“My daughter says this man was not involved in the attack. He was trying to help us.”
“Your daughter is a child. She was confused. How can she tell what she saw?” His hand tightened on the pod lid, impatient to tidy me away and get on. But Major Arnold was getting mad.
“Look, she knows this young man well. He used to be our baby-sitter.”
“This man is one of your people?” asked the Paramil.
I saw Major Arnold swallow, break out in a sweat. “He was a pupil of mine for ten years. The children know him well. He wasn’t in the van … he was riding a motorbike … he tried to warn us.” Old Arnold would never tell a lie. But what he could do with a half-truth…
The captain nodded, grudgingly. Two Paramils pulled me out onto the ground carelessly and slammed the pod lid.
Then they slammed the other pod lid down on Keri. Strands of her blond hair still hung down outside the black pod.
“She was on the motorbike as well,” I screeched. “She never went near the car.”
The Major nodded, wearily running his hand over his face. He was really putting his neck on the block for us. Bad-temperedly, the Paramils dumped Keri on the grass, too.
We lay there, side by side, and watched. The Arnolds were bundled into a psychopter and flown off. Two bigger choppers, sky cranes, arrived and hovered, lowering grabs to pick up the blackened Jag and the yellow van. Which had never belonged to East Midlands Water at all, but was now revealed as a poor fake, green paint beneath its yellow.
The captain came over and had a last frown at us, like we’d spoiled his body count. Then he flew off, too, leaving only the big gap in the perimeter Wire, and a patch of churned, burned grass, and broken glass glinting in the rain.
“Why do you Unnems do things like that?” I snarled. “Those oafs didn’t know Major Arnold from Adam. He’s a good bloke. And little kids. …”
” ‘Cause they ain’t got no hope. ‘Cause their dads didn’t have no hope. ‘Cause if they have kids the kids’ll have no hope. I’d do the same meself—only I’d plan it better.”
We glared at each other. We weren’t strong enough to do anything worse. After a bit I said, “D’you think you can crawl?”
“With one bloody leg.” We crawled side by side, as quickly as we could. Before the Paramils sent another sky crane for Mitzi.
Chapter 17
We felt better astride Mitzi. But we didn’t feel like moving on; just sat staring blankly at the broken Wire and the burned patch. Thought about Diane and Loretta, buried in flame; about the guys in the pods of the psychopters, still breathing, screaming, throwing up, but already as doomed as squawking chickens hooked to a broiler-house conveyor belt…
Our cover was blown. Already, they’d have got my name from Major Arnold. And Mitzi’s registration belonged to the vanished MacDonalds. Laura would certainly spot that. Maybe we had two hours left: enough time to go to ground in London Northeast. Which was exactly where they’d look for us.
Then the wind blew, scattering the charred stems of grass; bringing the evil smell of petrol. But behind the petrol smell came the huge smell of green. Green of grass and moss, pool and wood.
I looked up, noticing the country beyond the burning for the first time. Flat as a snooker table. Hedges and spinneys, cottages, and barns. But nothing could disguise the snooker-table flatness, blurring away into misty rain. No Wires or watchtowers, factories or estates, right to where the mist descended.
“Nice,” I said.
“Like the cheese in a trap.” Keri said bitterly. “Wherever there’s cheese, there’s sure to be a trap.”
“Might be a cheese factory. …”
“Sucker.”
“Rather go to London?” I started Mitzi and rode down through the broken Wire. Careful to keep our wheels inside the wheel tracks left by the yellow van.
“We don’t know where this is!”
“Could it be worse?” I pulled up where the van’s tire tracks ended. Forty yards on, a cart track led out of the field. “We’ll have to carry the bike from here.”
“Why?”
“Paramils have eyes. Hurry!” I unhooked the panniers, and we carried them first. Mitzi was lighter than most bikes, but humping her across that field nearly killed us.
I drove her deep into the first spinney. “Take a break— I’m going back to cover our tracks.” I had the sense to dump my leathers, change my boots for scruffy plimsolls.
The marks we’d left in the wet turf weren’t too bad. But it was obvious to the eagle eye that something had happened there. I began trotting to and fro, between the cart track and the burned patch. That looked better—as if a small crowd had gathered; or some looney had run backward and forward to keep fit. I was still trotting when the big yellow fence-repair truck arrived, and a jeep-load of Paramils.
I wasn’t daft enough to run away. I put a long stem of grass in my mouth and went to meet them, eyes full of wonder, total village idiot.
The Paramils inspected the marks on the grass with the old inscrutable Oriental eyes. One asked me, “Where are your friends?” For a Paramil, he was surprisingly gentle…
“Gone back to work.” I stood embarrassingly close to him, let my spit spatter on his shirt. He backed off. He didn’t like my three-week-old smell. The grass-chewing had filled my mouth with saliva. I let a bit of it drool. Even took him by the arm.
“We do be liftin’ taters over there. Come and see.”
He wriggled his arm out from under my hand, trying not to show his distaste. I let my eyes go even wider, till the whites showed all round, as I’d often practiced in the mirror.
“Big fires… choppers… fun!”
“Go back to work, please.”
I walked off, shoulders drooping like a disappointed child. But soon turned and gawped again. This situation was interesting. He hadn’t asked me for any ID. He’d expected me to be scruffy, not too bright. Done his damnedest not to upset me. … I continued gawping.
The repair truck was worth gawping at, with the pile driver attached to one side, and the huge roll of green fence wire to the other. It repaired the fence, good as new, without human help, in twenty minutes. The Paramils spent the time, with unzipped blasters, on the motorway embankment, only interested in keeping people out of this new place, not keeping the inhabitants in. That made it seem quite a nice place. Then truck and jeep drove off. We were safe inside.
Back at the spinney, Keri was fast asleep in a hedgerow, head cradled in her arms, hair flowing down her slender, shirted back and mixing golden with the ivy and cow parsley. The sun broke through the leaves and shone on her.
We wakened about teatime, Sahara-thirsty. No drinkable water; no streams; just irrigation channels, thick and green. Thirst drove us on. Too hot to wear bike gear, we stowed it. Our slipstream blew up the legs of our jeans, down our shirt sleeves, making them flutter like birds. The coolness was nearly as good as water.
The narrow road was raised above the land, endlessly long and straight and bumpy. With the flatness, and the hugeness of the sky, it felt like sailing. Keri complained she felt seasick. Deeper than the whine of the engine, the silence of the land sank greenly into us.
“Ain’t it quiet?”
“No pinging at all,” I said, “since we crossed the Wire.” Six hours and no psycho-radar. Even in the Highlands, we’d heard echoes of it every few hours.
Eventually, we did hear a helicopter, far off. Still no pinging, just the blat of chopper blades.
“Mebbe they’re testing silent psycho-radar,” said Keri, just to cheer me up.
I saw the chopper: it was fuzz of some sort. Circling to the south at zero height, vanishing behind spinneys and reappearing; being flown in a graceful, tricksy way, stopping dead, flying sideways, backward.
“Keep cool,” I said. “They’re not looking for anybody, just filling in time. Routine patrol.”
But her hands tightened on the handlebars. She wiped one hand on the leg of her jeans. It was ve
ry tense, in that flat, green emptiness.
“Sing,” I shouted. So we sang the old Racer’s hymn: “Take the piston from out of my crankcase. …”
A what-the-hell feeling overtook us. Enjoy the now, sitting astride the razor’s edge…
Louder and louder came the chopper. I told myself that all fuzz, even Paramils, are bored out of their mind ninety percent of the time. Lots of the things they do are just to avoid going mad from boredom.
It flew alongside, still at zero feet, its blades sending purple whirlpools through the ripening corn.
“Wave!” I shouted. We waved like mad and held our breath. British police would wave back; Paramils wouldn’t.
They waved. Keri began to weave the bike from side to side, missing the ditches by inches…
The chopper accepted the challenge. Flew ahead of us, spinning in elegant circles, waggling its hips like a girl.
Keri, encouraged, put up her feet on the handlebars to steer. The chopper dropped back to watch. Then waved and suddenly flew off northward.
“Friendly!”
“Or silent psycho-scan!”
But I felt good. We saw tractors working in the fields, a combine. The drivers waved; we waved back. We passed a cottage on a corner, dozing behind dense laurels, only the red tile roof showing. A scrawled notice said:
STRAWBERRIES 2c PER KILO. BEST TOMATOES 3c PER KILO. WALLFLOWERS 4c A BUNCH. BEWARE OF THE DOG.
I made Keri pull up a hundred meters on. “I’m going back for some fruit.”
“Be careful, Kit.”
“We’ve got to eat. They haven’t got a phone in that house. They haven’t even got telly.”
“I don’t like it. It’s like something out of a fairy tale.”
“If I’m not back in five, get the hell out to the nearest wood. I’ll find you.”
I was stiff from the riding. The road was silent. Flies buzzed. Then I saw the dog I was supposed to beware of. Brown and black and panting. Ears flopping. So fat he reared up on sticklike front legs, with his belly spreading across the old bricks of the garden path. I leaned over the mossy, rickety gate and patted him; he licked my hand. I hadn’t seen a dog for ages. Techs think they’re dirty. Unnems kill them on sight—probably eat them.
The gate creaked alarmingly. On the right was a greenhouse full of tomato plants. Glossy leaves pressed hard against the glass; gaps disclosed the female curves of unripe fruit, better than the ones my father grew.
I knocked, was about to knock again, when I heard a shuffling. I remembered Vic Huggett with a shudder.
But he was nothing like Vic, except he hadn’t shaved and had a considerable paunch under his dirty blue T-shirt. His massive arms, folded across his paunch, were tattooed: marion my love and death before dishonour. He had a beaky nose, wrinkles round his eyes, and might once have been a sailor.
He looked at me, without hopelessness or hate: not an Unnem, then.
No superior, watchful smirk: not a Tech, either.
No bossy, fake bonhomie: no Est.
He just yawned, without bothering to put his hand across his mouth.
“Kilo of tomatoes, please.” I kept it as short as possible. He led the way, wordlessly, to a black-tarred shed. Inside smelled heavenly: creosote, rope, soil, and the overpowering smell of fruit. Rows of brown paper bags, already weighed.
“Take yer pick.”
I picked up a punnet of strawberries with one hand, a bag of tomatoes with the other. Then realised I hadn’t paid. Tried putting five coins in his hand, without put ting down either bag. One coin fell on the floor. We stooped for it, together.
“Don’t bother … no bother,” said the man, gasping a bit with the effort. He’d totally lost interest in me. I only had to walk away. Perversely, I suddenly wanted to talk. “Nice day!”
“Urn,” he said. “Tara.” Turned and began looping up a piece of hairy string that trailed from the tarry wall of the shed.
We took a long, long road, quaintly called Nine Mile Bank. The bank ran along above us, to our left, seemingly forever. No turnoffs.
“If we don’t stop soon, I’ll die of thirst.” The tomatoes and strawberries lay safe between my belly and Keri’s back; their knobbly coolness tempted me beyond endurance.
“There’s no place to hide.”
“Stop trying to hide. That guy didn’t care. The chopper didn’t care. Different rules, here. They’ll only notice if we try to hide.”
So we left the bike by the roadside and climbed the bank. There was a canal at the top, deep blue, reflecting the sky. The wind was blowing along it, making big waves. Reeds hissed, shone pale green in the westering sun, like pointed sword blades. Further down, two swans were swimming.
We lay and ate tomatoes far too big for our mouths. Juice squirted and dribbled. Keri giggled. “Wash while you eat. What do you call these things?”
“Tomatoes. The others are strawberries.”
“Like in tomato soup?”
“There are no tomatoes in your horrible tinned tomato soup. Totally synthetic. Tomato flavour is one of the easiest to fake. I can give you the formula. …”
“Shut up, bighead!”
We rode on, eventually. Came to a village with an old grey church towering high above the rooftops. Keri stopped.
“What’s that—a Paramil watchtower?”
“It’s a church, stupid.”
“Oh! I read a book with a church in it once. I thought they were only in books. Weren’t they lucky to have this little hill to put the church on?”
I laughed. “You know what that hill’s made of? Five hundred years of buried dead bodies. So many, they’ve raised the earth level ten feet.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Come and look at the tombstones. …”
She spent ages among the tombstones, rubbing away moss and spelling out the old Gothic lettering with great persistence. “Here’s a little girl who died when she was two. In 1852. Isn’t that sad?”
“Oh, for God’s sake. …” I got up to go.
“Don’t you think it would be nice to be buried, instead of burned? People can come and bring flowers. I had a girl friend, when I started racing. The one I drank champagne with. We burned her. Now I can’t even remember her name. I wish she was here.” She started to tidy the grave, pulling out the long-dead grass.
“Come and see the church,” I said, quickly.
She gasped at the church. “It’s all crumbling and falling to bits!”
“So would you be, after five hundred years.”
“Isn’t it made of concrete?”
“No—limestone and flint.”
“What’s limestone? What’s flint?”
“I can’t spend the rest of my life answering questions. …”
“Why not? I thought you fancied me.”
We mooched round the interior, full of withered hymnbooks, mouse dirt and bell ropes. She read all the memorials. “Cripes, don’t they forget nobody round here?” She squinted up at the ceiling and gave a jump.
“Cripes—angels.” She backed toward the door.
“They won’t bite you—they’re carved out of wood.”
“But they’re bigger than people—all that golden hair an’ wings. Angels were in that book I read, too.”
She was silent, slapping her leather gauntlet on a bench end. Then she said, “That stuff about God is all Est crap, isn’t it?”
I took a deep breath and said, “I don’t know.”
“Cripes—the great brain finally admits he doesn’t know. Can we go up the tower?”
“If it’s not locked.”
“Nothing’s locked here. Aren’t they frightened the Fighters will come and smash these coloured winders? An’ pinch them gold candlesticks?”
“What Fighters? You’ll find no Fighters here.”
We climbed the narrow, dark spiral stair.
“I feel like a worm climbing a corkscrew,” said Keri.
We peered down on the village, as if it was a map.
Clouds of rooks were circling round us, cawing in the churchyard elms. “I wouldn’t mind being a bird,” she said. “How fast can they fly?”
“They can do about fifty, with the wind behind them.”
“Kit—I’d like to be buried here. Could you fix it?” No.
“Useless, stupid Est.”
Nobody spoke to us; nobody came. Keri put a credit in the box for the tower-restoration fund. I had to stop her signing her real name in the visitors’ book. Riding away, she said, “Nothing happened there. Nobody could ever prove we were in that church at all. It makes me feel like a ghost.”
“Don’t start kidding yourself you’re invisible.”
But we might as well have been. We only saw one copper, in shirtsleeves and pointed hat, talking to two women and a dog. Everybody else was busy, mowing lawns, cleaning windows. Blokes with their heads inside the bonnets of vintage cars, old Astras and Cavaliers that any Est would have given his eyeteeth for, and smothered in new enamel and polish. But these were broken down and rusty, with blind headlights and dung-spattered number plates. Car jacks lying carelessly in the gutter, and children’s bikes and even ancient teddy bears.
“Why doesn’t anybody steal them?”
Uncut hedges, sprouting ten feet in the air; lines of ragged, multicoloured washing…
“Ain’t anybody in charge? Everybody’s just doing what they like… All talking.” Everywhere we looked, there were little groups talking and laughing.
She pulled up again, outside a butcher’s. Outside hung huge sides of beef, whole carcasses of pigs, scraped so clean their skin looked human. Rows of skinned sheeps’ heads, some looking cocky and some looking stupid and some just looking dead. Flies crawling all over them.
“Not very hygienic,” I said.
“Poor things, they look so sad. …”
“People have to eat. What d’you think’s in that horrible pink luncheon meat you’re so fond of?”
“Oh, no!”
“Don’t worry. I doubt what you’ve eaten over the years has been responsible for the death of anything more than a soya bean.”
She was seized with an insatiable urge to shop. Pounds of apples. Old-fashioned boxes of matches made of real wood. Brands of fags I’d never heard of. I was frightened she might be noticed, but the shopkeepers served her without a break in their gossip. We pushed on.
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