by Alex Marwood
I cannot be angry with her, she thinks. This is my doing.
But the ugly bit inside knows that she will hate Romy forever.
The Guards arrive together, marching in step from the Guard House, Uri at their head. They line up, together, always together, along the back wall by the gate, and stand in silence with their hands behind their backs, Ilo gazing longingly at them from where he stands by his sister. We shall have trouble with them later, she thinks. They don’t think they’re Of Us any longer, any more than I do. I don’t think there’ll be one staying behind, except for Ilo, and I’m not sure if he’d be staying, honestly, if he weren’t still legally a child. He likes being with them. I can’t pretend otherwise. Maybe he’ll go to them, when he’s old enough.
Vita comes onto the steps and she is wearing black. They stand up straight and watch as she comes slowly down, a picture of dignity. I never really knew her, thinks Somer, and doubt I ever will. She’s a mystery, more of a mystery than even he was, really. Manipulating us all. Even him.
We’ll leave tomorrow. That’s what we’ll do. There will be no Guards on the gates and no one with the strength to stop us. I’ll take the children and run, and we’ll find a way to survive, somehow, among the Dead. There will be other places, other ways. Tomorrow I’ll take them and I’ll find a story to tell, and Romy can go to hell. She can go to the hell of her own choosing, with her bastard baby and her lying smile. If I’d never had her, none of this would have happened. If I’d never had her, I would be free.
The Cooks distribute glasses, fill them, and they cradle them, waiting for the signal to drink. From the corner of her eye she notices that the Guards, as one, are holding up hands and refusing to partake. Wonders if they’re staying sober because they have something in mind, then dismisses it. It’s just their way. Placing themselves apart, as though we care.
She sees Ilo reach for a drink, hurries over and takes the glass away.
‘Awww,’ he says, and she almost laughs. Hysteria so close to the surface she has to fight to keep it in.
‘You know the rules,’ she says. ‘Not til you’re eighteen.’
‘They let me drink in the Guard House.’
‘Well, you’re not in the Guard House,’ she says firmly. She hands the glass to Ursola, brings him back to the middle of the crowd with her, to keep an eye. Always one kid, she thinks, who sneaks away and steals a drink. It’s a rite of passage. From the corner of her eye she sees Horus and Sana snatch glasses of their own and run away behind the greenhouses. I’m not their mother, she thinks. And I’m not part of this community any more.
And then Vita has a burning torch in her hand, and she’s standing by the pyre. She raises her glass and faces her people. ‘Lucien!’ she cries.
‘Lucien!’ they cry back.
‘Burn in hell,’ Somer mutters, and downs her cider. It’s disgusting. Cloyingly sweet, and it tastes of foliage.
Among the Dead
December 2016
56 | Sarah
It rises up above the trees like a rocket ship, and for a little while she thinks that it’s just another of the junkyard scraps and bits of crane you see strewn along the sides of motorways. And then its wings unfurl in front of her and she realises that it’s a sculpture.
‘What’s that?’ asks Romy. ‘Over there?’
‘That’s the Angel of the North,’ she says. ‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’
Her breath is taken away. I should have seen so much more of my own country, she thinks. There’s so much here, so many extraordinary illustrations of human magnificence. I’ve wasted so much time sitting in my small town, dreaming of distant lands, when there was so much on my doorstep.
It should be ugly, this square-armed thing of corroding steel. A blot on the landscape, a ruination of the green hill below it. But it is one of the most beautiful things she has ever seen. Against a steely winter sky, a couple of tiny figures wandering at its feet, it soars. And she feels for a moment as though she is soaring with it.
‘So we’re in the north now?’ asks Romy.
‘Of England, yes. It won’t be so long til we’re in Scotland.’
She rolls down her window and lets the sharp northern air blast around her. Far away from Finbrough, and getting further with each passing second. The house abandoned, the Christmas tree dropping needles on the carpet, the portraits still propped against the wainscot.
If I never see that house again, she thinks, I don’t care. I’ll put it on the market when we get back, and be done with it.
And now that they’re in the north, now that they’ve left behind the synthetic sense of safety created by the green fields of the south, the world takes on a raw beauty she isn’t used to, that makes her feel small in a way she appreciates. They rise and rise, and the skies get huge and the land spreads away and away, and they can feel that the air is different from the air where they’ve been. Stronger, more potent. Newcastle upon Tyne, Morpeth, Alnwick, Berwick-upon-Tweed, and then they’re in Scotland.
They stop for petrol in a small town whose pink granite terraces are strung with white lights, but the streets are empty and the shops shuttered, even though it’s barely four o’clock. It’s different here. It’s probably not much smaller than Finbrough, but the commercial urgency of approaching Christmas doesn’t seem to have infected it much. Finbrough High Street is host to a council-sponsored Christmas market every day now, complete with licensed Glühwein stall and a criminal-record-checked Santa. The memory of Eden is already lost in the rush for luxury foodstuffs, the memorial flowers on the bridge removed in case they blow off and cause another pile-up.
The pub around the corner from the petrol station is enticing – warm light spilling through windows and a pleasing smell of roasting meat wafting through the door. But the Travelodge they’ve booked into is ten miles the other side of the Forth, and Romy is dozing, so she decides to press on.
She’s slept so little since it happened, she thinks. And, although she never complains, that baby must be sucking out her strength with every passing day. She’s in the front seat beside her, for the belt in the back refused to stretch across her abdomen. It’s going to be a biggie, that child. Despite everything. This will probably be our only trip before it’s born. They say we’re welcome for as long as we like, but she’s not going to manage a car journey like this again if we stay too long.
Romy’s doze deepens and she curls up against the passenger door, Sarah’s big wool shawl wrapped close around her though the car is toasty from the heater. Sarah glances in the rear-view and sees that Ilo, silent since Berwick, is wide awake nonetheless, gazing out at the dark. Or at his own reflection in the window. One or the other.
‘Is that pillow in the back with you?’ she asks.
She had a job persuading them to bring anything other than their boxes, but the boot is filled with suitcases of clothes against the northern cold and her own sits, held in by the belt, on the empty seat beside him. He looks down, scans the footwell.
‘Yes.’
‘Can you maybe lift your sister’s head up and put it under?’ she asks.
‘Oh.’ He sounds surprised by the suggestion, his inner Spartan still working despite his time out in the world. ‘Okay.’
He manipulates her surprisingly gently, his face a frown of focus, and she doesn’t wake. Just snuggles in deeper as her face finds the softness. Romy lets out a snore that rattles the windows, and their smiling eyes meet in the mirror.
‘She’s tired,’ he says.
‘I should think we all are,’ says Sarah.
‘But we’ve just been sitting all day.’
‘It’s not just that, though, is it, Ilo? It’s all of it. Sadness makes you tired. It’s totally normal.’
And not just sadness, she realises with a prickle of surprise. Loneliness, too. I’ve been so much more energetic since they came to live with me, and I hadn’t even noticed. In the week since Eden died, the weariness has come crashing back over me like a wave, but it’s
a different type of weariness. It’s grief. It’s exhausting, but sharp and intense. Real, somehow. Not the same as the leaden burden of an abandoned heart.
‘How do you feel?’ she asks. And there he is again, the young boy bereaved, his face working in the mirror. He’s had so much loss to live through, she thinks. Far more than anyone so young should have to bear. It’s good that we’re taking him to a place where there are people he knows. I know it’s not the same as his home, but some taste of the familiar – having people around him who share his memories – must do him some good.
‘I miss her,’ he says.
‘I know you do. So do I. That’s okay. It’s how you should feel. But she’s still here, in a way. She’ll always be with us, when we think of her.’
He pauses.
‘I’d like to never think of her at all,’ he replies, and she feels herself well up in sympathy. I hope he starts to feel better when we get there, she thinks. I hope he gets some comfort. Perhaps Uri can reach him. He certainly sounded willing to try.
I could do with some hope, she thinks. Some indication that there’s something better. That life won’t just be a slew of sadness in a crumbling world.
There are container ships out on the Firth of Forth. Floating tower blocks, lights twinkling through the misty dark, filled with sailors thousands of miles from home as Christmas begins. The deep orange glow of Edinburgh behind them, little pools of light in the dark on the far shore. Ilo gazes out, then studies the map on her phone, like a normal teenager. Reels off clumsy pronunciations that the locals wouldn’t recognise. Dalgety Bay. Aberdour. Burntisland.
‘It’s beautiful,’ he says.
‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘A lot of the world is beautiful,’ he says, and looks wistful in the glow from the dashboard. ‘There’s a lot to be lost.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know.’
Epilogue | Romy
In the night, we cross a bridge over a river that looks like the sea, and I remember how frightened I was on a similar bridge only a few months ago, and how bold I have become. We eat lasagne and ice cream in an empty service station dining room where a sleepy Slovak waits to shut up shop, and then I get into a bed so comfortable that I want to cry for what will be lost, and then I am aware of nothing until someone starts running a vacuum cleaner up and down the corridor outside my door and it’s morning.
It’s almost seven in the morning and pitch black outside. It was never dark in Hounslow, not even when it should have been. All there is to see in the light falling from my window is sleeping cars on a sea of tarmac. I shan’t miss this. Even getting up in the dark at Plas Golau wasn’t so bad, as the sky flushed gold over our labouring heads and the mountains turned from black to red to silver. I imagine that Taigh na Solas will afford us similar beauties.
I take five minutes to luxuriate in my clean soft bedclothes, then I get up and have a long hot shower. Let the water stroke my aches away as I stare down at my drum-tight belly, the gigantic breasts that seem to have sprung from nowhere. I liked my breasts as they were before: small and neat, not impairing my freedom of movement or pulling on my upper back til it aches. I hope they go back once their function’s done with.
It’s funny to think that you will probably never have this experience, which seems so simple when you’re out here among the Dead. This is probably the last time I shall sleep or bathe alone for a very long time.
I will miss things the Dead take for granted. Television. Soft beds. The ease of the internet. Jerk chicken. Long baths. Solitude. But what price your survival, baby? What price the world entire?
Mid-morning, we reach the mountains. Mountains on mountains on mountains. And castles and a great iron-grey glittering sea, and wild, wild moorland that stretches further than I can see, and snow on the peaks and little houses with their backs turned to the wind and roads that pass through valleys so deep that the sun doesn’t reach them until it’s well past noon, and I start to feel safe again for the first time since they took me away from Plas Golau.
Plas Golau is empty now. The winter rain will have washed the compound clean.
There’s a Guard on the gate with a walkie-talkie, and he just waves us through as though we are royalty. Sarah’s surprised to see him, but I point out how annoying it would be to get all the way up the hill and then find out you were in the wrong place, and she seems satisfied enough with that. ‘I suppose that’s what lodge gates are for,’ she says. ‘I’d never thought of it that way.’
The road that leads up to Taigh na Solas from the river Don is three miles long. And when we get there my heart leaps, for Cairngorm is different and yet the same: a big house with a walled garden and a U-shape of barns that form a cobbled court. High walls in the process of construction, to join them all together and enclose the land within.
Uri is standing in the courtyard when we arrive. I pull up in the middle and get out, swing my duffel over my shoulder and walk towards him. Sarah sits on in the car, and Ilo sits behind her, speaking quietly.
‘You took your time, 143,’ he says. ‘And I see you’re as pregnant as a dairy cow.’
‘Sir,’ I say.
‘Aren’t you the sly one?’ He sounds faintly admiring. ‘I’d thought we’d kept an eye on you two.’
‘An eye?’
‘You didn’t think we hadn’t noticed, did you? Good grief, girl, you were the talk of the compound.’
I feel myself go hot with fear. He knew? He knew all this time? Was all of this just so he could get me up here and make you safe?
Relief floods through me with his next words. ‘You were practically fucking on the dance floor on your first solstice. I mean, I know you weren’t used to drink, but they said it was like watching a pair of feral cats.’
He’s talking about Kiran. He thinks Kiran is your father, baby. He hasn’t even guessed where you came from.
‘Right,’ he says, and holds out a hand. I dig in my coat pocket and drop the two medallions into it.
‘Only the two?’
‘The third was lost on the motorway, sir,’ I say.
‘Fair enough,’ he replies. ‘I saw enough proof on the news. When are you going to drop that squalling infant? We don’t have much by way of facilities here yet.’
‘February, sir,’ I say.
‘Shame you couldn’t have brought its father,’ he says. ‘We need bodies.’
‘Shouldn’t have poisoned him,’ I say, and he raises an eyebrow.
‘Sorry. Shouldn’t have poisoned him, sir.’
‘Who’s in the car with you?’ he asks.
‘The boy. And the aunt.’
‘Good work,’ he says.
‘Good work of your own, sir,’ I tell him. ‘We’d never have persuaded her without you.’
Uri nods, speaks into his walkie-talkie, ‘New arrivals,’ and then he turns back to face the car and his face is filled with melancholy kindness. He is his father’s son as though he were reborn.
We walk back to the car and the others get out.
‘Welcome back, son,’ he says to Ilo, offering him a hand, then a brusque, fatherly squeeze around the shoulders. ‘You’ve been missed.’
‘Thank you,’ says Ilo.
Then he turns to Sarah and bathes her in his charisma. ‘Welcome to Cairngorm,’ he says. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss. We’ll look after you here. We’ll keep you safe.’
I see her melt beneath his clear blue gaze.
And here we are, baby, safe from the Dead again. There are only fifty-two of us here so far. I’m already in charge of the Infirmary, for Uri forgot, in his rush to take his revenge, that there’s more to survival than merely fighting, as Vita said so many times. He didn’t think the skills component through at all, really. Ilo is already the entire Corps of Engineers, all by himself.
I’m sharing a room with Willow. I’ll never forgive her, but for the time being she seems glad of female company, and I am content enough to watch and wait, and have you in peace.
But I am watching, and waiting. I made her a promise that night in the Infirmary. She may not know it, but I always keep my promises.
I’ve noticed already that she’s particularly fond of mushrooms.
The food is good and the company is rough, and the mud comes in with you wherever you go, but we’re far enough from a town that no one will bother us, and the hills are full of sheep and deer and rabbits. Sarah is helping out the Cooks – baking bread, plucking chickens, collecting eggs – and already there’s more colour in her cheeks and a light in her eye. We still sing at night, still plan for the End, the way we did at Plas Golau, and she’s already learned the words. We don’t talk much. New arrivals have always been separated from the ones they arrived with, until they can be trusted. She sleeps in a dormitory with three of the older women, and she seems content. I wave at her when we pass in the compound, and the smiles she returns to me are full of hope.
And as I wander the land looking for medicines, planning what we shall need to plant, my knife in my hand ready for the harvest, I also follow Uri around and watch him, so that I can learn his habits. He likes to take a walk each day, out onto the wild moorland. And one day, once you’re born and I can move again with stealth, I know he will go out alone. And then he will meet me coming the other way at the edge of the woods, where no one can see.
Maybe not this winter, though winter lasts a long, long time in these mountains. I can wait. I can always wait. One day, I shall follow. There are many places here where you can be alone, and in the winter the snow lies very deep.
And, once he’s gone, we will never speak of him again.
Acknowledgements
All books have their challenges, their deaths and disasters, and each one involves a learning of some sort. This one has taught me that one should trust the right people – and gosh, I’ve been blessed with the right people – to help when one’s in trouble, and that one should never trust a dermatologist. With beautiful irony, given the title of the book in question, one poisoned me so thoroughly as I was setting out to write it that I lost my ability to hold a thought or a memory for well over a year, an experience both terrifying and exhausting.
