by Sarah Hall
There were two doors to the house – one on the north side and one on the west. He stood by the west door and thought, Buffalo. He opened the door and felt the draw of air, then opened it wider and moved into the alcove behind the storm door. The storm door opened inwards and could be locked either side. He moved the bolt, forced himself out into the buffeting air, planted his feet and fastened the door behind him. Either side of the house, the wind tore past, conveying junk, going about its daily demolition. Behind him, the house felt solid. It was a squat, single-storey longbarn in the low-lying outskirts of town, with shutters and big outer doors. He’d modified it a bit, with nails and planks, building break-walls. This was his fifteenth house. The first – his mother’s, a white 1930s semi – had gone down as easily as straw, along with the rest of the row. They’d gone to the gymnasium as part of the reorganization, then to a shared terrace. The brick terraces had proved more durable, he’d lived in two, but they were high-ceilinged; once the big windows and roofs gave out they were easy for the wind to dismantle. Before the barn, he’d been in the bunker near the market with Craig, a sort of utility storage. It was a horrible, rat-like existence – dark, desperate, scavenging. Craig was much older than him. He’d wanted things and had taken things. There had been three big fights, and the last one made such a mess. But he wasn’t sorry. Maybe he should have stayed in the bunker alone but he didn’t want to. A lighthouse would have been best, round, aerodynamic, deep-sunk into rock, made to withstand batterings. But the coast was impossible. Before everything had gone down he’d seen news footage; he couldn’t quite believe the towering swells, the surges. He had nightmares about those waves reaching this far inland.
He inched along the barn wall, towards the open. He’d planned a new route through town. He would keep to the west side of streets wherever he could, for protection, but that meant being in the path of anything collapsing. In the past he’d outrun avalanching walls, he’d been picked up and flung against hard surfaces and rubble heaps, his collarbone and his wrist had been fractured. There were only so many near misses. He would need to judge the soundness of structures, only venture inside a building if the risks seemed low. He would go into the Golden Triangle – some of the big Victorian houses there were still holding and they were more likely to have what he was looking for. At the corner of the barn he knelt, tensed his neck and shoulder muscles and put his head out into the rushing wind. The force was immense. He checked for large oncoming objects, then began to crawl along the ground. What had once been the longbarn’s garden was now stripped bald of grass and the walls were in heaps. Clods of earth tumbled past him. The wind shunted his backside and slid him forward. He flattened out and moved like a lizard towards the farm buildings and the first rope. He had different techniques, depending on the situation. Sometimes he crawled miles and came back bruised black underneath. Sometimes he crouched like an ape and lumbered. Other times he made dashes, if there were intermittent blasts, cannonballing the lulls, but he could get caught out doing that. Sometimes it was better to walk into the wind head on, sometimes leaning back against it and digging your heels in worked.
It’d been a while since he’d been out in anything this strong. It was terrifying and exhilarating. The wind bent him over when he tried to stand, so he stayed low, a creature of stealth and avoidance. He clung to the cord that ran between the buildings. He’d rigged it himself and had tested the binding only a few days ago, but still he gave a good yank to make sure it hadn’t begun to untether. A lot of the ones in town he’d redone too. He traversed slowly while the wind bore between the buildings. After the farm, there was a dangerous open stretch. The Huff, he called it, because the weather always seemed in a filthy temper there. It had been a racecourse, quite famous. Beyond it, the town started properly: its suburbs, its alleys and piles of stone. Once it had been a town of magnificent trees. Plane trees, beeches, oaks: the big avenues had been lined by them, their leaves on fire in autumn, raining blossom in spring. Now they were mostly gone – uprooted and dying. There was a lot of firewood to haul away. He hardly ever saw anyone else taking it. He could probably count on one hand the number of people he saw in a month. Occasionally, a big armoured vehicle passed through, military – its windows covered in metal grilles. The soldiers never got out. A lot of people had gone to towns in the west because it was supposed to be milder, there was supposed to be more protection. He didn’t believe that really.
When he got to the Huff he almost changed his mind and went back. The air above was thick with dirt, a great sweeping cloud of it. There was a constant howling. Every few moments something rattled, fluttered or spun past, bounced off the ground and was lobbed upwards. On tamer days he’d sledged across the stretch on a big metal tray, for fun, putting his heels down to slow the contraption and flinging himself sideways to get off. Today, no larks, he’d be lucky not to break his neck. It was too wide a tract of land to rope; he had to go without moorings. Crossing would mean surrendering to the wind, becoming one of many hurled items, colliding with others, abraded, like a pellet in a shaker.
He gave himself a moment or two to prepare and then he let go of the farm walls and began to crawl across. He tried to move quickly to keep up with the thrust of the current, but it was too strong. Within moments the wind had taken him, lifting his back end and tossing him over. He felt the red stone slam into his spine. He started tobogganing, feet first. He tucked his head in, rolled on his side, brought his knees up. The ground was hard and bumpy and pounded his bones. He put his hands down and felt debris filling his cuffs. Something sharp caught his ankle bone and stung. Shit, he thought, shitshitshit. But he went with it, there was nothing he could do, and after a second or two he managed to regain some control. He hoofed his boots down and tried to brake. He was nearly at the edge of the racecourse, where the old, flint wall of the town began. The wind shoved him hard again and he went tumbling forward. He presented his back and hit the pointed stones and stopped.
He lay for a moment, dazed, brunted against the structure, with dirt pattering around him. It was hard to breathe. The air tasted of soil. He turned his head, and spat. When he opened his eyes one pane of the goggles was cracked, splitting his view. His ankle throbbed. Other than that he was all right, but he had to get moving. He pushed himself up and crawled along the boundary wall, around trolleys and piles of swept rubbish. At the first gap he went through. He sat up, leant against the flints and caught his breath while the wind roared the other side.
He bent and flexed his leg, cleaned his goggles, emptied his gloves. Moron, he thought. He did want to live, moments like this reminded him. He sat for a time, tried to relax. The boundary wall was twelve feet thick and sturdy. Whoever had built it had meant business. Probably the Romans. Sections along the river had been restored when he was a kid, as part of the ‘fan-Tas-tic flood defence initiative’.
He looked at the town. Roofs and upper floors were gone; cars were parked on their backs, their windscreens smashed. The big storms had left domino rubble in every direction, scattered fans of bricks and tiles, bouquets of splintered wood. Old maps meant nothing, new streets had been made, buildings rearranged. He had to keep relearning its form as its composition shifted.
He got up, crouched low, surveyed the route and limped off. It was a mile to the Golden Triangle, through Tombland and the market. He saw no one. He kept to the safer routes and used the secure ropes when he had to, hauling himself along. He squinted through the broken goggles, seeing an odd spider-like creature everywhere in front of him, but he didn’t take them off – the last thing he needed was to be blinded. The ruins were depressing, but he occasionally saw miraculous things in them. An animal, though they were rare. There were no birds, not even distressed gulls; nothing could cope in the torrent. The rats had done OK, anything living below ground level. Cats and dogs were few, always emaciated and wretched. There was no food, nothing growing, and not much to kill. People’s survival instincts were far worse, he often thought, but they could a
t least use can openers. Two years ago, on the edge of the Huff, he’d seen a stag, a fantastic thing. It was reddish, six points on each antler, standing perfectly still, like something from the middle of a forest, as if it had always stood there, as if tree after tree had been stripped away, until the forest was gone and there was nothing left to shield it. He’d seen awful things too. A man sliced in half by a flying glass pane, his entrails worming from his stomach. Craig’s broken skull, the soft, foul matter inside. Who you became afterwards was who you told yourself you were. Good things had to be held onto, and remembered, and celebrated. That was why he had to get the pages for Helene and why they would try to have a nice Christmas.
He made his way slowly through the town, forcing his body against the blast, starting to favour one leg as his ankle stiffened. He kept leeside wherever he could and watched for flying timber and rockslides. He crossed the little park at the edge of the Golden Triangle. There were stumps where the central pavilion had stood. The trees lying on the ground were scoured bare. Sleet had begun to gather along their trunks. He hoped it wouldn’t turn to snow; it was hard enough keeping his footing.
When he got to the district he was surprised to see smoke leaking from one of the heaps. He made his way over, cautiously, but it was just a random fire burning along a beam, some stray electrical spark perhaps, or friction. Two rows away the houses were in better shape, some only had holes in the roofs and lopped-off chimneys. The windows were mostly gone. He could hop through the bays if the lintels were safe. He always called out to make sure they were empty first. He’d been in some of the houses before, checking for food, batteries, essentials. They’d been lovely places once, owned by doctors and lawyers, he imagined – his mum had always wanted to live there. There were remnants of cast-iron fireplaces, painted tiles; even some crescents of stained glass hanging on above the doorframes. He tried a couple, searching through the downstairs rooms – he never went upstairs if he could help it, it was too dangerous. The wind moaned through the rooms, shifting wet curtains and making the peeling wallpaper flicker. Damp and lichen speckled the walls and fungus grew from the skirting boards. There were pulpy masses on the shelves, rotting covers, the sour smell of macerating paper. He stepped among the detritus, broken glass and broken furniture, digging through piles, tossing collapsed volumes aside like wet mushrooms. He’d been dreaming about finding a complete works since he’d found Helene – that would really be something special – bound in plastic perhaps, unviolated. But, like Bibles, they were the first to go, their pages wafer thin, like ghost’s breath. He’d studied the play in school, not with any particular enjoyment, he’d been better at science. He could remember bits of it, the parts he’d had to read out. As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’d with raven’s feather from unwholesome fen drop on you both! A south-west blow on ye … He was sure Helene had taught it; certainly she’d have read it. Reading it again might help her. She could begin to think differently. She could read it while she fed the baby. So far she’d said nothing about the baby, not even any names she liked. Sometimes she put her hand on her stomach, when the baby was moving. He’d found some sections of the play, dried the pages, sorted the scenes and put them in order, as best he could. He’d glued and glued things in between. It wasn’t an attractive-looking gift; he’d never been very artistic.
After ten or eleven houses he was starting to lose hope and was worried about the daylight. The wind was not letting up: if anything it was gaining power. There’d been a couple of worryingly big bangs nearby, something shattering, a frenzied thudding. He went back out onto the street. There was a big house further along, free-standing, walled. It had upper bays as well as lower. A vicarage, maybe. Part of the roof was gone. The gate was padlocked but the frame had come away from the post and he forced his way through the gap. In the garden the plant pots and urns were smashed apart but a small fruit tree was still standing, defiantly, petrified black globes hanging in its branches. He checked round the periphery of the house. Then he went through a lower window and down a hallway. His ankle felt sore, but that was OK, injuries you couldn’t feel were far worse.
He knew, even before he got to the big room at the back of the house, that he was going to find what he was looking for. Some things you knew, like echoes, good and bad things that were about to happen. He forced a swollen door into a parlour. It was quite quiet inside, not too much damage or decay. It would have been a nice place to sit and watch TV or read. The walls had once been red but were now darker, browny, like dried blood. There was a fireplace, heaped full of charred wood, pieces of chimney brick and sleeving. There was a man in a chair, a corpse. His eyelids were shrinking upwards over the empty sockets; some wisps of hair left on his head. The skin was yellow and tight and shedding off the cheekbones. A blanket was wrapped around his shoulders, as if he was cold. There was no bad smell in the room, it had happened a long time ago. Probably he had done it himself, a lot of people had. He didn’t look too closely at the man. He went over to the shelves. There were rows and rows of hardbacks. He could even read the titles on some of the spines. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Audubon. And there was a collection of Shakespeares, mottled, green mould blooming along them, but readable. He found it in the middle. He took off his gloves and opened it carefully; the edges of the paper were moist, stuck, and they tore slightly when moved, but the book held together. He turned gently to the end. I’ll deliver all; and promise you calm seas, auspicious gales and sail so expeditious that shall catch your royal fleet far off.
He took off his rucksack, wrapped the book in plastic and put it inside one of the small compartments. He put the rucksack back on, clicked the straps across his chest, drew them tight, and put on his gloves. It would be a good house to go through for other things, but he didn’t want to get caught out and not be able to get across town and over the Huff to the longbarn. He didn’t want to leave Helene alone longer than he had to. He would come back, after Christmas, and search properly. He closed the door on the dead man.
On the way out he saw his own reflection in the dusty, cracked hall mirror. Like books, not many mirrors were left either, the wind loved killing them. Probably a good thing. His coat hood was drawn tightly around his head; he was earless and bug-eyed, and one eye lens was shattered. The metallic tape around his neck shone like scales. He looked like some kind of demon. Maybe that’s what he was, maybe that’s what he’d become. But he felt human; he remembered feeling human. His ankle hurt, which was good. He could use a can opener. And he liked Christmas. He turned away from the mirror and climbed back out of the window. Snow was flying past.
· Goodnight Nobody ·
Jem had seen the dog the week before, the day after her birthday, while she’d been breaking in her new shoes. It was a small dog, a Jack Russell or a terrier, not something that looked dangerous like the muscley Doberman and the mint-eyed Alsatian further down the street. She’d seen the man walking the dog by the weir, and she’d seen it tied up outside the Saracen’s Head. It didn’t choke its lead or drool or go for people. The man was hard-faced though, hair buzzed to the scalp, tight jeans he was too old to wear, dark red boots laced up his shins. He had a tattoo on his neck. A web. Or a net. Something stringy. Mumm-Ra said tattoos outside the collar and cuff meant people were beyond civilization. Mumm-Ra saw a lot of tattoos at work, in all kinds of hidden places. She often told Gran about them. Once a woman with only one breast had had one where the other breast wasn’t. A rose.
Outside the man’s house there was a police van. It’d been there all morning. The lights and the engine were off, but it was very noticeable, very nosey-looking. They would be taking the dog away soon, Jem was sure. The kids on the street had been trying to climb the backyard wall for a look-see before it was destroyed, even though it was the same dog it’d been the week before, nothing extra special or with superpowers.
Destroyed made the dog sound like a battleship in a war game. Jem wondered how they’d do it – a gun, maybe, or by injection, like c
riminals in America. The dog would twitch and go to sleep and then its heart would stop. They’d been learning about the heart in biology. The heart was the last piece of equipment to keep going in a body; it worked the hardest. One cell told all the others what to do, and if the main cell died another normal cell took over. She’d shared that piece of information with Mumm-Ra and Gran. Gran had said it sounded like socialism. Dictatorship, more like, Mumm-Ra said. A vet might come to the man’s house and put the dog down, the same as if the dog had cancer or a broken leg. The dog wouldn’t know what was happening, so it wouldn’t be scared, although dogs did understand, they could sense things.
