken plates and cups all over the floor. There were a few mouldy buns in one of the display units but I wasn’t that hungry.

  There were no electric lights, of course, but there were so many windows that it barely made any difference. I was desperate for a pee so I headed for the toilet. Like I said: force of habit.

  The toilet stank worse than the rest of the place. I’m not going to try to describe the smell. You’ll have to imagine it. All I’ll say is that a heady blend of human excrement and ammonia were the dominant themes. The toilets had no windows and when I went inside the door closed behind me, leaving me in total darkness. That’s how I came to notice the light shining in one of the toilet stalls. It was just a faint glimmer visible in the gap under the door. If there had been any other light in the place I wouldn’t have seen it.

  I went back into the foyer. I needed something to keep the door to the gentlemen’s toilets wedged open. I tried to pick up a rubbish bin but it was fixed to the floor. Why had they fixed the rubbish bins to the floor, I wondered? Had they really been afraid that people would steal them? I went into the café. I thought I might be able to grab a chair. But there weren’t any chairs. The only seats were benches fixed to a metal frame that also supported the tables. Maybe their customers had tried to pinch the furniture too?

  Eventually I found something suitable in the newsagent’s. It was a huge pink teddy bear about the size of a small St Bernard dog. The teddy bear wasn’t fixed to anything. Clearly not even the most kleptomaniac of customers would have been mad enough to bother nicking it.

  I went back to the gents, opened the door and shoved the teddy into the gap so that the door stayed half-way open, letting in enough light for me to navigate my way between the basins and urinals. I glanced again at the lines of stalls where the light had been. There was nothing. I pulled teddy out of the gap and let the door swing fully shut. Even in total darkness, there was no light showing through the gap under the stall. I opened the door again and put teddy back into the gap.

  I still needed a pee so I went to one of the urinals and used it for its intended purpose. I would have washed my hands but no water came out of the taps so I wiped my hands on my jeans and returned to the problem of the mysterious light I’d seen emanating from the toilet stall. There were ten toilet cubicles (and therefore ten toilet doors) arranged in a line opposite the urinals. I tried to calculate which one had been the one from which the light had shone. It had been towards the far end of the line of cubicles. It hadn’t been the last one of all, though. So I reckoned it must either have been the eighth or the ninth one.

  I strode up to stall number nine. According to the dial on the door it was vacant. I gently pushed the door and peeked inside. It was too dark to see much so I went inside and kicked my legs around a bit. All they hit was the ceramic toilet bowl. Then I went to its neighbour, stall number eight. Aha! The dial said that one was engaged. I pushed the door. It didn’t budge. I stepped back a few feet and bent down. The bottom edge of the door was several inches above the floor. In the dim light, I could just about make out two feet. I had my own torch in my pocket. I took it out and shone it through the gap under the door. There were definitely two feet. They were wearing bedroom slippers with woolly pompoms on the top. I shone the torch up a bit further. It showed that the feet were attached to two legs wearing stripy pyjama bottoms. I stood up and rapped soundly upon the cubicle door.

  “How long are you going to be?” I said.

  Silence.

  I banged again, more loudly. “I know you’re in there. It’s no good pretending. I can see your feet.”

  “Use another one.”

  “What are you doing in there?”

  “What do you think?”

  “How long have you been in there?”

  “None of your business.”

  “This is a public convenience,” I said, “You can’t take up full time residence.”

  “I’m an old man,” the voice said, quavering with emotion, “It’s my bunions. They play me up. I have to sit down a lot.”

  “Are you the only person here? Or are there others?”

  “Others? In this cubicle? Are you suggesting I am here for immoral purposes?”

  “You can’t live in that cubicle.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why would anyone want to live in a toilet?”

  The door to the stall suddenly flew open. “You ask too many questions. What are you? A Jehovah’s Witness?”

  “Do I look like a Jehovah’s Witness?”

  The man standing before me must have been about seventy or so. He was wearing a beige duffel coat over a pair of striped pyjamas, and a greasy woolly hat with a bobble on the top. He looked me up and down for a few seconds. “What does a Jehovah’s Witness look like?” he said.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well then. You could be one. Not that I’m bothered. I’m devout Catholic. Lapsed. You haven’t got any sardines, I suppose?”

  “No. Why?”

  “What do you mean ‘why?’ You think I want to play cricket with them? Or grout a wall? What sor
t of bloody question is that, ’ey? Why do I want sardines? To eat. That’s what I want sardines for.”

  “I haven’t got any sardines.”

  “Well, then, why didn’t you say? Anyone else with you?”

  “That’s what I asked you.”

  Just at that point, Bobby arrived. He leapt over the pink teddy bear that I’d jammed into the gap in the door, ran straight up to the man in the duffel coat and barked. The man immediately backed into the toilet stall and shut the door.

  “It’s all right,” I said, “The dog’s friendly.”

  “How do I know that? I’ve only got your word for it and you’ve done nothing but lie to me so far.”

  “If there are any sardines in the place, maybe he could sniff them out.”

  The door to the toilet stall flew open again. “You think I’m soft in the head, do you? How’d he sniff out sardines? They are in tins. He can’t sniff through tins, can he? What’s his name?”

  “Bobby.”

  Bobby barked. The man patted him on the head. “I like dogs. Dogs like me. I had a dog once. I called him Aristotle.”

  “Why did you call him that?”

  “Because it was his name.” The man gave me a look of withering scorn. “Are you a bit simple, son? You haven’t taken in half I’ve been telling you.”

  “Come outside and we can talk things over at our leisure. The smell in here’s a bit overpowering.”

  “I hope you are not criticising my personal hygiene. That’s something I’m very sensitive about. Personal hygiene. And there’s nothing wrong with mine. What’s that pink teddy bear doing there?”

  “Keeping the door open.”

  He stuck out his bottom lip and scrunched up his thick grey eyebrows in an expression that showed he didn’t believe a word I’d said.

  “In case it has escaped your attention, son, this is a gentleman’s public convenience.”

  “I had noticed.”