by Simon Clark
In the briefcase were a few more items. String. A pocket knife. Pencils with broken points. An empty box of matches. A gold locket with a curl of fair hair inside. The inscription read Margaret Anne Schofield.
The girl's mother?
In the bottom of the bag lay the final item. A metal cigar-container complete with its stopper. From the size of the tube the cigar must have been a Havana, or something equally large. Maybe a reminder of her father? All in all, a piquant clutch of clues.
I'd started to replace the items in the bag when Christina stopped me by taking hold of my wrist. She guided my hand over the table to the cigar tube, then pressed my fingers down against it.
I glanced round at the others. They watched expectantly, the room silent save for the faraway thrum of the engines.
'Read it,' Christina insisted.
There were no markings on the outside of the cylinder. I unstoppered it. Inside, tightly rolled, I could see a piece of paper.
After teasing it out, I took a moment to unscroll the sheet then hold it down flat with two hands against the table. The handwriting looked hurried, but it had come from a once-elegant hand.
I looked at Christina. She sat still, eyes bright, expectant.
There was nothing I could do to postpone the moment further. I read the letter aloud:
To Whom It May Concern:
The girl who handed you this letter is my daughter. Her name is Christina Jane Schofield. She is five years old.
There is little time to detail what has befallen us. For twenty years we lived in a stockade on the Cornish coast. We were a mixed community of sighted and unsighted. In my estimation, we were comparatively successful, farming mainly, with a little fishing to supplement our diet.
Then a year ago a fleet of yachts approached the coast. We had no time to defend ourselves before we were attacked. The women who were sighted, together with our children, were carried off by the raiders. The remainder were butchered. More by luck than by design, I escaped with my daughter, Christina. We wandered for months. Living hand to mouth. Sleeping in ruins. Ever avoiding the triffids, which started to follow us as wolves trail a wounded animal. Which wasn't far from the mark. I was an old man when we left our community. Now I am ill. Walking more than a mile a day became an ordeal. The more slowly we moved the more the triffids gained on us.
During our travels over the last twelve months we have not encountered a single person. Not one. We are, I conclude, the only people in the whole of the county. The triffids have either destroyed them or driven them out. Now those blasted triffid plants are intent on making a meal of us.
I sit writing this letter to you, a stranger whom I shall never meet. Christina and I have found a temporary refuge in a boathouse on a river. It is dark. Even though I cannot see them, I can hear them. The triffids - beating at their woody boles with their little finger sticks, signalling to more of their kind that we are trapped here.
Christina sleeps unperturbed. She does not know that this is our last evening together.
Although I am no medical man, I understand that my time is drawing to an end. I can feel a hard, fixed mass in my stomach. My skin has turned a sickly yellow. A tumour, I suspect. In any event, I am too weak to move more than a few steps at a time. Soon even that ability will be lost.
However, that doesn't trouble me. My only concern is for my little daughter. My heart breaks at the thought of leaving her alone, unprotected - undefended against those bastard plants.
Even now I wonder if reason is leaving me. I am so drowsy I have difficulty in remaining awake for more than a few moments at a time. This evening Christina slipped out of the boathouse. I half remember asking her where she went. She replied she was looking for apples but other plants kept hitting her with their sticks. Naturally concerned, I asked her if the plants had struck her with their stings. She said they had, that it stung a little, but didn't bother her overmuch. Indeed, there were pink marks on her face, but no evidence of swelling, let alone of poisoning.
But maybe I was dreaming after all. Ah, I'm writing this letter as a retreat from reality. I'm avoiding reaching the end and doing what I must do to my beautiful child.
In a moment or so I will put her in a dinghy I have found here in the boathouse. I am giving her food, water, and this letter, then sending her away into the darkness alone. I can do no more. I can barely move. And I know I have not the strength to climb into the boat with her. My dear child must do what she can to survive alone out there.
It will be the most painful thing I've ever done to watch her go, knowing I will never see her again - and that I might be sending her to her death. But is there another way? Is there?
From the bottom of my heart I can only beg you to care for her. She is a good girl.
Yours faithfully,
Benjamin Schofield
When I had finished reading the letter I didn't say anything. Nor did anyone else. We sat quietly for a while with our own thoughts.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ONWARD
'HOW long will the crossing take?'
'New York? Another three days, I figure.'
'Glad to be going home early?'
'Orders are orders. But it'll be nice to walk on solid ground again. Say, you're pretty good at this, aren't you?'
'I get lots of practice, waiting around in mess rooms for good flying weather.'
Gabriel Deeds played, as the saying goes, a mean game of table tennis. Such was the black man's strength that more than one ball exploded beneath the force of one of his devastating forearm smashes.
Papering the walls of the R&R room were pin-ups of starlets. Crimson lips pouted on painted faces framed by elaborate platinum hairstyles.
'Wowee, Masen, where you learn that back spin?'
'Cricket.'
'Cricket?'
'My bowling's better than my batting.'
'What's this cricket? Other than a squeaky little bug.'
'You've never heard of cricket?'
Shaking his head Gabriel cracked the ball back across the table at what looked close to a million miles an hour. The ball struck my bat before cannoning away to ricochet off the ceiling. While I retrieved it I explained the bare essentials of cricket to him. A game that my old school master, Mr Pinz-Wilks, lovingly referred to as God's own. When I'd finished explaining the rudiments, Gabriel's expression spoke of his deep and lasting bafflement. Eventually, after much deliberation:
'And both teams can get through their batting innings in a match of, what? Two hours?'
'Oh no,' I told him, smiling. 'Cricket matches last a bit longer than that.' When I told him how long he shot me a look of such deep suspicion he must have thought I was giving his leg a good long pull.
'Two days?' He echoed. Two days?' Pushing a dent out of the table tennis ball with his huge thumb, he shook his head. 'You English guys must have real stamina. How do you play so long without food or sleep?'
'Oh, the teams have breaks for lunch and tea.'
'Tea?' Again the mystified look rolled through his eyes. I went on to explain that in England the word 'tea' not only meant a beverage but a meal eaten in that temporal borderland between afternoon and evening.
Gabriel nodded as he served the ball. 'Churchill was right. We're two nations divided by a common language.'
Once more I realized that cultural and even language differences between American and Englishman, superficial though they might at first seem, could cause more than one or two headaches along the way.
But I got on famously with Gabriel. His warmth and friendliness did much for my spirits. So we played table tennis, drank coffee (real coffee - not the acorn-brewed stuff I'd been raised on, that for some reason was known as 'French coffee') and we batted conversational subjects back and forth along with those celluloid balls that had such a pronounced tendency to shatter at Gabriel's touch.
He told me more about the research team aboard the SS Beagle Minor.
'The crew are a tad suspicious of us
,' he told me. 'They call us Ollies.'
'Ollies?'
'It started as "Ologists", then they shortened it. But I think they might see us a bunch of Oliver Hardys as well.' He grinned. 'But then, when we first came aboard maybe we did seem on the snooty side with our books and lab stuff. Good shot, David! But that didn't last long. We'd barely gotten out of the harbour before we had our heads over the side, calling for Hugh.'
'Calling for Hugh?' I smiled. 'Oh, I see. Mal de mer.'
'That's it… darn it, I'm sure that net keeps moving. Then the mal de mer gave way to a bout of mal du pays.'
Mal du pays? His using the unfamiliar French term for homesickness revealed a fair bit about Gabriel. His education was certainly first-rate.
'I take it the crew called the team the Ologists because of your professions?' I said.
'Nail on the head, David. Nail on the head. I'm a biologist specializing in the plant side of things.'
'And Dek?'
'Geologist. If we do happen anywhere near oil or useful ores we want to know about it. Kerris is the zoologist. She's trying to establish how animal life is faring under all those beautiful swaying triffids.'
'Badly, I guess.'
'Rats aren't doing so badly.'
'You mean they tidy up the scraps after the triffids have done with the bigger chaps?'
'Got it in one, David. Hell, I'm sure that net's growing before my eyes. You'll have to show me how you do that backspin, buddy.' Gabriel pulled the ball from the net, then tossed it to me to serve. 'Kim So's line is anthropology. Assessing how we poor Joes who are left are managing to survive.'
'And Rory?'
'Odd man out. He's strictly diplomatic service. A kind of roving ambassador to make contact with - and, ideally, allies of - the communities we find.'
'Which can't always be the easiest of jobs?'
'Absolutely… ah, my point, I think, old man.' He served again. The ball whistled by my ear. 'Match point coming up.' He picked up the thread of the conversation. 'You've probably encountered the same kind of thing. People get scared that what little food they grub out of the soil is going to be taken from them by bandits, so they lock themselves away in their communities and get all insular and secretive.'
'That's understandable.'
'Yeah, but it's time to break down those barriers. We can't continue living on our iddy-biddy islands with our iddy-biddy farms in our own iddy-biddy worlds. We've got to start communicating so that we can form an international federation.'
'United Nations mark two?'
'Why not? But some of these guys tucked away in their European enclaves don't even dare use a radio transmitter in case it draws attention to them. But you can wager big money that they're all listening to their sets, finding out all that they can about their neighbours.'
'We didn't know about New York,' I said, 'so you must have your own radio blackout?'
'There! Match point.' The ball struck my bat with such force that the little celluloid sphere split into two neat hemispheres. Then, with barely a blip, Gabriel continued the conversation. 'Sure - we use low-powered transmitters, so broadcasts don't carry much more than thirty miles or so. We've suffered pirate raids, too. What's more, we were in deep trouble until we got a new administration around twenty years ago that beefed up the defences. Anyone planning a hit on our town better think twice because we can hit back so hard the bad guys will stay hit for keeps. Coffee?'
I couldn't say no to that wonderful coffee. So we perched on the end of the table, sipped from paper cups, and chewed the fat. About the possible cause of the darkness that still had planet Earth wrapped up good and tight. We swapped stories about family, childhood: the stuff you do when you're getting to know someone properly. I told him about my exploits flying the model planes I'd built, even down to the time when I'd finally got my prized rocket plane airborne. And how the verger rang the church bell in panic on hearing the sound, thinking that the doodlebugs of Hitler's war had returned.
That tickled Gabriel. He laughed long and loud, and slapped his thigh hard enough, I reckon, to raise a bruise or two.
He ran a huge thumb reflectively along the edge of the table-tennis bat. 'It's easy to forget all those good times when you're a kid. I kept rabbits, lots of rabbits. They kept multiplying so I didn't notice when one or two went missing. You see, my daddy would harvest them from time to time for the pot.' He smiled. 'And my vice? That was the movies. Every Saturday I'd be first in line at Loew's. That's a big underground cinema on Broadway. I loved the slapstick. Y'know? Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Arkina Rossetta? Although I was never one for Chaplin, too much schmaltz. And I liked the cowboy flicks, too. The more shoot-outs the better. But I lost my appetite for watching folks killing folks.'
'Oh?'
'Yeah, you see, my Daddy shot my Mom. Pow… straight in the heart.'
Genuinely shocked, I said, 'I'm sorry, Gabriel. I didn't mean to-'
'No, David.' He waved a hand, looking apologetic himself. 'It happened a long time ago. They say he reacted badly to the chemi-shot.'
I didn't feel it right to cross-question him about what a chemi-shot was. He must have seen the puzzled look in my eye, however.
Easily he said, 'Chemi-shot. That'll be a new one on you, too, eh?'
I nodded, unsure what to say that wouldn't sound resoundingly insensitive, but the friendly smile had returned to Gabriel's handsome face. 'Chemi-shots are a method of male sterilization by injection.' He mimed putting a hypodermic into his arm. 'I reckon at twenty-six my Daddy was too old for the procedure. Sent him a tad off balance.' He tapped the side of his head. 'It didn't bother me at all. But then, I didn't miss what I'd never had, do you follow?'
I did follow. Secretly, I was horrified.
Still smiling he added, 'And once I'd got the Pink Card it got me into what we called Neuter High.' He chuckled, amused. 'And I got the damn finest education someone like me could hope to get. Now I've got a nice apartment along with a job that's second to none. Hey, David. You've spilt some of your coffee. Can I get you a drop more?'
I thanked him. No… I wanted to go up on deck to get some air… I complimented him on his game… I got a promise of a rematch. Then, without my face betraying what I was thinking, I left the room.
***
The time passed. There were times when night couldn't be differentiated from day. Heavy cloud had rolled across a diminished sun, reducing the already meagre light to nothing. Still the ship thrummed on, screws churning the waters of the Atlantic, the prow pointing westward. At times the wind blew fiercely cold. From out of the darkness raced flurries of snow. Someone once said that a snowflake in June was an evil thing. I saw that wasn't far from the truth. On what should have been a warm summer's day I watched streams of snowflakes flashing by the porthole. Maybe there would be no let-up. And maybe after a few grim years the whole world would be encased in thick, dead ice.
But then, who knew? For a thousand years, a million years, or for all eternity the Earth would circle the sun - locked inside a coffin of ice. Without so much as a microbe remaining on its face.
I wiped the condensation from the porthole glass. Beyond it lay utter darkness, sullied only by those spitting white flecks of snow.
The long-dead poet was right. A snowflake in summer was an evil thing indeed.
***
'Hello, bang-bang man!'
Christina beamed brightly at me from across the passenger saloon. She'd been drawing stick men with a fat wax crayon.
I smiled back, then touched my chest. 'David.' I drew out the vowel into a long 'aaay' sound. 'Daaay-vid.'
'David Masen,' she said brightly. 'Yes. David Masen. Suppertime?'
'No,' I said, taken aback by her progress. 'Supper won't be for a while yet.'
Kerris looked up from her report-writing. 'Christina's coming along in leaps and bounds. Give her a year or two and I think she'll be signing up for our research team.'
'She's going to be an Ollie, too?'
'Ollies? Oh, you've been talking to the crew, have you?'
'No. Gabriel told me. Truth be known the crew tend to steer clear of me.'
'Don't worry. They do that to us as well. Oh well, a little mutual suspicion never did anyone any harm. Whiskey?'
'Well… er, if you think-'
'Oh, come on, join me. The sun must be over the yardarm by now. Even if we can't see the blasted thing.' Lightly she swung her long legs from under the table before walking across the room with that interesting swaying walk of hers. (Gabriel had described it as 'sassy', before giving me a knowing wink.) 'If you ask me,' she said, scooping ice into a pair of tumblers, 'the crew are a little bit jealous of our refreshments.' She waggled the whiskey bottle in my direction. 'They're required to be "dry" when they're at sea. Seeing us with a reviving glass of something or other really gets them miffed. That enough for you?' She held up the glass: it held a more than generous splash of spirit.
'Yes… ample. Thanks.'
Christina gave me a stern look. 'Mucky beer.' Then she pulled a face, crossing her eyes while wobbling her head from side to side in a fair imitation of someone who'd tippled just that bit too self-indulgently.
Kerris smiled, 'Something tells me that within a few months our feral child here's going to be very much like a typical New York teenager… cheers!'
***
Within a couple of days I had my sea legs. What's more, I'd settled into the ship's routines. Meals were incredibly generous. Coffee on tap all day. Often I talked to the Ollies. Kerris Baedekker and Gabriel Deeds were the friendliest. (Although Gabriel took great delight in beating me hollow at table tennis - even so, I did pull one or two games back. I also showed him the rudiments of cricket with a cardboard tube and a pair of tightly rolled socks. Ah. Revenge, sweet revenge.) Kim So spent most of her time tutoring Christina, so I didn't see much of them. But I did notice that Christina's vocabulary had acquired musical American accents, peppered here and there with a phrasing that was pure Highland Scots. Dek, pleasant but painfully shy, tended to retreat into his work. He'd spend most of his waking hours writing detailed reports on geological findings at the various landfalls the ship had made so far. As far as I could gather there was a pressing need to find new oilfields that were readily accessible and triffid-free. No mean task. The team member I warmed to least was Rory Masterfield. I found a certain sharpness in his eyes off-putting; and, though he masked it behind a chummy smile, I sensed a lurking prickliness.
